TServo2049

I'm not smoking the pipe. I'm pointing out the fallacy of the perception that anything was seriously wrong with Pixar. My point is, they were being pilloried in some circles, up until Inside Out came out and reminded them "Oh wait, Pixar DOES still make good movies!"

Inside Out did wonders for Pixar's image. Before it released, people were accusing PIXAR of having sunk to the level of cash-grabbing. It reached its peak when Toy Story 4 was announced (and BTW, I've heard rumblings that TS4 won't really be a true TS4, but that it will be some kind of story taking place in the Toy Story universe but supposedly not centering around the main characters of the original trilogy, not involving humans at all. So basically, that it will be more a spin-off than a sequel?) Boy, what one great movie can do to "rehabilitate" a studio whose reputation was "declining".

The best thing about the Schumacher trailers is that they're narrated by Optimus freakin Prime. Those trailers felt so awesome back then. I remember when I thought Forever was so cool, ah, youthful stupidity.

Every of the last couple decades seems to have that wannabe mini-major that doesn't flame out due to flagrant overspending like Cannon/Orion/Carolco, but just sort of falls apart and goes out with a whimper. The 80s had DEG, the 90s had Savoy, the 00s had...I guess Overture? (Oddly enough, a lot of Overture staff went over to Relativity when they folded.)

Eventually, previews are going to go further and further back to the point that everything will eventually open a week earlier and we'll be back to movies starting ON Friday.

Oh man, that First Class poster is exactly the kind of thing that Pan poster reminds me of (though I don't remember that poster specifically). We have to find more Dutch angle character lineup posters, especially ones where someone is slow-walking at the viewer. This may be a more awful movie poster cliche than floating heads.

Oops. Yes, CAPD counts, it continued the Harrison Ford Jack Ryan franchise. (Actually, Patriot Games is a rare early example of a sort-of-not-quite-reboot - as a kid, I had no idea The Hunt For Red October was even a Jack Ryan movie, I thought that Sean Connery as the Russian submarine captain was the protagonist because his face was the only one on the poster. Baldwin's Ryan sort of feels like the deuteragonist in his own movie, Connery just had that power to steal any movie from the supposed main character.)

When I was a kid, I had always thought Days of Thunder was popular. It was parodied, it had a simulator ride installed at theme parks like Kings Dominion and Great America when they were bought by Paramount, and so on. But yeah, it was forgotten within a couple years. (Kind of like Backdraft, another real-world-thrills movie of the same time which was still fairly fresh in the public memory when I was a kid, then a few years later it was as if it never existed.) I guess it was expected to be "the next Top Gun" and it didn't achieve those heights. But at the same time, is it one of those movies like Congo or Batman & Robin or the Tim Burton Planet of the Apes that people seem to remember as being a "flop" when it actually did turn a profit of some kind? (Actually, I don't even think Apes '01 was that much of an underperformer - $362m WW on a $100m budget. Point still stands, films whose reputations suggest they were more of a failure theatrically than they really were.)

Something I forgot: The same period when these people stopped going to the movies is when TV got more interesting. The 2000s feels like an inflection point - my parents' moviegoing declined in the 00s, but they were definitely watching stuff like The Sopranos and 24. So in a way, many of the things that disappeared from movies simply migrated to TV. It's actually interesting, TV used to be derided as mass-appeal garbage, the "boob tube", watered down sitcom and procedural and action pap. It was more nuanced than that, but it does feel like the mid-budget, mid-range, programmers of the past morphed into the high-grade TV stuff of now. And movies are the mass-appeal stuff left over.

Lucy was a "what the fuck" movie. I enjoyed seeing it, but it was very "what the fuck did I just watch?" It was another example of clever marketing misdirection, it sold a Transcendence-type movie as Salt with superpowers.

Tying into the complaints about the state of film, I actually believe that the boomers were the generation that drove the character-driven and introspective dramas and thrillers and suspense and "real world"/"non-action"/"serious"/"grown up" stuff up to the 90s. When they retired and stopped going to the movies is right about when that stuff disappeared outside of the Oscar season. At least that's my theory - my parents used to leave me and my brother with a babysitter when they went to the movies, and they weren't seeing action movies, they were seeing dramas, the kind that only show up around October these days.

But regardless, ID4 did it better than most of the stuff that came after. I'm more annoyed by people who lump it in with the "CGI problem." Everything they blew up in that movie was a model, they deliberately chose to do so.

Also, much as ID4 gets lumped in with the "too many sequels, mindless CGI spectacle and destruction" thing, people seem to forget that it was original, it had at least two-dimensional characters, they had actual moments between the destruction, and nearly all the effects set pieces were practical, they were just composited digitally. ID4 is an enigma: Did it start the trends we bemoan today, or was it the end of the previous era? Or both? Really, it didn't all happen at once.

