TerwillikerInst

👀

Disney reps have apparently been handing these posters out at a Doctor Who convention in LA.

tbh- I can actually see what they're going for here. The hook for the first movie will be all the stuff people actually remember about the musical, and then the hook for the second one will be that they've beefed it up by making it even more of a direct Wizard of Oz retelling. Those shots of Dorothy screamed "end of movie stinger" to me.

I mean, it did flop because of Rowling, just not for her politics. The Harry Potter movies worked in large part because they were built on a strong foundation of many different collaborative voices, of which Rowling was only one. As the FB movies have demonstrated, starting from scratch with the Rowling of the last decade fully in the driver's seat is a disaster. There's a reason why Hogwarts Legacy has done way better than shit like this and Pottermore. She's overly obsessed with doing weird grim dark lore explorations of shit nobody cares about, and the Potter Max show is 100% going to suffer because of this. Like, forget including all the bad existing shit like the Hermione slave plot- she is 100% going to try to pick up the baton of these movies and attempt to shove in more dumbass retcon Grindelwald Dumbledore's lost sibling-type backstory.

IIRC- Vaughn has the rights to Kingsmen because he self-funds basically all his movies (he's a very rich dude). Which is also why his movies generally tend to have pretty reasonable budgets (the most expensive movie he's made til now is Kingsmen 2, and that was only $128 million in today's money). I'm guessing that Argylle probably cost around $110/125 million, and the rest of the money was for buying him out of his cut of the potential gross.

I mean, I doubt it was actually $60 million; studios like to inflate the budget reports for riskier movies so that if it flops, they can write off a larger amount. Plus, if it's shot overseas, they get more tax credit money. Remember how Everything Everywhere All At Once was listed as being $25 million everywhere until it was a smash success, whereupon reputable sites like Deadline started reporting the budget as actually being about $14 million? Same principle here. I'd also say the movie earned whatever budget it did have because the sets, locations and cinematography were stunning. Plus, being a Branagh production, I'm sure it was an efficient shoot (IMDB says about two months). Blumhouse movies are nice but when it comes to the bigger movies you can always tell where they cut corners.

IIRC, the original plan was to shoot it partially on location in Morrocco (Egypt being a no-go since the last DotN movie actively damaged some of the heritage sites it filmed at). But when Disney kept forcing Branagh to do multiple extensive last-minute reshoots on Artemis Fowl, filming kept having to be pushed back, and they lost the locations. That's why it cost like $30 million more than Orient; despite having fewer big-name actors, they lost a lot of their original casting and location choices and had to pay extra for replacement actors and sets.

Either that's Willem Dafoe or they haven't yet announced that Burn Gorman has joined the cast.

This is purely anecdotal, but I'm a member of several James Bond fan forums and as you might imagine they fit the target Indiana Jones revival sequel demographic perfectly, mostly middle-aged center/center-right white men. And while for ages the various Indiana Jones subthreads have been filled with a lot of negativity ("it's going to be woke", critical drinker videos, doomcock, all the usual suspects) those who have seen the movie have been pretty overwhelmingly positive and surprised at how positive they've been. Not sure how much you can read into that necessarily, but I do think it might bode better for WOM, at least among that demographic. The question is, will they see it in theatres, and what will others think?

I will say this unreservedly, this movie probably would've done better if Crystal Skull hadn't come out in the meantime. It did sort of eat up a lot of the easy "Indy's BACK!" oxygen, and the fact that it went from great initial reviews to pretty middling reception and legacy probably didn't exactly help to build some of that back up again.

Yeah, it's a good thing all actions exist totally divorced from context and thus can't be used as evidence of the extremely obvious. lol I've said it before and I'll say it again-

Yes, thank you for saying it. I think it's legitimately insane that ever since BvS DC has still never managed to fully get over just cutting their ties to the old Snyderverse and its baggage. You can like what Snyder did, you can dislike it, but it's impossible to deny the more removed from the main franchise story a DCEU movie was (even if it had a very heavily Snyder-inspired look and tone like WW) the better it did. People just weren't that into the overarching DCEU franchise choices and narrative, which was a huge problem for something that wanted to emulate Marvel. Multiple (!) WB regimes have lost hundreds of millions trying to magically find a way to keep all the old Snyder continuity stuff but shove it into an entirely new context and they still haven't made it work. If I were Gunn's advisor, I'd order him to start from scratch. No Peacemaker Season 2, no Waller spinoff. Bring back actors you like if you want to but as different characters. Don't keep making the same mistakes.

:Edit: Sorry, double-posted by mistake.

tbh- at this point I wouldn't be shocked if this performed similarly to a modern-day Bond film, with strong overseas grosses (especially in Europe) but a domestic that doesn't even match the budget. Not that it's necessarily a problem per se, but all the factors are there. It's an older franchise centred around a classic-type two-fisted masculine male lead overtly modelled on older pulp heroes, which is still hugely popular and beloved by international audiences and critics, but now seen by younger American ones as either old hat or not as good as the instalments they grew up with.

