TServo2049

My father believes that every disaster movie (or movie in general) that sticks a bunch of people in an isolated place/situation where they have to deal with each other is basically Lifeboat. Airport is Lifeboat, The Poseidon Adventure is Lifeboat, and so on.If you're going to copy someone, might as well copy Hitchcock...

What's with the very low drop for HTTYD2? Has its dollar run already started? It lost 150 theaters, when a film's dollar run starts doesn't it usually ADD theaters, and increase from the previous weekend. My Fandango does show it playing in some discount venues, but not others - do they all not get a film at the same time?

Bruckheimer has insinuated that he wants to get back to producing R-rated action movies. I hope this is one of them.

If this is at least unintentionally funny, like The Core, maybe it'll go on to a second life in post-theatrical as a "bad movie night" quasi-staple. (Especially if Gerard Butler brings a sizable quantity of ham to the table.)But as far as theatrical, this feels like a made-to-order turkey.

Floundering means struggling, doing badly. Like a fish out of the water, flopping around on the ground.It's sometimes mixed up with foundering. To founder means to sink - a boat filling up with water and sinking.Either way, that OW comparison is exactly what I was talking about. The movie is doing badly in Russia so far.

Um...China is the other huge piracy hub. Considering it's dropping later there, how do you know its potential won't be hurt by the leak MORE in China than in Russia?

I can't believe I've gone from being worried that we won't get HTTYD3 to being worried that we WILL get HTTYD4. I still want the third to be the final chapter, as intended.

Apparently the film is floundering in Russia - that's a market where I'd believe the leak WOULD do considerable damage.

Ok, then that is strange...

Yeah, that stuff contributed big-time to the R, I think.This is one of those examples where it seems like the American and European reasons for a restrictive rating match up. That was my point, people say "sex is more likely to get a film an R in America, while violence is more likely to get a film the equivalent rating in Europe" but with Lucy it seems that the violence and graphic stuff was the reason in BOTH places.

Lucy is not a good example of this - yes, "sexuality" is one of the reasons given in the info box on its R rating, but there were no sex scenes or nipples or really much of anything beyond the stock footage of animals doing it at the beginning, and how Lucy gets the keys from the guard. I'm not even sure if there was even ONE utterance of "fuck." IMO, Lucy is a perfect recent example of a film getting an R primarily because of its violence.

Well said again, Dash.I enjoy watching The Avengers more than I enjoy watching Apocalypse Now. But I would never say that The Avengers is a superior work of cinema to Apocalypse Now.And I laughed harder watching This Is the End than I have at any Woody Allen film ever (his brand of humor does nothing for me), but I would never say that TITE is a superior work of cinema to anything Allen did in the 70s.

Josh Wilding...oh, right, he's the fucker who read the THR article throwing out Disney among a completely speculative list of other possible bidders for Time Warner, and wrote a rumor blurb "Disney may try to buy Time Warner, this means there's a real possibility that the Marvel and DC universes could be merged!"That's the only thing I've read from him, and he pisses me off just for that.

Not trying to puff up GOTG/TMNT relative to RH2/AP2, but what about popularity relative to the amount of the U.S./Canada population that's actually going to the movies? Clearly, not as many people are going, otherwise we wouldn't be in the state we're in. But among the people who ARE, are GOTG/TMNT doing business on the same scale as RH2/AP2 among the 2001 moviegoing population?Using this site and its statistics adjusting RH2 further for population and per capita attendance changes (using current BOM 2014 price of $8.15, population of 2013, and per capitas of 2013 and 2011 - since this year's low attendance is comparable to '11) yielded an adjusted "popularity" number of either $275m (with 2011 per-capita) or $296m (with 2013 per-capita). The mean of those two numbers is $285.5m.So if GOTG does end up legging it at least that far, by that website's system it could be considered about as equally "popular" in the BO environment of August 2014 as RH2 was in the BO environment of August 2001.As for TMNT vs. AP2, doing the same thing for AP2 calculates to either $176.7 or $190.5 - the average is $183.6. Not sure if TMNT is going to reach that total...

