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Ipickthiswhiterose

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Everything posted by Ipickthiswhiterose

  1. 5 over $10m is fantastic. Avatar looked like maybe fading a bit and that Saturday hits and is so impressive. M3gan treading with fairly mundane weekday numbers but looks like it's going to post a really solid second week drop for a horror and just an absolutely terrific Saturday hold for PUSS!!!!!!!!! C'Mon for that level weekend Puss!
  2. Looking forward to Megan tonight. Booked for Aftersun and Babylon in the next week. Tar, Fablemans and who knows what in the week after!!!!! Finally going to the cinema after an Avatar-geddon driven month-and-a-half long absence. Cannot wait. Finally an Oasis after the Blue Desert.
  3. Rieu is a frigging juggernaut, man. What a career. Nearly watched it actually, but they always show up on Sky Arts anyway.
  4. "World War movies based on the British" is probably my perspective there. Dunkirk, 1917 and Darkest Hour are all fundamentally British stories and say so right in every element of the marketing and narrative. Oppenheimer is a story about an American Physicist who worked in California. Or even if it isn't, that's what all the marketing has implied that it is. None of the real-world people presented in the cast list are British.
  5. I would argue the chances of Barbie hitting $30m is significantly higher than the chances for Oppenheimer. Interstellar did $34m and I don't see Oppenheimer as as commercial as that. I may be wrong. Little Women did $28m and Uk loves itself some camp. Really don't see Hunger Games making it big here. Seems like a forgotten property. PS: I don't gather Chalamet as particularly popular or even well know here, my students don't really bring him up when discussing hot (both figuratively and literally) young male stars. But I'd still say Wonka on its own as a brand name pulls it towards 50m. Correction: OP was talking £ not $ - although I think that means Oppenheimers chances are even lower but not sure about Barbie either. Though I think the camp factor really will help it.
  6. Same old damn story with horror. Film gets buzz. Does well. Casual audience members go. Don't understand horror is a heterogenous genre with multiple spectatorship forms. The film isn't necessarily right on their buttons. Therefore it's dismissed as "bad" or at least "mediocre". Only exceptions are essentially thrillers like Silence Of the Lambs and Black Phone or wet known properties like IT. It's impossible to be a successful horror film without a backlash. Even harder to be a very good, well crafted horror film (which M3g3n may or may not be, I haven't seen it yet) without a backlash. It's why horror will always be the mutt despite being the most reliable genre there is.
  7. The designated "massive flop" Puss In Boots that was being dunked on by certain members of the forum its first weekend is now at $145m, almost double its budget worldwide; has literally only just opened in Brazil, Argentina, Korea and Poland; has not yet opened in family film loving UK and Ireland, nor in India or Japan. And still has plenty of gas in the tank in all markets. PRAY FOR MERCY!!!!!
  8. Again, it's hard to shake the notion here that the biggest contributing factor right now is there are literally no other options. It has another week to go with absolutely nothing even resembling competition outside of a niche biopic and films that have been out nearly two months. From the 12th December (three weeks after Matilda release and a month after BP2 release) to 6th January (Otto) EVERYONE going to the cinema will end up seeing Avatar by default. Heck, one could argue no truly mainstream film other than Avatar has come out between Matilda on 25th November and Puss & Knock on the Cabin on February 3rd. It is astonishing convergence of totally free real estate for Avatar 2. Is it genius, luck or fear in competitors? Difficult to say. I've never known anything like it. Maybe, maybe when Bond comes out it's like this in some cinemas but even then other films are actually coming out, just not being given many screenings.
  9. Regardless of how it normally is, right now there is NOTHING ELSE OUT. It's Whitney (very limited pull in the UK), Matilda (which has already been out over a month and family audiences have already seen) and Avatar. Puss, for reasons beyond anyone, isn't released here until February. Violent Night and BP2 have been pulled near everywhere. Most Oscar contenders yet to be released aren't until at least mid Jan. Otto's not out until 7th Jan. Babylon and Fablemans not till late Jan. Avatar 2 has just been handed an absolute runway. An absolute runway. I had no plans to watch it, but I'm now basically guaranteed to see it once, if not twice, just by default of wanting to go to the cinema.
  10. Heated conversations on social media today about whether Babylon's flopping "should" be celebrated given its an instance of Hollywood having a good old swing at an original property for a big name 'auteur' director. Versus the infuriating tendency of Hollywood massively disproportionately having a swing at original properties and giving the nods to productions about Hollywood. Surely Fablemans, Empire and Babylon is going to end that trend this year. But is it going to be at the cost of Hollywood studios having a swing on anything, or are they going to have the self reflection to realise that it's specifically naval gazing looking back Hollywood films about films and filmmaking and filmmakers and reflecting on filmmakers and films and filmmaking and nostalgia and heartbreak-feels-good-in-a-place-like-this that the general audience is sick to the back teeth of?
  11. Seems extraordinary. I loved Matilda, but it shouldn't have 8 showings having been out this long. Puss seems like obvious good Christmas programming. And I suspect the audience would have welcomed a counter programmed horror film a lot more than Whitney at this time of year.
  12. To my absolute rage, Violent Night has been pulled from my cinema. Totally. I planned to see it this week. I hate when UK cinemas do this, but we are now on an incessant Avatarpalooza, seasoned with Matilda and Dance with Somebody. Dance with Somebody seems to have a completely overoptimistic number of screens. We don't even have the revival showings. Just a couple of Indian and Polish films that they always have on are the only options beyond these two and a couple showings of Strange World. Graaaaaaargh. With Babylon and Puss not being released, it's created an utterly barren landscape in the UK if you don't have much interest in Avatar or flops given Matilda's been out for well over a month.
