Predicting the Movie Hits and Bombs of 2018

Discussion in 'Visual Arts' started by Vidiot, Dec 17, 2017.

Thread Status:
Not open for further replies.
  1. eddiel

    eddiel Senior Member

    Location:
    Toronto, Canada
    Rented that a few weeks back. Enjoyable film.
     
  2. Deuce66

    Deuce66 Senior Member

    Location:
    Canada
    Lots of people getting an Iron Giant vibe from the clip, I can see that. The director is Travis Knight who's last movie was Kubo and the Two Strings.
     
  3. The tepid reaction to Solo has more to do with the general trends going on in the Stars Wars franchise under Disney. The hardcore fans see very troubling signs, especially in the wake of The Last Jedi.

    I think Disney may have permanently damaged the Star Wars brand.
     
    IronWaffle likes this.
  4. Jim B.

    Jim B. Senior Member

    Location:
    UK
    With all due respect I think that's hyperbole. Par for the course I guess in the age we live in where something has to be the best thing ever or worst film ever made. Without debating TLJ again it made a huge amount of money, was very liked by the critics and the majority of fans. A few VERY vocal hardcore fans on the internet do not represent the consensus opinion.

    All SW needs is one really great film and everything will be back on track. I'm not sure if that will be Episode 9 though.
     
  5. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR! Thread Starter

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    I think they're working very hard on making Episode IX as good as it possibly can be, and they're painfully aware of the damage they have to undo. I think that film will be wrapped in a few months and then goes into a year of post (release date December 2019), and there's every expectation that J.J. Abrams will be able to make a film that can satisfy critics, satisfy the fans, and still make a whole lotta dough. He has the advantage of more development and being both co-writer, director, and producer of his own film.
     
    Encuentro, Jrr and IronWaffle like this.
  6. mBen989

    mBen989 Senior Member

    Location:
    Scranton, PA
    You forget the two months of reshoots it seems every film goes through nowadays.
     
  7. Holerbot6000

    Holerbot6000 Forum Resident

    Location:
    California
    I just hope JJ has the balls to continue on with what they started in Last Jedi. He tends to be very good at fan service movies where all the comfortable buttons are pushed and that seems to be what SW fans want, unfortunately, but this is a real opportunity to take the SW saga in a fresh direction. If they muff it, then people will be blaming the Last Jedi for killing off the Skywalker saga too soon. If they ace it, all will likely be forgiven. I wouldn't want to be in his shoes though. I love Star Wars but these fanatical fans are something else altogether.
     
  8. Deuce66

    Deuce66 Senior Member

    Location:
    Canada
    I think they kind of painted themselves into a corner, it's basically moving the same story from the original trilogy moving forward with new characters, the never ending battle.
     
  9. The Panda

    The Panda Forum Mutant

    Location:
    Marple, PA, USA
    yes, can't they think of a deadly virus, wild animals, or 'natural' disasters that need to be fought?
     
  10. Oatsdad

    Oatsdad Oat, Biscuits, Abbie & Mitzi: Best Dogs Ever

    Location:
    Alexandria VA
    If the Prequels - which were much more heavily criticized than the "Disney movies" - didn't "permanently damage" the brand, nothing will!
     
  11. Oatsdad

    Oatsdad Oat, Biscuits, Abbie & Mitzi: Best Dogs Ever

    Location:
    Alexandria VA
    Isn't this like arguing there should be superhero movies without villains?

    The series is called "Star Wars". Sure, they could branch into realms that have nothing to do with the overall "good vs. evil" battle, but that doesn't seem like a natural fit for the franchise... :shrug:
     
  12. Maggie

    Maggie like a walking, talking art show

    Location:
    Toronto, Canada
    I think it is too early to draw conclusions about the state of the Star Wars brand after The Last Jedi. The problem with Solo probably has more to do with a bungled marketing campaign -- no teaser until 3 months before release, everything looks drab, no story hook in the marketing besides "see your favorite character when he was younger!" I thought Rogue One was a bore, but it did have a story hook -- the same story hook as the original Star Wars, i.e., a scrappy gang of outsiders take on an evil empire -- and a spectacular teaser. Rogue One also had an interesting-looking cast (mostly wasted, but we didn't know that from the teaser).

