How I learned to stop worrying & love the Veronica Mars film.

30,000 people donated an average of $64 during a several hour period yesterday, and thus we will be getting a Veronica Mars movie sometime next summer.  Creator Rob Thomas and star Kristen Bell used Kickstarter to basically prove to Warner Bros. that there is indeed an interest in a continuation of the cult detective drama that ran for three low-rated seasons on the CW back in 2004-2007.  The deal was basically to raise $2 million in a month and Warner Bros. would agree to distribute and market the film, giving it a limited theatrical release and the various home-viewing options.  They hit their target at 5:55 pm this evening.  I made a bitchy joke earlier in the day about raising money to find domestic 'food insecurity' among American children by calling such an initiative 'Save Firefly!' or something to that effect.  My first instincts were ones of priorities and what this said about our 'entitlement culture'.  Upon reflection (I purposely didn't write anything immediately), I'm still not sure how I feel about this. This is indeed very interesting, it may even be *news*.  But is it good news overall?

Weekend Box Office part I: Fee Fi Fo Flop: Jack (the Giant Slayer) bombs harder than even John Carter.

Pretty much everything I said last March about John Carter applies to Jack the Giant Slayer.  There are a few differences.  Jack and the Beanstalk is technically a well-known property and Bryan Singer had the live-action track record that Andrew Stanton did not.  But otherwise it is pretty much the same fallacy with pretty much the same result: $200 million cost plus who knows how much in marketing for $27.9 million on opening weekend.  No stars, source material no one really cared to see onscreen, marketing that didn't convince them that they should, a release date that put them within one week of a likely juggernaut, and mixed reviews.  Like John Carter and Battleship, Jack the Giant Slayer was basically a $200 million variation on 'Generic Blockbuster: The Movie'.  Unlike Disney and Universal respectively, Warner Bros. seemed to see this one coming well in advance.  They changed the release date from June 2012 to this weekend and changed the title from Jack the Giant Killer to 'appeal to families'.  Yet they still spent $200 million on a would-be family film that I can't take my daughter to because it's PG-13 and (allegedly) features slightly toned down Lord of the Rings type violence. To be fair, some of that $200 million cost was due to reshoots and the date change, but why bother?  Warner spent untold extra millions to get the exact same terrible result they got this weekend.  And really the film's cost is as usual the prime offender.

2012 in Film: The Year's "Worst" Films.

Almost to the end, folks.  But before we finally recap the best (or, err, my favorites) of 2012, let's take a pit stop to discuss what are arguably the worst films of 2012.  Now as always, I can't presume that I've seen every probable terrible movie out there (I generally avoid Adam Sandler comedies and didn't catch Parental Guidance in time), but I tried to highlight films that were both very bad and whose respective failures meant something more than just their artistic inadequacy.  As always, the films below are in alphabetical order.  So, without further ado, let's dive in!

Alex Cross:
To William Hurt in A History of Violence, "How to do you f*** that up?!"  You have a long-running detective series filled with larger-than-life villains and often insanely over-the-top violence.  You have Tyler Perry, if perhaps cast against type than at least hungry to prove that he can do something different.  You have Matthew Fox theoretically willing to chew up every bit of available scenery.  And you have audiences primed for a kind of old-school adult-skewing genre picture that the previous two Morgan Freeman-starring Alex Cross films (Kiss the Girls and Along Came A Spider) represented back in the 1990s.  How in the world do you make this film this incredibly boring?  First of all, you take an explicitly R-rated story and neuter it into a still-inappropriate PG-13.  Then you pile on generic cliche on top of generic cliche.  Then you instruct every actor other than Fox to be as lifeless as possible.  Finally, you never decide to make a down-to-Earth crime thriller or a would-be superhero/super villain story.  The end result is a painfully dull would-be thriller that can't hold a candle to the most average episode of Criminal Minds.

2012 in film: Audiences show (relatively) good taste.

We won't know what effect the 2012 movie year will have long term for quite awhile, but we may very well come to see 2012 as the year audiences said "Thanks, but no thanks."  No, I'm not talking about some imaginary movie going slump that never was and arguably never will be.  I'm talking about the fact that this year, seemingly moreso than in recent years prior, American audiences seemed actually almost... picky?  If you glance at the films that were hits and the films that were bombs, you'll notice at least a token quality curve, especially when dealing with the mainstream and/or blockbusters.  Time and time again, audiences seemingly rejected the prepackage blockbusters that were tossed their way as if to ignite some kind of Pavlovian response.  While on the other hand, they seemed to embrace not so much the 'good' would-be blockbusters but ones that existed somewhat outside the conventional wisdom about what could or couldn't reach mega-gross levels. To a certain extent, at least to a degree worth acknowledging, conventional wisdom went out the window in 2012.

