A Look at The Biggest Box Office Stories from 1972-present (THABOS: The History of Amazing Box Office Stories) | IT'S FINALLY COMPLETE!!!!!!!

[baumer]

I've only seen JAWS once in theaters....so I envy you you for that.  I can't compete with you with past Titanic.  I saws Last Crusade 13X.  Titanic would be 9 including the 3D release.  Other than that, there's a lot of 6's and 7's.  A really odd one is that I saw Texas Chainsaw 3 (the one with Viggo Mortensen) 5X.  It's not nearly as good as the original but I just loved that movie when it came out.  Other horror multiple times are Blair Witch and Sixth Sense 5X.  I think I saw both Rambo and Back to the Future 5X as well.  That was a lot of paper route money that went to the movies that summer.

[75Live]

5 minutes ago, Stutterng baumer Denbrough said:

I've only seen JAWS once in theaters....so I envy you you for that.  I can't compete with you with past Titanic.  I saws Last Crusade 13X.  Titanic would be 9 including the 3D release.  Other than that, there's a lot of 6's and 7's.  A really odd one is that I saw Texas Chainsaw 3 (the one with Viggo Mortensen) 5X.  It's not nearly as good as the original but I just loved that movie when it came out.  Other horror multiple times are Blair Witch and Sixth Sense 5X.  I think I saw both Rambo and Back to the Future 5X as well.  That was a lot of paper route money that went to the movies that summer.

 

yeah most of mine are probably 2-3 with some 5s in there was well

 

We had a retro night at one theater for Jaws and it was a blast.  I got a cool Quint fishing charters t-shirt, I go interviewed for a newspaper about it and was part of the marketing.  I know i have a pic of it all somewhere.  The funny part of the night was during the part when the girl starts yelling "shark" when it's going into the pond, there was a guy in a shark costume that came running through the middle walkthrough aisle exactly at that point.  It was hilarious   obviously it was planned by the theater but still funny

Edited August 3, 2017 by 75livesinDerry

[baumer]

Ok, I so need to go to a JAWS screening where they treat it like The Rocky Horror Picture Show!

[75Live]

5 minutes ago, Stutterng baumer Denbrough said:

Ok, I so need to go to a JAWS screening where they treat it like The Rocky Horror Picture Show!

 

yeah that would be really fun  

[75Live]

28 minutes ago, Stutterng baumer Denbrough said:

Ok, I so need to go to a JAWS screening where they treat it like The Rocky Horror Picture Show!

 

yeah that would be really fun  

Edited August 3, 2017 by 75livesinDerry
lol apparently I got a double post somehow

[75Live]

and here's the shirt I got that day 

[Man of Steelbook]

At my local theatre they showed Nightmare on Elm Street and it was like that. People laughing, yelling things it was one of the best experiences I have had at a movie ever! 

[75Live]

Just now, Man of Steelbook said:

At my local theatre they showed Nightmare on Elm Street and it was like that. People laughing, yelling things it was one of the best experiences I have had at a movie ever! 

 

I've done a bunch of retro nights and they all have been fun because 99% of us know the movie so we just have fun with it.  I guess it's like the Rocky Horror like baumer said.  They all have their fun fanbases.

[baumer]

Similar experience seeing Predator 25 years later.  All the Arnold one liners were shouted at the screen.  STICK AROUND and YOU ONE UGLY MUTHFUCKA got the biggest reactions.

[Man of Steelbook]

11 minutes ago, 75livesinDerry said:

 

I've done a bunch of retro nights and they all have been fun because 99% of us know the movie so we just have fun with it.  I guess it's like the Rocky Horror like baumer said.  They all have their fun fanbases.

I think a Batman & Robin showing like that would be  a blast!

[baumer]

Ok, thanks for all the Titanic replies.  I'll be working on the rest of 97 soon.  I will attempt to get 98 done as well.  1999 should be a blast as well.

[75Live]

5 minutes ago, Stutterng baumer Denbrough said:

Ok, thanks for all the Titanic replies.  I'll be working on the rest of 97 soon.  I will attempt to get 98 done as well.  1999 should be a blast as well.

 

didn't mean to hijack the thread.  Please continue  

[baumer]

No hijacking at all...I could talk Titanic all day.

[75Live]

9 minutes ago, Stutterng baumer Denbrough said:

No hijacking at all...I could talk Titanic all day.