    But I also think that it's not fair to compare the response to The Last Jedi to the response to the prequels. The prequels told the story people were expecting, just clumsily. It didn't mess with anyone's "head canon." But The Last Jedi represented characters people love in a way they didn't like -- Luke especially, Leia to a degree -- and promising if underdeveloped characters in The Force Awakens were treated in frustrating ways (Poe, Snoke, Finn, Rey to a degree). I liked what Rian Johnson did with these characters. But I don't give a damn about Star Wars. I imagine real fans were quite annoyed and disillusioned.

    I love the Marvel movies, and I imagine I might be frustrated if Thanos were suddenly killed by a resurrected Loki, or if Captain America was shown to have turned into a bitter old wise-ass. Other characters in the Marvel movies have been treated in surprising or demystifying ways, but it always has felt motivated. A lot of Star Wars fans thought the stuff that happened in Last Jedi wasn't motivated by what came before.
     
    Luke The Drifter likes this.
  13. Holerbot6000

    Holerbot6000 Forum Resident

    Location:
    California
    The Resistance vs the Empire theme will likely always be the driving narrative 'force' in these movies but it can be addressed in a lot of different ways. They just need to move well away from the whole Deathstar thing. They basically parodied it in the last movie so it's definitely time to move on to something else.
     
  14. I really don't understand this mindset at all - reshoots aren't a new concept to filmmaking, yet they've recently become an indicator of troubled productions for some reason. Why is this? Sure, there have been a few high profile examples (Fant4stic, Justice League... seemingly pretty much every large budget superhero movie these days, for that matter), but it's not always the case. My guess is that most studios are just less reluctant to take risks as the figures involved rise, so they become increasingly reliant on pick-up shots. However, that's not to say every last project is catastrophically flawed. If only we didn't collectively latch onto the negative side of the craft as much or amplify problems out of proportion when things are going relatively well!
     
    Jim B. likes this.
  15. Deuce66

    Deuce66 Senior Member

    Location:
    Canada
    Here's another Spiderman...out this December.

     
    Encuentro and mBen989 like this.
  16. GlamorProfession

    GlamorProfession Forum Resident

    Location:
    Tejas
  17. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR! Thread Starter

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    When a new director steps in to handle the reshoots, there's trouble afoot. Moviemaking is not a paint-by-the-numbers process. Sometimes there are story and pacing issues that only become clear when the first assembly of the picture is done, and then they realize either they needed a "linking" segment to connect one sequence to another, or they needed to add a little more dialogue in a scene to explain something that comes later. For this reason, reshoots have always been part of the process. But in the past, it was rare that this process would take more than a few days. Weeks of reshoots are not normal.

    But then, Pixar generally makes every one of their animated films twice, because in some cases, they decide deep into the process that they made a fundamental mistake and decide to change it. In the case of Good Dinosaur, they had made the lead character a teenager, and when it was decided that didn't work, they had to scrap everything, hire a completely new set of actors, and redo the movie as if the young dinosaur was about 6 or 7 years old. And that movie still tanked.

    On the other hand: Pixar fired the director of Ratatouille far into the film, replaced him with Brad Bird, and it went on to become an enormous success. The whole thing is always a big gamble, both financially and creatively.

    By all indications, Incredibles 2 is shaping up to be one of the biggest movies of the year. Reportedly, longtime Pixar exec John Lasseter's name is no longer on the film (despite having worked on it for 2 years, because he was ousted last year for harassment charges).