I honestly am not too bothered. For one, there's more important things in life. For two, I enjoy some of the stuff coming out, regardless. For three, I know in the back of my mind that this is all going to come crashing down. Not sure when, not sure how, not sure what will come after, but it's coming.

I'm going to see it this weekend only because I've had to see that damn trailer in front of everything else I've seen so far this summer. Interesting contrast to DM2, where I saw it because seeing the trailer so many times actually hooked me. This time I just wanna get it over with.

They have nothing to lose, this movie is going to be a blip on the radar regardless. It's one of those low-budget horror comedies, I'd be more surprised if it WASN'T R.

1992 was 4 originals, 3 sequels (one a comic book adaptation), a TV adaptation, a fairy-tale adaptation, and a based-on-a-true-story. 1993 was 4 originals, 4 book adaptations, 1 TV adaptation, 1 based-on-a-true-story, and no sequels. I'm actually surprised that the 1990s had four years (2 consecutive) where not a single sequel placed in the top 10 releases of the year: 1993, 1994, 1996, 1998. ('98 was the last year that would ever happen.) The reason I surprised is because people were complaining about sequels even then.

But the way you talk about it, Max, sounds like you were there and following this stuff. Do you really remember it being a big surprise that T2 did so well?

So-so track record? Arnold had just been in two movies that together combined to T2's gross, Total Recall and Kindergarten Cop. He was on the upswing at the time. T2 outdid expectations, but it must have been expected to be a hit regardless. (Anybody old enough to remember, going into summer 1991, was T2 expected to win the summer from the get-go, or was Robin Hood?)

The media did explain adjustment when The Dark Knight was breaking records, when The Avengers was breaking records, and they've explained it as Jurassic World has been breaking records. We just heard about it more with Avatar because that movie broke the all-time gross record. If something beats Avatar someday, they'll talk about it again. I remembered reading about Titanic in some article about upcoming disaster movies or something (this was when Hard Rain still had the working title "Flash Flood"). I remembered seeing either the teaser poster or a big four-sided column standee that had the title "sinking", with a summer date. I remember hearing about it being delayed. I remember hearing it could flop. I remember hearing about it being 3 hours. And I remember being surprised it was a romance, I had somehow thought it was going to be in line with Twister and ID4 and stuff and be all about the sinking. I was just a kid, I had no idea how well this was going to do, I knew little about gross, but I was definitely aware how huge it was as it built and built.

Makes sense, but I was referring to the fact that I heard more people talking about Avatar than I had Shrek 2. It could have been that Shrek 2 came out when I was in high school, and I didn't hear much from my peers? Or I just was paying even less attention to movies as I was at the time of Avatar? I'm not doubting your estimates, just wondering why if it was bigger, I didn't hear as much conversation about it among regular people during release as Avatar. (For Lion King, I was 6, I can be forgiven. Though there was certainly talk about that among my peers then.)

red firebird, can you put the biggest films of the last 30 years in order, with the tickets and dollar adjustments that you think are correct (not BOM's)? I'm genuinely curious. And if your figure is true, I'm interested in why did Avatar feel so much bigger? Just it being 3D? The fact that its total was as much due to long-term WOM and legs? Being someone who was out of the BO loop at the time, I heard more talk about Avatar than about Shrek 2. (Could it just be popularity being among adults and not kids that skewed the perception?)

Screens were bigger on average? I guess, but a couple older multiplexes still survive around here, and their largest auditoriums don't have any more seats than the biggest non-large-format auditoriums at the megaplexes. Most multiplexes' largest auditoriums in 1993 were about equal to or less than the biggest auditoriums at modern theaters, weren't they?

Yes, there are other factors (population, how often people went to the movies in general, etc.) but price inflation is a good start. Theater/screen saturation is important to note too. These films sold more tickets from a smaller population, with fewer theaters and far fewer screens. I remember that in the days before megaplexes and Fandango, my parents were always wary about going to see a film on opening weekend, because of the risk of waiting in line only to find out the showing we wanted was sold out, and having to wait around for up to two hours for the next showing (depending on whether said movie was on two screens, or just one). I seem to remember us buying advance tickets for Batman Forever the morning of, and waiting in a massive line around the building just for ticket holders, before our auditorium opened up.) We did sometimes buy tickets at the BO for a showing two hours out, get dinner, then come back. Part of the blessing/curse of more theaters and presales is that films open bigger, but legs are that much weaker because there aren't as many people waiting it out. (Not the only reason, I know, the Internet and all, just interesting.)

I enjoyed The First Avenger a lot, but yes, TWS is the better film. But I still enjoyed the fuck out of CA1. It's the film that actually got me into the MCU, I hadn't seen a single entry but I saw CA:TFA because it was Joe Johnston doing another period pulp adventure film like The Rocketeer.