 

same here   but then we would never get to 1998  

[junkshop36]

Funny enough, Titanic and Avatar are the only other movies I've seen more than once in theaters not named Star Wars lol

 

 

I look forward to the Phantom Menace write up, by the way

[baumer]

Continuing with 1997 the number two and three films were both produced by Spielberg.  The number two film was shockingly not the follow up to Jurassic Park, but the Will Smith, Tommy Lee Jones sci fi comedy, Men In Black.  Men in Black was directed by Barry Sonnenfeld and produced by Walter F. Parkes and Laurie MacDonald. Amblin Entertainment was one of the production companies and it was sid that Steven Spielberg added some input to the final look of the film.  Loosely adapted from The Men in Black comic book series created by Lowell Cunningham and Sandy Carruthers, the film stars Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith as two agents of a secret organization called the Men in Black, who supervise extraterrestrial lifeforms who live on Earth and hide their existence from ordinary humans. The film featured the creature effects and makeup of Rick Baker and visual effects by Industrial Light & Magic.  For those who have never heard of Rick Baker, I could write a Titanic sized write up of him.  He's the Stan Winston (before Stan was Stan) of practical effects and makeup.  He's a legend with credits to his name like Friday the 13th, The Howling and American Werewolf in London, just to name a very very few.  

 

 

The film was released on July 2, 1997, by Columbia Pictures, and grossed over 250/593 against a $90 million budget.   It received worldwide acclaim, with critics highly praising its witty, sophisticated humour, Jones and Smith's performances, and Danny Elfman's musical score. The film received three Academy Award nominations for Best Art Direction, Best Original Score, and Best Makeup, winning the latter award. The film spawned two sequels, Men in Black II (2002) and Men in Black 3 (2012), as well as an animated series. A reboot of the film series has been discussed and is in development.

 

Men in Black was Will Smith's follow up to Independence Day and it didn't disappoint at the box office.  

 

Number three is The Lost World: Jurassic Park, Steven Spielberg's first directed film in four years.  After he made Schindler's List, Steven said he lost all desire to direct anything.  Two years later, he began to develop ideas for the sequel.  He asked Michael Crichton if he was going to write a follow up novel and at the time, he wasn't sure.  Spielberg also became busy with his new studio that he was part owner of.  Dreamworks SKG opened in 1994.  Ultimately Crichton did write a treatment for the film but by this time, Spielberg had no interest in his story.  He commissioned David Koepp to write the screenplay.  

 

 Jeff Goldblum returns as the chaos-theorist and eccentric mathematician Ian Malcolm, leading a cast that includes Julianne Moore, Pete Postlethwaite, Vince Vaughn, Vanessa Lee Chester and Arliss Howard. Goldblum is the only actor from the previous film to return with a major role. Cameos feature return appearances by Richard Attenborough as John Hammond and a brief appearance by Joseph Mazzello and Ariana Richards as Hammond's grandchildren Tim and Lex.

The story is set four years after the events of the original film and centers around the fictional Isla Sorna, a deserted island located off Central America's Pacific Coast, near Costa Rica, where the cloned dinosaurs made by John Hammond's InGen have been roaming free in their own ecosystem. Learning that his nephew, who took control of InGen, is planning to capture the Isla Sorna dinosaurs and bring them to the mainland, Hammond sends an expedition led by Dr. Ian Malcolm to arrive there before InGen's squad. The two groups confront each other in the face of extreme danger and then team up in order to survive.

After the original book's release and the first film's success, Crichton was pressured by fans and Spielberg himself for a sequel novel. After the book was published in 1995, production began on a film sequel. The Lost World's plot and imagery is substantially darker than the previous film, and the film has more extensive usage of computer-generated imagery to depict the dinosaurs, along with life-sized animatronics.

 

 

Jurassic Park 2 opened to a massive 72 million, destroying the previous opening weekend record of 52.8 million by Batman Forever.  But reception to the film was harsh and the film only managed a 3.18 multiplier for a total of 229 million.  It did a bit better internationally as it took in 390 million for a WW total of 618 million.  So it didn't do quite as well theatrically as the original.  However, the theatrical receipts were just part of the story.  Fox TV paid 80 million for the rights to have exclusivity on the TV rights.  This was done before the film came out.  The average amount paid to broadcast a film on TV is 15% of the domestic gross.  So Universal scored big time with this.  