Sam Raimi's Oz: The Great and Powerful gets a teaser poster. Is it the next Alice In Wonderland or the next John Carter?

It's going to be a slow week at Mendelson's Memos this week, both because I have holiday-related family stuff and because I have a slight case of writer's block (I don't want to incessantly whine about The Amazing Spider-Man and not much else is happening news-wise at least until I see Savages on Friday morning).  Anyway, Disney dropped this poster for Sam Raimi's $200 million (!!!) Oz: The Great and Powerful, which is apparently a prequel to the original Wizard of Oz.  Disney is opening this on March 8th, 2013, or the same weekend that Disney's Alice In Wonderland debuted in 2010.  Let's hope they have better luck with this James Franco/Mila Kunis/Zach Braff/Michelle Williams/Rachel Weisz tent-pole than they did with their last first-weekend-of-March entry, John Carter.


Scott Mendelson

Don't leave us hanging... If you want us to see a sequel, you might want to *finish* the first film.

Corey Atad wrote a great 'wish I had gotten around to writing it first' piece on Friday.  It's about well, it's called "Prometheus; or Stop Trying to Set Up Sequels!".  I've whined about this in brief or in the context of something else from time to time, but the whole 'everything's a trilogy' mindset has been quite harmful to any number of pictures over the last decade.  When you go back and look at the films that spawned successful franchises, they generally began with mostly close-ended installments.  Star Wars stands on its own, as does The Matrix, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Batman Begins (heck, over the last four years I've come to admire how The Dark Knight begins and finishes its Harvey Dent business within its own 152 minute running time).  Even the first Back to the Future ended its specific narrative before offering a comedic cliffhanger that didn't necessarily need to be revolved (the producers always say they sure as hell wouldn't have had a flying car at the epilogue if they knew they were going to have to do expensive FX for a flying car all throughout a sequel).  Even Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone had a relatively self-contained story that didn't necessarily require a sequel to complete its narrative.

Money for nothing: A commercial (not artistic) defense of Paramount's decision to convert GI Joe Retaliation to 3D.

As most of you know, Paramount has announced that it is moving one of its three major summer releases, G.I. Joe: Retaliation, from June 29th, 2012 to March 29th, 2013.  The official reason for this date change is not quality issues with the film, the need for reshoots, problems with the marketing, or the desire to 'unkill Channing Tatum due to his increased visibility/profile. but purely because they want to take the extra nine months to convert the film to 3D for theatrical release.  Obviously most of the film punditry world is crying foul over this decision and as someone who was looking forward to the film I sympathize.  But putting aside the "I want to see it *now*!" and the "I hate needless and/or post-converted 3D!" arguments, it's tough in this current box office climate to argue that Paramount didn't make the right call.  Since Avatar kick-started the 3D trend 2.5 years ago, there has been a flurry of would-be tentpole films going the 3D route and an equal number of would-be blockbusters choosing to renounce the gimmick and go out as 2D only.  While we can all appreciate the filmmakers who stuck to their artistic guns in the face of box office pressure, the truth of the matter is that in today's marketplace, where a big-budget film's financial fate is often decided by overseas dollars, it's almost fiscal self-injury not to make the call.  For anywhere from $10 million to $20 million extra, you can add around 15-20% to your opening weekend grosses and around 15% to your total domestic box office, with an un-quantifiable upshot for foreign grosses.  For numbers like that, why *wouldn't* you convert your purely commercial popcorn adventure film to 3D?

Weekend Box Office (05/20/12): Battleship sinks, The Dictator and What To Expect When You're Expecting stumble, while The Avengers charges on.

Most box office write-ups written today or tomorrow will exclaim that 'The Avengers sunk Battleship!'.  The truth is that Battleship (review) sunk itself.  The film was terrible, a mishmash of a thousand prior blockbuster films all meshed into a generic template that seemed like producers checking off a list of ingredients on a sciencitic formula.  More importantly, the marketing accurately conveyed this and audiences decided to either stay home or see something else.  The assumption of global success, based on an arbitrary connection to a board game and $220 million worth of special effects surrounded by a stale concoction of used parts, was cynicism of the highest order.  The fact domestic audiences soundly rejected it has to be cause for optimism.  With John Carter and now Battleship (pity Taylor Kitsch, who stars in both but bears little responsibility), it appears that movie studios run the risk of indeed going broke underestimating the taste of the American public.

