April 30, 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” — 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 — 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 — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.
So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — 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 named—” “Yeah, sure — 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 I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s 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 didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — 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. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s 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
Enough hasn’t been said about the catastrophic collapse of Lionsgate openers this year. Domestically, they are down 55% since last year, and are back to pre-Summit acquisition gross levels with their good performers (Tyler Perry) mirroring what they used to be as well. On this trajectory, STX will be the premier mid-major in a year or two.
And yeah, Fox has simply given up pre-merger. I feel for Shane Black’s PREDATOR. The studio just isn’t trying.
Will be interested to see if MI:6 can match ANT MAN 2 domestically. I’m thankful it’s ahead internationally…I like both but not every tentpole should be a superhero.
That’s a freaking champ of a hold for MI:F, and very well deserved. It will leave Ant-Man in the dust and get a new high for the franchise, at least domestically.
MI:F was so freaking good. I’ve been watching Tom Cruise movies that I’ve missed all week. Jack Reacher tonight. I am very very anti Scientology, especially after reading GOING CLEAR, but it’s his life. The guy is still a star.
@DrWally that’s a bold statement considering Ant-Man 2 is $10 million ahead of it through two weekends and has an average -40% drop in the subsequent three weekends. Then again, there’s no August competition so I think MI:6 wins, but it certainly doesn’t leave Ant-Man “in the dust.”
Glad the D’Souza is tanking.
Wish “Eighth Grade” was doing better.
Ant-Man and the Wasp doesn’t even have a Chinese date. Once it gets that? Add another 100m, and you once again have a movie about a guy and gal who shrink, that’s made 500M dollars. That’s pretty solid.
And yeah, MI-6 isn’t a fucking Raid movie. There’s nothing more insane to me, than people acting like 80s set pieces and a 56 year old dude beating the shit out of himself, is better than the Raid movies. It’s just…
One more thing: not every comic book movie has to be a tent pole, but guess what? Tom Cruise’s demo is old, and the Predator demo is just as old or older. There’s an entire generation of kids, born in the late 90s, and what is MOVIES to THEM are comic book movies.
@JS if we’re talking about MI vs Ant Man worldwide, MI dominates in almost every market…
Ethan, when you need to make close to 800m to cover cost, from your star injuring himself. You’re not winning. You’re not even close to winning.
800m? Where did you get that? MI:6 is going to crush Ant-Man worldwide and be happy for it. Cruise isn’t demanding $200M for his injury. This is FAKE NEWS.
So you’re saying my reaction to MI:F was false? Not genuine? That I’m lying or my brain was lying to me as I enjoyed the fuck out of it, JSP? I don’t understand.
Bill, if we are discussing action films in the 21st century, and people are stating they are better than the Raid movies. Well, I simply disagree with that sentiment, and wasn’t referring to you in particular, Bob. It’s more the entertainment press/twitter, that seemingly is ignoring the most insane action films from this century. Hell. Mile 22 looks more edge of your seat than anything in Fallout, but it is what it is. I simply… disagree.
Ethan, it’s been reported in the press, that the insurance cost alone made the cost of the production double. It’s funny, that you can spend the same amount of money, and can get a 2bn dollar movie. Again, outside of the goodness or badness of the movie, Fallout is an eventual success. It’s just not a success right now.
Anyone else catch the continuity error in Avengers:IW with Tom Holland’s hair in the scene on the spaceship when Parker and Stark have the talk before saving Strange? Most of the scene its slicked back, then on one of his closeups, its dry and hanging over his forehead. I wonder why/how they missed that? Not a big deal at all. Just a little jarring every time it happens as per usual with continuity errors.
a new high for the franchise, at least domestically.
