Predicting the Movie Hits & Bombs of 2022

Discussion in 'Visual Arts' started by Vidiot, Jan 7, 2022.

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  1. Deuce66

    Deuce66 Senior Member

    Location:
    Canada
    More recently you could add...to name five, when you tack on equal amounts for marketing/distribution etc on the cost side the red ink can pile up quickly.

    The Last Duel: $30.552 million worldwide box office - production budget $100 million
    West Side Story: $76 million box office - production budget $100 million
    The Northman: $69.6 million box office - production budget $90 million
    Ad Astra: $127.5 million box office - $100 million budget
    Cats: $73.8 million box office - $95 million budget
     
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  2. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR! Thread Starter

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    Yeah, all the movies you mention are pretty much bombs, but not megaton bombs. I made sure we saw Cats in the theater because I knew it would not disappoint. The audience I was with (maybe 12 people total) booed and yelled and said rude things throughout. Great experience. I think it might be the worst film I've paid money to see in the past 20 years. Wild Wild West in 1999 probably was worse, and that one also lost money (cost $240M, made $222M).
     
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  3. SandAndGlass

    SandAndGlass Twilight Forum Resident

    It was pretty bad.

    Surprised it did that well.
     
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  4. mBen989

    mBen989 Senior Member

    Location:
    Scranton, PA
    Of course if it made made money, it's probably because it opened against the South Park movie so teenagers were buying tickets for Wild Wild West and going down to South Park instead.
     
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  5. PhilBorder

    PhilBorder Senior Member

    Location:
    Sheboygan, WI
    Alamo? I think its troubled production may have cast some shade, but I think it's one of the best movie this century so far. Director John Lee Hancock knows how to tell a story with emotional clarity and deliver action, so its too bad many have missed it.

    The scene with Davy Crockett on the mission wall 'answering' Santa Anna's troops with his fiddle is in the top 10 scenes of all time imo. This isn't some idiosyncratic endeavor that some seize on and conflate well beyond its merits. Its truly a great film.
    The Alamo (2004) Deserves to be Better Remembered
     
  6. Deuce66

    Deuce66 Senior Member

    Location:
    Canada
    Wow the production budget on this was $170 million, worldwide gross of only $222 million, assume 45% back into the studio hands this movie easily lost well over $100 million for sure when you add in marketing/distribution costs.

    Wild Wild West - Box Office Mojo

    Wild Wild West (1999)
    The two best special agents in the Wild West must save President Grant from the clutches of a diabolical, wheelchair-bound, steampunk-savvy, Confederate scientist bent on revenge for losing the Civil War.
     
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  7. It’s become the next Rocky Horror Picture Show except Rocky Horror is actually good.
     
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  8. SandAndGlass

    SandAndGlass Twilight Forum Resident

    It clearly illustrates what you should not do with a successful established property.

    Starting with the costumes. So instead of real cat suites, like in the play, you spend many millions on creating them by CGI. Why?

    Then you change the characters. Why?

    ...
     
  9. I never saw it, but I suspect it has great midnight movie potential if the producers/studio can swallow their pride.

    EDIT: I see others are thinking along the same lines.
     
  10. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR! Thread Starter

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    The costumes were real in Cats, but they were "augmented" by CGI to eliminate the lines between the human actor and the cat character. The problem is you wind up with weird humanoid cats... and it's very weird to look at. There are people clamoring for an earlier version the movie that was more, uh, anatomically-correct, but I don't think it would make it 1% better. Sure, it would be more ridiculous, but the movie is really hard to take as it is.

    BTW, all the alien characters in most contemporary sci-fi films are also digitally augmented so you don't see the seams in the ears, the sweat on their foreheads, the wrinkles on the side, and all that stuff. But in that case, they're generally not trying to sing and dance and be fun and charming in a Broadway musical.

    Many years after it happened, Will Smith admitted in interviews that making Wild Wild West was one of the biggest mistakes of his career. The worst thing to me is that he had no chemistry with Kevin Kline, which I thought was a shame -- Kline was (and is) a fantastic actor. But it was a ridiculous film that I think nobody could have saved.

