Predicting the Movie Hits and Bombs of 2015

And here we go...

This didn't take long. Already there's an article up on the web predicting that the following will be major bombs:

Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2
Peanuts (animated feature)
Fifty Shades of Gray
Mad Max: Fury Road
Terminator: Genesys
Amityville: The Awakening
The Transporter Legacy
Friday the 13th

and a bunch of others. I didn't care for the first Paul Blart, but I thought it was a funny idea for a movie: "Die Hard with a security guard in a mall, but as a comedy." Great idea. The Peanuts feature looks weird as hell to me, only because some comic book characters don't look good when transformed into a 3-dimensional world. 50 Shades of Gray does nothing for me, but I know it's a huge best-seller so I'd bet it'll get a lot of interest from fans of the book. I liked the first two Mad Max films quite a bit, but Beyond Thunderdome got very tired, very fast, and this new one looks totally over-the-top to me.

Arnold Schwarzenegger desperately needs a hit, so I know they're putting a lot into the newest Terminator movie. But Arnie's pushing 67 right now, and I'm not sure any amount of VFX can disguise that. I think the Amityville and Friday the 13th franchises are very tired, and I'm not convinced endless reboots telling similar stories will gain any new fans or make any money.

Full list here:

http://www.answers.com/article/1219992/13-films-we-know-will-be-box-office-bombs-in-2015

There's tons of new films that I suspect will be enormous hits in 2015. High on that list will be Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens. I'll predict right now this could surpass Avatar's $2 billion+ world-wide box-office, assuming J.J. Abrams and his crew do a great job.

 

I think they are completely wrong about the Peanuts film, I predict that will be huge. I also think the Mad Max film could do blockbuster business.

The budgets on the Amityville and Friday The 13th films will be so low that even if they flop it's not going to be big deal.

 

Yup - Star Wars will crush, though being a 12/15 flick - it's kinda gonna miss both year lists for #1 since it straddles the year. It won't be #1 for 2015 only because it won't have enough time to bank the coin. Maybe 2016 #1?

I don't think it will beat Avatar - you never know, but does the next generation care? We all do, but I'm not sure enough teeny boppers will go multiple times.

I predict 1.6 billion worldwide ...

I think Mad Max will do well.

What does Marvel have going on in 2015 - too lazy to look it up - suffice to say - they will smash....

This is a strange year coming up - there are no more Trilogy's except Hunger Games. With the exception of Star Wars, Hollywood is going to have to come up with many new 3 parters (4 if the last ones are split) if they want to keep the formula rolling.

 

From that list, I'd say only Mad Max & Terminator have shot at making it 'big'.

 

Arnie' n'some CGI fairy dust ' perhaps.

 

Very good point. I think the studios were very surprised by the huge money made by The Purge and similar horror/ultra-violent films shot in the $5M-$6M range. If you can get even $15M in a single weekend, you've already at least broken even.

I think the statute of limitations has expired, so I can reveal that there was quite a bit of defocusing going on for Arnold's face in Terminator 3... and that was 11 years ago.

 

They have the Avengers sequel, The Avengers: Age of Ultron, which I'm sure will go through the roof, plus Ant-Man. Fox has the reboot of Fantastic Four, and though it's not a Marvel movie per se, it has Marvel characters.

Here's an incomplete list of some of the movies coming out in 2015:

http://www.movieinsider.com/movies/-/2015/

The few that I think will be big include Jurassic World from Universal, Tomorrowland from Brad Bird at Disney, and I like the look of Kingsman: The Secret Service. Things could go either way with Ted 2, but a lot of people (including me) underestimated the appeal of the first one; I thought it would be a hit, but no way did I ever think it could go north of $400M.

The remakes of Poltergeist and Man from U.N.C.L.E. look sketchy to me, because we've seen it all before. The Pixar Good Dinosaur film is I think their only release for 2015, and I'd bet there's a big audience for that (despite many production problems and delays). And I bet the forthcoming Mission:Impossible V will do OK.

 

Yoga Hosers

 

Some interesting flicks coming out. Looking forward to Untitled Whitey Bulger project with Affleck directing, Ridley Scott's The Martian, Everest with Jake Gyllenhaal, Mission V and of course Spectre (newest Bond)

 

I don't think the Bond film is out until 2016.

 

Anything by Sony.

