April 25, 2024
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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” ā some novel, you know?
So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.
And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it ā I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.
There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.
I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury ā he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” ā and I’d forgot who he was.
So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging ā I was with her at that moment ā she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.
But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy namedā” “Yeah, sure ā you want his phone number?”
My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher
“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that Iām on the phone with you now, after all thatās been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didnāt seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. Thereās not a case of that. He wasnāt using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had ā if that were what the accusation involved ā the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. Iām not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, āYou know, itās not this, itās thatā? Because ā let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. TimesĀ piece, thatās what it lacked. Thatās what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.
~ David Simon
Blumhouse is definitely experiencing its first real rough patch. This is actualy the company’s 5th US release this year. It send a trio of scream queen titles Direct to video as Universal took a pass; THE VEIL (Jessica Alba), VISIONS (Isla Fischer), and CURVE (Julianne Hough), this following the disastrous JEM AND THE HOLOGRAMS and GREEN INFERNO rollouts, and the so-so experiment on PARANORMAL 5. What’s sad is that they have a gem in the straight-to-Netflix HUSH (a mashup of WAIT UNTIL DARK and THE STRANGERS) that could have made a few bucks I think, despite the anonymous cast. Check it out if you haven’t.
Any thoughts on MONEY MONSTER? I enjoyed it…I feel like people are dismissing it because it isn’t “important” like BIG SHORT. For a summer thriller though, it’s a breeze.
LAST DAYS IN THE DESERT deserves better. No LOBSTER numbers?
ETGuild, you’re not even trying to spin that Captain America drop are you? š 74% on its second Friday is more than any other recent Marvel film, except for Fantastic Four which dropped 78%.
Sloppy, Geoff. It’s a 1% better Friday-to-Friday drop than ULTRON, despite the fact ULTRON had even less competition than this movie. It’s also a better hold than the #4 superhero movie of all-time, TDKR.
Are we really going to do this again this year? I remember spending most of last May arguing with people who didn’t think ULTRON would come close to TDKR.
I actually think that the big console releases of Doom and Uncharted 4 this week have hurt Cap, you know.
From what I can tell, EtGuild isn’t trying to spin anything one way or the other. To the contrary, he seems to have things firmly in perspective. As he stated, ‘Ultron’ had a slightly larger Friday-to-Friday drop around this same time last year even though it faced less competition.
I’m not sure that what we are seeing here is truly the onset of “superhero fatigue” or even Marvel/MCU fatigue. Perhaps the MCU, and by extension superhero films as a whole, simply peaked with the first ‘Avengers film.’ I’d say that at this point, there’s ample evidence to suggest that ‘The Avengers’ might have been an outlier. It had a certain novelty factor going for it at the time, and it’s success helped to make that novelty the new norm. How realistic is it to expect every subsequent MCU team-up film to replicate and/or surpass it’s success? I think it’s high time that we start to reconsider our expectations for these films. It might be a while before we see another MCU film reach $500 million domestic. That being said, I don’t think the bubble will truly burst anytime soon.
Uncharted 4 is a better big budget action spectacle than any summer movie in some time.
Civil War had the biggest opening of the year, will surpass Deadpool as the #1 domestic film and Zootopia as the #1 worldwide film, may hold on to all three of those titles by year’s end and it’s a sign of “MCU/superhero fatigue.”
Being #1 doesn’t mean anything when there is pattern of declining grosses. That’s one thing this blog actually always does a great job of pointing out. Also don’t see how it is a lock to stick at place with Dory and Star Wars around.
Declining? If it ends up near 450 million domestic and 1.3 billion worldwide, then the declining grosses are what don’t mean anything. Also, I agree it’s not a lock to stay at #1–that’s why I wrote “may hold”.
One of the many problems with arguing that this is a sign of declining grosses is the fact there hasn’t been any decline by any measure except in this country. ULTRON is the biggest superhero movie of all-time overseas. The brand continues to grow across the globe (ANT-MAN made more than CAP 1 and INCREDIBLE HULK combined). The mere idea that a movie with CAPTAIN AMERICA in the title could challenge for the superhero #1 all-time overseas, which it is doing, should be considered ludicrous on its face given Kevin Feige and Joe Johnston were talking about the limitations of selling a CAPTAIN AMERICA movie to a worldwide audience less than 5 years ago. Yup, it’s AVENGERS 2.5, but the fact it’s fronted by a symbol of American jingoism and is up near the all-time top is remarkable.