    No, it lost huge money. As has often been discussed, Hollywood studio films typically have to make about 2.5x their budget just to break even, because the studios keep half the box office money. If it makes $220M in theaters, the studio only got $110M of that. And they spent well over $240M making the film, particularly with promotion and distribution. I think WB anticipated making north of $500M, which would've given them a small profit; Independence Day had made about $816M, which would've been great... but it never happened. There were wide reports of empty theaters and executives heads rolling back in 1999 when this happened, and I think producer Jon Peters lost a lot of his cache because of his movie's failure.
     
    Last edited: Sep 11, 2022
  11. Isaac K.

    Isaac K. Forum Resident

    No subject of super bombs could go without mentioning Superman Returns. It made just under $400 million worldwide but "officially" was made for $270 million. I suspect that the real price tag was considerably higher, more in the ballpark of half a billion, especially when promotion is taken into consideration.
     
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  12. The worst part was the script, direction and Will Smith. Kevin Kline was the only good thing in the movie. They ruined a potential franchise with that film. Taking established TV properties and translating them to the big screen is tricky enough without the totally botched script they worked with.
     
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  13. SandAndGlass

    SandAndGlass Twilight Forum Resident

    Obviously, they were wearing something but they were not costumes.

    [​IMG]

    And more...

    [​IMG]

    The reasoning I heard, was that the costumes would encumber the artists performance.

    And the real cast of Cat's, the play.

    [​IMG]

    Where their argument does not hold up, is the the real costumes are dance unitards. This is the stuff that real ballet dancers wear on stage when performing.

    I've worn one, you have incredibly complete freedom in them, They are no way restraining. Any way that you can move, the unitard can move. Here is Victoria from the play.

    [​IMG]

    This is why the whole damn thing was so stupid expensive.

    If they only used real costumes, they might have shaved of $90M or so...

    They could have left the CGI part to the tails or a touch-up here or there.

    Instead, they used CGI on the faces too and it made everything an abomination.

    If they were going to go down that route (which I think would also be stupid and unnecessary), they should have shot everything in motion capture like Alita.

    As it was, just about everything they did was completely unnecessary and stupid expensive.
     
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  14. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR! Thread Starter

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    Wow, that's news to me. This wasn't exactly publicized, so I knew zip about it. Here's a brief behind-the-scenes video:



    Apparently they wore some kind of VFX leotard, and then the "virtual costumes" were all added later. That's surprising -- I assumed the costumes were about 90% there on the set, and then the VFX added the rest (which is what Marvel traditionally does).

    No matter how they did it, the movie was awful and made no money, so... here we are in the "Hits and Bomb" section. The Cats looked weird as hell, but it was beyond CG or animation. It just looked very strange and unnerving.

    I know a VFX person who made six figures for half a year's work just cleaning up digital camera problems on Superman Returns. They were using kind of a hand-built Panavision Genesis 2K digital camera, and it turned out to have visible "cracks" in the picture due to issues with the CCD chips they were using. I'm told that Panavision lost a ton of money on the camera. It eventually got junked and replaced with better, modified Red camera. It's fair to say Superman Returns had a ton of problems, technical, story, casting, you name it. The film was nearly 3 hours long and was almost a remake of the original 1979 film -- reviews were mixed at best.
     
    Last edited: Sep 12, 2022
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  15. MichaelH

    MichaelH Forum Resident

    Location:
    Bakersfield
    I hated Superman Returns, the only Superman movie I've ever seen.
     
  16. SandAndGlass

    SandAndGlass Twilight Forum Resident

    I like the part on the video where he praises Taylor Swift saying, "she practices and works it out, like a total pro", duh...

    I don't know if you have ever seen the video of the play? They did it in a real theater with an all star cast.

    The realism and energy is there. The cast is really working it all through the show. Even though it is on video, the intensity is real.

    There is a dance number with Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer. After that number, the next scene comes up. You can see the two characters from the previous scene still breathing hard in the background.

    The movie was a complete mess! Taylor's number and set was decent. She did write a nice song for the movie, Beautiful Ghosts.

    The only savinv grace in the entire movie was the Victoria character. In the play, she has a wonderful solo. The above photo is from her dance.

    In the play, I guess they decided that Victoria should be the principal character and we see her throughout the entire movie.

    Francesca Hayward, the actress that portrays Victoria is a principal dancers in the Royal Ballet. She does portray her part and brings in some much needed warmth to an otherwise cold and sterile production. Not that any of this saves the movie, but she is the highlight of the show.

