Predicting the Movie Hits and Bombs of 2014

My site links to Amazon, so if it's not listed on Amazon, I can't link. At least when Amazon was fighting WB a couple of months ago, you could still go to a page for the movie - as far as Amazon's concerned, though, "Winter Soldier" doesn't exist in DVD/BD form!

 

There's a Chinese Blu-ray listed plus a couple from third parties. Why can't your site link to non-Amazon items? So what if you don't get a 10-cent commission or whatever it is.

I think this Amazon vs. book publishers and Amazon vs. Disney dispute is very interesting. My take is they're all greedy corporate bastards on both sides: Amazon wants too much control, and the publishers and studios want to charge too much money. Nobody is really on the side of the consumer. They're all pigheaded morons, and regular customers are getting screwed over.

 

Cap 2 is listed on Amazon.ca:

http://www.amazon.ca/Captain-America-Soldier-Blu-ray-Bilingual/dp/B00KHD5FK0

It's also there on Amazon.com, btw:

http://www.amazon.com/Captain-America-Soldier-Blu-ray-Bilingual/dp/B00KHD5FK0

 

Not good for Rodriguez...

http://variety.com/2014/film/news/s...-for-estimated-10-million-weekend-1201288515/

 

EXACTLY! like this is something new?

 

And it appears that the new Sin City 2 is tanking, big-time:

http://deadline.com/2014/08/box-off...-city-2-tanking-in-dog-days-of-summer-823607/

I was surprised to find out the film cost $60M! It's predicted to only make $8 million this weekend, which is not good...

As ultra-stylized comicbook movies go, there’s no denying that Rodriguez and Miller’s lurid canvas has been realized with a certain single-minded purity. (Rodriguez again handled lensing and editing duties, in addition to collaborating on the score with Carl Thiel.) But it’s a deliberately airless, static vision, devoid of honest thrills and, aside from a few flakes of stereoscopic snow, absent the novelty that made the first “Sin City” so fascinating, at least before it bogged down in its own sadism. Once again the filmmakers have smothered Miller’s mean-street archetypes in a thick patina of cool — equal parts cut-rate nihilism and self-admiring style — but as a hundred Tarantino knockoffs have long since established, cool is not enough. It takes at least a sliver of human interest to make a noir pastiche more than the sum of its influences, and anything resembling authentic feeling has been neatly airbrushed away from this movie’s synthetic surface. The endless striped shadows that creep into Steve Joyner and Caylah Eddleblute’s production design don’t express the characters’ inner darkness; they merely put it in quotes.

http://variety.com/2014/film/reviews/film-review-sin-city-a-dame-to-kill-for-1201286847/

 

Are you surprised it cost that much or that little?

 

Did the original Sin City make a profit? It is kind of a cult movie now.

 

Apparently the first movie made almost $160 million worldwide and cost $40 million, so it made money...

 

That's a huge amount of money for a Rodriguez film! He told me that the Spy Kids movies were all around $35 million, and that he had full creative control provided a) the movies didn't go over budget, b) they were under a certain length, and c) they got no more than a PG-13 rating. $60M is way out of that range.

I heard that several of the actors in the new movie were all shot individually against green screen, so there are scenes with two or three actors in the shot and none of them ever met in real life. I feel like this is the opposite of an organic approach and yields peculiar results.

 

$60 million is high for Rodriguez, but it's still cheap for a movie of that sort. According to IMDB, the first "Sin City" cost $40 million 9 years ago...

 

Ouch - Sin City with 6.5 this weekend. I saw it and it wasn't nearly as good as the first one.

Guardians will be the #1 movie of 2014 by the end of this upcoming week and was #1 this weekend.

 

Doh, they were initially predicting $12M for Sin City 2, then they downgraded it to just under $10M, and by the smoke settled, it's only $6.5M, #8 for the week! One of the biggest flops of the year -- awful.

I'm very surprised that Guardians would bounce back so big. That's very unusual. Here's an interesting article on how the studios and execs are very concerned that all their predictions are going wrong:

http://deadline.com/2014/08/movie-tracking-in-the-toilet-fix-or-flush-823699/

Here's some interesting quotes:

For instance, the tracking on Sex Tape was being forecast at $30M and it came opened at $14.6M. Guardians was predicted to do in the $60M’s and ended up opening at $94M. I could go on and on.

