It was definitely promoted as horror on the talk show circuit. Also, Metacritic classifies it as “thriller, horror, comedy,” and Rotten Tomatoes calls it “horror, mystery & thriller, comedy.” Maybe they thought the horror label would help sell it.
Oh, I'm sure it would. But the fact you gotta go back 50 years to find a horror movie that might've made $1 billion kinda proves my point!
I wouldn't refer to The Menu using quite these terms. I think of a mystery as more of a who-done-it movie. Of course you could also view this in reverse order. Such as, "somethings going to happen, I just don't know what it will be". Mystery, and of and in itself is a pretty nebulous and abstract term. Therefore, an element of mystery is present in most every movie we go to see. We watched the trailers, they caught our attention and curiosity. We go to the movie, knowing some things and are completely ignorant of others. What we know going in is, a group of wealthy diners are going to a very exclusive and remote restaurant for a dining experience... Since this is a movie, we can expect that there will be more than eating dinner, which you can watch on a food channel documentary. Now, for the suspense aspect. Somethings going to happen but when and what? Since they are eating dinner, we can assume that whatever is going to happen, will take course over the next few hours. The movie is not that long but we should be seeing things unfold in almost real time. There are always events that mark time. In a dinner setting, this would be delineated by the different courses that will be served. Since we know about how long the movie lasts and we have an outline as to the time frame, we would be given to assume that the conclusion will take place later, toward the end of the meal, i.e. dessert. So while we might expect little things to occur along the way, we have reasonable belief that nothing major will happen during the body of the dinner. So, we have suspense, but not the kind of edge-of-your-seat type suspense. You are correct in your appraisal of "not horror per se". But some reviews and movie synopsis do place the horror label on the film. We have just been introduced to this group, we, the audience, care nothing about them. If they are eaten by raptors, so what? When you view this as a Black Comedy, things take on a different perspective. Much better to think of the film this way...
I'm honestly wondering why you see this movie as a animated crap. It looks colorful, true to the Mario world and characters and while it doesn't look like it will be winning an Academy Award for best movie, it seems like a fun kids movie. I wouldn't compare it with the the 1993 movie either. While both are Mario movies, this one stays much more true to the characters people love from the video games, due to Nintendo's involvement. The 1993 movie is mess...but it's a fascinating mess. Instead of targeting the primary audience that played the video games at the time, it almost feels Blade Runner-esque due to it's set design and somber tone. The whole production seemed to have been a nightmare as well, according to everyone involved. It's probably one of the reasons why Nintendo's involved with this one.
Paranormal Activity - Wikipedia Budget Production: $15,000 Post-production: $215,000[6] Box office $193.4 million[7] Not too shabby!
And there's "Blair Witch Project", which cost like $250,000 and brought in almost $250 million - or 1000X its cost. But I differentiated between movies that made massive "multipliers" times their budgets and those that made mega-bucks regardless of budget. $250 million is chicken feed for MCU movies or other tentpoles. The studios crave the $1 billion plus movies, even when those films cost $300m or more. Horror kicks butt in terms of basic return on investment since most of those movies are cheap to make. But they don't approach the box office stratosphere.
Early numbers have M3GAN winning Friday and Avatar 2 winning the weekend. Should be a good weekend for both. M3GAN was a lot of fun and, like a lot of recent black comedies, offers some relevant cultural commentary. It’s predictable, but lands the plot points with enough style to satisfy most. My audience was 90% under 25 years old and a little rowdy.
The Cinemascore for M3GAN is a "B". Rotten Tomatoes is 94% critics / 79% fans. I think it will do very well and return a very nice profit for the studio. Recent movies that received a "B" from audiences include Bones and All, The Menu and Strange World.
