Less is more. Why Marvel's decision to increase Iron Man 3's budget by $60 million may not be a net-positive.

This is old news, but it broke while I was busy and I suppose the release of the first official still is as good a time to discuss this as any.  Despite commentary running up to the release of The Avengers swearing that Shane Black's Iron Man 3 would be a scaled-back and character-centric affair, it now appears that the eye-popping success of The Avengers has changed the template over at Marvel.  The film's budget of $140 million has now been raised by a whopping $60 million, so that it will now cost $200 million assuming everything gets done on time and on schedule.  Instead of promising a low-key character drama loosely based on "Extremis", Iron Man 3 is now intended to be the biggest Marvel movie yet!  Iron Man 2 cost $200 million and still felt incredibly small-scale and the $140 million Captain America was the only pre-Avengers film that actually felt 'big'.  It's not that money can't buy quality or anything obvious like that, it's the idea that money wrongly applied and/or given to a film purely because it can be sometimes does more harm than good.

Weekend Box Office (02/12/12): Everybody wins as The Vow breaks records, Safe House opens huge, Journey 2 best Journey 1, and Phantom Menace 3D feels the Force.

Wow.  Just wow.  Four major releases debuted this weekend and every single one of them opened with superb numbers.  On one hand, that means that every respective demographic was ably served this weekend.  On the other hand, one can only wonder how much cash was sacrificed by opening these four movies on the same weekend.  Anyway, the top film of the weekend was the Rachel McAdams/Channing Tatum romantic drama The Vow.  The $30 million Screen Gems drama, which by the way is NOT based on a Nicholas Sparks novel (it's a true story), debuted with an eye-popping $41 million, a record for the studio.  That's well-over $10 million more than the $30.4 million debut of Dear John, which was the previous record-holder for an opening weekend for a pure romantic drama.  The film played 55% under-25 years old and 72% female.  Obviously everything clicked on the marketing for this one, and Channing Tatum is now the official king of the romantic drama, having headlined the first one to open with more than $30 million and now the first one to open with over $40 million, while Rachel McAdams is the queen, now holding the first and fourth-biggest opening weekend for an unfiltered romantic drama ($18 million for The Time Traveler's Wife).  Where it goes from here is an open question, as Dear John did not have the strongest legs, topping out at $80 million (or just below the $81 million gross of Rachel McAdam's The Notebook).  On the plus side, The Vow doesn't have the same-demo blockbuster Valentine's Day nipping on its heals like Dear John did.  Plus, even if The Vow has the same quick-kill performance (2.6x weekend-to-final multiplier), it will become the first pure romantic drama (no explosions, no action scenes, no mass-disaster in the third act) to cross $100 million since Jerry McGuire in 1996.

Painfully obvious sexism watch: One of these JOURNEY 2 posters is not like the other. Hint, it's the one with giant boobs are more important than giant bees.

 

Here are four character posters for Warner Bros' upcoming Journey 2: The Mysterious Island.  Each poster highlights a lead character and a respective giant animal menace.  As you can clearly see, the focus point of three of the posters is the actual special effects creation that is chasing our heroes.  In three of the posters, the human character is smaller than the monsters, thus making the giant animals themselves the center of our attention.  Of course, the second poster on the left, the one highlighting Vanessa Hudgens is a bit different.  In her poster, the flying bee creature is smaller than Hudgens's profile.  So if the giant bee is not the center of attention isn't the fx monster in this poster, than what is?  Why, Hudgens's boobs of course.  As you can see, the largest thing on the poster, the thing that is clearly intended to be the focus point for Hudgens's poster is the young actress's rack.  The marketing team at Warner Bros. didn't see fit to fetishize Dwayne Johnson's massive muscles or any manly attributes that Josh Hutcherson may possess.  But in her character poster (and the main poster on the left), the young actress's breasts are apparently the main attraction. Because of course when you're a girl in a generic or male-driven mainstream genre film, even when it's a PG-rated adventure aimed at younger kids, the only marketable attributes you have is your 'fuck-ability'.  Stay classy, Warner.

Scott Mendelson