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
    A very quiet weekend.

    Black Panther - weekend #4 down 61.4% over last weekend - worldwide total now at $733 million (7th place for 2022).
    Strange World - what a disaster worldwide take of $42.3 million - weekend #2 down 59.5%
    The Menu - worldwide $47.2 million - production budget of $30 million

    [​IMG]
     
  2. alexpop

    alexpop Power pop + other bad habits....

    The Menu I liked. Small indie movie.
     
  3. Crack To The Egg

    Crack To The Egg Forum Resident

    Location:
    OR
    Good opening for Violent Night. Should turn a decent profit.
     
  4. alexpop

    alexpop Power pop + other bad habits....

    White Noise is excellent.
     
  5. SandAndGlass

    SandAndGlass Twilight Forum Resident

    I'm somewhat interested in seeing that. I like David Harbor.

    Thought The Menu might be entertaining?

    What's going on with the kid who has a movie camera?
     
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  6. Deuce66

    Deuce66 Senior Member

    Location:
    Canada
    Who Steven Spielberg's The Fableman's ? The release schedule for this movie is all over the place, less than 650 theatres domestic and it's not doing well. $5.6 million earned to date.
     
  7. SandAndGlass

    SandAndGlass Twilight Forum Resident

    So how much did it cost to make?
     
  8. Deuce66

    Deuce66 Senior Member

    Location:
    Canada
    $40 million USD

    91% on Rotten Tomatoes - 233 critic reviews
     
  9. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR! Thread Starter

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    Did you actually see it? I was shocked it was so awful, just totally self-indulgent, too artsy, and dull. It has moments that are particularly good -- I told a friend that if the entire film had been like the last 10 minutes, it would've been fantastic -- but it's not what I hoped and expected it to be. I'm not surprised that it's only made $6 million so far. I would be extremely surprised if it ever breaks even.
     
  10. Deuce66

    Deuce66 Senior Member

    Location:
    Canada
    No, I didn't see it. It did win the People's Choice Award at the Toronto Film Festival a few months ago. Go figure. I'll see it eventually on the small screen.
     
  11. Isaac K.

    Isaac K. Forum Resident

    The days where Spielberg’s name had box office clout are long gone. Without actually looking at numbers it just feels like he has had far more bombs over the last 25 years than bonafide hits, and even the few movies that made money in theater are a pale shadow of his heyday and are largely forgettable. But still, he’s a Hollywood elder and can pretty much do what he wants now.
     
  12. brownie61

    brownie61 Forum Resident

    I didn’t think The Fablemans was awful, but I sure did think it was self-indulgent. I’m still wondering why I should care about Steven Spielberg’s life story. I think Gabriel LaBelle as the teenage Sam Fableman was a shining star in the midst of all the self-indulgence.
     
  13. 64FALCON

    64FALCON Forum Resident

    You should care about Spielberg's life story because you should care. :drool:
     
  14. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR! Thread Starter

    Location:
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    Totally agree with all that.
     
  15. SandAndGlass

    SandAndGlass Twilight Forum Resident

    If you keep away from movies that require extraordinary things, like lots of SFX shots and location filming on the moon, you can make a major motion picture for $40M!

    Instead, they spend $40M on a docudrama about a teenage kid who shoots movies with a wind-up 16mm Bolex. Better they should have shot the movie itself in 16mm. That at least, would lend it some authenticity...
     
  16. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR! Thread Starter

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    I'm well aware of it. I've worked here in Hollywoo for more than 45 years now on at least a couple of thousand movies and about 75 network TV series. I have a pretty good sense of budgets, even for a union studio picture like The Fabelmans.

