TServo2049

You think it's gonna take that long for HTTYD2 to get a Japan release? BH6 will get the typical March Disney slot, right?

Believe it or not, just a couple days ago I was actually wondering if anybody was trying to make a theatrical film out of this book.I like the idea of animation people being brought over to WRITE - if you're not directing, there's less pressure on you if you fail a la Stanton. (I know Dean DeBlois sold a few live-action scripts between Lilo and Stitch and HTTYD, though in those cases, he was to direct/produce as well - and none of them made it to production.)

I would be intrigued by a film which was cast by lottery. In other words, just write each character's traits with no regard to stuff like race and gender, or ignore what's in the script. For each character, determine the race, gender, possibly orientation, age, body type, religion, etc. by drawing a value out of a lottery drum with one card of each option, meaning each has equal probability. Once all cards have been drawn for a character, then the casting director puts out a call for talent matching the profile. For added bonus, the character cannot be rewritten or the actor/actress directed based on what profile was chosen to make it fit into any stereotype.Again, I just am intrigued by the idea of completely unpredictable casting, of people playing against type, of being SURPRISED.

My question is the same as the gender one: How would you propose to SOLVE this? If the problem is in the Hollywood studio culture itself, what's the fix? If Hollywood can't be trusted to do it themselves, would some external governing body need to impose diversity from without?This is something I am honestly curious about. I'm interested in seeing unconventional casting, I'm interested in seeing people of different races/genders/ages/orientations/body types/whatever play completely against type. I would be interested in seeing movies be completely unpredictable as to who plays what kind of character, not out of a desire for social justice but just out of a desire for movies to not all be the fucking same like they are now. But how the heck would such an end goal be ACHIEVED?

Star-Lord almost feels like a mix of Lone Starr from Spaceballs and Jack Burton from Big Trouble in Little China. Anybody else get that vibe?And again, my personal theory is that up to when we join him in the present day, Quill has basically been play-acting the "lovable rogue" character type from all the movies he watched back on Earth.

Yes, I think it has a cult following in Japan?And I wonder if it would help that HTTYD2 has scenes and beats in it that almost play like a Miyazaki film. (Though of course, Japanese audiences also tend to reject American stuff when they perceive it as ripping off their own movies - Hunger Games, Pacific Rim, and so on...)

If I could find a GIF of Randal from Clerks II saying "What the fuck happened to this world", this is where I'd put it. And keep in mind, I LIKE Star-Lord.

BOM adjustments are based off of the avg of the quarter of release vs. the current year's average (which, if the year is currently in progress, is the average of the previous quarters). Since IM3 was released in Q2 '13 and Q2's average was $8.38, adjusting it to $8.15 brings it down. ALL films released in Q2 of a given year get adjusted down by BOM. AFAIK, it has nothing to do with which films were in 3D, except to the extent that nowadays, the Q2 average is always the most 3D-inflated of any year.

I like Star-Lord, really I do, but he is no Han Solo. Han Solo is the real deal; on the other hand, Peter Quill probably based much of his persona off of memories of watching Han Solo as a kid back on Earth. (That's my headcanon and I'm sticking to it.)BTW: Peter Quill is the luckiest human in the universe. Since he hasn't been to Earth since 1988, he's been spared from ever seeing Greedo shoot first.

If you adjust for inflation it is indeed the second slowest, by about 3 weeks (at today's prices, Tangled would have gotten to $200m some time *before* the Memorial Day push - probably on or just after its first dollar-theater weekend in March?)Godzilla took 6 days more than WWZ...off a weekend that was almost $27m bigger.

It's obvious that with regards to the Spidey franchise, Sony has basically turned into 90s Marvel Comics. Ironic, since Avi Arad was one of the people who SAVED Marvel from collapse after idiocy like this drove them into bankruptcy.Do we get a Clone Saga movie next?

Well done, Sony. You came up with the one movie, alongside maybe a Cable film and/or that Boba Fett spin-off, I absolutely did not want to ever see. Venom as an anti-hero protagonist, fighting Carnage, the most overhyped, overrated 90s villain that's not named Doomsday. Whoopee.

The Academy is not about popularity, at least not GA popularity. If they were, Avatar would have won Best Picture instead of The Hurt Locker.The Academy is insular, it's generally Hollywood awarding itself, their decisions are not based on popularity. Maybe popularity WITHIN the Hollywood community itself, but even that is suspect (there's a reason Harvey Weinstein is repeatedly accused of having bought Miramax/TWC's Best Picture wins).I do agree with you that the Academy is in many, many respects a corrupt institution. I won't go into any more detail.