    'Incredibles 2': First Reactions from the Premiere

    [​IMG]
     
    Last edited: Jun 6, 2018
    sunspot42 likes this.
  18. Gill-man

    Gill-man Forum Resident

    Location:
    USA
    I think the issue with Star Wars more so than Marvel is that Star Wars fans have such a rigid, defined view of what they expect from certain characters story wise. They already had a picture painted of what’s going to happen to the characters. Fanfiction is through the roof. Expectations from Star Wars fans is almost always going to be too high for each film. Directors and Producers are competing with the wild imaginations of Star Wars fans. There’s no way for them to live up to that. Marvel seems to be grounded and made with the expectation that they aren’t trying to please wildly unrealistic expectations from fans.
     
    David Campbell and Maggie like this.
  19. Standoffish

    Standoffish Smarter than a turkey

    Location:
    North Carolina
    Star Wars "nerds" make up a tiny fraction of the audience. Most of the current theater audience weren't alive for the original trilogy or even the prequels. Foreign audiences don't have any emotional investment in the OT, either.

    They don't care that Han shot first :D.

    Bottom line: the studio doesn't care what hardcore fans want, they want to make money.
     
    David Campbell and sunspot42 like this.
  20. sunspot42

    sunspot42 Forum Resident

    Location:
    San Francisco
    As @Standoffish just observed, the studios are out to make money, which means large audiences. Larger than just the American fanboys who constitute the core of the Star Wars fanbase (a dwindling demographic, especially in the global market).

    Star Wars
    traditionally did OK in Europe and the newer installments have done poorly in Asia, but was never the monster overseas it was in North America, I think in part because it had a very white, male, Midwestern origin (Lucas was from the central California valley, which might as well be Missouri). Luke was your prototypical exurban or suburban white American teenage boy who gets carried off on a great adventure. There's nothing wrong with that - Lucas was writing from his own experience, which is great, and it certainly resonated with me as a white suburban boy originally from a small western American town. I even grew up on the edge of Phoenix surrounded by agricultural land in the middle of a desert. He didn't have to do a lot of work for me to relate to the character - it just clicked. But in the intervening 40 years even America's demographics have changed dramatically, not to mention the increasing importance of the global market to Hollywood, and that kind of character shorthand no longer immediately connects with most of the young audience these films rely on. Hence the push for characters who look and act very differently, with different backgrounds - ones the modern moviegoing demographic can relate to in the same kind of automatic way.

    The market for a film with a protagonist like Luke Skywalker is rapidly drying up. In 1977, enormous swathes of the US population could easily relate to that character and his experience. Now? Not so much. I think going on half of all people under 25 in the US are non-white, and the majority of them are urban, not rural. They have more in common with people in Mexico City, Bangalore or Hong Kong than with people from Modesto. This seems to be causing a lot of consternation for a demographic that for decades was used to having so many lead characters in these sci-fi action films mirror them and their experiences; Hollywood is no longer catering to them as much as it used to. It's nothing personal and there's no agenda - they just aren't as relevant anymore.

    This is going to become a lot more pronounced as budgets continue to inflate on these roller coaster rides, China and India become increasingly important for earning back the massive investments, and foreign corporations begin to buy up Hollywood studios and tweak the output based on their own cultural shorthand.

    For what it's worth, I'm not sure Star Wars can survive the transition to this new environment. I think its identity is so tied up in Lucas and his origins and that initial base of fans that - in spite of the saga's galaxy-spanning tableau - maybe it can't be successfully unwound from all that. I think with Marvel (and even DC) it's much easier to connect with audiences worldwide because their superhero characters always seem to be some kind of outsider or other archetype not quite as dependent on resonating best with white American teenage boys of a certain era and locale. The characters don't have the kind of wish fulfillment hook for a specific demographic that Luke Skywalker ended up representing. They have different hooks that translate better across borders and demographics.