Oh, forgot about that. So you think it's going to hold well? (After weeks of disappointment, I don't want to get my hopes up right away.)

But will it hold next weekend? It's had a history of markets opening big and then dropping sharply on weekend two. Russia, Southeast Asia (Singapore/Malaysia/Philippines/Thailand), Scandinavia (Sweden/Norway), Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, France, Spain. Yes, sometimes it was due to TF4 opening on the second weekend, but not always (most of SE Asia didn't get TF4 until HTTYD2's THIRD weekend, yet weekend two STILL dropped 50%...)Does it have a chance of good legs in Italy?

Which is why I wasn't trashing China when TF4 broke out. I knew China had a possibility of becoming the market to "save" HTTYD2, so I said nothing.China has ensured that HTTYD3 is a guarantee, and is solely responsible for Pacific Rim 2 getting a greenlight, so I can't completely hate on their cinematic tastes. (Heck, they were the biggest foreign market for Captain America 2, by a WIDE margin. That has to count for something...)

Then what happens to the Bollywood monkey musical thing? That's the one I keep worrying is gonna get cancelled - it's bern in development for over three years, but there hasn't been any tangible news about its progress in many months. (Maybe it and Larrikins will each get bumped back a year? There's no other open space for it...)

The Animation Guild blog says HTTYD3 is already in early development at DWA, but this China performance just seals the deal. We're getting HTTYD3.People worried after TF4 that China will have undue influence on Hollywood's future output, but if it means HTTYD3, I for one welcome our new Chinese overlords. :)Wait, is the Chinese release through DW, or Fox? It says Oriental DreamWorks, but is also mentioned under Fox International. (And if it's directly through ODW, does that mean DWA would get a bigger piece of the Chinese gross than if it were going through Fox?)

No, that would be stupid.

Objective and subjective, love/like/dislike/hate vs. great/good/bad/horrible, are going to get mixed up and conflated. Even with my previous post, I will still admit this. I was going to make some mention of The Way We Were in my earlier post, in talking about films I *truly* consider to be overrated, and not just good films I don't like. But then I realized that unlike the other films I mentioned, my utter dislike for the film (too sentimental, I don't like Streisand, I'm not really a fan of Redford either, the hamfisted political stuff irritates me) truly clouds my ability to objectively pass judgment on it. My parents enjoy the movie, I do not.And speaking of my parents, while they were of the generation of that film's release, it's also important to know that they both absolutely DESPISE Love Story. They think it's a genuinely bad movie - but is that again just because they don't like it?I could also call Patch Adams or A Beautiful Mind "bad" or "overrated" out of my utter dislike of them...but again, are they? And on the subject of movies which I like that others call "bad", my family and I really enjoy Drop Dead Fred, my parents will actually say outright that it's a "good" movie, but just because we enjoy it, does that make it "good", and does that mean everyone who calls it "bad" is wrong?I'm not trying to speak from some high ground of "I'm above subjective judgment", I realize I'm just as driven by my opinions of certain films as everyone is...

Whoa, TF4's opening caused HTTYD2 to drop 60%, and now TF4 is the one behind? This soon?

Go Toothless! This just made my weekend.

I remember hearing early in HTTYD2's run that an added problem for it was that the toy sales were also below expectations.I know there were films in the past where poor toy sales added insult to injury (this is part of why Disney took a bath on Dick Tracy back in 1990, all the merchandise tie-ins didn't sell).

I think it IS possible to acknowledge a movie you don't like as being good, without being pretentious. I do not care for (or in some cases, actively DISlike) such cinematic classics as The Graduate, The Last Picture Show, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Taxi Driver, Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, or any of Woody Allen's 70s classics (Bananas, Annie Hall, Manhattan, etc.), but I am not going to be so juvenile as to say they're "bad movies." They're all not only "well-made", they have passion and substance and artistic merit. I get what each of them is going for, and I believe they all succeed at what their doing. They're all examples of great cinema, but I just don't LIKE them.