Technically, yeah, but factor in inflation and it’d have to make almost $400 million to compete with the first two MIs! It’s funny everyone trashing MI2 these days, but people forget how massive it was at the time. Here, I cut and pasted the boxofficemojo stats representing adjusted totals:
1 Mission: Impossible Par. $379,570,500
2 Mission: Impossible II Par. $370,473,000
3 Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol $246,468,600
4 Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation Par. $219,012,100
5 Mission: Impossible III Par. $189,688,000
JS you do realize that the insurance actually covers the cost of having to shut down for eight weeks while Cruise recovered, right? That’s how insurance works. And the cost didn’t double. The reported actual budget is around $180 million. Not nothing, and certainly the highest in the franchise. With the insurance covering the additional $60-70 million.
As for it being better than The RAID, that’s a matter of opinion, obviously. I haven’t seen Fallout. But The Raid is a very specific fight-centric action movie with the flimsiest of storylines. Still a terrific visceral experience, but I can easily see people – of any age – preferring something g with more story, more variety of action sequences, bigger stars, etc. It’s hardly a stretch.
For me, when it comes to action films, classification is a big deal. M:I Fallout, The Raid:Redemption, Transformers 3, The Avengers and Predator are all films heavily reliant on action. Miss:Imp is an espionage thriller. Its progression is based on uncovering a mystery and solving a plot. The length Cruise’s character goes through, those intense action sequences, make the movie. I can’t say the plot for The Raid is any more complex than Trans3 but just adding more action and more explosions just made for overkill and a long bloated miserable experience in the case of the later.
The Avengers had a story and characters you cared about. Like the first Trans. There really wasn’t much story in Predator but it still managed to be riveting. Also, some cool lines. I think many of the superhero films over the past 14 (has it been that long??) years have really benefited by having more complex stories and why the gen pub hasn’t grown tired of them because they’re not the same ol’ same ol’ all the time. I think there were a lot of complaints abut one of the Miss:Imp films having a too complex (convoluted) plot. I don’t generally have a problem following what is going on but I may question why some things are necessary and that takes a lot away from my enjoyment of a film.
I really enjoyed the franchise installment Predators. It made the distinction very early on that it wasn’t a film about plot or reason just survival and I thought was executed very well.
I suppose the tl;dr version of this post would be apples to oranges in action films. Predator and The Raid, great examples of what can be done in a straight action film w/minimalist plot. As much as I loved X2 and M:I Fallout, and would recommend any of the four just mentioned for someone wanting to see a good film with a lot of action, I’d still follow up with questions like, “Do you like superhero films? Do you get squeamish over violence? Do you just want to shut your brain off and watch?” cuz those qualifiers could make a serious difference.
A couple of us “old” guys, age range 45-60 like action films, and we have done the unspeakable, seen all MI movies, and seen all Marvel movies. And for the most part, liked em both. Shocking.
I have been wondering if Mission:Impossible Fallout hasn’t benefited from its contrasting live stunts to the plethora of cg superheroes feats. On the one hand, I had remembered that Cruise did his stunts like scaling the needle in Dubai and hanging on to the cargo net outside of the plane and I found those films to be…alright. But I found more of an appreciation for the skydive sequence and him trying to climb up into a helicopter this time around. Maybe just shot and edited to show him being a badass as opposed to it being real but then have it look like anything else with a green screen so you just don’t care?? Was it one too many times seeing someone crushed by a falling skyscraper or steamrolled by a semi and still knowing the character will survive that desensitized any fear of death?
There’s obviously a safety issue to consider in enlisting extravagant stunts but to me it shows you don’t need the totally made up to be thrilled and engaged, just merely the impossible.
“Raid 2” is freaking phenomenal.
But I love “M:I–Fallout,” too.
Took a spill this morning. There were lots of cuts, gashes and blood, but a shoulder injury (dislocated? fractured?) brought me to urgent care. After three-and-a-half hours, a physician’s assistant–apparently there are no MDs there on Saturdays–still couldn’t ascertain (from two series of x-rays) whether I’d broken my collar bone, dislocated my shoulder…or not.
And he couldn’t even write me a prescription for a pain killer (which I desperately need: opioids be damned!), only a steroid. Which so far hasn’t helped a whit.
