Amph The Box Office Thread

I don't think I'm reading more into box office figures than is warranted by the reality of commercial film making. I personally feel that AotC is nearly unwatchable in its entirety, but I also know my personal individual feelings don't scale up into any kind of overarching theory of why enough people will or will not go to a 3D re-release in large enough numbers to make it commercially worthwhile.

"People really love AotC and the box office figures don't reflect that" doesn't really make the grade as an argument. Prove it.

If someone tells me George Lucas will push ahead with the 3D re-release of AotC even though he knows it won't make enough money alone to justify the conversion and marketing costs because his licensing empire is his core revenue stream and he has to keep the Star Wars brand in front of audiences, I can believe that. It makes a fair amount of sense.

 

I can see Clones making more money than TPM as a 3D re-release, and I would put money on it doing so. Lucas only has to make back the money he put in to convert the film, which if TPM is anything to go by he will do.

Most people I know with kids say the little ones like Clones most, which leads me to believe it will do better than TPM. Sith will also do better than TPM or Clones being the best of the Prequels, you'll see.

 

We'll make it a gentleman's bet. I'll put anything TOS-legal you'd like into my signature for a week if you win. I've lost this kind of bet before, so I know the drill.

 

[image=http://wpc.556e.edgecastcdn.net/80556E/img.news/NEgeXihhnHoXjn_1_1.jpg]
"I except"



I can see Titanic 3D not doing anywhere near as well as the film did originally in 1997, I just don't think it's as popular now as it was back then. Most critics have lowered their opinion of it and I think a lot of viewers have also. Even those who still like it don't obsess as they did back when it was in the cinema. I think it will make 3D conversion money back, but it will hardly be a stellar success. Just because it was massively popular first time around doesn't mean it will be now, just as something that was originally unpopular could be a success when re-released.

 

Grammatic fail, of course I meant "accept"

 

I was just thinking about Titanic in a round about way. My grandmother's sister just died this past week. She was 97. And my grandmother died a few years ago. The two of them were famously not big moviegoers. They went out to the movies exactly three times in their lives. The first time was for Gone With the Wind. The second time was for Dr. Zhivago and the third time was for Titanic.

 

"The Lorax" stuns with $70 Million

 

The Lorax opening shows what a good trailer can do for a movie.... Also don't forget Seuss will have parents wanting to go just to relive their childhood as well.

 

Weird. I thought the trailer was awful, and also that the movie looked next to nothing like my childhood memories of The Lorax.

 

Its 70 million thats stunning, not that The Lorax took the week. Its a very popular story by a very popular author with a theme thats relevant right now, and its release was timed to coincide with a week where American schools were celebrating the author. But holy crow, 70 million!

 

That's a lot of wonga for an animated movie that isn't by Disney, especially one with such an average trailer (I though so anyway). Still, it might be really good, it's not out over here until the summer so I'll see how it does then.

 

Unless The Hunger Games is super duper awful, its opening weekend may be closer to $100 million than $70 million, although I doubt it will take down the Alice in Wonderland opening record.

The Hunger Games novels have become a sleeper hit with adults. I have women friends reading this thing in their book clubs. So, if the movie is even halfway decent I think it could be a monster hit on the scale of Twilight. Also, I'd say that post Winter's Bone and X-Men First Class Jennifer Lawrence is at a higher profile stage of her career right now than Kristen Stewart was when the first Twilight movie hit. She is definitely a strong enough screen presence to carry a franchise.

 

Plus Hunger Games is actually good and Lawrence can actually act, Twilight isn't and Stewart can't.

 

I haven't read the former or seen the latter in its entirety. The first Twilight movie kept putting me to sleep and I haven't tried to watch any of the sequels. But I agree that Lawrence can act. She's going to be a big star if she can keep her **** together.

 

Okay, I guess by this comment the trailer wasn't as good as I thought, though it sure worked for me. But then I don't remember Lorax as much as other Suess character

 

The Lorax vs. John Carter

 

We all saw it coming.