The studios pay millions of dollars a year for solid tracking information so they can figure out how to spend their media. Guess what? The tracking ain’t working. It isn’t reliable. It’s off by millions. So the studios are, basically, basing their media buys on pure crap info. Millions and millions more dollars are being flushed in media buys. Great news for shareholders, eh?

And it’s affecting everything. Not only do tracking numbers affect how studios spend on marketing, but they are also looking at those numbers to help determine what kind of genre projects to greenlight. They are hiring directors and writers based on what looks likely to be successful.

I think the studios are just as baffled by studios that do extremely well as they are by the movies that tank. Nobody can predict anything. One interesting new factor now is social media: people immediately Tweet or post on Facebook whether they like a new film, and this has a very fast ripple effect on movie box office success (or failure).

 

I was reading your post and before I got to the end was thinking that Social Media probably has a big impact and is very unpredictable....
I'm going to predict that Star Wars VII will make coin... you heard it here first!

 

I agree! I'm just praying it doesn't suck as much as Phantom Menace...

 

lol - well I've always wondered, are the prequels really that bad? I mean really that bad? We all know the dialog sucked, Jar Jar sucks, CGI heavy etc etc but weren't there any good spots? If you shut off your brain, aren't they still entertaining? John Campea (who is quite opinionated) from AMC Movie News doesn't even acknowledge their existence!



It's going to be quite easy to predict how things will shake out. The reviews will generally be good, but will say something like "Script could have been better" "JJ did a great job keeping CGI at bay with a good blend of practical effects" "Entertaining but the old magic is missing - time for Ford to hang it up... " etc etc. yada yada. It will probably rank 4th among the 7.
It will make close to 2 billion worldwide.
True fans are waiting for the Boba Fett spin off...

I'm just hoping Disney puts in a Mos Eisley Cantina at Downtown Disney. Would be fun to have a beer with Star Wars characters milling about and the band playing that awesome jazz song.

 

I think the second half of Revenge of the Sith is the only part of the prequels I can handle...

Shalom, y'all!

L. Bangs

 

I had the same reaction as the nutty fans in the People vs. George Lucas documentary, where I went to see Phantom Menace with very high expectations, and then spent most of the movie open-mouthed, saying, "I can't believe it's this bad!" And then we had to go back a few days later to see it again to make sure we just didn't have unrealistic expectations.

Nope... it was actually that bad.

There has been talk of an entire Star Wars theme park the size of Disneyland. All they have to do is figure out where to build it.

 

I'd like to think that some of the issues with Sin City 2 is taint due to being associated with Frank Miller and what he did to The Spirit.

 

None of the Star Wars movies are high art. I rewatched the prequels recently, and they're OK. Certainly entertaining at points due to all of the eye candy.

I think the biggest issue is that they just don't square with the original trilogy. The two trilogies have completely different aesthetics and they just don't work if you watch both in sequence; the change from heavy CGI to practical effects is just too jarring (Jar-Jarring?). The change in focus in Anakin Skywalker in the first three to Luke in the second three, with Darth Vader being what appears to be a minor villain until the big reveal at the end of Empire shows just how little thought Lucas put into the entire thing.

We'll see how the Disney films work out.

 

Thanks Cerebus, Vidiot and lbangs. Ya it's been a while since I've seen the prequels. Perhaps a more fun question is ( last one on the thread derailment) ... Rank these movies in order of quality or watchability. 1 being best 7 worst.

Star Wars I
Star Wars II
Star Wars III
Transformers I
Transformers II
Transformers III
Transformers IV

I've seen only bits and pieces of Transformers so I'll say ... Star Wars III, II , Transformers I , Star Wars I, then Transformers II, III, IV

 

Can I have an 8 for the entire Transformers series? In fact, can we go to 11?

 

I was surprised that it tanked as badly as it did.

 

I honestly don't think that many people remember "The Spirit"...I blotted it from my memory (until you reminded me....curses!)

 

I'm holding off of the Transformers movies (the first was all I could take), but I'd rank the prequels in reverse order III, II, and I. Maybe 4 or 5 on your scale.