 

Critically, it suffered backlash as well.  Roger Ebert, who gave the first film three stars, gave The Lost World only two, writing that "It can be said that the creatures in this film transcend any visible signs of special effects and seem to walk the earth, but the same realism isn't brought to the human characters, who are bound by plot conventions and action formulas." Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune also gave the film two stars and said, "I was disappointed as much as I was thrilled because 'The Lost World' lacks a staple of Steven Spielberg's adventure films: exciting characters. Even in the original 'Jurassic Park,' the dinosaurs – not to mention the human beings – had more distinct personalities than they have here. Save for superior special effects, 'The Lost World' comes off as recycled material." Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly gave the film a B grade; he remarked, "Mr. T-Rex was cool in the first Spielberg flick, sure, but it wasn't until [it was in] San Diego that things got crazy-cool. It's the old 'tree falling in the woods' conundrum: Unless your giant monster is causing massive property damage, can you really call it a giant monster?" 

 

Spielberg confessed that during production he became increasingly disenchanted with the film, admitting, "I beat myself up... growing more and more impatient with myself... It made me wistful about doing a talking picture, because sometimes I got the feeling I was just making this big silent-roar movie... I found myself saying, 'Is that all there is? It's not enough for me."

 

Number four was the Jim Carrey film Liar Liar.  This is considered by many to be his funniest film.  Liar Liar is a comedy directed by Tom Shadyac, written by Paul Guay and Stephen Mazur.  Jim Carrey was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in Comedy.

The film is the second of three collaborations between Carrey and Shadyac, the first being Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and the third being Bruce Almighty.

 

Jim Carrey was paid 20 million for his role and the film was basically all about him and his drawing power.  The rest of the cast are somewhat recognizable names like Carey Elwes, Meg Tilly and Maura Tierney.  Carrey got so into the role that he would go home from the set exhausted after the day of filming.  In the bathroom scene where he beats himself up, there are no sound effects used.  Carrey wanted it to look and sound real, so when you see him wrapping his head off the wall or the toilet seat, that's all him without any effects.  Carrey was happy to do the film as he viewed Fletcher as a normal person, opposed to his previous characters.

 

 

The script floated around Hollywood for years and was turned down 9 times until Brian Grazer bought it.  He says that he did so after reading two sentences of the treatment.  Steve Martin was originally offered the role and of course turned it down.  

 

Liar Liar was a huge hit both domestically and internationally.  It took in 181 million stateside and a total of 302 million WW.  The budget was a modest 45 million.

 

Number five was the Harrison Ford smash hit, Air Force One.  Air Force One is a political action-thriller  written by Andrew W. Marlowe and directed and co-produced by Wolfgang Petersen. It is about a group of Kazakh terrorists that hijack Air Force One, and the President of the United States' attempt to retake the plane, while saving as many lives as possible.

The film stars Harrison Ford and Gary Oldman, as well as Glenn Close, Xander Berkeley, William H. Macy, Dean Stockwell and Paul Guilfoyle. A box office success with generally positive critical reviews, the film was one of the most popular action films of the 1990s. GET OFF MY PLANE is one of the more popular lines at our site.

 

As mentioned in the Titanic post, Harrison Ford wanted this film to succeed immensely.  He was still stinging from a rare misfire when The Devil's Own tanked.  Ford was one of the sure things at the box office from the 80's to around the early 2000's.  Air Force One became his biggest hit since The Fugitive, four years earlier.  

 

 

President Bill Clinton saw the film twice while in office and gave it good reviews. He noted, however, that certain elements of the film's version of Air Force One, such as the escape pod and the rear parachute ramp, did not reflect features of the actual Air Force One (though since many Air Force One features are highly classified and "need-to-know", these features cannot be completely ruled out). In the audio commentary, Wolfgang Petersen mused that although the real plane did not have those features at the time of the filming, they would probably be added by future governments.

 

Air Force One spared no expense with its cast.  This is probably one of the reasons the film cost 85 million.  This was a hefty sum for 1997.  Titanic of course cost 200 million but that was unheard of at the time.  But everything paid off Air Force One finished at number five both domestically and WW.

 

Number six domestic and world wide of 1997 was the Jack Nicholson, Helen Hunt film, As Good As it Gets.  