In a spoiler culture, the biggest offenders are the studios.

If there is one 'trend' in film marketing this year that has raised the ire of pundits and bloggers around the web, it is the practice of studios cutting what amounts to a 'teaser for a trailer'.  Summit has done this for the last couple Twilight films, but the would-be trend reached an apex with two major science-fiction summer tentpoles.  First, Fox has been cutting teasers for nearly all of its 7,000 trailers for Ridley Scott's Prometheus.  Second of all, Sony cut a 30-second teaser for its first trailer of the Total Recall remake which was to debut during a Sunday afternoon basketball game at the beginning of last month.  Everyone complains about it, but pretty much all of the movie news sits post the embeds of these 'trailer-teasers' as quickly as they are released. This week Warner Bros. unleashed an online viral game of some kind which apparently unlocked specific shots of the new Dark Knight Rises trailer.  By mid-day, someone had combined all of the shots into a video file and basically was able to present what amounted to the first half of the trailer.  Thus Warner Bros. ended up releasing the whole thing online Monday night rather than (as I presume was intended) waiting to premiere the 140-second preview in theaters attached to The Avengers on Friday.   We've now reached the point where Lionsgate released this Terry Crews-hosted 'teaser' for the upcoming Expendables 2 trailer where Crews openly admits that 'trailer-teasers' are now a mandatory marketing tool (from JoBlo).

R.I.P., John Carter. What its failure means and why it matters...

With ten days down and $53 million in the domestic kitty and $179 million worldwide, it's pretty much time to call 'time of death' for John Carter.  Disney is announcing that the picture will lose them $200 million, and it's almost fitting. The film serves as a shining example of everything that can go wrong when crafting a franchise film in big-studio Hollywood.  Not only was it a case where everything went wrong, it was a film where everything absolutely had to go right on a record level in order to have any hope of making its investment back.  To be frank, they should have seen it coming from a mile away.   

Weekend Box Office (03/11/12): John Carter bombs in America but is somewhat saved by overseas grosses... for now.

It was judgment day for the much-debated John Carter (review HERE) as Disney's $250-300 million sci-fi adventure finally was unleashed on paying audiences this weekend.  And the judgment was mostly grim with a possible silver lining.  With a terrible marketing campaign that didn't know what to sell, and mixed word of mouth and reviews that emphasized its convoluted story and mediocre action sequences, the film debuted with just $30.1 million.  For a cheaper picture, this would be a fine debut, but for a massively expensive would-be franchise tentpole with little chance of maintaining legs, this is a pretty disastrous result.  As I've written about from time to time (like HERE), Disney has been dead-set on creating a boy-friendly franchise while all but openly insulting the female-friendly films that have long been its bread-and-butter.  In the last few years, we've seen Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, The Sorcerer's Apprentice, Tron: Legacy, I Am Number Four, Real Steel, and now John Carter.  Only I Am Number Four and Real Steel were remotely profitable, and only because they were both budgeted well-under $100 million. John Carter is the end-result, with a film that was sold as the ultimate generic boys action fantasy to such an extent that it was arguably insulting to boys. With no stars, source material that barely known outside the hardcore geek crowd, stunningly indecisive marketing that teased not a single 'money shot', a budget more suited to the third entry in an established blockbuster franchise, and a release period that had yielded only a single $300 million+ grosser ever (Disney's Tim Burton-helmed/Johnny Depp-starring Alice In Wonderland two years ago), the stage was set for an epic domestic crash-and-burn.

Midnight Box Office (03/08/11): John Carter earns a grim $500,000 at 12:01am.

