Predicting the Movie Hits and Bombs of 2014 (Part Two)

Correct! I'd be far more worried that the movie looks pretty bland from those trailers and that the reviews aren't helping that impression at all...

Shalom, y'all!

L. Bangs

 

Oh, I would never expect them, or anyone else to do it... I was just referencing the '82 version (of which I'm guilty of being a fan). And of course, grew up with Geoffrey also as making 7-Up sound and taste better.

Of course, I also remember demanding my mom buy only Tropicana OJ because Bruce Jenner said, "Only one can be the best... and for me, that's Tropicana". How times have changed!

Jeff

 

Guess I misread your post - I thought you were thinking a dedication to Holder was a "must" and the filmmakers would be rude not to do so. We disagree about the 1982 movie but I also remember those 7-Up commercials fondly!

I wonder how many remakes have been dedicated to people in the original movie?

Though I'd argue this isn't actually a "remake" - it's just another adaptation of the stage production, IMO. If this is a remake of the 1982 "Annie", then I guess that makes "The Wiz" a remake of the 1939 "Wizard of Oz"!

 

Agreed - and the stage production is a "remake" of the Little Orphan Annie comic strip

I was 7 or 8 when Carol Burnett gave us a fun scream when it came out in theaters. So that's where I was at with the "memories". So haven't seen it in decades, but lump that into a guilty pleasure from childhood - at least they are not remaking an Altman-Popeye!

Jeff

 

Hmm... if you've not seen it since you were a kid, I encourage you to keep those memories intact. I think it's a pretty lousy movie - while I have low expectations for the new one, I don't think I could like it less than the 1982 flick.

I loved "The Wiz" as a kid - kinda wish I'd never watched it as an adult!

 

So how accurate did this turn out to be?

They were way off on Guardians of the Galaxy and Maleficent.

Divergent and the Maze Runner were big enough hits to put the next installments of the series into production.

Interstellar was not a Batman sized phenomenon but it seems to have done well enough.

The jury is still out on Annie (not out yet) and Jupiter Ascending (delayed until next year).

The others were duds or disappointments to one degree or another (unfairly in the case of Edge of Tomorrow).

 

Actually, Interstellar just made it to $600M and will almost definitely go to $700M worldwide. Given that it cost about $150M, that's a pretty good-sized hit. I don't think anybody expected a billion dollars out of it, but grossing four times the production cost is a hit by any definition. "Profitable," though, is a contractual term.

Edge of Tomorrow made $378M and cost $178M, so that was a little better than break-even but not by much. I think they were hoping for at least $450M-$500M. Not a bomb, not a huge hit, but OK.

I'll go into shock if Annie makes dime one.

 

Dracula Untold was also profitable, didn't do well in the states but pulled in $215 million worldwide on a $70 million budget.

 

The answer is: not very. Indeed, they got it wrong when it got difficult. It was not hard to see that Pompeii and The Legend of Hercules would bomb or that nobody would care about Robocop or I, Frankenstein, but only five out of twelve movies were really flops. The other range from "did well" to "big hit".

 

Odd that the original list called the new "Annie" an "all-black" movie, as it's not vaguely "all-black". Changing the race of a couple of characters doesn't make it "all-black".

This is the best "Annie" anyway:

 

Terrible film, for sure. A few things in particular that I disliked about it:

1) Constant use of that stupid "3-second slow-motion insert during an otherwise fast-paced battle scene" technique. Just stop.

2) People get continually stabbed, sliced, hacked, and impaled, and yet there isn't a single drop of blood/gore in the entire film. Give me a break.

3) The cliché happy ending, which seems to ignore the fact that a certain important character was impaled in the previous scene and should be dead.

 

Renny Harlin has made some great movies in his career, but unfortunately The Legend of Hercules wasn't one of them. His previous film, Devil's Pass, was made on a fraction of the budget, and was actually quite good... although I doubt many people are even aware of it, because it didn't get much publicity or have much of a marketing campaign to back it up.

