TServo2049

I never said the sequel was a good idea.

As I said in the estimates thread: I don't understand the hate for MBFGW, particularly going into this weekend. Sure, it didn't endure in the cultural consciousness, but it earned that record by starting small and then building and building to #2 in weekend 20. That was astounding even in 2002. It was a perpetual-motion-machine of WOM. And yet people hate on the movie now. It's almost like the Ally McBeal of cinema, seemingly nobody on the Internet will admit that they liked it back then, or that its popularity back then was legitimate.

I don't understand the hate for MBFGW. Sure, it didn't endure in the cultural consciousness, but it earned that record by starting small and then building and building to #2 in weekend 20. That was astounding even in 2002. It was a perpetual-motion-machine of WOM. And yet people hate on the movie now. It's almost like the Ally McBeal of cinema, seemingly nobody on the Internet will admit that they liked it back then, or that its popularity back then was legitimate.

Oh, I should have checked, it was Ouija leapfrogging Nightcrawler on Halloween weekend last year. (Wasn't the last time anything similar happened in summer Smurfs vs. Cowboys and Aliens, where studio estimates were a tie?)

When's the last time we had such a nail biter as to what would take #1, all the way down to actuals? And when is the last time #1 and #2 switched with actuals?

Monsters University made $83m from the time Despicable Me 2 dropped, and it cratered against the latter (with not even 2 full weeks to itself). WOM wasn't anywhere near as good for MU, so if that could still get another $83m, IO will do fine. I am curious how big the usual Pixar Labor Day expansion will be - since 2007, every Pixar film except Up got some kind of expansion back into over 1,000 locations. Though since Up was the highest grosser of them, maybe Disney didn't feel a need to do it that year, and they may forgo it this time too?

The girl who plays Agnes will not be able to do that cute little girl voice anymore. You could already tell she was having to put it on in the second one. So they're all going to have to be just a little older, I'm sure.

There's no point in guessing what's going on in Cameron's head. South Park said it perfectly:

I will repeat this fragment of a conversation I heard between some women about MM and/or MMXXL: "Too much plot."

Point well taken.

People say three years is too long for a sequel, when I always remember sequels taking about three years on average. Why is it that people keep saying that sequels need to come out after two years to be successful? Does everything really move faster now?

Pixels has a shit-ton of bus stop posters around here.

Overheard from some adult women at a 4th of July party, discussing MMXXL: "Too much plot." (Though actually, they may have been talking about the first, they may have been discussing that they were going to see MMXXL later.)

I never understand how weather affects movies. I've heard of inclement weather helping movies, and hurting movies. I've heard of heat waves hurting movies in Europe, which doesn't make sense because you'd think people would go to the movies for the air conditioning. (Or are movies too expensive these days to use as a place to get out of the heat?)

The Rock would honestly be better as a Resistance soldier than a Terminator. Now, a new PREDATOR movie starring The Rock as the human lead might be interesting. (Which reminds me, a Doom movie with The Rock as a space marine should have been all kinds of awesome, what went wrong with the actual movie we got?)

He does have a point, the majority of the top 10 for each year has been franchises every year since 2001. It does seem like the franchises make the most money; not many originals these days cross $300 million, but if you adjust for inflation a lot of older ones do. But there were always book adaptations, and a lot of big stars were de facto "franchises" in and of themselves. We tend to think there was a period when all the big blockbusters were original sci-fantasy-adventure on the Lucas/Spielberg/etc. model, but there actually weren't as many megahits in that "genre" as we like to think, and they were only in a relatively short period of time. You were just likely to see big splashy star vehicles that were more down to earth (star power ain't what it used to be), or really successful dramas (this doesn't really happen anymore because the people going to see them were the baby boomers, who got old and started preferring to stay home rather than go out to the movies; in this regard, American Sniper is kind of a throwback to the era when dramas or more dramatic films could make serious bank, right down to the controversies and think-pieces that often accompanied them) It's more complex than we like to remember. A lot of the people lamenting the rise of franchises seem to be idealistic 80s/early 90s pop-cinephiles who want today's young audiences to grow up with the kind of original, exciting stuff they themselves grew up with. People who grew up in the 60s and pre-blockbuster 70s similarly lamented the proliferation of mass-appeal blockbusters (all the way back to Star Wars, even Jaws) believing they crowded out movies which "meant something" and "said something", as if the preceding era was all stuff like The Graduate and The Godfather and Taxi Driver, seeming to forget the mass-appeal pop fluff like Airport and Love Story and so on. I think we remember the era we grew up in as some sort of glory days where the movies we saw/loved are the ones that reigned supreme, or even believe that today's culture suffers for lack of them (or maybe if we grew up renting movies that were just before our time, we may pine for the era right before ours). I know we like to think people are never going to wax nostalgic for the way things were at any point after 2000, but I'm sure it's going to happen.