Yeah, most of the record books say that Paranormal Activity has the greatest "cost-to-profit" ratio of any film ever made. You figure it cost roughly $200K and made almost $200 million, which is pretty incredible. I've corrected people who said the movie only cost $15,000, since they did spend months on the sound mix and a lot of complicated editorial fixes, caused by the fact that they initially used bad cameras and a cheap editing system. Bad casting. I'm opposed to a lot of video game -> feature film ideas. I just saw the trailer again a few days ago, and I swear, there were crickets in the audience. And yet people went nuts for the Mission: Impossible trailer. Absolutely nuts. This is a longer version of what we saw:
perspective: Box Office 2022 Wasn’t Recovery, but 2023 Needs to Recover Audience | IndieWire Being officially characterized as a 'Avatar naysayer' here, I'll reiterate: movies like that vaccum up so much capital and risk, they prevent other movies - that's right, a truly diverse slate of medium budgeted movies - from being made. In the long run, and even apparently the short run, that's not healthy. I thought the first Avatar was, frankly stupid, and conceptually aimed very low. If people enjoyed it, great. Good for them. Good for Cameron. The Producers. Etc. But that success may be further cultivating a disinterest in movie going by those who simply want to see intelligent mainstream films. You can argue the point, by pointing to a few recent films that are mainstream and intelligent, but you can't disagree with the box office reality.
We can disagree with your conclusions. Movies like Avatar and Top Gun Maverick are getting people back to the movies. Medium budget movies, outside of horror, have had a really rough year. Even when there was no notable new big budget competition, medium budgeted films did poorly. You’re focused on the wrong things. Cinema needs to focus on survival this year with a bunch of titles that will get people in the door. If not we are going to see a massive reduction in the number of screens in coming years. Chains like Regal are really struggling. It’s always been the case that theaters need a mix of big budget crowd pleasing entertainment and more niche fare to sustain. The big budget stuff allows theaters to run films that may not be as profitable so the theater programmer can take risks. That’s how you get your mix. I do enjoy how much people who hoped for Avatar to crash and burn are now working on college thesis level dissertations about why it shouldn’t have happened.
I'd say that it would play well to Gen-Xers and Millennials with children whom, when perusing the 'kid' flicks on offer over the holidays, select Mario based upon 40 years of gaming recognition (across various platforms). Indeed, I'd suggest there's a significant crossover in generational appeal that might elude typical audience tracking.
If your suggesting I 'hoped' Avatar would fail: wrong. I haven't seen it (and never will!). As I said, good for whoever. But if Avatar is as dumb as the first movie, I do find it dismaying that such nonsense would be the remedy for the film industry.
If it wasn't for big budget blockbusters the movie theatre industry would be shutdown, the small/medium budget "indie" style films that you seem to champion are just as risky an investment even if the $$ is smaller and they generate far less revenue for the industry, they are still being made in significant numbers. @Chris DeVoe and his wife see a lot of these smaller indie films on a near weekly basis, there's no shortage. Similar to the music industry you have huge names that generate a lot of $$ and name recognition and thousands of smaller indie artists that can be found for serious fans who want to dig a little deeper. These are the Top 5's from each of the last 5 years. 2022 1- Avatar: The Way of Water $1,730,906,779 2- Top Gun: Maverick $1,488,732,821 3- Jurassic World: Dominion $1,001,978,080 4- Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness $955,775,804 5- Minions: The Rise of Gru $939,628,210 2021 1- Spider-Man: No Way Home $1,906,693,477 2- The Battle at Lake Changjin $902,548,476 3- Hi, Mom $822,009,764 4- No Time to Die $774,153,007 5- F9: The Fast Saga $726,229,501 2019 1- Avengers: Endgame $2,797,501,328 2- The Lion King $1,656,943,394 3- Frozen II $1,450,026,933 4- Spider-Man: Far from Home $1,131,927,996 5- Captain Marvel $1,128,274,794 2018 1- Avengers: Infinity War $2,048,359,754 2- Black Panther $1,346,913,161 3- Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom $1,308,467,944 4- Incredibles 2 $1,242,805,359 5- Aquaman $1,148,461,807 2017 1- Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi $1,332,539,889 2- Beauty and the Beast $1,263,521,126 3- The Fate of the Furious $1,236,005,118 4- Despicable Me 3 $1,034,799,409 5- Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle $962,077,546
people are tweeting this about Avatar "they are saying after what Avatar does this weekend in the US, it will equate to normal 2022 film that did 275 million domestic" Vidiot
News to me. I don't pay attention to tweets from unidentified people on the net -- I think it's just another opinion. There's only five films in history that have made $2 billion dollars or more worldwide, and it's pretty certain that Avatar 2 will be one of them... 'Avatar 2' Is Sixth-Biggest Film of All-Time With $1.92 Billion - Variety Hey, you left out 2020: 1 The Eight Hundred $461,421,559 2 Demon Slayer the Movie: Mugen Train $453,210,959 3 Bad Boys for Life $426,505,244 4 My People, My Homeland $422,390,820 5 Tenet $365,304,105 2020 Worldwide Box Office - Box Office Mojo Low numbers because of COVID. Interesting, the number of foreign films (especially Asian films) on the worldwide list.