    I think the difference with Fabelmans is everybody took a pay cut out of respect to Spielberg, so 90% of the money went to locations, sets, cars, period props, all stuff that you actually see on screen. I bet 90% of the actors worked for scale (which is good money, but not incredible money). Spielberg is aware that if you can shoot the whole movie in less than 2 months -- which he did on this one -- there's no need for the budget to get to $80M-$90M-$100 million dollar level. West Side Story cost $100M, but I don't think you could do a huge, epic period musical shot on location in NYC with a big cast for less than that. (Note that film lost huge money, grossing only $76M and winning no major awards except for Ariana DeBose winning Best Supporting Actress.)
     
  17. 64FALCON

    64FALCON Forum Resident

    Just out of curiosity, Vidiot, what's the lowest-budget movie you recall working on?
     
  18. SandAndGlass

    SandAndGlass Twilight Forum Resident

    Still, there are many "period" movies that are shot on locations, with period accurate props, etc., that have nowhere near $40M budgets!

    Not having seen the movie, I can't really comment. But Steven Spielberg was born post WWII in 1946. It is not that difficult to find localities and props from most of the 20th century.

    When they filmed Bonnie and Clyde in the late 60's, they used actual towns for locations that had not changed much since the 1930's, including a real bank interior.

    Thinking back, I remember that you brought up a good point about the TV show, The Time Tunnel. About it being expensive, because they went back and forward to all of those different locations and points in time. A normal series only has to create a single location and time frame.

    Probably not. But that is just another example of not a very smart decision. Most of what I remember from the original movie, took place in alleys and low rent neighborhood sets.
     
    Last edited: Dec 5, 2022
  19. Michael

    Michael I LOVE WIDE S-T-E-R-E-O!

    Fabelmans...out of curiosity I will see this on home video...
     
  20. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR! Thread Starter

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    Actually, Irwin Allen made an entire career out of making cheap & crappy TV shows. He got Fox interested because he said, "we can use stock footage from the last 20 years of color movies we've made, and it'll be really affordable!" Lots of examples of that in this show. You'll also see the same alien creatures show up in Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Lost in Space, Time Tunnel, and Land of the Giants, which is pretty hilarious.

    They did have the vast (at least in the mid-1960s) Fox studio lot, so it was relatively affordable to shoot on "A NY street" or "A European street" or "A submarine" and so on, so that part of it was pretty cheap.

    Gene Roddenberry lamented for years that Star Trek was -- at the time -- the most expensive show on television, because they couldn't just go out and buy any props, costumes, or sets... they had to build them all from scratch at Paramount. So that was a considerably tougher show.

    We're about to see a brand-new big-budget period film, Damian Chazzelle's Babylon, which was comparatively affordable at $76 million dollars. However, it's over 3 hours long and has a pretty unrelenting downbeat story, basically about Hollywood actors going through the wrenching transition from silent films to talkies in the 1920s. My joke is, "it's basically Singin' in the Rain, only with no comedy, lots of drama, lots of sex & violence, debauchery, and tons of drugs and alcohol." And all that 1920s atomosphere -- the cars, the old studios, the old cameras, the costumes, everything -- all had to be found or duplicated. (One wonders if they could've just asked Baz Luhrmann to loan them all the props from his 2013 film Great Gatsby, which coincidentally, also had Toby Maguire in it.)



    The pros of Babylon are: 1) I really like that period of Hollywood, when things were turned topsy-turvy and a lot of actors and directors lost their jobs almost overnight; 2) Margot Robbie can do no wrong; 3) who doesn't like Brad Pitt?

    But on the minus side, they use a modern remake of David Bowie's "Fame" in the trailer (completely appropriate in terms of the story), but it's a weird anachronism. Is the song in the movie? We don't know. Will it work? Talk to me in 3 weeks.

    I'm not getting the "big blockbuster movie" vibe from Babylon, so if I was a gambling man, I'd say it's gonna tank. I don't think there's a big audience who wants to see great-looking people going through stressful times in the roaring 1920. I think average audience don't give a crap about life in Hollywoo a hundred years ago. But... I'm also the guy that said that Titanic would tank back in 1997. Chazelle's last movie, First Man, had high expectations but cost about $70M and was a big disappointment with a $100 million gross -- though I liked parts of it quite a bit. And I'm a huge fan of La La Land. If he tanks again with Babylon, which is a big gamble by any measure, it'll hurt his career.
     