    [​IMG]

    Curiously enough, the woke were upset over the "white washing" of Hayward. Never mind that her character is a silvery white cat.

    [​IMG]

    What goes beyond stupid, is that when you look at the outfits the used on the sets to film the CGI, they are heavier and don't fit like a dance unitard does. Just look at the thumbnail of your video. The costume bunches up. It has a horrible fit, there are wrinkles everywhere.

    Here is the Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer number from the Cats video.



    You can see that, throughout the dance number, their unitard costumes fit perfectly.

    Your quote pretty much sums it up.

     
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  17. I would have gone with costumes and had them augmented as Vidiot noted.
     
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  18. It pushed them into the uncanny valley area because of all the cgi.
     
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  19. Post-Punk Monk

    Post-Punk Monk Seeking divinity in records from '78-'85 or so…

    Location:
    North Carolina
    Jon Peters: "But it was all so worth it for that sweet, sweet MECHANICAL SPIDER!
    [​IMG]
     
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  20. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR! Thread Starter

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    Noted writer/director Kevin Smith said he was pulled into a mid-1990s rewrite on a Superman movie script produced by Jon Peters, who told him this: "you can write anything you want, but we don't want an 'S' on his chest -- we're going with a new costume... we don't want Superman to fly -- it never looked good in the movies, and at the end, the villain has a Giant Mechanical Spider."

    Smith asked, "why a Giant Mechanical Spider?"

    And Peters said, "because it looks cool!"

    Smith wrote the film the way he wanted to, he had Superman fly, he still had an 'S' on his uniform (and a red cape), and there was no giant mechanical spider. He got fired off the film and it was never made. But Peters did reuse the Giant Spider idea in Wild Wild West.

    [​IMG]


    The Superman movie that was going to have a gay R2-D2 and a giant mechanical spider

    I still wanna see the infamous "BH Cut" version of Cats, to see the way the creatures looked before the studio changed them.
     
    Last edited: Sep 12, 2022
  21. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR! Thread Starter

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    I never went to see the musical play -- I don't see plays very often, but I do sometimes -- because the commercials scared me away. I basically said, "ya know, aside from 'Mr. Mistoffelees' and 'Memory', there's no really good songs in the show. And they characters look really weird." Apparently the Broadway play suffered from similar criticisms, but it nonetheless packed them in for decades and made over $3 million dollars in Broadway and London's West End.

    I think Universal gave director Tom Hooper a long leash because he had done so well with Les Miserables in 2012, made $441 million dollars, and won three Oscars. Previously, The King's Speech (not a big flashy subject) made $427 million and won 4 Oscars. So I think they assumed that Hooper had earned the right to make a big costume fantasy musical, and maybe he could pull it off and make another $400 million+ hit film.

    I think it's very interesting to note that Steve Spielberg tried to develop Cats as a live action film for more than 10 years, finally decided it would have to be an animated film instead. But Andrew Lloyd Webber (writer/producer who controlled the story and music rights to Cats) insisted it had to be live action. Spielberg stepped back from the film and let Hooper do it instead. In hindsight, Spielberg made a wise move. (Spielberg was still credited as a producer on the film, but I'd bet it was just a contractual thing.)

    The funniest thing I remember about Cats is that noted CBS talkshow host James Corden had a major singing role in the film. After it was released, if anybody brought it up, he'd say, "I haven't seen it yet," which is the nicest thing you can say about a film that got horrific reviews and made no money.
     
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  22. Oatsdad

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

    Location:
    Alexandria VA
    Didn't the price tag include abandoned Superman reboots prior to 2006 as well?

    I might be wrong, but I thought that was the case - like the official budget for "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" included costs for earlier "Trek" projects that failed to come to fruition.

    I don't think they spent $270m solely on what we saw on screens in 2006.
     
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  23. Isaac K.

    Isaac K. Forum Resident

    Of course not. Kevin Spacey spent a lot of that on male prostitutes and coke.
     
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  24. yesstiles

    yesstiles Senior Member

    A prequel has already been completed and is showing at Quentin Tarantino’s theater on a double bill with “X” this week.
     
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  25. alexpop

    alexpop Power pop + other bad habits....

    More “X”
    Sweet. :)
     
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