As Good as It Gets is a romantic comedy directed by James L. Brooks. It stars Jack Nicholson as a misanthropic and obsessive-compulsive novelist, Helen Hunt as a single mother with a chronically ill son, and Greg Kinnear as a gay artist. Also co-starring were Cuba Gooding Jr and Skeet Ulrich.  The screenplay was written by Mark Andrus and Brooks. 

Nicholson and Hunt won the Academy Award for Best Actor and Best Actress, respectively, making As Good As It Gets the most recent film to win both of the lead acting awards, and the first since 1991's The Silence of the Lambs. It is ranked 140th on Empire magazine's "The 500 Greatest Movies of All Time" list.  

 

 

 

In a different year, this is the kind of film that probably would have done incredibly well at the Oscars.  But it ran up against the juggernaut known as the Titanic so it had to settle for just the acting awards.  The interesting thing about the film is that it never placed higher than number three in the weekend tally.  It opened Christmas week in third with 12.6 million, which came in behind Titanic and Tomorrow Never Dies.  It not only had exceptional WOM, dropping very softly in the coming weeks, it also had increases on Valentines weekend (28%) and then consecutive weekends on March 20th and the 27th.  This was done without any theatre increase.  The movie just had exceptional WOM and people loved seeing Jack as the cantankerous but sweet natured man.  It also had one of the most bittersweet and touching scenes when Jack tells Helen Hunt, "You make me want to be a better man."  AGAIG's had a multiplier of 12.  

 

 

Number seven was the film that launched the Matt and Ben era.  Good Will Hunting is a drama, directed by Gus Van Sant, and starring Robin Williams, Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Minnie Driver and Stellan Skarsgård. Written by Affleck and Damon (and with Damon in the title role), the film follows 20-year-old South Boston labourer Will Hunting, an unrecognized genius who, as part of a deferred prosecution agreement after assaulting a police officer, becomes a client of a therapist and studies advanced mathematics with a renowned professor. Through his therapy sessions, Will re-evaluates his relationships with his best friend, his girlfriend and himself, facing the significant task of confronting his past and thinking about his future.

The film received positive reviews and was a financial success. It grossed over US$225m WW  during its theatrical run with only a modest $10 million budget. It was nominated for nine Academy Awards, including the Academy Award for Best Picture, and won two: Best Supporting Actor for Williams and Best Original Screenplay for Affleck and Damon.

 

I personally love success stories like this as it reminds me of Stallone and Rocky.  In fact, Damon and Affleck even mentioned Stallone as an inspiration when they were trying to get it made.  Here's the story.  

 

Matt Damon originally started writing the film as a final assignment for a playwriting class he was taking at Harvard University.  Instead of writing a one-act play, Damon submitted a 40-page script. He wrote his girlfriend at that time, medical student Skylar Satenstein (credited in the closing credits of the film), into his script. He then came to Ben Affleck and asked him to develop the screenplay together, and the two completed the script in 1994.  At first, it was written as a thriller about a young man in the rough-and-tumble streets of South Boston who possesses a superior intelligence and is targeted by the FBI to become a G-Man.  Castle Rock Entertainment president Rob Reiner later urged them to drop the thriller aspect of the story and to focus on the relationship between Will Hunting (Damon) and his psychologist (Robin Williams). At Reiner's request, screenwriter William Goldman read the script and further suggested that the film's climax ought to be Will's decision to follow his girlfriend Skylar to California. Goldman has consistently denied the persistent rumour that he wrote Good Will Hunting or acted as a script doctor. In his book Which Lie Did I Tell?, Goldman jokingly writes, "I did not just doctor it. I wrote the whole thing from scratch," before dismissing the rumor as false.

 

 

Castle Rock bought the script for $675,000 against $775,000, meaning that Damon and Affleck would stand to earn an additional $100,000 if the film was produced and they retained sole writing credit. However, studios balked at the idea of Affleck and Damon in the lead roles.  At the time, Damon and Affleck were meeting at Castle Rock, Kevin Smith was working with Affleck on Mallrats and with both Damon and Affleck on Chasing Amy. Castle Rock put the script in turnaround, and gave Damon and Affleck 30 days to find another buyer for the script who would reimburse Castle Rock the money paid, otherwise the script reverted to the studio, and Damon and Affleck would be out. All the studios that were involved in the original bidding war for the screenplay now each turned the pair down, taking meetings with Affleck and Damon only to tell them this to their face. As a last resort, Affleck passed the script to his Chasing Amy director Kevin Smith, who read it and promised to walk the script directly into Harvey Weinstein's office at Miramax. Weinstein read the script, loved it, and paid Castle Rock their due, while also agreeing to let Damon and Affleck star in the film. In his recollection of the meeting, Weinstein asked about an out-of-place, mid-script oral sex scene, which Damon and Affleck explained was a test to see which studio executives had actually read the script.

