TServo2049

As a kid, just seeing clips of the movies on the Disney Channel, I somehow ended up under the impression that the princes in Snow White, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty had no lines at all, they just stood around smiling. Eventually, when I got a little older and actually saw the movies, I realized this wasn't true, but this just reminded me of that.

Every time I see this movie, it has excellent audience reaction. Always huge laughter at the same points (Baymax deflating, fist bump, etc.), always applause at the end. Is it having better WOM/legs in places like the San Francisco Bay Area? Yes, San Fransokyo connection, but I believe certain films have played better here than in the domestic market as a whole? (Star Trek Into Darkness, Pacific Rim, Godzilla, Interstellar?)

There were adult-skewing network-TV dramas back in the day - Dallas, Dynasty, and so on. Yes people consider them "prime-time soaps", but they were dramas, melo- or not. (And there were "dramedies" too - I think the later years of M*A*S*H count, though it had a laugh track added against the protests of the producer.) Network TV viewing actually peaked in the early 80s - the fall 1980 season premiere of Dallas, the resolution of the "Who Shot J.R.?" cliffhanger, was the most-viewed TV broadcast of all time. Then 3 years later, the M*A*S*H series finale broke that record. I think that was basically the apex of network TV viewership, it was all downhill from there. (Coincidence that ticket sales dropped in 1980? The rapid inflation caused total BO to go up, but total admissions in 1980 dropped from 1979 by somewhere between 60-100 million tickets.)

Movie ticket inflation also outpaces regular inflation, so it's more discretionary now than before. If movie tickets had kept pace with inflation from 1980-today, the average would only be $7.75. Also, when I was a kid my parents would go to the movies, these same adult-skewing movies in short supply nowadays, and leave me with a babysitter. Around the late 90s/early 2000s, they stopped doing so. We had gotten satellite TV, they started just watching stuff on HBO or what-have-you. And they'd rent more at the video store (they already did before). They got more into TV also - Sopranos, 24, CSI:NY, etc. Not sure if the tickets got too expensive, or they just got a bit older and less willing to go out to the movies. Or if the act of going to the movies became less appealing to them. You don't see as much of date-night "see a movie just to see a movie"/"see a movie just to make out in the dark" either. It seems like up to when I was in high school, casual non-family moviegoing was bigger than it is now.

Nothing. I guess I oversnarked.

You mean the book whose co-author filed a lawsuit against Brown? The book that, from what I understand, doesn't fully say what the characters in the book say it says?

Um...Wardrobe WAS published first. The Magician's Nephew was a prequel, it was the next-to-last Narnia book Lewis wrote. Same deal with The Horse and His Boy, it was a "midquel"/"sidequel" between Wardrobe and Caspian, written after The Silver Chair.

Also, Angels and Demons partly collapsed on domestic "buyer's remorse" about the first film. Domestic audiences showed up out of the goodwill of DVC the book, and were roundly disappointed by the film. Does nobody remember the complaints that the film was dull, that Tom Hanks seemed to be on the verge of falling asleep, and so on?

When it gets naked enough that moviegoers with some degree of intelligence feel that said intelligence is being insulted, a movie WILL suffer to some degree. Not always as much as said film deserves, but the Spider-Man reboot, Hobbit 2, Pirates 4, Transformers 4 all show that some of the audience either knew they were being played and rejected the product, or didn't show up because the attempts to play them backfired by only producing apathy. Audiences are not as stupid as some would think. These films still made money, but there have to have been people who thought, "And just WHY do I need to see this, anyway?"

This is true. But population was also smaller, and there were fewer theaters. Though this site has yearly per-capita ticket sales numbers: http://www.waynesthisandthat.com/moviedata.html 2010 and 2012-13 had almost as low per-capita sales as 1986. 2011 was the worst since 1971 (the nadir of the 1968-71 Hollywood meltdown - the painful death of Old Hollywood and birth of New Hollywood)

OK, instead of EOT maybe I should have said TASM2 (even though $500M OS wasn't enough of a "save" for Sony to not go into panic mode).

And Dragon 2, and Edge of Tomorrow, and (it seems) Interstellar. I'm starting to notice a pattern this year...

This always confuses me. How can studios show the MPAA a rough cut to get a rating? They still have to eventually submit the final cut to prove they didn't sneak in NC-17 material or something, right? Or is the movie already 100% finished and just sitting on a shelf for the next 12 months?

Look up "Trouble." There is precedent for young spy Aunt May (though Trouble flopped and was quickly expunged from continuity). EDIT: AJG beat me.

I dunno, that didn't seem TOO far off from the classic cartoons...

Push comes to shove, Katzenberg will probably fold and sell DWA for less than he would want. I don't think he'd be arrogant and stupid enough to actually run the company all the way into the ground if he can't sell it for the same price Pixar got... Either that, or shareholders will get fed up with the multiple sale opportunities he ruined, and force him out a la Michael Eisner. (Which would be harder because there's no Roy E. Disney type to lead a revolt.)

I know there was at least one hoax script floating around; the one I remember was attributed to Last Crusade screenwriter Jeffrey Boam. (I think it was the "Indiana Jones and the Sons of Darkness" script.)

Spielberg is Jewish, Lucas was raised Methodist but AFAIK is non-practicing, possibly even agnostic. I don't think that has anything to do with it, I think Lucas just developed a habit of overwriting and overthinking his stories - or perhaps, the higher budgets, more advanced technology and lack of checks and balances allowed Lucas' overwriting tendencies to actually make it to the screen in a way they didn't. If you read the early drafts of Star Wars, they are in many ways as stilted and overwrought as the prequels. 80s Lucas, with Kasdan doing the screenwriting, may have been able to pull off a better ancient-aliens storyline. Maybe.

I'm not sure, isn't the picture in the L.A. Times article concept art?

Snoopy is huge in Japan. Wouldn't be surprised if that ended up being its biggest OS market (provided it gets a real release there, something many Fox animated features don't receive...)

I just don't hear people *I* know talk about Avatar. But I do admit that's a small reference pool - some of the people I know never saw it (myself included). I was making a rhetorically broad statement, and I shouldn't have. I apologize for that.

Bad/mediocre sequels do not hurt good movies in the long run. As the years progress, the sequels are forgotten and the original endures. I don't think Joe/Jane Average gives much thought to the existence of The Lost World: Jurassic Park, or Jaws: The Revenge, or Alien: Resurrection, or Caddyshack II, or Vegas Vacation...

I'd be inclined to sort of agree. People still talk about Star Wars, E.T., Jurassic Park, Titanic...but not really about Avatar as much.

Godzilla was no masterpiece, but I don't get this idea that it was awful. The way some people talk about it, you'd think it was on the same level as the Roland Emmerich version.

Actually, from what I read, Pixar dropped newt because Gary Rydstrom left the project, then Pete Docter took over, and he couldn't get anywhere with it so they stopped it and he shifted to Inside Out. In other words, Rio had nothing to do with it. And why would Pixar change something or cancel something for fear of similarity to something else? It's usually been other studios that rip off Pixar, not the other way around.