    This is probably also another reason why the Prequels weren't particularly warmly received, although they were still quite the sausagefest (plus Senator girlfriend...and a Muppet). There really wasn't a protagonist you could latch onto in the first place, and none of the characters really resonated apart from Obi-Wan, who we already knew so we could relate (it helped that Ewan McGregor was crazy charming). I mean, how relatable is a "queen" who dresses up in twenty different ridiculous costumes or whatever over the course of a film? Or a Senator for that matter? Although Padme was certainly more relatable than the creepy Anakin Skywalker (and she got some of the films' more insightful lines)...

    Compare and contrast to the original trilogy, which had three relatable and entertaining lead characters (I won't go into Obi-Wan, other than to say he would have been a pretty generic sage if they hadn't scored Alec Guinness). We've already talked about the shorthand that made Luke so immediately appealing to US audiences then. Han Solo was your '70s antihero archetype and in lesser hands might have been merely annoying, but they lucked out when they cast Harrison Ford who - like McGregor a generation later - could work wonders even with perhaps questionable material. Leia was probably the most shocking character for '77 - a trash-talking take-charge woman who didn't take crap from anyone, even a 7 foot tall walking carpet - and was the exact opposite of the "damsel in distress" stereotype you would have expected. (Remember, she was drawn from the original concept for the film's lead character - at some point Lucas must have decided that would be a bridge too far for the audiences of '77.) Carrie Fisher might not have put in an Oscar-worthy performance in that first film (she got better - fast - by the time of Empire), but she certainly projected the kind of attitude required to flip what would have been a tired trope completely on its head. If there's a problem with the latest batch of films, I think it's the lack of her kind of invert-a-stereotype character. The films are missing a certain vitality as a result.
     
    Jrr, kevywevy, Alan G. and 2 others like this.
  21. Word on the street is that Kathleen Kennedy has already been fired and will soon step down.
     
  22. Jrr

    Jrr Forum Resident

    What an insiteful excellent post. I don't want to, but you said something I haven't read anywhere else that I do agree with. I'm also not so sure Star Wars can really survive a move away from the core characters of Luke and everyone else from the 1977 films. The next episode is going to be very important to Disney. They will likely find out how much damage has been done, and where they should go from there. Obviously the original characters are almost gone now. I know I'm not that interested in it after ep IX. You made me realize how far the films have jumped the shark by reminding us of a handful of fun scenes from the 1977 film. It's moved far from there, though I'm one who thinks they did an excellent job with The Force Awakens. But it's really gone downhill from there, and your post makes me realize perhaps that was inevitable. TLJ was ridiculous for me in that I wanted to see Luke again, in all his glory, and one could easily got the impression that as much as we wanted to see him, he just as much didn't want any part of it (I don't mean literally, I mean his character).. Too much time was spent, imo, on him convincing the audience he wanted nothing to do with getting involved again. Huh? That's why many of us went to see TLJ. In the end, he pulled through and the movie was better for it, but a lot of mistakes were made imo and I'm likely done after the next one. And, I think many others will be too.
     
  23. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR! Thread Starter

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    Naw, I'm not hearing that. What I will believe is that Iger & Company won't tolerate any more screw ups.

    Look at it this way: Ken Tsujihara at Warner Bros. had three or four relatively big disappointments (Batman vs. Superman, Justice League, and Suicide Squad). And I think they hoped for a lot more from Man of Steel. WB is very frustrated that even minor Marvel films like Antman and Deadpool are making a lot more profit than they are.
     
    sunspot42 likes this.
  24. This I will watch. The first Incredibles is right up there with the Toy Story and Up movies as my favorite animated movies of all time.
     
  25. Jim B.

    Jim B. Senior Member

    Location:
    UK
    I don't believe that and if it is true then her bosses should be fired for stupidity.

    She has been in charge of 4 SW films. Three have broken a billion worldwide. One broke 2 billion. Who would fire someone who is responsible for three of the biggest films of all-time?
     
    sunspot42 likes this.
Thread Status:
Not open for further replies.

Share This Page

molar-endocrine