 

After buying the rights from Castle Rock, Miramax gave the green light to put the film into production. Several well-known filmmakers were originally considered to direct, including Mel Gibson, Michael Mann, and Steven Soderbergh. Originally, Affleck asked Kevin Smith if he was interested in directing. He declined, saying they needed a "good director" and that he only directs things he writes and is not much of a visual director, but still served as one of the film's executive producers. Damon and Affleck later chose Gus Van Sant for the job, whose work on previous films like Drugstore Cowboy (1989) had left a favorable impression on the fledgling screenwriters. Miramax was persuaded and hired Van Sant to direct the film.

 

 

I realize this probably happens to almost every film before it's bought and greenlit.  But it's truly shocking to me that one studio guy can look at something and think it's shit and then another can read it and instantly see how good it can be.  I give the Weinstein's a lot of shit for some of their oscar antics, but they have a terrific track record of taking chances on young artists and seeing things that other studios don't or can't or just won't.  They did it with Scream, True Romance, Pulp Fiction and they were involved in the process to get Lord of the Rings to screen.  They guys definitely have an eye for things that others don't.  

 

Number eight was Star Wars: Special Edition.  By this time, it had been announced that a new trilogy was being released starting in 1999.  So a film that was made 20 years ago, gets released into theaters for a brief stint, and ends up grossing 138 million domestic and a total of 256 million WW.  A rerelease made the top ten movies of the year.  To me, it's kind of surreal that so many of us were and still are willing to drop money on a film that we all own on VHS or DVD or BR, perhaps all formats (that would be me).  And yet, Lucas released his original films to whet the appetite of those who were drooling over the thought of seeing the new trilogy.  However, as well as they did and as much as people loved to see them, there were a lot of pissed off people when they left the theatre.  George Lucas made some drastic changes and one of them almost caused mass suicides when they found out that Greedo shot first.  This is what Lucas had to say about his right to make the changes:

 

There will only be one [version of the films]. And it won't be what I would call the "rough cut", it'll be the "final cut". The other one will be some sort of interesting artifact that people will look at and say, "There was an earlier draft of this." The same thing happens with plays and earlier drafts of books. In essence, films never get finished, they get abandoned. At some point, you're dragged off the picture kicking and screaming while somebody says, "Okay, it's done." That isn't really the way it should work. Occasionally, [you can] go back and get your cut of the video out there, which I did on both American Graffiti and THX 1138; that's the place where it will live forever. So what ends up being important in my mind is what the DVD version is going to look like, because that's what everybody is going to remember. The other versions will disappear. Even the 35 million tapes of Star Wars out there won't last more than 30 or 40 years. A hundred years from now, the only version of the movie that anyone will remember will be the DVD version [of the Special Edition], and you'll be able to project it on a 20-foot-by-40-foot screen with perfect quality. I think it's the director's prerogative, not the studio's, to go back and reinvent a movie.

 

 

George Lucas

 

We'll get much more into Star Wars in 1999.

 

Number nine...another Julia Roberts smash hit.  

My Best Friend's Wedding is a romantic comedy directed by P.J. Hogan, and in addition to Roberts, starred Cameron Diaz, Dermott Mulroney and Rupert Everett.

The film opened at No. 2 at the North American box office, making $21,678,377 USD in its opening weekend, behind Batman & Robin. It stayed in the top 10 weekly U.S. box-office for six consecutive weeks, and eventually earned $127,120,029. The worldwide gross total stands at $299,288,605 (listed as one of the 10 biggest films of 1997 both domestically and worldwide).  MBFW was the film that got Robert's back on top.  She had starred in a string of poorly received movies and there was talk that her reign as box office queen might be over.  Mary Reilly grossed an embarrassing 5.7 million.  But after Best Friend's Wedding, she got right back to the top of the heap and it would be 5 movies and three years later that she would win best actress for Erin Brockovich.

 

The film received generally positive reviews from critics.

