Predicting the Movie Bombs of 2012

Screamers and The Adjustment Bureau had moments as well. I'm a huge fan of Philip K. Dick's work, but I kind of wince at the changes made to stuff like Blade Runner ("Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep") and Total Recall ("We Can Remember It for You Wholesale"). Neither film goes far enough into the paranoia and weird reality of the author's work for me.

In other news, it looks like Avengers will again be the #1 movie this weekend. This thing is unstoppable...

 

I like Blade Runner despite the changes, the fact that Dick was excited about it before he died was a factor for me too. It's an amazing movie, and though they made changes, the "world" is Dickian.

Total Recall I'm ashamed to say was linked to Dick in any way. Just a POS.

 

It's true that Dick's stuff hasn't typically been well served by the movie adaptations, though I find that Blade Runner succeeds on its own terms, sort of loosely inspired by Dick's ideas but not a real adaptation of the book (Wasn't there talk of Ridley Scott doing some sort of a sequel there too? We'll see how that pans out after Prometheus. . .). The only one I've seen that really tries to remain faithful to the book is A Scanner Darkly, which was pretty successful, IMO (Great role for Robert Downey Jr.!). I'd like to see a really talented director (maybe David Fincher? I'm guessing Joss Whedon's dance card will be filled for the foreseeable future) have a go at another one of his 70's novels like "Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said" or "The Divine Invasion". I read about an as of yet unreleased take on "Radio Free Albumuth" a while back, but my hopes aren't too high on that one. It's strange how influential he's become but still so many have trouble capturing the essence of his work.

I'll admit I'm glad to hear that Battleship may bomb too, kinda restores my faith in humanity. Perhaps it will discourage companies from pursuing such half baked concepts in the future.

 

Michel Gondry, I think, was most successful in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which had a very PKD invention at its center. The rumored adaptation of UBIK that Gondry is (or was) supposed to be working on intrigues me.

I've said this before, but Paul Giamatti seems like the ideal Dick protagonist to me. Wasn't he interested in starring in a biopic about PKD?

 

Yes, Gondry or Spike Jonze would be good choices for a Dick adaptation too. I hope that Ubik project bears fruit.

 

Hmm just feels like it was ages ago. Time flies.....

 

Studios are rightfully leary of the Dick novels, they're probably really hard to adapt on screen. A Scanner Darkly was successful in going to the screen because it is the most straight-forward of the science fiction ones imo. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep became Blade Runner for a reason. The stories are optioned because they are considered easier as ideas to be molded. But the molding is seldom done in a really Dickian manner.

Personally I think that one of Dick's "mainstream novels" would make an excellent offbeat movie, probably be welcomed by the same crowd and be more successful as a film than "Revolutionary Road," at least for me, I didn't think that film really succeeded.

I think Solar Lottery is simple enough to be a good film, and my dream movie would be The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, though that would be very hard to bring to the screen.

I predict that Spiderman and The Dark Knight Rises are going to be big movies, not bombs.

 

I'm looking forward to The Dark Knight Rises and I predict it will be huge.

The Spiderman film becomes less interesting to me with each new trailer I see. Been there, done that (very recently) and not being a comic book guy I could care less whether it's a different universe or not...it just seems like a badly timed reboot of a series that didn't need to be rebooted.

Prometheus is the big draw for me this summer, rumors of the "downbeat ending" just makes it all the more intriguing to me, as we have plenty (way too many) happy endings out there and these films SHOULD be dark.

 

It's a milieu that hasn't been seen in film before (The Full Monty doesn't count), and it's a chance for Soderbergh to do an Altman homage. Good enough reason for me. Considering that nine out of ten movies out of Hollywood "have to be told" solely for reasons of $$$, singling this one out as a "double-bill with ... a legendary bad film" before you've even seen it is crazy.

I just don't get the fascination with box office results, anyway. They have an indirect effect on what else might get made down the line, but beyond that, who cares?

 

Eh, people in the business care. I think the fascination with movie box-office grosses started in the late 1980s, when newspapers started reporting this information Monday morning, and shows like the syndicated Entertainment Tonight and Showbiz Today on CNN started featuring this as news. Bear in mind: it's called show business for a reason. This kind of speculation is just horse-race gambling.

I agree that there are many examples of good movies that did not even break even. The most recent example I can give is Hugo, which still hasn't made in total even close to what Avengers did in one weekend. I wouldn't say Avengers is a better film than Hugo, even though it made a lot more money.