One I forgot:2010: The Year We Make Contact. This gets a lot of shit for not being like 2001, but it's almost a study in contrasts. Sure, it's not as good in the aspects where 2001 was strongest (mood, atmosphere, spectacle, "experience") but it also improves on a lot of things 2001 was weak on (plot, character, etc.)I actually know of people who hate 2001 and love 2010 - and they're not cultural/cinematic philistines either. One of them is an intelligent sci-fi fan who considers Harlan Ellison's I, Robot the greatest movie never made. They criticize 2001 in ways like: it has no story and it spends way too much time on visuals, or it only has 20 minutes of story in its entire running time, the HAL-9000 stuff is the only good/compelling part, the Discovery section is the only part where anything HAPPENS, the rest is visual style over substance, it's the worst kind of pretentious, it's an anti-movie, it's vastly overrated as a science-fiction story and as a film in general. I respectfully disagree with them on 2001 - I don't care if it's light on story and plot and character and the elements of a normal movie, it's an amazing experience - you want a film that tries the same things as 2001 and fails, watch Star Trek: The Motion Picture.Anyway, my point is that they basically say that everything 2001 fails at/does wrong, 2010 succeeds at/does right. In a lot of respects, they're not incorrect. 2010 is a different kind of movie, but it is absolutely not the travesty that many 2001 fans make it out to be. I think it's a good film in its own right - just a completely different one.

They already mined stuff from Looking Glass in the first film - White Queen/Red Queen and all that. The plot will likely have nothing to do with the book other than the means of getting to Wonderland.

Adjusted, The Lion King's original run was already bigger than Shrek 2. (Though Disney did have the film pulled from theaters for two months between September-November to build up more demand.)Shrek 2 sold more tickets during the same amount of weeks as TLK's pre-moratorium (June-September) run, but much of the difference came from S2's huge first 2 weeks - its drops after that were always bigger than TLK's. On its last weekend in September before the prints were recalled, TLK sold almost 6x the tickets S2 sold on its equivalent weekend.

The screening I was just at was pretty full, and I saw more people coming in as I left. It could have a soft drop yet.

A little bummed that GOTG isn't doing well so far, but happy that HTTYD2 is.

I'm sure they made it worth Diesel's while. Yes, he's a big Marvel fan, but I'm sure he got more than scale for this job.

Sure does. Baymax looks like he's gonna be a lot of fun in a Stitch/Toothless/WALL-E/Iron Giant, visual-centric-performance sort of way.

^This. Absolutely this."SU...PER...MANNNNN..."

Points well taken. I agree that the brands should not be freely intermingled - that is one thing that many people predicted with dread when Disney bought Marvel, and they have done a commendable job not mixing them.I wasn't saying they should plaster the Marvel logo on the posters or at the front of the movie or announce it out loud or anything. I just meant that maybe they should put a conservatively-sized "Inspired by the Marvel Comics characters" somewhere on the poster. After all, they put it in the trailer...But the Disney name should always be bigger than any mention of Marvel, and as I said before, I am absolutely NOT saying they should use the Marvel LOGO. Because this IS a Disney movie, not a Marvel movie.I guess I kind of regret my original suggestion now...

Does anybody know what the ACTUAL legs for HTTYD2's run have been like, with the preview grosses counted for the days they actually happened instead of being stuffed into the official nationwide OW number? Fox reported the actual OW gross of £2.9m, and the cumulative preview grosses of £4.4m, but does anybody know how much of the £4.4m fell on which weekends? I assume that if you take the actual preview grosses for each weekend, combine them with the Scotland/Ireland early general release, and compare the REAL weekend-to-weekend numbers, the film has had decent legs up to this point?

School holidays in the UK. Same story as in Australia and New Zealand last month, the schools got out and the numbers increased.Glad to see this after the near-50% drop last weekend, and the completely artificial 76% drop the weekend before (due to two weeks of previews being deferred into the official OW number and making the next weekend's decrease seem that much worse).

Oops, my mistake. Silly me, I actually brought up that fact earlier in this very thread, so I'm not sure why I used the term "explosion." I guess what I meant was, while it's not going to make $500m OS like KFP2 did, it's still going to do Puss in Boots-type numbers and save face from its domestic performance the way Puss did (though it will have made over $20m more domestically).