 

It was a better movie then The Lorax too, or at least I thought so. I agree with the article - they made the film for older film goers. I think it was marketed terribly and Disney is gonna pay for it, but not much. I can see it being a big cult hit with the geek squad in the next twenty years. But they can forget about a franchise. Seriously, nary a mention of Burroughs, no mention like " from the creator of Tarzan " or " from the legendary author Edgar Rice Burroughs ". The television spots were terrible. I can think of three dozen shots shots in the film they shouldve went with, plus changing the title so close to the release was stupid. Not going with original title of the first story was stupid, come to think of it. Still, it was pretty good and i'm not pissed about seeing it on the big screen. The effects were great, the music was great, the action was good, and the acting was bad in a good way - it was everything you want from a scifi actioneer. Ah well, its a one shot. At least the stories got nice new publications in the bookstores.

 

The press coverage of this has been hilariously over the top. They were all salivating for this one to fail. It's the movie world equivalent of ambulance chasers.

It's not a masterpiece, but it's a perfectly fine film given what it's intended to be.
It's a sci-fi action story set on Mars with gladiator-like scenes and a muscular hero who falls in love with a princess. Great effects and great score. I've seen lots of films worse than this one.

Jesus, we're a society that is not longer content to rip the movie to shreds, that's not enough. Now we have to rip the marketing campaign to shreds too.

I have no great love or hate for the Disney organization, but I at least give them credit for rolling the dice and giving the director all the resources he needed. Which is basically what a lot of people reviewed, the budget, not the movie itself.

 

You know what'll hurt John Carter in the long run? The budget victimization narrative. Y'know, the one where everyone ignores critically acclaimed expensive films from the past like Apocalypse Now in favor of this supposed media "conspiracy" wherein they want expensive movies to fail. Then any sort of legacy becomes tarnished by people claiming the film was "screwed" out of its rightful dominance, guaranteeing it that same sort of weird cult status shared by the likes of Dune.

The man is not out to get freaking Disney. Disney is the man.

 

Perhaps you've seen worse, but I'll bet you you haven't seen worse movies that cost a quarter of $1 billion dollars. I think Disney could probably have built a new theme park for that kind of money, and at least it wouldn't be a complete write-off, even if it took many years to become profitable.

Right now, the best-case scenario would be if the movie were at least to break even. I don't see anyone at Disney rushing to argue that there should be more John Carter movies any time soon, to be honest.

 

Sure I have. Spider-Man 3, Avatar, X-Men 3, The Chronicles of Narnia 2, Superman Returns, Jackson's King Kong, and the second and third Pirates films were all $200billion+ productions that were worse than John Carter (or, to be subjective about it, that I liked less than John Carter). Anyway. I think it's ridiculous for any film's budget to be that high, and given that these tremendously expensive films seem to be about as likely to flop as to be hits it seems silly for the studios to keep making them. I'm just curious what it is about John Carter that people react so strongly against. Is its failure completely down to the lousy marketing, or is it something about the movie itself that's keeping people away?

 

Well, people keep throwing around that 250 million dollar figure like it's gospel. That movie had been in development forever, at one time
Jon Favreau was going to direct it, at one point Robert Rodriguez was going to direct it, at one point Harry Knowles of aintitcool.com was
involved as a PRODUCER, how's that for a scary thought? All those people had to be paid for their involvement and that's not cheap and over the
years those development costs add up.

So the figure could include development costs from it's previous lives, and by the way, (shocker alert!) studios have been known to lie and exaggerate
about a film's budget.

We don't know exactly what that 250 million figure entails, or even if it's accurate. It obviously didn't go to "star salaries."

But the press does know that people love to review budgets instead of movies, because hey, that's what the press likes to do, so they fan the flames.

And by the way, March IS a time of year when you can make big money, as evidenced by the March release of Disney's Alice in Wonderland, which made
over 1 billion dollars. March is not a losing proposition.

Incidentally, Box office mojo is reporting that world-wide the gross for John Carter is one hundred million dollars plus.
Here's the link:

John Carter earns 100 million dollars globally first weekend