There’s just a ceiling for these things. We can’t fall for the Wall Street lie that growth can be constant and neverending. The MCU movies will stay in this ballpark for another decade at least. Maybe someone on a board somewhere will be disappointed that some imagined outcome never became a reality but success is success. None of these movies are losing money. BVS on the other hand is only saved by merchandise.
Guess I made an error about Ultron my apologies. But it dropped more on its second Friday than Ant-Man, Winter Soldier, Iron Man 3, and just about every other recent Marvel film EXCEPT Ultron…..for one film (BVS) to drop off 81% on its second Friday (from a holiday no less) to immediately be covered as a film that audiences revile and for another film from the same genre (Civil War) just about a month and a half later to drop 74% to be covered as a film that audiences MUST love does indicate some bias in the coverage, you guys really can’t deny that. š And even though it’s called “Captain America: Civil War” in most countries (Disney/Marvel is still titling it “The First Avenger” in several markets) doesn’t obscure the fact that it was marketed as and is in fact Avengers 2.5 – it’s the Avengers minus Hulk and Thor plus Black Panther and Spider-man, comparing the grosses to ‘Winter Soldier is apples and oranges. And most other countries do NOT hate America at this time….Trump hasn’t been elected….YET. š
With its 60%+ drop this weekend expecting 450M at this point is crazy. The legs it’s shown so far have been on par or worse then Ultron and IM3, not better.
Geoff, of the 189 movies to open with at least $50 million, BvS had the 8th largest drop in history, behind only the Potter finale, Ang Lee’s Hulk, the Twilight sequels, Fifty Shades of Grey and Valentine’s Day. If CIVIL WAR drops 61%, which is a stretch, it will be the 36th largest drop out of 189. Anotherwords, not great but wholly unremarkable.
Again, AVENGERS 2.5 or not the idea of CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR outgrossing AVENGERS, BATMAN, SPIDERMAN et al internationally is pure insanity, and very well might happen. We’re talking crushing the last Spider-Man by 60% and BvS by 50% insanity. We’re talking about a franchise that wasn’t even called CAPTAIN AMERICA the first time out due to fear of international condemnation.
@PJ, $425 million was what I called for on this blog back when the year started. I don’t think anyone expected 450, except maybe you and Geoff.
I’m as ready as anyone for the trend of superhero fatigue to be a real thing. But as far as the mass audience goes, it isn’t. If anything, the huge gross of Deadpool shows an appetite for different varieties of superhero movies. And we’ll get that fulfilled with Black Panther and Suicide Squad and probably Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel and Guardians 2, etc.
So will it go higher? Unless there’s some huge trainwreck we don’t know about on the horizon, I’d say yes.
@Etguild And warren further upthread. But 425 is also looking like a stretch. Again, it’s on par or worse, not better.
How is that a poor opening for The Darkness given the budget (4M) and very minimal marketing? Supposedly, an opening from 4-6M is all they expect for their BlumHouse Tilt releases, the next of which is Incarnate in September starring Aaron Eckhart and directed by Brad Peyton (San Andreas).
Green Inferno underperformed that threshold but this looks to be right in that range. Incarnate looks commercial enough to also be at least in that range as well. Delirium with Topher Grace and Patricia Clarkson and directed by Dennis Iliadis (Last House on the Left remake) will follow. Even Jem only cost like $4M so with VOD and rentals, I bet they may have made something or lost very little.
They’ve also got what looks like a surefire moneymaker in the next Purge movie in July and Shyamalan’s follow-up to The Visit in “Split” coming after.
Iron Man 3 grosses are a reasonable expectation, I’m guessing it cracks $400 million domestic maybe a bit higher, who knows? But THIS was the weekend to grab the extra cash because the next several weeks look about as log-jammed as the competition Iron Man 3 had in its first month – next week, you have Neighbors 2, The Nice Guys (genuinely stupid for Warners to open this against another R-rated comedy, but oh well), and Angry Birds THEN X-Men and Alice 2 (all of Disney’s marketing dollars now being diverted towards that opening within a few days) THEN Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles THEN Warcraft and Conjuring 2……no way it’s going to hold on to all of its screens with that kind of competition, especially direct comic book competition from X-Men and ‘Turtles.
And yeah it’s cleaning up internationally but both X-Men and Alice are hitting overseas markets next week…..look it’s clear that Disney itself was comfortable leaving some money on the table with this one, cannibalizing itself with $200 million plus budget tent-poles being released every three weeks. But this was a discussion we were having last week….
