Mizzou Tigers

18 Comments

• Oliver says:

  July 9, 2013 at 5:41 am

  At least you bothered to shave.

• mw says:

  July 9, 2013 at 7:47 am

  I think that most people, when they con­sider wheth­er or not they’re going to see a movie, espe­cially a sum­mer block­buster, espe­cially one that’s not a sequel, don’t make the decision so much based on the genre or the stars as wheth­er or not they have a reas­on­able expect­a­tion they will enjoy it; i.e. word-of-mouth. I, too, remem­ber when Pirates of the Caribbean came out. People did­n’t like pir­ate movies. People espe­cially did­n’t like movies based on Disney theme park rides. But des­pite how bad it soun­ded, the movie was enter­tain­ing and people talked. Same thing with Star Wars. And Iron Man. And count­less others.
  So I don’t think “people don’t like west­erns any­more” or “people are sick of Johnny Depp’s schtick” has much, if any­thing to do with it. It’s more that people don’t like block­buster west­erns that suck and they base wheth­er or not they think it’s gonna suck on what they hear, mostly from people they know. And in these days of $13 tick­ets and not long to wait until it’s out on DVD or some pay ser­vice, it’s become quite a fin­an­cial gamble for a lot of us – or more per­tin­ently, our kids – to see a 2 and a half hour movie that we have reas­on to believe will suck, and pos­sibly to an excru­ci­at­ing degree.

• Josh Z says:

  July 9, 2013 at 12:01 pm

  @mw. The prob­lem with your the­ory is that open­ing week­end is make-or-break time for all of these block­busters and wan­nabe block­busters. They make the major­ity of their income in the first week. People have to decide wheth­er or not to see a movie before word-of-mouth has time to spread. And giv­en that nobody listens to crit­ics any­more (apo­lo­gies, Glenn, but that’s the cul­ture we live in these days), a movie’s buzz is based on trail­ers and pri­or famili­ar­ity with the IP.
  Pirates of the Carribbean and Iron Man had huge open­ing week­ends. They did­n’t start small and grow over time. The days when that could hap­pen are over.
  This is how movies like Transformers 2 or Spider-Man 3, which seem to be almost uni­ver­sally hated by every­one who saw them, still man­aged to gross many hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars. That money poured in before the tox­ic word-of-mouth got out. By the time any­one told their friends how bad the movie was, it was too late. Their friends had already seen it too.
  To your point, how­ever, I agree that the fail­ure of Lone Ranger does­n’t have much to do with dis­lik­ing Westerns or being sick of Johnny Depp. I’m sure that the next Pirates movie will gross anoth­er bil­lion dol­lars, the same as the last 7 or 8 of those (how­ever many there have been at this point). People just watched the trail­ers for Lone Ranger and thought it looked dumb.

• haice says:

  July 9, 2013 at 1:24 pm

  Who would have guessed in 1968 that a movie based on the Disneyland ride The Pirates of the Caribbean would make tons of money?
  Um.…Roman Polanski?

• mw says:

  July 9, 2013 at 1:28 pm

  @ Josh Z, regard­ing Transformers 2 or Spiderman 3, I did include the caveat exempt­ing sequels. Good points though, oth­er­wise, and I con­sidered them as I wrote. Subjectively, there are a lot of movies I, or more import­antly , my kids and their friends want to see based on the pre-release pub­li­city; but if they don’t see it on open­ing day, they hear about it on Saturday morn­ing and based on that decide if they’re going to see it Saturday night or Sunday. I’d be curi­ous to see a break­down of open­ing week­ends for Blockbusters. How do the days imme­di­ately fol­low­ing the open­ing go? And then of course there are some (cough cough Cowboys vs. Aliens) that just sound so stu­pid that no one cares. The kid’s out of town for the sum­mer so I’m a bit in the dark on The Lone Ranger. Maybe that demo­graph­ic has no interest in west­erns and Johnny Depp has become some bor­ing old guy they liked when they were stu­pid little kids. but have def­in­itely out­grown? What do I know? Not much, imho.

• Peter Labuza says:

  July 9, 2013 at 2:30 pm

  HOW DOES HE SHAVE?

• george says:

  July 9, 2013 at 4:56 pm

  “Django Unchained” was a hit. So was the “True Grit” remake a few years ago. It’s not that people don’t want to see Westerns. They don’t want to see Westerns that don’t look interesting.