Total Film praised the film, giving it four stars out of five and stating "Here she banishes all memories of Mary Reilly and I Love Trouble with a lively, nay sparkling, performance. Smiling that killer smile, shedding those winning tears, delivering great lines with effortless charm, Roberts is back where she rightly belongs - not in grey period costume, but as the sexy queen of laughs". The Review also said that "My Best Friend's Wedding is a perfect date movie", and a film that "proves Roberts isn't as crap as we all thought she was".

Peter Travers of Rolling Stone called it "the summer-date-film supreme for pretty women and the gay men they love", despite criticisms of the script. He praises Roberts as "riper, more dexterous with a comic line, slyer with modulation", concluding that "Roberts puts her heart into this one".

Joanna Berry of Radio Times gave it four stars out of five, observing that this "sparkling comedy" proved to be a career-resurrecting movie for Julia Roberts.

CNN movie reviewer Carol Buckland said Roberts "lights up the screen", calling the film "fluffy fun".

 

 

Coming in at number ten for the year domestic, but number four world wide, is the James Bond film, Tomorrow Never Dies.  Tomorrow Never Dies is the eighteenth spy film in the James Bond series, and the second to star Pierce Brosnan as the fictional MI6 agent James Bond. Directed by Roger Spottiswoode, with the screenplay written by Bruce Feirstein, the film follows Bond as he attempts to stop Elliot Carver, a power-mad media mogul, from engineering world events to initiate World War III.

The film was produced by Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli, and was the first James Bond film made after the death of producer Albert R. Broccoli, to whom the movie pays tribute in the end credits. Filming locations included France, Thailand, Germany, Mexico and the United Kingdom. Tomorrow Never Dies performed well at the box office and earned a Golden Globe nomination despite mixed reviews. While its performance at the domestic box office surpassed that of its predecessor, GoldenEye, it was the only Pierce Brosnan Bond film not to open at number one at the box office, as it opened the same day as Titanic.  Many observers thought it would open to number one, but then again, no one was prepared for the carnage Titanic would leave in it's wake.

 

While the film did well, grossing more than 335 million WW, it came with a hefty price tag of 125 million.  But Bond, like other on going series, isn't just about the theatrical figures.  There's merchandise and HV and it also boosts sales and rentals of other Bond films.  

 

 

Number eleven was the first of two huge hits for Nicolas Cage.  This one is Face/Off.  

Face/Off is a science fiction action film directed by John Woo, written by Mike Werb and Michael Colleary, and starring John Travolta and Nicolas Cage. Travolta plays an FBI agent and Cage plays a terrorist, sworn enemies who assume each other's physical appearance.

The first Hollywood film in which Woo was given major creative control, Face/Off earned favorable reviews and grossed $245 million worldwide. The film was nominated for an Academy Award in the category of Sound Effects Editing.

 

Face/Off was a spec script which writers Mike Werb and Michael Colleary tried to sell to a studio from as early as 1990. The first actors who were chosen to play Sean Archer and Castor Troy were Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger respectively but John Woo instead hired John Travolta and Nicolas Cage to play those characters. It took numerous studios, producers and rewrites before John Woo became attached several years later.  For the Archer character, Woo considered casting either Michael Douglas or Jean-Claude Van Damme whom he had worked with in Hard Target. When the film was eventually made, Douglas served as an executive producer. Werb and Colleary have cited White Heat (1949) and Seconds (1966) as influences on the plot.

With an $80 million production budget, Face/Off made heavy use of action set pieces including several violent shootouts and a boat chase filmed in the Los Angeles area. The boat scene at the end of the film was shot in San Diego.

Calling the brothers Castor and Pollux is a reference to Greek mythology; Castor and Pollux are the twins transformed by Zeus into the constellation Gemini.

 

  

 

 

Coming in at number twelve for the year is one of the worst films ever made, and yet it is not the worst Batman of all time, that would be Batman Returns.  Batman & Robin is a superhero film based on the DC Comics characters Batman and Robin. It is the fourth and final installment of Warner Bros.' initial Batman film series. The film was directed by Joel Schumacher and written by Akiva Goldsman. It stars Arnold Schwarzenegger, George Clooney, Chris O'Donnell, Alicia Silverstone, and Uma Thurman. Batman & Robin tells the story of Batman and Robin as they attempt to prevent Mr. Freeze and Poison Ivy from freezing all mankind to death and repopulating the earth with mutant plants, while at the same time struggling to keep their partnership together. It is also to date the only live-action film appearance of Batgirl, who helps the title characters fight the villains.