And you know it’s not REALLY crazy to think that The Avengers (worldwide) and The Dark Knight (domestically) might be the ceiling for this genre, because that’s a pretty high ceiling. š Those films were both lightning-in-a-bottle phenomenons that could be really hard to duplicate no matter how many new superheroes you throw in the mix.
Would anybody be shocked if Deathly Hallows Part 2 and Return of the King remained the box office ceiling for fantasy adventures from this point on?
Civil War will still likely do at least $430m/domestic, dropping off just a few million admissions from Age of Ultron, and will close somewhere near $80m/ domestic ahead of BvS and beating it by something like 30% worldwide. The film will also improve $170+ million over CAP 2’s domestic gross by the time it closes, and north of $500 mill+ worldwide. By all accounts it will be a resounding victory for Marvel/Disney.
PJ, “If it ends up near 450…” is not predicting 450.
@Mark, didn’t say it was poor. But I don’t think anyone is HOPING for a $5 million opening in this day and age. When a $10 million gross is your box office high water mark amongst an Eli Roth movie, a $4 million Jessica Alba and Thomas Jane chiller, an adaptation of Jem and the Holograms, an original with Isla Fischer and Jim Parsons, an adaptation of one of the most acclaimed Euro-horror movies of the century (Martyrs), and the Blumhouse debut of the director of The Skeleton Key, I’d maintain you’re in a teeny rough patch, especially when your flicks routinely register $50-$150 million worldwide.
Hey, remember that time when THIS was the weekend Ultron was going to bust out given all it was going against was a Reese Witherspoon/Sofia Vergera vehicle, but then it had the worst weekend drop since INCREDIBLE HULK and was instead going to go on to get slaughtered by Mad Max, San Andreas, Poltergeist, Tomorrowland and Jurassic World while barely clawing to $400 million when all was said and done? Turns out its 2nd weekend drop with zero competition was the worst performance of its run by far, because there are these things called “final exams” in mid-May that those crafty Hollywood studios have apparently known about for years. Those were the days.
Yeah. Never count out Marvel movies. They are fucking money making machines, and they are SATURDAY MOVIES. Once again, Saturday will tell the damn tale, but who doesn’t want this level of earning? Seriously? If this is the ceiling, then isn’t this a hell of a ceiling?
Anybody know how long The Darkness sat on the shelf? The kid in it currently plays Bruce Wayne on Fox’s Gotham and looks years older on TV.
The Darkness finished filming in August of 2014.
Yeah ETGuild, I remember it going into the weakest performing Memorial Day Weekend in ten years with not another $200 million domestic hit coming for a full month later after its release (just as with the first Avengers) and ZERO comic book films until Ant-Man in July….. very comparable to TWO comic book movies coming over the next three weeks backed by very aggressive marketing campaigns. Oh and yeah I remember the FIRST Neighbors taking down a big Marvel movie (TASM2) on its opening weekend…. no way that could happen again right? š
I remember this guy Geoff on this blog, who on this weekend last year kicked off his talking point that Ultron had performed poorly against “minimal competition,” would end at $425 milion, and was accused of being a WB shill for advancing the idea BvS would finish close to Ultron.
Sigh…I give up. Anything could happen. That’s the point of box office. But there’s been a longstanding pattern on this blog, that people who make bold predictions after the 1st or 2nd weekend of a big movie look like complete idiots. It’s happened this year frequently (BVS, TJB, Zootopia).
Hey! Looks like we got that 59% drop after all. As for NEIGHBORS 2….Uni has got to be worried about the tracking. Looking at $25 million right now at most.
I’m no shill for Warners, I just like the films that come out of their studios better – I honestly can’t remember if I said that BVS would make as much as Ultron but if this was a year ago with one teaser trailer to go on, then it might have seemed like a reasonable prediction….the last two Batman films cleared $1 billion and that was before the growth of many overseas markets, including China. But then as we got closer to release, I was increasingly reminded of why BVS would never make that much for one striking reason: Warners hired Zack Snyder to direct and apparently gave him free reign. And since when it is so “bold” to predict a film will gross around what Iron Man 3 did when it came out in the same launch window with a similar trajectory?? š You think the folks at Disney weren’t actually counting on that? š Last I checked $1.2 billion was pretty strong.
$25-million?!?
Yeek!
