In the early days of the internet, I would spend an inordinate amount of time on the message boards of the IMDB. It used to be this groovy place where people who liked movies would talk about movies with other people who also liked movies.
It has since become a festering wasteland of 'DARK KNIGHT IS BETTER THAN AVENGERS' and "80 MILLION OPENING??? FLOP!!!!' and so on.
Polite disagreements are a thing of the past, I understand this. I'm at a loss, however, to explain why every other movie has ten threads about the box office returns for every thread about the actual film. Maybe I'm in the minority, but does the amount of money a film earns impact anyone's ability to enjoy that film? Did anyone leave Pacific Rim feeling awesome, see that it was going to struggle to make its money back and go 'well #### this Jaeger bull#### then'? I don't think they did.
I confess, there are moments when I'm curious to see how a movie does, and my primary interest is usually driven by:
1. I liked the movie and I hope it makes enough to ensure the people involved get to do more things I might also like.
OR
2. I'm legitimately interested to see how many big budget cash grabs need to fail miserably before Hollywood takes a hint.
I run into more people than I think I should who's go-to argument when debating a film's merits is 'but how much money did it make?' and to that I say 'who cares?'. It doesn't matter if Battleship ended up grossing $300 million worldwide. All that tells me is that there's $300 million worth of humanity out there that can easily be tricked.
Obviously money plays a role in determining what movies get produced and distributed. I can't understand the level of importance placed on it by the movie-going public.
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Mom and Dad love you, Rowan - February 15, 2024
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I'm good friends with the theatre owner here in High River and he pays great attention to the box office numbers when deciding which movie he is going to bring in. I always argue that a collection of reviews one can get on Rotten Tomatoes is a better way to judge a movie performance. In a number of cases a movie doesn't draw the audience he was expecting and he blames it on fickle residents.
I was talking to the husband of my wife's best friend about movies, and he was trying to convince me that Paranormal Activity deserved more acclaim and praise because of all the money it made compared to how much it cost. Cripes, not only is that argument shallow and void of any appreciation of artistic integrity, but he was actually trying to tell me I was wrong for not liking it.
I enjoy the fact that a decent movie like The Hunger Games is on top of that list, and family friendly material always makes more at the box office, so Monsters University, Frozen, and Despicable Me 2 are totally expected to be there. The usual fodder of Iron Man, Man of Steel, Hobbit, Thor etc. are always up there because they are crowd pleasers…so I regularly ignore the top of the list. I do however check further down the list to see how much the crap films make compared to the great films. Here's an example:
70. 12 Years A Slave-$46,531,274
84. Blue Jasmine-$33,242,114
And the problem is that those 2 horribly crap movies above had double the amount of screens to generate revenue. But still, people often miss brilliant films in favor of watching crap…and not just "I'm a snooty film snob who can't enjoy anything that isn't an art house film" definition of crap. I'm talking Grownups 2. Oh yeah, that gem made $133,668,525. People suck and have horrible taste. /end rant.
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Originally Posted by ResAlien
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The problem with using box office as a measuring stick if a film's good or not is that once the money is paid TO the box office, you don't get it back. If I go and see a movie (like, Grownups 2) based on the first one and one buddy who thought it was hilarious, and I think it sucks...the theatre doesn't give my money back, and the movie still 'earns' that money.
Yeah, I can read reviews and things, but until I actually see a movie myself, I won't know if I will like it or not...and the box office will already have my money at that point.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by WhiteTiger
The problem with using box office as a measuring stick if a film's good or not is that once the money is paid TO the box office, you don't get it back. If I go and see a movie (like, Grownups 2) based on the first one and one buddy who thought it was hilarious, and I think it sucks...the theatre doesn't give my money back, and the movie still 'earns' that money.
Yeah, I can read reviews and things, but until I actually see a movie myself, I won't know if I will like it or not...and the box office will already have my money at that point.
That is why I hestate to pay big bucks to see the new releases. I'd rather wait until discount threatres like Canyon Meadows shows it. You don't feel quite as ripped off when you only pay $5.00
Actually I'm shocked Pacific Rim broke $100 million. I really wanted to like it but couldn't look past just how horribly bad of a movie it was.
Pacific Rim is goofy. But by no means is it a bad movie. It's a big, dumb, colorful, fun movie that doesn't have an ounce of cynicism in it.
But I'll grant you, it's no Alien Seed.
Quote:
Originally Posted by WhiteTiger
The problem with using box office as a measuring stick if a film's good or not is that once the money is paid TO the box office, you don't get it back. If I go and see a movie (like, Grownups 2) based on the first one and one buddy who thought it was hilarious, and I think it sucks...the theatre doesn't give my money back, and the movie still 'earns' that money.
Yeah, I can read reviews and things, but until I actually see a movie myself, I won't know if I will like it or not...and the box office will already have my money at that point.
If you willingly went to grown ups 2, you deserve what you get.