But there is such a thing as a big, blockbuster, money-making film that pleases audiences and also makes money. What kills me are movies that are awful (at least critically) but go on to make tons of money. I'd put the Twilight films and the Transformers films in that category.

You must care to a point, since you're participating in this thread. If you don't care about what movies will bomb, and what movies will be major hits, start your own thread: "Predicting the Best Critically-Acclaimed Films of 2012."

 

And just an update: the trailer is now up for Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire. This is a weird, weird-looking film -- I'm not sure anybody can buy a period piece shot in digital 3D.

http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/wb/thegreatgatsby/

But then, Moulin Rouge did pretty well, thanks to a lot of music numbers and frantic, fast-paced dancing routines. I enjoyed it, but that kind of thing is not exactly a serious F. Scott Fitzgerald novel...

 

Well one has left the table already.

G.I. JOE is now being 'delayed' for 9 months to supposedly be 3D'd.

Sounds more like they know anything less than a triple A title is going to die a death this summer so they can avoid the clash and maybe also do some re-shoots to build it up a bit. It would get killed this summer.

 

I wonder if Jackson will create a 24fps 2D version by dropping frames, or if the 2D version will go out as 48fps as well?

Derek

 

I saw the trailer for this last night and I agree that it just seems weird. I'm not a fan of Luhrmann's stylized nonsense, so I'm admittedly not the target audience, but looking at this trailer I'm not sure what that target audience is.

 

Apparently that is an option.

The crazy thing is which version do you watch? The A frames version or the B frames one?

 

I'm astonished that Bruce Willis agreed to be in this piece of crap! One hopes it doesn't suck too much, but the first one was basically a militarized version of Iron Man, to me. If they spend 9 months on dimensionalizing it, I don't doubt it'll at least look good. This is also about how long it took to convert Avengers and Men in Black 3 to 3D -- both of them were shot conventionally (the first on Alexa digital, the second on old-school film).

I think they have a way during the workflow to create a 24fps version without artifacts, both in terms of dropping frames, averaging movement, minimizing motion problems, and finding a shutter angle that works. They did months and months of tests before deciding on a combination of frame rate, exposure, and shutter angle that worked.

All the trailers up are 24fps conversions, and they look OK to me. I am concerned about the "hyper real" quality of 48fps (like you see with new flat screen TV sets), and to me, that does get in the way of the "film look" too much. But Jackson's a smart guy -- one hopes if anybody can make the movie look good, he and his people can pull it off.

 

*bump* to look at how these predictions are faring. Good call early in the thread on Rock of Ages, one of the summer's big flops along with That's My Boy. As for my pick of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, I saw several headlines calling it a flop, even though it opened with a $16.5 million weekend and the most optimistic projections I read didn't have it doing much more than $20 million. Maybe I can get partial credit?

 

As if to answer, here's an interesting piece from TheWrap:

5 Box Office Lessons From the Middle of Summer 2012

1. The Star System is Tarnished
2. The Movies Are Way Too Expensive
3. Seth Grahame-Smith = Box Office Poison [the writer of both Dark Shadows and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter]
4. Indie Films Are Doing Just Fine, Thank You
5. Never Bet Against Animation

Good piece, and I think they have most of it right. I can see where Adam Sandler would be particularly nervous right now -- his career path is going into that Jim Carrey/Jerry Lewis direction.

 

If we're looking beyond the summer, the movie I'm most curious about is Cloud Atlas. One of my top five novels of this millenium; post-modern metafiction, no less. Now a $100,000,000 2:45 minute epic with three directors (by design) incuding the Warchowskis.

 

Jeez...that has flop written all over it.

 

The Wachowski brother and sister. I hope it does better than Speed Racer...

Synopsis from Wikipedia:

"...an epic story of humankind in which the actions and consequences of our lives impact one another throughout the past, present and future as one soul is shaped from a murderer into a savior and a single act of kindness ripples out for centuries to inspire a revolution."

 

Battleship has won the prize for Summer bomb.

 

The novel was a finalist for the Man Booker prize. Its structure is one of the most interesting elements. I think most people who start the book have some idea what to expect, but for those who do not, I will refrain from saying any more. The author, David Mitchell, is a natural story-teller. But it is a complex multi-faceted tale he has to tell.

 

Good books don't always translate into good movies. They're two very distinct ways of telling a story and one doesn't always translate well into the other.

 

I agree. IMO this film will have to be brilliant in order not to be awful.