Except that was a twist that occurred in act one, and was basically impossible not to spoil in marketing. Cameron left ambiguity in the film, yes, but there was no way that info was not going to get spoiled. And that was also one of the best marketing hooks ever - now-superstar action hero Arnold as a Terminator that's a good guy, up against an even more advanced Terminator. Contrast to the T:G twist, which would have been just as easy to hide, was not the kind of key element you need to sell in the marketing, and which has elicited more "Why?" than "Awesome!" In short, the problem is not that twist was spoiled. The problem is that the twist is utterly stupid, and you don't put stupid stuff in the trailers if you want people to actually come see your movie.

Yeah, at least go with laserdisc. The bottom has fallen out on the used laserdisc market, you can go into any Half Price Books and get them for peanuts. (I went to a used record store and bought the supposedly rare recalled Nightmare Before Christmas box set that had Henry Selick's MTV stuff in the bonus features without MTV's permission. I checked the liner notes to make sure they were on the set. Price? 15 dollars. I bought it even though I don't have a player.)

Terminator Genisyfive would have been as hilarious as Screfourm or Fantfourstic or Takthreen.

Right, it is not how it works. That is like if someone were to say that JW was going to be as bad as Seventh Son because they were both from Legendary.

Good sequels to bad movies? IMO, Star Trek: The Motion Picture was not BAD so much as mediocre. I guess Star Trek II qualifies though. Star Trek VI would definitely qualify, because Star Trek V was genuinely bad. Also IMO, Revenge of the Sith only seems better in comparison to Menace and (especially) Clones. I honestly don't think it's any better, we were just fooled (or perhaps more accurately, fooled ourselves) into thinking it was for that summer, because we WANTED it to be. I know that's how it was with me.

Gravity was a film that absolutely played well on the big screen, regardless of any flaws. (My mom saw it with me in the theaters and loved it. My dad saw it on hotel PPV and didn't understand what all the fuss was about. My mom agrees with him, it's not the same watching it on the small screen.) Basically, the same effect some others here say happened to Avatar after theatrical release.

My whole point is that the kinds of movies like Inception, Interstellar, Tomorrowland, etc. (which are all sci-fi, you notice) only happen a couple times a decade - or I should say, only hit it big a couple times a decade. The "big risk which paid off, not based on an existing thing": 1970s - Star Wars 1980s - Raiders, E.T. 1990s - ID4, Titanic (if you don't discount it for being based around an actual historical event) 2000s - Avatar 2010s - Inception, Gravity, Interstellar (but none of them were as astronomical hits as the previous examples) I think we get this all mixed up with the lack of original non-sequel non-franchise star vehicles, and original non-sequel non-franchise "real-world" action tentpole films which weren't as risky as the above, and didn't cost as much as the above. Stuff like Tomorrowland and JA has always had just as much chance of flopping as succeeding. The Abyss disappointed theatrically; Waterworld was a miss domestically and needed OS to reach the break even point.

Non-sequels aren't the same as the "original" meme. Avatar fits the template. Frozen is an animated Disney movie based on a fairy tale, it was only "risky" because people thought this kind of movie wasn't en vogue anymore - in reality, it repeated the winning Disney formula from the early 90s, it's just that it struck a chord with audiences in a way the post-Lion King stuff hadn't (Better execution? Just the right time?) Alice in Wonderland was a reimagining (and a "sequel" to the Alice story in general, not one specific past adaptation) Inception qualifies too. Guardians of the Galaxy was a Marvel movie and a comic adaptation, but riskier because the property wasn't known and the concept was off-beat 2012 qualifies, I guess. Emmerich wasn't a "risk", but the film was another one where OS came in to save the day. Inside Out, I guess that qualifies, it's only a "franchise" in the sense of Pixar as a franchise. It was "risky" only in the sense that Pixar seemed down on its luck, if it had come out directly after Toy Story 3 it would still be seen as a big success and a continuation of Pixar's winning streak, but not a "triumphant return" of the studio.

OK, Inception is a good example, its concept was completely original and risky, but it was partially mitigated by being from the director of The Dark Knight and starring DiCaprio. Interstellar was kind of a wash domestically, OS redeemed it.