• Glenn Kenny says:

  July 9, 2013 at 5:14 pm

  Under dif­fer­ent cir­cum­stances I’d say “point taken” to George and leave it at that. But I don’t agree, at all, and if the mass mar­ket did not want to see ANY genre films that “don’t look inter­est­ing” we would have far bet­ter block­busters out there. “Django Unchained” was­n’t sold as a Western: it was sold as a freed-slave-revenge movie. And “True Grit” was sold as a Coen Brothers pic­ture, and it turned out to be one of those Coen Brothers’ pic­tures that stuck around a long time and got a grip on the pub­lic imagination—it was a hit because it grew into one. They were Westerns people argu­ably saw IN SPITE of being Westerns, is my assessment.

• Zach says:

  July 9, 2013 at 5:54 pm

  Nice dis­cus­sion, Glenn. I daresay you’re really get­ting the hang of this TV thing.
  As for the the­or­ies, I hold with those who say that word-of-mouth still mat­ters. Certainly trail­ers and mar­ket­ing play into it, but espe­cially in the blitzkrieg world social media, opin­ions mat­ter, and they travel very quickly. There is always a sig­ni­fic­ant drop-off from the first to the second week­end, and so on down the line, but the really big suc­cesses, the ones that the stu­di­os insanely expect to achieve every time out of the gate, have really long tails. That’s how you cross the billion-dollar mark. The reas­on the first week­end mat­ters so much is that that’s when the biggest audi­ence con­cen­tra­tions are, and that’s when they have the chance to cap­ture, for a few fleet­ing moments, the pop­u­lar imagination.

• george says:

  July 9, 2013 at 8:56 pm

  Glenn Kenny said: “They were Westerns people argu­ably saw IN SPITE of being Westerns, is my assessment.”
  I’ll go along with that. Maybe a Western today needs a quirky auteur, like Tarantino or the Coens, to draw an audience.

• george says:

  July 9, 2013 at 8:59 pm

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojxOkG86Mdc
  BTW, Glenn, looks like you’ve slimmed down from a few years back.

• Cadavra says:

  July 11, 2013 at 1:31 am

  Funny thing is, people who are going to RANGER seem to like it very much and are post­ing as such on the ‘net. It will nev­er recov­er from its dis­mal open­ing, but it may hang around longer than ini­tially thought.
  And yes, I loved it. So sue me.

• Joel says:

  July 11, 2013 at 10:28 am

  Josh Z (and any­one else):
  I’ve always been curi­ous: from a busi­ness stand­point, why does a movie have to be biggest on its open­ing week­end? Is it because they get a high­er per­cent­age of theat­ers’ tick­et sales then? They get booked on the most screens then? I always thought that focus­ing solely on one week­end of release, and then for­get­ting about the movie in favor of next week­end’s big open­ing, was a weird self-imposed han­di­cap that stu­dio mar­keters put on them­selves. On the oth­er hand, they’re not idi­ots, so there’s prob­ably a good explanation.

• Josh Z says:

  July 12, 2013 at 9:58 am

  @Joel. Yes, those factors play into it, but I think the biggest reas­on is simply our cul­ture’s ter­rible ADD. After open­ing week­end, audi­ences for­get all about a movie and move onto the next shiny thing that catches their eye. By the time they remem­ber about that movie they kind of wanted to see a few weeks earli­er, it’s already on DVD, Blu-ray and digit­al stream­ing for them to watch at home or on their iPad.

• Jeff McMahon says:

  July 12, 2013 at 2:20 pm

  Of course, that cul­tur­al ADD is part of a self-reinforcing feed­back loop in which the stu­di­os are breath­lessly mar­ket­ing their movies for that open­ing week­end and then aban­don them once they flop (After Earth has been out for six weeks and already it’s vir­tu­ally impossible to find a screen­ing in south­ern California.)

• george says:

  July 12, 2013 at 4:06 pm

  Now that I think of it, “Django Unchained” and “True Grit” wer­en’t Westerns as much as they were “Southerns.”
  “Django” takes place mainly in Mississippi and Tennessee, while “True Grit” is set in Arkansas, with an epi­logue in Memphis. The Old South seems to have replaced the Old West as the site for pop­u­lar shoot-em-ups.

• george says:

  August 6, 2013 at 7:19 pm

  http://www.thewrap.com/movies/column-post/johnny-depp-armie-hammer-lone-ranger-jerry-bruckheimer-108756
  Crybabies Depp, Bruckheimer and Hammer blame mean old crit­ics for hurt­ing Lone Ranger with unfair reviews.
  Critic responds: “If film crit­ics could des­troy a movie, Michael Bay and Adam Sandler would be work­ing at Starbucks.”

• Oliver_C says:

  August 7, 2013 at 5:01 am

  Some of the des­per­ate com­ments accom­pa­ny­ing that deli­cious art­icle..! Where’s David Manning when you need him?