TServo2049

Yeah, that's a good example. Even in cases like The Last Airbender or Dragonball Evolution, changes to the source did not cause their respective underperformance or failure. I feel like there's a see-I-told-you-so attitude among diehards about those...or am I imagining it?

The fanbases who complain do not comprise a majority of the people who show up to see these movies. Neither Ghostbusters nor Power Rangers will be hurt by fanbase backlash. (Come to think about it, has there ever been a situation where fanbase backlash was the primary thing that caused a film to fail? I mean for real, not just fans taking credit for the failure of an adaptation/reboot they didn't like, when in reality it failed because of GA indifference.)

Yes, but the people from whom the backlash is coming won't be the target audience, and won't make or break it. Power Rangers is going to be like TMNT 2014, it won't matter what the hardcore fans think of it, as long as grade-school boys take to it.

It came out on VOD this week. (And even that doesn't necessarily have to happen for an HD version to end up online; a 1080p version of How to Train Your Dragon 2 leaked online before its VOD release.)

The first Back to the Future would probably be a PG-13 - Doc getting gunned down on camera, Biff trying to rape Lorraine, etc. There's no blood shown in Doc's death, not much skin shown in Biff groping Lorraine, but I still think it probably would be too much for PG now. Even if just barely. (The sequels, on the other hand, don't really have anything I can think of that would get them PG-13.) I'm still surprised Beetlejuice got a PG in 1988. Michael Keaton grabbing his crotch, lusting after a 16 year old (and I don't just mean Winona Ryder's character, she actually was 16 during filming), the whorehouse bit (and Juno actually saying "whorehouse"), not to mention the infamous F-bomb. It's probably the last time a movie had the F-word and still got a PG (Spaceballs got away with a PG in '87, but in '89 National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation seems to have gotten a PG-13 solely because of "since Bing Crosby tap danced with Danny f**king Kaye"). European Vacation would likely be an R now. I know Anchorman also got away with using the phrase "Go f**k yourself" 20 years later, but I'm not so sure the MPAA would give a PG-13 to a movie where we see bare breasts in two different scenes. It's interesting to look at films from the late 80s, when PG-13 already existed, and wonder whether they'd get the same ratings now that they did then.

Oh wow, if the film is so bad that it's getting negative scores, I can understand why Universal didn't want to release it.

Passion of the Christ is a run that might not have been possible today. It would still have opened as well, but would it have had legs as killer? And any controversy with AS could never measure up to Passion. That movie was such a phenomenon that I took a college course about the movie two years later. It was still being discussed two years after its theatrical release. (And this was before Gibson's DUI reignited it.) The Da Vinci Code was flying off bookshelves at the same time, that had to have played a role in fanning the flames. The two fed off each other - I was there, there was a lot of stuff in religious circles where Passion and Da Vinci were compared/contrasted, "Da Vinci is a lie," "Passion is the truth about Jesus," there were so many think pieces and opinion pieces about one or the other or both that it stayed relevant long enough for me to be taking a course about the two in the fall semester of 2006. Yes, the Da Vinci Code movie had recently come out, but Passion was two years old. It just feels like the phenomenon wouldn't have the same kind of staying power in the age of Twitter...

Right, Bram Stoker's Dracula had worse legs. But it was only the #4 opening of 1992, Interview was the #2 of 1994. Dracula's drop-off was akin to that of Star Trek V three years earlier, except Dracula opened much bigger (adjusted too). (Though I did not realize that at the time it opened, Dracula was the 5th biggest OW of all time. Interview with the Vampire was #5 when it opened too. Vampire movies have a history of frontloading...)

Actually, I mentioned some earlier. The biggest ones (adjusting for inflation) were The Santa Clause opening to a little more than half as much as Interview with the Vampire and eventually pulling considerably ahead of it, and My Best Friend's Wedding doing the same thing against Batman & Robin. Batman & Robin understandably underperformed due to the bad WOM, but Vampire was a hit, and a big opening for the time. It just turned out to also be an unexpectedly frontloaded run for the time; in 1994, it was the worst legs ever off of a blockbuster #1 opening - basically the Twilight of its day.

I'd already forgotten about Legends of Oz...

Strange Magic by ELO, I assume. This movie will not tarnish it, it will still be remembered long after this is forgotten.

Yeah, the early 2000s attendance boom was the final heyday of those legendary bombs. Battlefield Earth, Freddy Got Fingered, Glitter, Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever, The Country Bears, Death to Smoochy, and so on. You're right, there haven't really been LEGENDARY ones. Nobody thinks about Paranoia or Machete Kills or Winter's Tale or Sin City 2. Nobody will remember Mortdecai or Strange Magic a year from now, as you said. Sure, there have been big-budget studio turkeys like John Carter, Battleship, The Lone Ranger, etc., but the last "legendary", endlessly ridiculed megabomb I can think of was Mars Needs Moms, almost four years ago.