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Pacific Rim is goofy. But by no means is it a bad movie. It's a big, dumb, colorful, fun movie that doesn't have an ounce of cynicism in it.
Pacific Rim is Sharknado with a big budget. It's honestly one of the worst movies I've seen in years only somewhat redeemed by the robot vs monster scenes. I like Charlie Hunnam but there isn't much he could have done better provided with such a horrible script. Google Pacific Rim with the words "worst ever" and you will see a lot of opinions that mirror mine.
Last edited by Erick Estrada; 02-08-2014 at 08:15 PM.
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How much a movie makes does make it more enjoyable for people to watch. There have been a whole bunch of sociology experiments testing this. Basically if everyone else thinks something is good people will like it more than if they saw it with no information.
Pacific Rim is Sharknado with a big budget. It's honestly one of the worst movies I've seen in years only somewhat redeemed by the robot vs monster scenes. I like Charlie Hunnam but there isn't much he could have done better provided with such a horrible script. Google Pacific Rim with the words "worst ever" and you will see a lot of opinions that mirror mine.
The problem is the show needs two things:
1) You go in to watch only what you thought kind of redeemed it.
2) You know going in that the story is intended to not be serious and more of an excuse plot to see CGI robots punch CGI monsters.
And I get that. The show is built on stereotypes, cliche stories, and every trope in the book. I'm a huge fan of shows with giant robots in them and I could certainly point out every "twist" along the way. In fact, I think del Toro even mentioned he built the story around these concepts, basing the entire film and world off of shows he watched as a kid. It's a cute love letter to the old shows. In fact, it comes so close on some scales that other fan bases (some of the animated show Neon Genesis Evangelion's Western fans for example) come out swinging, claiming it's purely a rip off (Evangelion being a 1995 TV series).
But for someone unfamiliar with the stories or concepts though, it seems to be taken a little too seriously to be a good show.
Honestly, it's probably true that Pacific Rim could have been just cut down to its fight scenes as too much time was wasted "setting up" each fight. Padding is a bit of an issue there.
At any rate, the story with the cash flow is that I don't think NA audiences like such a film. The tropes in Pacific Rim are much closer to those found in some Eastern TV shows unlike those of Transformers, so they feel new and just poorly executed as an actual story instead of just excuses thrown out for the sake of even having a story to prevent it from just being a YouTube video called "20 minutes of robots".
If you do go by the box office numbers, Pacific Rim dominated the international markets, racking up (I think it was) 2/3s of its money in EU and Asia. These are not large markets, so it's pretty telling that it earned double on foreign soil. I don't recall the numbers, but I do remember it had a significant share of the income of its primary money earning weeks.
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Last edited by kirant; 02-08-2014 at 08:54 PM.
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What happened in the music industry 20 years ago is what has been happening in movies for the past 4-5 years and a year and a half for gaming. Production and publication companies are hesitant to invest in anything but definite profits because artistic integrity means nothing when a flop means the bankruptcy of a studio.
The best thing to happen would be for the entire industry to tank and for independent developers to create innovations that make it possible to produce high quality movies much cheaper, people like Freddie Wong that have passion for creativity in their area of interest will hopefully take over the industry. 100 million dollar movies are almost guaranteed to suck because they must pander to the common denominator, take Terminator 1 vs. Terminator 4. Minimum budget, cheesy effects vs. huge budget and constant overstimulation and the movie from 30 years ago is drastically better because the big budget garbage had to attempt to appeal to everyone to make as much money. Anything clever, genuine or even remotely thought provoking was replaced with the most-mindnumbingly bad twist and pointless action scenes.
Just like with the new Star Wars movies, there's no way it can be good, there will be no genuine moments with charismatic characters. It will be fast-paced nonsense to sell toys to kids. The very fact it performs well at the box office is nearly guaranteed to make it awful because when you try to appeal to as broad an audience as possible you have to remove anything out of the ordinary or possibly thought provoking, it's so obvious when it happens too, just look at Iron Man 3; terrible villain, terrible plot, beyond moronic ending, even worse premise but it was to be expected, maybe there was a good script in the beginning but a bunch of analysts in a boardroom streamlined it as much as possible essentially destroying his character entirely. Just like Hulk's I'm always angry, these people don't give a crap about story or characters, they care about $$$ only. Just like any industry though, you invest 100 million into anything and you want to make damn sure it's not going to fail.
I've actually heard Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters is sort of a hidden gem at this point. It delivers on what it promises, which is over the top witch hunting. Someone compared it to early Sam Raimi movies, which is a huge compliment. I haven't seen it yet, but it's not like they were wanting to make the best movie ever, and at least it might have risen above the usual scholk of crappolla B movies.
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If one watches the box office takes keep an eye on week 2 and 3 of the release and see if the numbers still hold up. If the numbers are dropping it's a sign that word of mouth from those who saw it the first weekend are not good.
Obsessions with Box Office
That'd be an easier and less confusing way to put it. 