 

The speed ramp/fast-slow deal does get wearying over time. My big nit-pick is with the high-speed shutter deal, where they shoot all action scenes with a 45-degree shutter (aka "The Saving Private Ryan Look"). Drives me crazy. Every time I see it on TV, I go "wait! Now things are going to get exciting!" Just another stupid visual cliche.

 

Could you expand a little more on what is 45-degree shutter thing? Do you mean a strobe-y effect?

 

Actually, I just looked it up and it is what I thought it was. I'd just never heard the term 45-degree shutter - it seemed strange to give a degree value to a shutter which in my mind should just be opened or closed.

This is a great reference which explained it well. It goes back to the mechanical days when the shutter was implemented as a rotating disk with a notch cut out of one side, to varying degrees. Effectively it limits the amount of time that light is allowed to expose the frame. With only a 45 deg shutter, the shorter time a film frame is exposed to light and the shorter distance a particular object can travel across the frame during that time, resulting in minimal motion blur, or a strobey motion effect.

 

I'm Mayor Tommy Shanks and I approve this message.

 

Jump about 3 minutes in. That's DP Janusz Kaminski's 45-degree shutter (sometimes 90-degree), creating kind of a "staccato" ultra-sharp look for the D-Day battle scene in Saving Private Ryan, for which he won an Oscar.

 

And I believe I nailed my prediction on the fate of Annie six months ago...

‘Annie’ Reviews Are In: More Bad News for Sony

The remake of a popular Broadway musical and 1982 film has been declared “rotten” by the majority of critics who have seen it.

“Musically, ‘Annie’ is a disaster. The melodious original score by Charles Strouse and Martin Charnin gets the full-on Autotune pap treatment, which takes to these songs about as well as a lute to death metal."

“For all the talent involved, the overall effect is surprisingly flat. Foxx appears disconnected, Byrne is wasted and a painfully hammy Diaz seems to be in another movie altogether. The awkward choreography is also disappointing. But the strangest mistake is the music, which has been blandly retooled for a new generation."

“‘Annie’s’ flimsy plot soon loses all coherence, which given its storied history is frankly unforgivable once a romantic plot between Stacks and Rose Byrne’s Grace Farrell is shoehorned in, and the laughable conclusion is so contrived that literally zero tension or intrigue is created. ‘Annie’s’ most damning flaw, though, is the lack of energy, originality or panache in its musical numbers.”

http://www.thewrap.com/annie-reviews-equal-more-bad-news-for-sony/

In hindsight, maybe they should've released The Interview and then dropped Annie on North Korea to blow them up.

 

Doesn't the movie need to actually open before it's declared a financial bomb?

 

Oh man, Annie is a Sony movie... My advice to the executives at Sony is to start drinking heavily.

 

Too late! They've moved on to pills and heroin, just to get through the day.

At the moment, it's an artistic and creative bomb. Next week, it'll be a financial bomb.

 

I'll go out on a limb here with my prediction for financial Bomb of the year: The Interview

 

Y'know, the first preview I saw actually showed some promise. It played up the comedy and made it look like the movie might be watchable.

The second preview played up more of the sentiment and syrup and made the film look much less interesting.

Doubt I would've seen it anyway, but I would've considered it based on the first trailer.

I do have some morbid curiosity to see if Quvenzhané Wallis is as terrible in the whole movie as she is in the previews!

 

While box office was down, I don't think that 2014 was any worse than any other year in terms of quality vs. crap. In no particular order:

On my list of Top Movies:

1. Nightcrawler
2. Guardians of the Galaxy
3. Captain America Winter Soldier
4. Locke
5. Lego Movie
6. Gone Girl
7. X-Men: Days of Future Passed
8. Borgman
9. Live, Die, Repeat
10.Boyhood
11. Calvary
12. Frank
13. The Congress
14. St. Vincent
15. John Wick
16. The Babadook

Honorable Mention:
1. Interstellar
2. The Rover

I haven't seen Birdman yet nor have I seen