  13. Very uneven and mixed release dates in Europe for Puss. Not out here in UK yet for example.
  14. Even with the still limited expansion, are we anywhere near the phrase "The Fablemans has been rejected by audiences" yet? Or at least "The wide audience simply wasn't interested in the premise underpinning The Fablemans"? $40m price tag.
  15. Budget listed as $80m, worldwide opening of $57m with the whole run into the new year still to go. Sorry, not buying listing that as a mega bomb yet. Good chance of it being a flop still, but bomb? Depending on your definition, I think that's unlikely. Certainly not in the Lightyear/Strange World category.
  16. Illumination have re-engineered the brains of family audiences to remove any quality control whatsoever. Puss In Boots uses wit, wordplay and character comedy. Who wants that when you can have yellow sausages squeaking while doing badly executed pratfalls and you have loads of massive celebrities doing voiceovers that there is no reason celebrities have to do since they can barely even be recognised and they're delivering dialogue automated by Excel. It took over a month for people to notice Bad Guys was good, and it eventually came good. We can only hope something similar happens here.
  17. The big caveat to what I'm saying is I haven't seen Babylon. BUT Based on the trailer (again, I haven't seen it)....it strongly appears as through it is a film that simultaneously wants... 1) to present an augmented reality version of its subject with a very limited, borderline zero, relationship to verisimilitude. 2) to *say something* about its subject or the general perception thereof. Reconciling those two rationales, while not absolutely impossible, is close to it. La La Land did it somewhat but had at least one grounded character at the heart of it, and was more a character study than a film that wanted to 'say something' about its central themes. And not only is Babylon doing it, but it's doing it with a subject that there are no longer people around with living memory to myth make and story tell about it. Again, I HAVEN'T SEEN IT...but that's a very, very, very narrow line to walk and if Chazelle hasn't walked it then not only does his film be 'flawed', but it is outright broken: which is the perception I took from the trailer.
  18. The only films I would generally call "Oscar Bait" are in the acting category - I think I would happily refer to Judy, Vice, Harriet, King Richard, Theory of Everything, King's Speech as Oscar Bait. Especially given the proven track record of just-carely-decent biopic performances in forgettable getting Oscars. For other things, there are films that aren't so much Oscar Bait as Oscar Assumed - Fablemans, Roma, Once Upon a time in Hollywood, Irishman, BlackKklansman - where you have directors who are treated as royalty and the red carpet is brought out and regardless of what other films come out that year the perception is that it's almost a slight not to give these films nominations. But that's not to say that the films THEMSELVES are actual Oscar Bait. Even The Irishman - the epitome of a film that I think criminally clogged up nominations by default the year it came out despite very few people sincerely believing it was a Top 5 film of the year - I don't think was Oscar Bait as far as Scorsese or those involved were concerned. Such clogging is an issue of the voters and media, not the filmmakers themselves. Oh, all of this though excludes Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. That was 100% reprehensible Oscar Bait. That is the exception that proves the rule.
  19. I haven't seen 3 of these and for all I know they may be right or wrong (Babylon looks awful to me, but not exactly boring), but calling Banshees "Boring Predictable Oscar bait" is possibly the biggest L I've seen in the history of my time on this forum.
  20. How does everyone feel about the number of rereleases doing well in the UK at the mo? Good and a template for how things actually should be with returns to the past and greats having short runs.... Or a worrying sign of the sheer amount of padding needed at the minute?
  21. I think it's far harder to unpick the two than people think. I've always thought It is BECAUSE the prequel trilogy was received so poorly in many quarters that when The Force Awakens remade New Hope it was accepted extremely positively rather than, as it should have been, booed out of every cinema going. Its astonishing looking back that even cynical outlets like Red Letter Media aimed all of their "Remember Star Wars!!!!!!!" vitriol at Rogue One that so very obviously deserved to be flung at Force Awakens that even they gave a completely free pass to. But then I also think it is because the prequel trilogy was divisive that Disney chose to make the most down the line, small-c conservative version of Star Wars possible as the first film out and acquired the most down the line, small-c conservative director possible to do so. A film that caused huge problems down the line because of just HOW small-c conservative it was and how few ideas it had other than to repeat previously used Star Wars beats. The problems with the two trilogies are entirely different. One was planned in detail with severe flaws in execution and concept; the other wasn't planned at all but at least the middle one was directed by someone who genuinely was interested in science fiction and wanted to pull out ideas from Star Wars that hadn't been mined since the first film. For What it's worth: Last Jedi: B Sith: C- Force Awakens: D+ Menace: D- Clones: F Skywalker: F In other words, outside of Last Jedi, which I see as just a slightly above average movie, neither trilogy really bares any discussion to me other than the fact it's Star Wars and therefore inherently interesting from a pop culture basis. 5 of the films are below average, and 2 are a disgrace.
  22. $37m worldwide. Not so much a big success really as it did what the first one did in most markets, solid business everywhere - though it over performed in Mexico. But the anomaly with it wasn't really any of the foreign markets so much as the fact that the US release was a complete and utter horlicks. Weird that there are three low to mid budget horror films that did DRASTICALLY different business in the US: Barbarian, Prey for the Devil and Orphan: First Kill that essentially did pretty much the same worldwide. What Orphan made a complete horlicks of in it's domestic release, Barbarian completely fumbled its international release with no prescience of its success in the US, while Prey like an old reliable possession film did okay everywhere.
  23. This is going to chug, chug, chug right through Christmas surely. Not sure when the Netflix release is though.
  24. Am I right in recalling though that in $ Avatar came out at a time of a ridiculous $/£ exchange rate? I mean the difference between the mid 2000s and now is enormous. Surely theres's no way a movie now can make in $ conversion what it would have done in 2004-2010. I may be completely wrong.
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