Smells like the sloppy seconds performance of “Ted 2.”
Apparently everybody who loved “Neighbors” has decided they’re just not that into it anymore.
Maybe WB wasn’t so foolish to date “The Nice Guys” on the same day as “N2” after all. Pretty sure that’s going to open better than $25-million.
It’s kinda sad…NEIGHBORS 2 is pretty fun and isn’t really worse than the first one. Chloe Moretz is great, and it has some humorously subversive takes on the media’s characterization of young female behavior.
But yeah…freshness means a lot in comedy. NEIGHBORS opened to $14 million in the UK, and NEIGHBORS 2 opened with $2 million there last weekend. That’s a straight up disaster.
Damn, you get to see things a lot earlier than me, Et!
Except for “Apocalypse” (and really, why did Fox even bother?), the standard here is two or three days (nights usually; they’re almost always promotionals) before opening.
I kind of hated “Neighbors 1” which I found off-cuttingly mean-spirited.
Of course, I felt the same way about the original “Hangover,” too.
Was surprised to discover that the same audience who made “N-1” a smash just two years ago has apparently moved on.
If only moviegoers would be as fickle w/ Marvel, DC and “Star Wars” sequels as they’re proving to be w/ gross-out bro comedies.
If a Blumhouse movie only needs $6 million for it to be successful, why not give everything a theatrical release? How do they decide that The Veil is worthy of a quiet Netflix dump while The Darkness is worthy of a (pretty) wide release (and I ask having not seen The Veil)? The Darkness is insanely bad. A dull and stupid train wreck. Are The Veil, Visions, and Curve that much worse? That’s a scary thought. I also hated Hush. A lot. 84 minutes feels like 4 hours. As dull and stupid as The Darkness. Incarnate looks really bad too. I hope they start making some good movies soon.
From a 2015 Blumhouse profile: Blumās quick and easy MO has also led to a glut of lower-tier films, some of which are so lazy and uninspired ā Dark Skies, Jessabelle and all the Paranormal Activity sequels come to mind ā that they threaten to give horror a bad name, or a worse one than the typically disrespected genre already has.
“Also problematic is what happens to the movies Blumhouse produces that donāt become worldwide phenomenons. Part of the risk for filmmakers partnering with Blumhouse is that thereās no guarantee of distribution. For every Insidious, thereās an Area 51, which got a whisper-quiet release this past May after sitting on a shelf for six years. Even some of Blumhouseās higher-profile projects ā movies with marquee stars and directors ā have been cast aside unceremoniously. Stretch, for instance, was directed by Joe Carnahan… Yet the dark comedy, one of Blumhouseās occasional forays outside horror, was yanked from Universalās distribution calendar weeks before its planned 2014 release, leading Blumhouse to slip it onto VOD months later. āTheir job is to make 10 of something, and if one of them meets the metric with an audience, thatās the one thatāll get the TLC,ā Carnahan told the Grantland website last year. āI understand that. If you shotgun enough paint cans, youāre going to get a Picasso.ā
Blum, however, says itās just smart business. āI like to say to the directors that the ultimate bet is on yourself: I can promise the vision will be yours, and you will live and die on your own sword, which for creative people is a satisfying agreement to get into,ā he says, adding that his companyās new Tilt imprint has been releasing smaller films left by the wayside. āWe donāt pretend those movies donāt exist. Iām proud of those movies that come out on Netflix and iTunes. We shine a light on them, too.ā
I remember reading that Ray. I still wonder about their decisions though. Does The Darkness get a theatrical release because Bacon is in it? But it’s not like he’s a massive box office draw or part of the marketing campaign. Surely they knew it was a stinker long ago (especially if filming ended nearly two years ago). I want to like Blumhouse but more and more I feel like the films they’ve made that I like are just random accidents.
Very interesting (though I take issue with the characterization of the shitty titles; PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 3 is better than the first one and I liked DARK SKIES).
And yeah that’s some questionable decision making. I’ve seen THE VEIL and it’s a masterpiece compared to THE DARKNESS. It’s pretty average overall, but poor Thomas Jane gives a bizarrely inspired performance and is far superior to any of the acting in this crap. My only guess is TILT took one glance in the direction of the BO for the THE SACRAMENT (an actual good movie) and pissed their pants. This thing looked freakin’ expensive though. When a straight-to-VOD title is willing to claim a $4 million budget (it was produced by Blumhouse fyi) who knows what the actual price tag was.