Box Office Theory Forum's Top 100 Warner Bros. Movies

[Ipickthiswhiterose]

6 hours ago, excel1 said:

 

meh what similarly sized budget film doesn't have the occasional suspension of disbelief requirement?

 

 

Most? other than Batman Begins, what else is even comparable?

 

 

But your first point demonstrates the issue, doesn't it. It wants to have its "I'm a superhero movie and therefore am just silly fun and don't need to adhere to logic and have a villain that is essentially magic" cake and eat it in a manner that says "I'm a gritty realistic crime drama like Heat".

 

 And you can go with that, or not go with that. But the same people who try to claim it's sophisticated on moment, then turn round when it's held up to scrutiny and say "ah, come on suspend your disbelief it's a blockbuster".

 

As for comparability: X2, Unbreakable and The Incredibles were all superhero movies released before The Dark Knight and for differing reasons were more thematically rich.

 

The Rocketeer, Spider-Man 1 & 2, Batman and Returns, Blade 2 and SMTMP were all superhero movies released before The Dark Knight that have a smooth, consistent, efficient vision without the dissonance at the core of TDK.

 

But I think the best comparison is Jurassic Park. Specifically Michael Crichton in general. He managed to sell "here is some completely made up bull science that I'm pretending is a deep and rich cultural issue but is actually just kind of some hokum to make it feel like this hugely fun populist stuff is actually a lot deeper and closer to 'proper' sci-fi than it actually is." and he did it perfectly. IMO a lot better than Nolan does, but it's very much the same trick that Nolan employs in TDK. It becomes a matter I suppose of how much do you think that trick is genius and how much do you think it's cheap. 

 

So I experience Jurassic Park as being much, MUCH better at pulling that similar trick than TDK (and also at providing the outright-fun part, but that's personal). But is that cause it's better or is because I watched Jurassic Park for the first time when I was 11 and Dark Knight when I was 26? 

 

Oh and...for someone who really, really went hard at James Bond for 'ripping off' beats of The Dark Knight you spend an AWFUL lot of time waxing lyrical about how brave and original it is for TDK to kill off it's Damsel in Distress......given that Casino Royale had come out two years earlier (and PS not a Bond fan and there are other examples as well, just thought your oversight here is particularly indicative of not very objective claims).

Edited August 21, 2023 by Ipickthiswhiterose

[Jake Gittes]

The Bourne Supremacy killed off the well-established love interest earlier than both, and did it with more gravity and ramifications for the hero's character and story.

[Human]

6 hours ago, WorkingonaName said:

Fury road is the weakest Mad Max movie. 

I haven't seen any of them.  I spend too much time in the Louisiana heat to think watching deserts is fun.

[Eric the Fall Guy]

1 hour ago, Jake Gittes said:

The Bourne Supremacy killed off the well-established love interest earlier than both, and did it with more gravity and ramifications for the hero's character and story.

GOAT franchise. The way it influenced all our faves. Other series could never.

[Ipickthiswhiterose]

5 hours ago, Jake Gittes said:

The Bourne Supremacy killed off the well-established love interest earlier than both, and did it with more gravity and ramifications for the hero's character and story.

 

Whilst it happens at the end of the movie I would actually argue that Young Sherlock Holmes is the most surprising 'actually kills the love interest' movie moment. And is one of the more legitimately early ones of the modern version of the trope (1985).

 

Really captures out-of-nowhereness, callousness and pointlessness. It's only just within the tone of the movie, but because it's only just within the tone of the movie it works brutally well. Takes advantage of the fact that up to that point Indiana Jones and Romancing the Stone, whose styles it clearly emulated, had never gone for the gutpunch ending despite having styles that seemed like they might.

[TheDude391]

18 hours ago, Eric Reyes said:

You need to see Michael Curtiz mah boi. Dude was out there making a movie a year, sometimes 2 or 3 plus a year, and so many of them have become some of the most defining classics of their era. Man made Errol Flynn and Doris Day movie stars, he made the GOAT that is Casablanca. Dude was a legend.

I'm guilty of it too but the aura around the auteur director does tend to make other masters like Curtiz less known. It's a shame too bc I think someone able to disappear fully into their films, pumping them out like crazy and them being good is just as impressive.

[Tower]

Thanks Eric for going to the trouble of organising this list, and, at least for my liking, Starting with the best studio.

 

I plan on submitting a list for the Disney list, and at this point in my life I have seen enough films that I expect to find 100 Disney films that I like. But it will never match Warner Brothers in terms of being a collection of my all time favourites.

Edited August 21, 2023 by Tower

[excel1]

12 hours ago, Jake Gittes said:

The Bourne Supremacy killed off the well-established love interest earlier than both, and did it with more gravity and ramifications for the hero's character and story.

 

yeah but nobody cares about those films lol Batman >>>>

 

14 hours ago, Ipickthiswhiterose said:

 

But your first point demonstrates the issue, doesn't it. It wants to have its "I'm a superhero movie and therefore am just silly fun and don't need to adhere to logic and have a villain that is essentially magic" cake and eat it in a manner that says "I'm a gritty realistic crime drama like Heat".