 

Warner Bros. fast-tracked development for Batman & Robin following the box office success of the previous film, Batman Forever. Schumacher and Goldsman conceived the storyline during pre-production on A Time to Kill, while Val Kilmer decided not to reprise the role over scheduling conflicts with The Saint. Schumacher had a strong interest in casting William Baldwin in Kilmer's place before George Clooney won the role. Principal photography began in September 1996 and finished in January 1997, two weeks ahead of the shooting schedule (when you see the finished product, you realize why they finished ahead of schedule).

 

Batman & Robin premiered in Los Angeles on June 12, 1997 and went into general release on June 20, 1997. While it performed modestly at the box office, making $238.2 million worldwide against a production budget of $125 million, the film was a critical failure and is often considered to be one of the worst films of all time.  It is also the lowest grossing live-action Batman movie to date.  Due to the film's negative reception, Warner Bros. cancelled a sequel, Batman Unchained, and rebooted the film series with Batman Begins in 2005. 

 

 

So where did Batman and Robin go wrong?  I'm not sure you can pick just one or two areas, but for the purpose of this article, I'll mention two.  The first was the script.  Joel Schumacher can certainly take the blame for the failure because he is the director but everything from the story to the dialogue the delivery of Arnold's lines, was just plain horrific.  I mean, the villains want to kill everyone and then repopulate the world with mutant plants......WTF!  How did this even pass as a story idea let alone something that got approved.  I watched one of Kevin Smith's shows and in it he talks about meeting with Jon Peters and Peters told him that he wanted a giant spider to be in the next superman movie because giant spiders were fucking cool  Smith laughed it off and so did everyone else.  And as stupid of an idea as that sounds, it's about 3 billion times better than what they came up with Batman and Robin.  

 

When comparing work on Batman Forever, Chris O'Donnell, who portrayed Robin, explained, "It just felt like everything got a little soft the second time. On Batman Forever, I felt like I was making a movie. The second time, I felt like I was making a kid's toy commercial." He also complained of the Robin costume, saying it was more involved and uncomfortable than the one he wore in Batman Forever, with a glued-on mask which caused sweat to pool on his face. According to John Glover, who played Dr. Jason Woodrue, "Joel [Schumacher] would sit on a crane with a megaphone and yell before each take, 'Remember, everyone, this is a cartoon'. It was hard to act because that kind of set the tone for the film." Production designer Barbara Ling admitted her influences for the Gotham City design came from "neon-ridden Tokyo and the Machine Age. Gotham is like a World's Fair on ecstasy."

According to Shadows of the Bat: The Cinematic Saga of the Dark Knight Part 6: Batman Unbound, Chris O'Donnell revealed that despite hanging out with Arnold Schwarzenegger a lot off set and during promotion for the film, they never worked a single day together. This was achieved with stand ins when one of the actors wasn't available.

 

 

Batman and Robin is one of the all time disasters.  The only good thing that came out of it is that WB scrapped the next film and then waited 8 years to make another one.  And of course, that film took off and reinvented the super-hero film.  

 

For fun, here is a list of horrible lines uttered by Arnold, in the film.

 

The Ice Man has cometh

Everything freezes

Tonight, Hell freezes over

I'm afraid my condition has left me cold to your pleas of mercy (WTF)

You are not sending me to the cooler

Stay cool, bird boy

All right, everyone chill

Tonight's forecast, a freeze is coming

What killed the dinosaurs?  THE ICE AGE

Ice to see you

Let's kick some ice

 

Arnold was paid 25 million for this brilliant piece of work.

 

Coming in at number 15 was the second Nic Cage film that did very well.  Con Air (which is I think is much better than Face/Off...much to the chagrin of @Squadron Leader Tele ) took in 101 million domestic and 224 million WW against a budget of 75 million.  

Con Air is an action film directed by Simon West, written by Scott Rosenberg, and produced by Jerry Bruckheimer. The film stars Nicolas Cage, John Cusack, and John Malkovich alongside Steve Buscemi, Colm Meaney, Mykelti Williamson, Ving Rhames, Nick Chinlund, Jesse Borrego, Jose Zuniga, and Monica Potter.

It was released theatrically on June 6, 1997 by Touchstone Pictures and was a box office success.  Despite this, the film received mixed reviews from critics, but praising Cage and the cast performances as well as its action sequences, stunts and the villain portrayed by Malkovich. The film also borrows its title from the nickname of the Justice Prisoner and Alien Transportation System.

