TServo2049

Summer 2015 is like the anti-summer 2014. A few smash breakouts, nothing between $185m-$325m, a horrible August. The only way in which it wasn't like a mirror-universe version of summer 2014 was that July still wasn't strong (though at least it wasn't sub-$1B this time). Maybe you could say May was still "weak" like 2014, but it's still a reverse of 2014 in that it was the 2nd biggest of the 10s (while 2014 was the 2nd worst), and it was much less "balanced" in terms of successes vs. failures (though with MM:FR and PP2 picking up the slack from AOU, it was nowhere near as top-heavy as May 2012).

50 First Dead Zones.

I understand it took another year, I understand The Blind Side was not the only film people carped about (Avatar definitely got its share too), but when the rule change for the 2012 Oscars was reported, most of the articles still singled out The Blind Side as the kind of movie that would not get nominated now/that they hoped would not get nominated now, rather than any other beneficiary of the 10-film slate from either year. As an outsider, not following the BO or awards very much, that was the title I remember hearing name-dropped most often. The only film for which I heard more "How the fuck did THAT get nominated" backlash was Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - which was AFTER the current rules were implemented.

Nobody wants to make those kinds of movies. You have the people like Aronofsky and Scott trying to do edgy revisionist versions to show the rest of Hollywood and the critics they're intelligent and modern and iconoclastic and radical and not beholden to outmoded backwards religious dogma (in other words, simply reaffirming what the rest of the critics and Hollywood already know about them). The general moviegoers who don't want to see those interpretations reject it, and Hollywood laughs/sneers/laments that middle America is so backwards and conservative and narrow-minded to have rejected these "intelligent" "challenging" "brave" films which seem to have been explicitly designed NOT to appeal to them, and almost to deliberately provoke them. And you have the small-time faith-based filmmakers doing their "preachy" films, certainly not that well-made, certainly ham-fisted, but they are a reaction (regardless of how warranted) to what Hollywood is doing to faith. "If they won't do it, we will." And they are trying to send a message BACK to Hollywood. And the critics trash these films not just because of the quality of the films, but because they seem incensed that films with these kinds of messages even EXIST. The reviews are as much a rejection of the films' world views as they are a criticism of the films themselves. Hence these films get single digits or even zeroes on Rotten Tomatoes. There are non-faith-based/non-conservative-oriented films of about equal quality, but they do not seem to get as much venom from the critics even if they get scores as low. Yet the public sometimes responds favorably. And when they do, the critics are appalled that these films are succeeding, and are apoplectic that paying audiences would be so "stupid" to want to see these movies. On the other hand, when the films flop, the critics point and laugh at the films for their failure, in a "serves you right for having such a backwards dogmatic point of view" way. And when someone does make a film that hits big with middle America and the Bible Belt, the knives go out even if the film initially got good reviews on the merits of the film itself. The Passion of the Christ, The Blind Side, American Sniper, they all got trashed in a how-dare-this-film-be-this-successful way. I brought this up in the Inside Out thread, but I am absolutely convinced that The Blind Side singlehandedly killed the 10-nominee Best Picture slate simply by being nominated, pissing off the critics and Hollywood insiders who seemed to believe that its presence on the BP nominee list was besmirching the very name of Oscar. There seems to be little interest in making an earnest, DeMille-type film that mixes faith and good filmmaking. People of "culture" love to bag on The Ten Commandments, its hammy acting, its morality, its "outmoded" values, but that film still gets great ratings on TV every Easter, even as less and less people watch conventional TV. But nobody wants to go that route. The people on the inside of Hollywood want to make films that basically pick apart and question their own source material, the people on the outside make their films which are naked displays of faith as a retort to what they perceive coming from the people on the inside. I agree, I think if someone tried to do a new big-budget epic in the vein of The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur, something which took a traditional approach to faith but still had big scale and production values and actors behind it, it could do very well indeed.

24 years of inflation and market expansion will do that. In the markets that were major in 1991, it seems like Genisys is disappointing much as in the USA. For example, in Germany T2 sold 4.65m tickets. Genisys? 800,000. Not saying T:G is "illegitimate", but I am saying that 1.) it is not going to sell as many tickets WW or OS as T2 did, and 2.) it is disappointing in the markets that made T2 the #2 highest-grossing film of all time OS/WW in 1991.