 

 And you can go with that, or not go with that. But the same people who try to claim it's sophisticated on moment, then turn round when it's held up to scrutiny and say "ah, come on suspend your disbelief it's a blockbuster".

 

As for comparability: X2, Unbreakable and The Incredibles were all superhero movies released before The Dark Knight and for differing reasons were more thematically rich.

 

The Rocketeer, Spider-Man 1 & 2, Batman and Returns, Blade 2 and SMTMP were all superhero movies released before The Dark Knight that have a smooth, consistent, efficient vision without the dissonance at the core of TDK.

 

But I think the best comparison is Jurassic Park. Specifically Michael Crichton in general. He managed to sell "here is some completely made up bull science that I'm pretending is a deep and rich cultural issue but is actually just kind of some hokum to make it feel like this hugely fun populist stuff is actually a lot deeper and closer to 'proper' sci-fi than it actually is." and he did it perfectly. IMO a lot better than Nolan does, but it's very much the same trick that Nolan employs in TDK. It becomes a matter I suppose of how much do you think that trick is genius and how much do you think it's cheap. 

 

So I experience Jurassic Park as being much, MUCH better at pulling that similar trick than TDK (and also at providing the outright-fun part, but that's personal). But is that cause it's better or is because I watched Jurassic Park for the first time when I was 11 and Dark Knight when I was 26? 

 

Oh and...for someone who really, really went hard at James Bond for 'ripping off' beats of The Dark Knight you spend an AWFUL lot of time waxing lyrical about how brave and original it is for TDK to kill off it's Damsel in Distress......given that Casino Royale had come out two years earlier (and PS not a Bond fan and there are other examples as well, just thought your oversight here is particularly indicative of not very objective claims).

 

TDK is still very believable at its flimsiest. Jurassic Park requires a much larger suspension of disbelief. And Casino Royale isn't the first Bond film to the kill the girl LOL and did so at the end of the film. 

 

Apples and oranges. TDK GOAT 

[4815162342]

33 minutes ago, excel1 said:

 

yeah but nobody cares about those films lol Batman >>>>

 

Get some rest excel, you look tired

[TalismanRing]

12 hours ago, Jake Gittes said:

The Bourne Supremacy killed off the well-established love interest earlier than both, and did it with more gravity and ramifications for the hero's character and story.

 

Killing love interests to push or shape the hero's narrative is not new in films, TV or literature.   It's so common in comics it lead to the term fridging.

 

[Jake Gittes]

6 hours ago, TalismanRing said:

 

Killing love interests to push or shape the hero's narrative is not new in films, TV or literature.   It's so common in comics it lead to the term fridging.

 

 

I know, athough I didn't think the term necessarily applied when the woman is a developed character whose death is felt afterward, as opposed to serving merely as a motivational plot device. But then I've only ever thought about this in terms of movies. X-Men Apocalypse felt like a textbook example when I saw it.

[Ipickthiswhiterose]

9 hours ago, excel1 said:

 

yeah but nobody cares about those films lol Batman >>>>

 

 

TDK is still very believable at its flimsiest. Jurassic Park requires a much larger suspension of disbelief. And Casino Royale isn't the first Bond film to the kill the girl LOL and did so at the end of the film. 

 

Apples and oranges. TDK GOAT 

 

 

Oh come off it. The Joker Bugs Bunnys around the entire film with complete omniscience and no adherence to offscreen logic. He dresses in a nurse's attire (and this magically somehow actually works) and pulls an explosive device out of his rear end that executes a controlled explosion of a hospital it would have taken months to plan. Again - literal Bugs Bunny stuff. He times things he literally can't predict to the second. He is twenty times more ludicrous than Jigsaw in terms of the operations he can pull off within the timescale. It's only believable if you are solely hoodwinked by tone....there's nothing believable about a heist in which none of the criminals have met, don't know what each other look like, don't know who their leader is, and can be just lolimbetrayingyoudie levels of naïve. Yet Nolanites act like that scene's the second coming of Rififi.

 

Again nothing wrong with all that - it's superhero movie. But once you don't buy the realism that isn't there..it's just an above average superhero film but with a lot of the fun removed.

 

Oh and I literally wrote in the post that Casino Royale wasn't the first to do that and wrote it directly at someone purely because of how overboard they'd gone in claiming James Bond ripped off TDK. I thought that was clear. Lots of films have done that. The idea TDK was brave or innovative by killing off the female lead was inherently silly, though it executed the trope pretty well, I think we have happily all come to agree on that. 

Edited August 22, 2023 by Ipickthiswhiterose

[ChipDerby]

I'm going outside

[cannastop]

https://letterboxd.com/cannastop/list/box-office-theorys-top-100-warner-bros-movies/

 

I made a letterboxd list of this list if no one else did... but it was worth it because I finally got to read this list.