 

 

Con Air was an action fans delight.  It also had a witty script and a terrific performance from Cage and many of the cast members.  I enjoyed Malkovich of course but I also loved seeing Ving and Buscemi in a film together.  They were in Pulp Fiction but didn't share any screen time.  This was a time in film history when the cast could sell a film.  The eclectic cast certainly helped in that department.  It opened to 24 million and that was good enough for number one.

 

Number 44 for the year was the Full Monty.  This did okay in NA but absolutely killed it in the UK, which contributed heavily to the international gross of 211 million.  

The Full Monty is a British comedy  directed by Peter Cattaneo, starring Robert Carlyle, Mark Addy, William Snape, Steve Huison, Tom Wilkinson, Paul Barber and Hugo Speer. The screenplay was written by Simon Beaufoy.

The film is set in Sheffield, England and, starting off with a travelogue of the city in 1972, tells the story of six unemployed men, four of them former steel workers, who decide to form a male striptease act (à la Chippendale dancers) in order to gather enough money to get somewhere else and for the main character, Gaz, to be able to see his son. Gaz declares that their show will be better than the Chippendales dancers because they will go "the full monty"—strip all the way—hence the film's title.

Despite being a comedy, the film also touches on serious subjects such as unemployment, fathers' rights, depression, impotence, homosexuality, body image, working class culture and suicide.

 

 

The Full Monty was a major critical success upon release and an unexpected international commercial success, grossing over $250 million from a budget of only $3.5 million. It was the highest-grossing film in the UK until it was outsold by Titanic. It was nominated for Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay and Best Original Music Score, winning the last.

The film was later adapted into a musical in 2000, and a play in 2013.

 

And finally coming it at 110 for the year, is what I think is the second best film of 1997.  Chasing Amy.  

Chasing Amy is a romantic comedy-drama written and directed by Kevin Smith. The film is about a male comic artist who falls in love with a lesbian woman, to the displeasure of his best friend. It is the third film in Smith's View Askewniverse series.

The film was originally inspired by a brief scene from an early movie by a friend of Smith's. In Guinevere Turner's Go Fish, one of the lesbian characters imagines her friends passing judgment on her for "selling out" by sleeping with a man. Kevin Smith was dating star Joey Lauren Adams at the time he was writing the script, which was also partly inspired by her.

The film won two awards at the 1998 Independent Spirit Awards (Best Screenplay for Smith and Best Supporting Actor for Jason Lee).

 

 

Chasing Amy is one of my favourite scripts to be made and it has one of my favourite performances of all time, that by Jason Lee, as Banky, the shy, repressed, slightly homophobic, possible closeted gay person.  According to Kevin Smith, he was told that Chasing Amy was only two votes away from a best picture nomination.  It's a film that deals with love but from a different angle.  There's the love triangle but in this case its about a heterosexual man, who falls for a lesbian woman but he can't be with her because of her sexual preference.  They end up together much to the chagrin and vitriol of Banky (Lee).  He ridicules Holden (Affleck) every chance he gets, not understanding the relationship at all.  Roger Ebert made a savvy observation about it:

 

 "While the surface of his film sparkles with sharp, ironic dialogue, deeper issues are forming, and Chasing Amy develops into a film of touching insights. Most romantic comedies place phony obstacles in the way of true love, but Smith knows that at some level there's nothing funny about being in love: It's a dead serious business, in which your entire being is at risk." Ebert believed the film was an improvement over Smith's previous effort Mallrats and he added that Adams was a discovery. 

 

The film was a minor hit with a gross of 12 million but a budget of just 250K.  I'd argue that this is Ben' best performance and I too agree with Ebert about Adams, she should have been nominated for best actress.  

 

Chasing Amy also has an incredible tribute and "rip off" of JAWS.  It basically recreates the USS Indianapolis speech scene and it is absolutely fucking hilarious.

 

Chasing Amy is my favourite Smith film.

This was 1997

 

 

 

[baumer]

@narniadis; @Diana Prince; 

 

 

[baumer]

@Maxmoser3 

 

Ok, this tagging thing is pissing me off.

[baumer]

I couldn't take all requests, sorry.  But I got in a lot of them.

[baumer]

@Kalo @damnitgeorge08 @75livesinDerry