    Last edited: Dec 5, 2022
  21. Deuce66

    Deuce66 Senior Member

    Location:
    Canada
    The box office forecast for Babylon is poor, currently tracking for a $4 million opening weekend = disaster. The early impressions of the movie are extremely mixed, it's love/hate type deal.
     
  22. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR! Thread Starter

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    That is a big disaster. I can't wait to see it, but I'm curbing my enthusiasm for now.
     
  23. brownie61

    brownie61 Forum Resident

    I’ve seen the trailer for Babylon many times now. As with the trailer for Amsterdam, it’s hard to figure out what the film is about by watching it. That, along with the fact that the released synopsis is so vague, has left me disinterested in seeing it. @Vidiot ’s post above saying it’s about the transition from silent films to “talkies” has done more to spark my interest than all the marketing the studio has done to date. I still don’t know if I’m interested in seeing it. For the record, I liked Whiplash, La La Land and First Man very much.
     
  24. SandAndGlass

    SandAndGlass Twilight Forum Resident

    Yep, even Robbie the Robot was recycled.

    Before Roddenberry came on the scene Allen was It in TV science fiction. Science fiction, be it on TV or in the movies has always been problematic. To give it any sort of futuristic "realism" you have to either spend money or have the sets looking like the cardboard they are probably made of.

    I used to notice that while an average movie from the 40's through the 60's lasted about two hours, most science fiction movies were usually a fair bit less than that, most likely due to their budgets.

    Being born in 1954, I grew up with all the TV classics. Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, had its cheesy moments, even to someone my age and in B&W. I still recall one creature that came aboard the ship through the open flying sub bay. His suit literally looked like it was made from brown paper grocery bags that had plastic seaweed glued to it, which it probably was!

    I caught a couple of interviews with Bill Mumy saying that Allen could really talk up the concept but the execution was something completely less impressive. Back then, TV shows were shot on very minimal budgets. Getting any kind of science fiction show on TV must have been a feat unto itself.

    For various reasons, including the Dr. Smith character, Lost in Space was less cerebral than anticipated. Buy, I only recently learned from Bill's interviews that by the 3rd season, the networks were telling the writers to make everything campy because that was what was popular with TV audiences at the time, go figure...

    I noticed that and the made for cable Boardwalk Empire came to mind. They filmed it in a converted marine storage facility in the western end of Broward County. One of my motel guests came here for the first two seasons because he was in the wardrobe department. Being a period piece, all wardrobe had to be made for the show. He told me that the season two wardrobe budget was $1M, which was huge for a cable production at that time.

    Me too. I was concerned with Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which coincidentally also stars Brad Pitt and Margo Robbie, would have questionable appeal to more modern audiences, being both a Hollywood period piece and long. But, it did very well for itself!

    I was very fascinated by early Hollywood and used to read many books about it. Some people were fascinated by the movie stars. For me it was the technology. The creation of an entire new mega industry out of nothing.
     
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  25. AppleBonker

    AppleBonker Forum Resident

    Location:
    Seattle
    I'm a big fan of silent films, and I have to say, I don't get even the vaguest feel of 1920s from these promos. Robbie looks more like she stepped out of Studio 54 than a 1920s film set. Perhaps they are choosing to emphasize the stuff they think is likely to sell it to modern audiences and the actual film captures the feel of the era more, but for now I'm feeling a big 'meh' for this one; and I should be one of the first in line!

    Also, I see an Asian woman in the photos, which means I'd better steal myself for another terrible take on Anna May Wong after that one where she won an Oscar from a year or two ago. I sure hope the biopic they are making finally gives us decent take on this important actress, because I doubt we will get one in Babylon.
     
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