I find it interesting that people would participate in a "Hits & Bombs" forum discussion, but be unwilling to see the biggest hit film of the year on the fear that it might be "as dumb as the first movie." (It's kind of like the naysayers who refused to see Star Wars or Godfather or Jaws or Titanic or any other huge mass-market film, just so they proudly declare they were apart from the zeitgeist of the moment.) For the record, I actually thought Avatar 2 was a better film than the first one. It's got a long list of awards and accolades already, and the Oscar noms haven't happened yet: List of accolades received by Avatar: The Way of Water - Wikipedia I'd be very surprised if Avatar 2 doesn't get Oscar nominations for VFX, Cinematography, Editing, Production Design, and Sound, but I'd be iffy on Script and any actor awards. I think it's worth seeing just for the sheer spectacle of the experience: it really looks like a $350 million dollar film on screen. I'd see a movie like this just to enjoy the technology... and there's no harm than that. You can always say, "wow, it was great to look at, but the story and characters weren't very good." I actually was surprised that the story and characters were far better than I expected, and I actually got swept up in the whole thing. But I was in the right mood to see it, and we got cheap seats at the local IMAX.
I agree with this. But I also feel that movies like Valerian and Tomorrowland had some impressive visual experiences. The same goes for Alita, which to me was a far more visually challenging film than WoW for one singular particular aspect. Alita had to be human-like. I was and remain impressed by the level of human movement and expression. I can forgive their obvious script shortcomings because I never had any high expectations on that front. I would say the same with regard to any Star Wars movie after watching the first one. Though I am also with you on the WoW script being better than expected.
No, those were acid in the eyes. Jupiter Ascending was another one. Just because a movie has a massive budget and dazzling visuals doesn't make it worth seeing. To me, both Avatar movies go beyond that: there's something to enjoy beyond the visuals. Compare the reviews and box office of Valerian / Tomorrowland / Jupiter to Avatar.
I think the whole franchise made money, except perhaps for Solo. But they had a lot going on besides visuals. I also think if you examine the reviews, the mainstream critics were fairly complimentary; only the toxic fans went crazy with their criticisms. I don't think the movies were great, but they weren't horrible. I said when they were released (and now), I think the sequels were actually better than the prequels. But again, it's a separate argument from Avatar, Avatar 2, and whether it's worth seeing, which was really my point.
Well, let's say The Way of Water cost $250 million. Now, let's say Disney did a 1:1 advertising spend and we know theaters return 52% of the gross domestic, 45% international and Beijing will only allow 25% out of the country. Has The Way of Water broken even? (You can find financial information here.)
I love this site. But the tickets sold numbers make zero sense The Way Of Water , breaks down (roughly) to a cost of $9 , per ticket , using their numbers I have not seen a ticket cheaper then a $18 bill , while most range from $20 to $25