It's been awhile since we had a movie that justified running the 'midnight math', so let's make this quick.  John Carter grossed $500,000 worth of 12:01am shows last night.  That's quite a bit under the $3-5 million that most of last summer's tent-pole films were pulling in.  Moreover, it's $3.1 million less than the midnight gross for Tron: Legacy just over a year ago.  While one may argue that school is in session so it may not be fair to compare, any number of major summer releases that debut in May or early June have to worry about kids still in school, to say nothing of the boffo $3.7 million midnight debut for Fast Five last April.  But, in the name of mercy, let's give a bit of leeway.  Generally speaking, unless the film has hugely positive word of mouth (not likely),  the amped-up audience just doesn't *need* to see it at midnight (probable), or is insanely front-loaded (let's hope not...) a genre film like this usually pulls in between 4.5% and 6.5% of its money via midnight shows.  So under those circumstances, we'd be looking at a probable opening weekend for John Carter of between $7.7 million and $11.1 million.  I honestly don't think that the opening weekend is going to be that bad, so let's play absolute best case scenario and assume that only the absolute hard-cores went last night.  If we presume that the midnight showings made up between 1.5% and 2.5% of the weekend total, then that leaves John Carter between $20 million and $33 million for its opening weekend (or, optimistically, about what Prince of Persia did with its $500,000 midnight opening and $30 million Fri-Sun weekend back in May 2010).  Still, if the midnight figures mean anything at all in calculating the opening weekend, and if John Carter's midnight scores are in any way 'normal' for a big-budget fantasy tentpole, then Disney is in deep trouble...

Scott Mendelson

Why The Lone Ranger was always a smarter bet than John Carter...

Well, um, this does look like Arnie Hammer a The Lone Ranger and Johnny Depp as Tonto.  Here is your first official look (congrats on getting it online before cell-phone photos were leaked) at Gore Verbinski's The Lone Ranger.  If you recall, the film was almost shelved last year over budgetary concerns.  Disney only put the project back on the table when costs were trimmed from $250 million to $215 million.  Ironically, it was this story that first brought to light the insanely high price tag for Andrew Stanton's John Carter, which (barring a miracle) is set to open to pretty lukewarm numbers tomorrow.  I've long argued against the ever-rising budgets of big-scale would-be blockbusters, arguing that studios shouldn't "spend Return of the King money on Fellowship of the Ring".  But it is beyond odd that this film was the one to make Disney finally come down hard on budgets.  Even if $215 million is still a bit much to spend on a Lone Ranger film, it is surely a far-safer bet than a complete unknown entity like John Carter (which has no stars, cult-level source material, an untested live-action director at the helm, and - in hindsight - isn't a good movie).

Fantasy exposition done right: I had never read Lord of the Rings, but this explained everything I needed to know...

I knew I was probably going to love The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring right around the seven minute mark.  I had half-heartedly read The Hobbit in middle-school (and watched the musical cartoon version) and wasn't crazy about it, causing me to never get around to reading Lord of the Rings.  But as I sat there on opening night just over ten years ago watching the above prologue unspool before me, not only was I utterly captivated and entertained, but I was left with a complete understanding of the fantastical world that these films would be set in, as well as exactly what was at stake.  It was completely coherent and utterly comprehensible, even to a relative Tolkien newbie.  In all 10-11 hours of the three-film Lord of the Rings saga, I was never once confused by the character names, geographic locations, or the broad plot movements.  So when I tell you that John Carter confused the hell out of me, it's not because I'm some grumpy old man who can't handle his fantasy alongside his comic book adventures.  It's because I'm pretty sure that everyone involved at the highest levels of production had either read the original books or was familiar enough with them to not even question whether a newbie could follow the film version.  Peter Jackson never made that mistake...

Scott Mendelson          

Review: Confusing and unengaging, John Carter (2012) is sci-fi fantasy done wrong, making Avatar look like, well... Avatar.

John Carter: An IMAX 3D Experience
2012
132 minutes
rated PG-13

by Scott Mendelson

I understood Brian DePalma's Mission: Impossible the first time I saw it in theaters.  I had no trouble following Chris Nolan's brain-twister thrillers (Memento, The Prestige, Inception).  It was work, but I more-or-less 'got' the core narrative beats of LA Confidential and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.  But by golly John Carter is a confusing muddle of a movie.  There has been all kinds of hand-wringing about the film's rather large budget and its lousy marketing campaign.  I've taken the film to task for representing Disney's obsessive desire to ditch their core female audience while spending untold millions on boy-friendly franchises that don't pay off (HERE).  But putting all of that aside, Andrew Stanton's visually ambitious and cheerfully innocent boys' adventure film does indeed have a few moments of visual splendor and gee-whiz action.  But it is saddled by a needlessly convoluted narrative that goes nowhere slowly, and that further strains patience by telling its story through cryptic exposition as well as inexplicable casting and costuming choices that renders a large chunk of the supporting cast indistinguishable from each other at key junctures.

Pet Peeve of the day: Attention movie bloggers/writers - Stop spoiling unreleased films by discussing what does or doesn't happen in the sequel!