Not meaning to restart this whole thing, but... Throwing aside any arguments about quality, I would rewatch Superman III before I would rewatch SR *or* MOS. At least Superman III is fun in how stupid it is. (Though I can't say the same for Superman IV - that movie is just plain bad.)

Never forget

Which trailer was the initial trailer? This one? Or was it this one?

Yes, Rob Zombie's Halloween was the biggest LD 4-day opening ever. $30.6m ($36.1m adj.) It seems like some sort of fluke, the 2nd biggest is The Possession at only $21.1m (though adjusted, it's Transporter 2 at $25.5m). There have been only five movies to have a Labor Day opening of over $20m adjusted, and four of them came out between 2001-07. Of course, for non-openers, the movie to sell the most tickets over the 4-day was The Sixth Sense (a WTF $46.8m adjusted, that's $10m more than Halloween at today's prices). And back in 1993, The Fugitive had another WTF, $33.8m adjusted.

I thought Furious 7 was also re-expanding for Labor Day; was that cancelled?

Empire is awesome, but I think Raiders is a better free-standing movie, by just a hair.

The Empire Strikes Back vs. Raiders of the Lost Ark Jaws vs. The Lion King Jurassic Park vs. Star Wars The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers vs. Back to the Future

You are totally underselling the popularity of Pitch Perfect, basement. You think its popularity is merely equal to Dark Shadows, Project X, This Means War, or The Dictator? LOL, get out.

I guess Dominion has too many syllables. (And Dominion of the Planet of the Apes sounds weird. Maybe if it was just Dominion of the Apes...) The pattern thus far is "generic clichéd one-syllable word of the Planet of the Apes." Calling it right now, I think the fourth film will be titled Age of the Planet of the Apes. (Which is what I thought the third film was going to be called. I bet someone at Fox has already suggested it.)

I didn't know that either. It's like finding out that Hayden Panettiere was Dot in A Bug's Life.

True. Most of the complaints I hear are about non-sequel tentpoles getting squeezed out, with mid-budget films being a second.

But...but...TOXIC WOM!

I was actually referring to people who say these "unnecessary" franchise sequels and attempted reboots are killing off the original tentpoles and mid-budget programmers, not art films. The people who think popular entertainments should not all be sequels and (worse yet) poor attempts to recycled franchise from prior decades.

The line of thinking seems to be that they want studios to stop making these kinds of franchise entries "nobody asked for" because they squeeze out better (usually original) movies that could have been made/released instead. They want "bad" franchises (franchises they don't like) to be punished, not rewarded. To people like this, it's those dumb GA moviegoers in (whatever country/market - USA, China, wherever) ruining cinema by being stupid enough to prolong the life of a franchise that should be dead by all rights if this were a just world, and enable the bad behaviors of Hollywood. In short: "How dare anybody like this, the people who do are ruining the movie industry."

Hollywood agrees with you (though isn't it in development hell yet again?)

Actually, I do kind of agree. Though I still prefer Tobey over Garfield, parts of TASM2 (the opening action scene, for example) are some of the closest we've ever gotten to Spidey's comics personality in live-action. And I say that not even liking the movie as a whole.

Go to the store, get some Orville Redenbacher's, and watch something worthwhile at home. It's cheaper, and you'll probably enjoy the movie more.

The movie is just "good." I liked it more when there were fewer Pixar films, but the more movies got added to the Pixar canon, the less special it became. But I still think it's a fun movie that gets ignored simply because it doesn't have anything special to say, it's not as imaginative as the later stuff, and (as tribefan said) it doesn't have the emotional hook of a Monsters Inc. or Finding Nemo. B

It's an issue of "James Cameron raised the bar with T2, so we HAVE to go just as big." I too would love to see a smaller Terminator movie, but Hollywood has a problem with lowering the bar on theatrical franchises. (See: The Amazing Spider-Man being promised to cost less, and be more street-level and romance-oriented with more practical effects, and still it turned out to cost as much as the Raimi movies, and TASM2 turned out just as costly and overblown as SM3.)