Last time I checked TSS also got a B+ CinemaScore and didn't even make its (much more expensive) budget back but I don't see anybody bringing that up. And for good reason, people obviously dug what that movie was doing and making underperforming movies with good WoM is something that tends to pay off if you're trying to improve the future of an imperilled franchise. Or at the very least, pays off better than releasing a string of movies which start off hyped then drop like stones in their second/third weekends and leave such a bad taste in people's mouths that the much better-reviewed followups' box office pays for their sins. And yeah, while the Day and Date thing definitely hurt a lot of WB movies, based on how their other 2021 movies did, TSS was still never going to make anything close to the first movie's haul. And again, that's partially the fault of the first Suicide Squad which was a pyrrhic success that basically poisoned the well and WB understood that, which is why Gunn is now in charge of DC.

At long last, after an entire decade's worth of evidence, can we just finally admit that general audiences just weren't that into the DCEU? They didn't all hate it, they didn't all despise it, they just looked at what they were being given and said "meh". There were individual success stories, sure, but crucially, all of them felt mostly cut off from its overarching mythology and worldbuilding (even the first Wonder Woman was set 100 years before). And again, that would've been fine if their biggest movies were not clearly aping an MCU-style shared universe and box office. People rag on Birds of Prey but that movie had excellent word of mouth and did pretty damn well for a spiritual sequel to a movie that pretty much everyone agrees was an unholy mess. A slate of modestly budgeted slightly more niche and distinct films like that which (in time) would've built up positive WOM around the DCEU and its quality could've gone a long way. People aren't not getting hyped for the Flash because they don't care about Batman, they're not getting hyped because they don't care about the annoying sidekick from a 2017 movie nobody liked and a 2021 recut nobody saw. This always happens. Instead of trying to make more movies aimed at different groups so that way you minimise risk and expand your potential fanbase, studios keep plowing ahead with these $500 million IP wankfests. In a sense that's really what happened to Hollywood in general. Audiences don't go to the movies anymore, they just go to A movie, once in a while. And that's not healthy for the medium.

This is exactly it. If Greta Gerwig's Barbie had terrible-looking VFX action sequences it wouldn't really affect her reputation all that much because it would just be a case of an auteur director stepping outside their comfort zone for a one-off. No harm no foul. But if Greta Gerwig decided to pivot into making effects-heavy IP genre fare for the rest of her career, it would suddenly matter a whole lot.

The reason why the VFX don't look good is the same reason why most of the movie doesn't look good, Muschetti is just not very good at blocking. There are many movies which have had way faker-looking VFX but those still have a charm because the directors clearly had a strong grasp of shot composition, actor blocking, and camera movement. You can use mostly practical effects, you can go all CGI, you can make movies with crazy aesthetics, or very plain boring ones. The main thing that matters is shooting what you have with purpose and a clarity of vision. Of course, everyone's mileage will vary but the simple fact is, no cadre of VFX houses can compensate for a sequence in post that the director had no real idea how to shoot. (See 90% of all MCU climaxes for the past few years). This shot from Spiderman 2 is a perfect example. Basically nothing in it looks 'real' (from the body movement, to the background, to the way the camera moves) but it's clearly shot with purpose. You couldn't move the position of the camera or characters a few feet in any direction and end up with a shot that communicates what it's trying to say as effectively and stylishly. Not so with most of the stuff in the Flash.

I think people are forgetting though that recasting Connery did not go smoothly at all. Lazenby's first movie made roughly a third less than any of Connery's previous three movies and it spooked them so much they hired (an obviously greying and out of shape) Connery back for Diamonds. And even after that when they realized they would still have to bite the bullet and recast, their eventual choice was Roger Moore who had made a career starring in internationally successful tv shows playing James Bond-ish type characters. I guess what I'm saying is, recasting a role like that is totally possible but it's a massive risk and has to be done with a great deal of care and thought because you need to prime the public to accept even just the possibility. And even then the initial replacement is going to be subject to so much backlash.

I like all the Mission Impossible films to varying degrees but one of my problems with them is that they've gone down the Daniel Craig Bond route of trying to deepen the character, but unlike those films, they haven't really given Ethan Hunt any actual flaws apart from "being too good" and "too nice". It's a flaw that goes back to the first movie which was very clearly originally shot with Ethan having an affair with Jim Phelps's wife (you can even see them make out in the trailer*) but when it came down to DePalma's vision vs Cruise's, Cruise won out. Now, I like the movie regardless but it did set this franchise precedent of both trying to be morally complex while not actually risking making Hunt look bad and cutting out major character beats that help the movie make thematic sense.

Also loved this section from the same interview

I mean, people are allowed to be downers, even in a box office thread. Like, I'm not seeing a mass outcry in the Indy 5 thread because the usual suspects are saying it'll underperform or flop, or just generally be bad.

My most unpopular opinion is that there are 3 unimpeachably great Indiana Jones movies, but unfortunately, the other 2 are unevenly distributed over the last three movies. I think I enjoy Crusade the most in certain contexts, but I'm fully aware that it's a much sloppier bigger dumber retread of Raiders. (kinda worse edited too?) And frankly, I totally get why after Spielberg felt like he had to do that after TOD, he believed there was nothing else he could do with the franchise.

Right, so, just to be clear - HBO Go was the place where you could stream HBO shows *now* with HBO Now being where you could Go watch them until HBO became the place you could go to for Max until Max became the one to watch for HBO?

It's from Siddhant Adlakha, though. Who's like, the only actual critic they have. In fact, I believe he actually got taken off reviewing Marvel stuff for some website because people hated that he just kept giving every episode a negative review. Which isn't to say that makes his opinion wrong, but it also means he's not the typical IGN "this was an 11/10, a real gift for the fans!" guy.