 

Spectre has a UK release date of the 6th November 2015.

 

Put me down as one who thinks Peanuts will do boffo box office. It has a lot of cross-cutting appeal, to both nostalgic adults and parents looking for something "clean" to take the kids to.

 

Does anyone know what's happening with the Eli Roth-produced horror flick Clown? I think this one has real sleeper potential, and is likely to draw out those of us who generally haven't paid much attention to the recent spate of cheap horror films but might come out for one with a particularly fresh, twisted perspective - which this film appears to have.

 

Whats' the buzz on Michael Mann's 'Blackhat'?

 

Is it really? I bet they're not gonna make the release if it just went into production last week.

An acquaintance of mine worked on it in Hong Kong and said that Mann was very difficult and the film was awful. But I saw the trailers and they looked terrific, so who knows...

Now available for download!

 

I can't see the new Mad Max film bombing. I would think that the audience profile for it would match closely to those that watch the Fast and the Furious films and the last one of those (#6) grossed over $700M worldwide.

 

Agreed, Mad Max should do fine. Tom Hardy in the lead, right? He's a good actor, good intensity, and always get loaded up for the action roles. I'll be up for seeing it, provided it can cross the 60-point threshold on metacritic.com (not an absolute requirement but a pretty good indicator of whether I might like something).

Why shouldn't "50 Shades" do well? I think just about every woman I know between the ages of 25 and 50 read the books and was shamefully but completely absorbed. Provided it isn't panned as a piece of dung, shouldn't it sell tickets? I might see it just to remove whatever sliver of temptation I otherwise might have had to glance at the books.

Schwarzenegger as another terminator is the kind of mediocre thing that should end up in the black once you figure in international and video-disc sales.

 

Funny thing is that because of the Sony hack we now know the details of Hollywood's global anti piracy strategy:

One of the top priorities for the MPAA are cyberlockers and illegal streaming sites, with lawsuits planned in the UK, Germany and Canada. Torrent sites are a medium priority, which the MPAA hopes to fight with criminal prosecutions, domain seizures and site blocking.

And in further revelations:

Sony Pictures' TV network AXN developed a guerrilla marketing campaign to convert users of The Pirate Bay, KickassTorrents and other torrent sites to paying customers. The company planned to flood torrent sites with promos for the premiere Hannibal disguised as pirated copies of the popular TV-show.

Data wants to be free.

 

I think Mad Max, Terminator and Peanuts will do fine. Fifty shades is probably the biggest gamble because even though its a bestseller, We live in the internet age where that type of subject matter is available on the internet without the MPAA saying what should be shown and what shouldn't. 2015 looks like it could be a good year for the movies with Mad Max, Terminator, Star Wars, and the new James Bond coming out.

 

The 6th of November 2015 is actually the US release date.
The UK gets it even earlier on the 23rd of October!

 

The new Mad Max film looks interesting, but it's hard to tell based on the previews. Apparently, the new Terminator recycles scenes from T2 using the new T-1000. Perhaps Robert Patrick didn't age to their liking or maybe they saw appeal in introducing a new character to alter the timeline.

 

I think 50 Shades is likely to underperform because I'm not sure that the older female audience it's targeting - ie, not the Twilight teens - is a demographic that's going to come out for a kinky sex-type film, rather than just stay at home and continue to get off on the books. It also doesn't strike me as a "girls night out" movie a la Sex And The City, but we shall see...

 

Fifty Shades Of Grey started off as a piece of Twilight fan fiction (under the title Master Of The Universe), so while the powers that be have made efforts to separate the two, E.L. James' books and the upcoming film adaptation will surely be on the radar of many teens. Using a commercial, household name such as Beyoncé prominently in the marketing for the movie probably won't help, plus it's claimed there were last minute reshoots to lower the overall rating, so I have to question why such adult-oriented content is being so blatantly pushed on a wider market... surely it can't be as simple as wanting to maximise potential revenue? On the other hand, a lot of the die-hards seem disappointed by what they've seen already, and negative word of mouth - about a supposed lack of visual chemistry, from what I've read - this early must have those behind the scenes worried, as the project once seemed to be a guaranteed money spinner. Then again, it probably doesn't help that it took what feels like an eternity to cast the leads, or at least it appeared that way based on the media's extensive "on again/off again" coverage of the whole process!

 

Any Adam Sandler Movie.