I don't mean to keep picking on John Carter, I really don't.  In fact, if nothing else, this article gives me an excuse to embed the above fan-made trailer (that Devin Faraci brought to my attention) which is not only a much better trailer than any of the official ones cut by Disney, but actually makes the movie look somewhat impressive.  But I am again discussing John Carter because I happened to scan the headline for an interview with an actor who stars in the picture.  I'm not going to name the actor/actress, but I will link to the piece out of fairness to the original writers over at the otherwise esteemed The Playlist.  Said headline (and article) contains what would arguably be considered a massive spoiler.  What does said actor reveal in the interview?  Well, merely that said thespian is indeed signed for a sequel or two to John Carter should the film's box office performance merit a sequel.  So, purely from the basis on that statement, we know that at least one of the major characters in John Carter does indeed live to see a sequel.

John Carter gets an 'introduce the heroes' new preview.

Ignoring the Disney Channel-esque voice-over (this may very well be intended to air during Shake It Up commercial breaks), the biggest problem in this 61-second preview is the seemingly awful performance from lead Taylor Kitsch.  The American trailer barely lets him speak at all, and getting to hear him toss off a few lines more complicated than 'Ugh' makes me realize why.  Again, it's just a 61-second teaser that spends most of the time introducing the heroic supporting characters (the wise mentor/sidekick, the princess/love interest, and the comic relief pet), but his few moments of actual vocal inflection leave quite a bit to be desired.  Frankly, it sounds like there is something wrong with his voice, as if someone (be it Kitsch or voice-modulators) is trying to make the strapping hero's pitch sound lower than he actually is.  Of course, a bad vocal performance isn't entirely fatal if said actor is expressive enough to somewhat compensate (Hayden Christensen's highly expressive face somewhat compensated for wooden vocal delivery in Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith), but having neither positive traits can be quite fatal (think Garrett Hedlund in Tron: Legacy).  I'm assuming that this Sunday's Super Bowl commercial will show off the scale of this Andrew Stanton epic, so here's hoping that the film actually looks like it cost $300 million.

Scott Mendelson    

Going broke chasing boys: Why Disney ditched princesses and spent $300 million on John Carter, and what it means for the Mouse House's core demo.

If you've seen the trailer for the upcoming John Carter, you know that not only does it not look like it cost $300 million, but it so painfully feels like a Mad Libs male-driven fantasy blockbuster that it borders on parody.  It's no secret that Disney thinks it has a boy problem. One of the reasons it bought Marvel two years ago was to build up a slate of boy-friendly franchises.  And the last two years have seen an almost embarrassing attempt to fashion boy-friendly franchises (Prince of Persia, Tron: Legacy, The Sorcerer's Apprentice, I Am Number Four, Fright Night,  and Real Steel), only half of which were even as successful as their alleged flop The Princess and the Frog (which obviously grossed 'just' $267 million on a $105 million budget because it starred a character with a vagina).  We can only ponder the reasons why Disney decided to outright state that they were never going to make another fairy-tale princess cartoon again, even after Tangled became their most successful non-Pixar toon since The Lion King, but I'm pretty sure Disney won't be making such statements about boy-centric fantasy franchises anytime soon.

Trailer: John Carter looks like a rip-off of the countless stories that ripped it off.

The good news is that this does indeed look pretty impressive on a visual level.  The action looks large-scale, but the relatively generic desert 'Mars' locale does make one wonder where that $300 million (!) went.  The bad news is that the narrative seems as generic as can be.  I know Edgar Rice Burroughs's John Carter of Mars franchise was a pioneering work of science fiction way back in 1912.  But there is a danger of adapting the 'one that started it all'.  Frankly, it looks less like an original work and more like a generic copy of the many many stories that have borrowed/homaged/stolen its template over the last century.  The ripped shirtless hero who can barely act finds himself in a lost world and just happens to be there to lead the fight against an oppressive rule and score with the token princess? Smells like Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes to me.  That may not be a fair judgment, but when you're spending $300 million on a new franchise with no stars that looks like dozens of other such pictures, saying 'Oh, but this is the one they all ripped off!' isn't going to cut it.  Despite the huge budget and Pixar pedigree, this looks like the most generic male-driven fantasy blockbuster possible, lacking any wit or character or concepts to make it stand out in any way.  Alas, Disney debuts this Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo, Wall-E) picture in 2D, 3D, and IMAX 3D on March 9th.  As always, we'll see.

Scott Mendelson