The 90s Disney had no such worries about whether their marketing would play to boys. Good grief, I was a little boy and I still went to see all of them. (Well, actually, reading DisneyWar, I think there was a bit of worry with The Little Mermaid? But it was put to rest when that did well.) It does seem like DreamWorks' period of being more popular than WDAS, plus WDAS's stumble in the early 2000s, plus the underperformance of The Princess and the Frog, all contributed to the marketing tactics leading up to Frozen's release. I would hope they've learned their lesson, and when they get to Moana, they will go all-out in marketing a female-led Broadway-musical fairy-tale spectacular as exactly what it really is. If every other studio is marketing their films the same way to the same demographic, wouldn't your film stand out more by not adopting the same marketing strategies as everyone else? If you're making a "DISNEY" movie, shouldn't you go all out marketing it as a "DISNEY" movie the way you did in the 90s? Yes, I know about The Princess and the Frog, but Frozen blew up so much that it can't hurt anymore to market your princess musicals as being princess musicals. Show the female lead singing, say "from the people who brought you Frozen" and I'd say you're set. Guess I'm just too naive and idealistic (not to mention going way, way, WAAAAY off topic...)

I thought principal photography was finished? It started in May.

Interesting that Paramount is shuffling all its horror films at once. I know we get big studio reshufflings every so often, but never limited to a single genre... ...I wonder if Scouts vs. Zombies will stay on the following weekend. There was no reschedule for it in this round of announcements. Would Paramount keep two horror-related movies on adjacent weekends? (Then again, this will probably make over/under half its gross on OW, so I guess they won't really be cannibalizing each other?)

Oh, I know. That's why I didn't just bag on him. Though I would love to see Darabont finally get a chance to write an Indy film that actually gets made...

I would snark about how Koepp wrote the screenplay for Crystal Skull, but I am still curious what kind of script he could write when not forced to work from a 2000s George Lucas storyline.

AS has already sold more tickets during the month of January than any other film except Titanic and Avatar. Tootsie and Meet the Fockers are the only other movies whose January calendar admissions adjust to over $150 million.

As I said, the original press release said Captain Underpants is going to be lower-budget and done outside of the Glendale studio. There's speculation it will be done at the Montreal animation studio that did The Little Prince (directed by Mark Osborne of KFP1), Katzenberg made a visit there a couple months ago. And as I also said, there has not yet been an official announcement of CU's new date, just that it would be some time in 2017. I was genuinely surprised to see CU put into the 3/10/17 date by BOM, it may have been speculation or a mistake on the part of their source (since that was the old date of the Mumbai musical, maybe they assumed CU was taking its date?) With so much in flux, anything could change (provided this date has actually been set by DWA/Fox to begin with).

Yeah, that's interesting. DWA themselves never announced that date, nor did Fox. But makes sense. (As we know, not going to be animated at DWA's studio in Glendale; there's speculation it will be done in Canada.)

I guess if anybody is going to replace Ford, at least it's an actor I like. Though a I'd much prefer a younger Indy than a full-on reboot. Set it 5 years before Temple of Doom or something.

Harrison Ford as Indy with Chris Pratt as his son? I'd actually be down for that. I'm not sure I could accept someone else as Indiana Jones. It's like how I've never been able to 100% buy Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto and the rest of the Star Trek reboot cast.

I know Katzenberg basically drove the wedge between DWA and Aardman. I remember hearing about how Flushed Away was interfered with and retooled almost all the way up to release, and I know whole characters (in particular the hamster butlers, I forget their names) were removed from the final cut. When the movie flopped, and they subsequently broke up, I think most people figured DWA was to blame, and not Aardman.

I'm reading DisneyWar, and will read The Men Who Would Be King after that. It's interesting how when Katzenberg was at Disney, he was so into making "Disney" animated movies, but after he left he seemed to become obsessed with making stuff that was the antithesis to Disney. Earnestness and "heart" seem in short supply, which is part of why so many people's reaction to HTTYD1 was that it felt closer to a Pixar movie than a DreamWorks movie. I had no idea that Katzenberg was actually quite instrumental in the development of The Lion King, or that he actually had the most faith in Who Framed Roger Rabbit out of any of the studio execs. (He supposedly said flat out that it would be the biggest movie of the year.) He was a meddler in his Disney days, but he didn't seem to be obsessed with making aggressively in-your-face stuff. Part of the reason I'm reading these books is to figure out what the hell happened with him. Though obviously, they won't be the whole story - DisneyWar mentions Katzenberg helping Pixar through early story problems on Toy Story by suggesting they watch The Defiant Ones and 48 Hrs., but says nothing about the later "Black Friday," which was, from what I've read, caused in part by them following prior story notes by Disney execs to make the film "edgy." Some accounts (I think Steve Jobs' biography is one of them) say the main person at Disney pushing the "edgy" line was Katzenberg. I just can't figure this guy out. Maybe someone will eventually write a book about this era at DWA....

HTTYD2 still made a bit more than KFP2 even with two seasons of a TV series. I wonder if Penguins was hit much, much harder because it's a "comedy antics" film, the trailer was sold on gags and antics, and there were no real stakes evident from those trailers. In contrast to DWA, Universal/Illumination are being extremely smart with the Minions, because other than little shorts on the movie DVDs, and the theme park ride and other ancillary stuff, the only way to see more Minions is to go to the theater when the movie comes out. Again, you may think they're overexposed, but as with Cars, imagine if DWA had them...