G-damn. I keep finding new ways to hurt myself.
Movieman, if it’s your collarbone. Your neck will feel it’s just hovering there, because collarbone injuries fucking suck. Get better though, man. Seriously.
BD, again, I can be confounded by the Raid films being excluded from action film talk. Also, I don’t really consider comic book films action films. That’s just me in case you missed it :D!
Movieman, dude, take care of that injury and get better…..a lot of us, myself included, really count on your feedback here.
JS, I’m not disputing how mind-blowing both Raid films were but that’s just such a weird qualifier – yes MI:F has gotten gobs of praise for how great the action is but mainly just from comparing to other big budget studio blockbusters, not something like The Raid or any more obscure recent films starring Donnie Yen. I have seen and read tons of highly positive reviews but not one saying it was better than The Raid.
That said, I really dug it myself….I don’t think it was as good as ‘Ghost Protocol or ‘Rogue Nation, but it was pretty strong – I think worldwide, it’s going to demolish Ant-Man & and the WASP….but that’s more on Disney’s release strategy than competition from outside the studio. I liked Ant-Man 2, actually enjoyed it more than the first one…and if you had asked me a couple of months ago, I thought it had an outside shot at a billion with $800 mill worldwide as the absolute floor so yeah having to rely on China AGAIN for an Ant-Man film to nudge over $500 million and just break even, I have little doubt that Disney/Marvel was leaving money on the table – they opened it three weeks after The Incredibles, what did they expect??
And as for MI:F’s box office, $800 million worldwide is looking very possible…and that would be a highwater mark for the franchise and Cruise…but it’s pretty obvious at this point: Cruise as a DOMESTIC draw clearly has a ceiling that he’s not likely to ever crack again for the foreseeable future. With the reviews and buzz this film had leading up to opening, $61 million felt like a let-down….and that’s on Cruise for better or worse.
I get why they promote his stuntwork acumen as a selling point for these movies but at the end of the day, they’re then making these films ALL about CRUISE which is keep some audiences away – tearing apart the absurdity of Scientology (ask Leah Remini) has become a bigger business than promoting it nowadays, I can’t see how that doesn’t drag his brand down a bit….he’s basically a pseudo-cult leader or at the very least the figurehead for a very sketchy cult – short of him publicly leaving and speaking out against Scientology, I don’t see that stain (and a deserved one in my opinion) on his reputation ever going away no matter how many funny talk-show appearances or smiley interviews he gives.
So if Paramount is smart and they actually want to keep Mission Impossible a running franchise, they might want to reconsider transitioning the reins over to Jeremy Renner…or hell why not, Rebecca Ferguson!
from Variety
With a $178 million production budget and a promotional and distribution price tag that hovers around $150 million, sources close to the studio and at rival companies estimate that the sixth installment in the spy franchise will need to pull in $560 million in order to get into the black. Some competitors think the figure that “Mission: Impossible” needs to make is even higher, approaching the $650 million range.
These are achievable results given the past track record of films in the series. “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol” boasts the biggest haul with $694.7 million globally. Its follow-up, “Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation,” fell slightly short of the fourth iteration, generating a nevertheless robust $682.7 million worldwide. If “Fallout” hits either figure, it will be in the clear.
Disney finally goosed Panther over the 700 mil mark. Over a thousand percent increase from last weekend. Lots of pent up inetrrest apparently
Okay, so it needs more like 600m. And it should be Ferguson. She’s never getting a comic book movie, so they might as well make the IMF about her and a new team, that would be different.
Hcat, they had to do it. They just had to do it.
I like the idea of The Swedish Nightingale getting her own spinoff or taking over. She’s great.
Looks like “Doctor Dee” fell off a cliff in week 2, which is, sad to say, well deserved for that sub-par entry.
+ 1 for ferguson (the perfect opportunity to diversify, and it’ll never happen)
your ER sounds shit movieman, hope your bones heal
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