Second time's the charm part 01: When X-Men, not Batman, spawned a golden age of comic book movies.

This is one of three pieces that delve into something that has frankly puzzled me over the years.  In brief, we've seen occasions where a massively, seemingly influential blockbuster that completely failed to spawn successful imitators.  Yet some years later, another somewhat similar film would end up unleashing a wave of proverbial copycats.  What is it about the second successful at-bat that spurred the studios (and of course paying audiences) in a way the first time did not?  The first of these three pieces will deal with the comic book film in the aftermath of Batman. Remember all of those smash-hit comic book adaptations brought on by the success of Tim Burton's Batman back in June of 1989?  Oh right, there weren't any.  Yes, I will always argue that Batman changed the movie industry and basically kick-started the whole idea of shaping various non-traditional properties for big-screen adaptations (something I'll touch upon yet again in a later essay), but it did not usher in a new golden age of comic book films.  

Amazing Spider-Man sets Tuesday record with $35 million opening day. Six day weekend: $140m-$162m.

The Amazing Spider-Man ended up almost as amazing as Spider-Man 2 on the first day of its respective six-day Independence Day holiday weekend.  With $35 million per-Sony, it broke the record for the biggest Tuesday gross ever and the biggest Tuesday opening day ever (both held by Transformers, grossed $27 million over its first day ($4 million of that, or 11.4%, was from IMAX engagements).  But, as you recall, Transformers had $8.8 million worth of 8pm-12am sneak previews on Monday that year, giving the film a 1.25 day total of $36 million.  So Transformers needed 1.25 days to do what The Amazing Spider-Man did in 24 hours.  But The Amazing Spider-Man has 3D bumps and inflation to reckon with.  Inflation alone would put Transformers's opening 1.25 days at about $42 million, which is about what Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen made ($43 million) on its first 1.25 days this time last year.  So it appears offhand that The Amazing Spider-Man will perform, in terms of weekend multipliers, somewhere between 4x and 4.6x its opening day number, or about what Transformers (4.3x - $155m/$36m), Transformers 3 (4.1x - $180m/$43m), Spider-Man 2 (4.5x - $180m/$40m), Hancock (4.6x - $112m/$24m), and Superman Returns (4.6x - $97m/$21m) did over their respective July 4th six-day "weekends". The outlier is War of the Worlds, which opened with $21 million on a Wednesday and made it to $112 million by Monday, a 5x weekend multiplier. As such, expect The Amazing Spider-Man to gross between $140 million and $162 million by Sunday night, with an off-chance of it earning as much as $175 million.

Scott Mendelson
 

While you're at the office, listen to this Spider-Man (2002) commentary with myself, Aaron Neuwurth, and Jim Dietz.

Watching this two days before seeing The Amazing Spider-Man probably didn't help, because it just reminded me how much of Spider-Man worked just fine the first time.  Having said that, this is my first commentary and one of the more enjoyable things I've done in awhile.  It's myself, Aaron Neuwirth, and Jim Dietz.  Do enjoy, because I certainly did.

Scott Mendelson

Why Warner Bros' Lego: The Piece of Resistance may end up being the greatest movie ever made by humans...

Much of this is speculation, so bare with me.  Jeff Snyder over at Variety reported today that Channing Tatum and Will Arnett have been cast as voices in Warner Bros' new Lego movie. The bad news is that yes there is a Lego movie coming, but the good news is that it's being directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, they of Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs and 21 Jump Street (so they are two for two so far).  The even better and more curious news is that the live-action/animation hybrid Lego: The Piece of Resistance is casting Tatum as Superman and Arnett as Batman.  Yup, Justice League may or may not ever happen and Wolfgang Peterson's Superman Vs. Batman project is a distant memory, but we will indeed be seeing an big-screen team-up of the Caped Crusader and the Man of Steel in some form.  That's certainly amusing and perhaps noteworthy, but a little imagination leads to an even more insane possibility.  In short, what if Warner Bros. gets the rights to use all or most of the various properties that Lego currently has? 

Newsflash: Twilight didn't invent the female-driven blockbuster and Sam Raimi's Spider-Man was primarily about romance too...

As expected, the initial wave of mostly positive reviews for The Amazing Spider-Man have partially involved a form of collective amnesia. Robbie Collin of The Daily Telegraph called the film 'a superhero film for the Twilight generation' and states that Twilight was the first blockbuster to target women and The Amazing Spider-Man is the first superhero targeted at females, a theme that a number of critics have implicitly or explicitly stated in their critiques.  Both of these things are false of course.  Sam Raimi's Spider-Man trilogy was primarily a romantic drama stretched over three films.  The web-slinging action beats and occasional super-villain squabbles were less important than the ongoing love story between Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson.  Kristen Dunst was as much of a main character as Toby Maguire, especially in the somewhat underrated Spider-Man 3, and the romantic arc was the main narrative throughout the blockbuster trilogy.  And as for the second claim, it's like Titanic, Spider-Man, Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl, and Avatar never happened.  But in an era where no one remembers a damn thing and everyone is too damn lazy to look it up, Marc Webb is now getting the credit for basically inventing a female-skewing superhero film and Twilight is now presumed to be the only reference point for blockbusters that were popular with women.

Thoughts on Sam Raimi's Spider-Man, ten years after its surprising and record-setting $100m+ debut.

Ten years ago, we had our first $100 million opening weekend.   Ten years ago, feeding off twenty years of anticipation, positive reviews, and a post-9/11 atmosphere that craved distinctly American heroism, Sam Raimi's Spider-Man pulled off the unthinkable.  And really, looking back on that fabled three-day weekend in May 2002, that's the thing that sticks out.  In these days of heavily-publicized box office tracking reports, with every blogger with a website playing box office pundit, with studios having mastered the art of saturation-level opening weekends down to a science, Spider-Man's record Fri-Sun debut was a complete surprise.  Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone had just broken the three-day record six months ago with $92 million.  Spider-Man wasn't even supposed to be the biggest movie of summer 2002, with that honor theoretically going to Star Wars: Episode II: Attack of the Clones.  Spider-Man was supposed to be the warm-up play, the summer kick-off picture that wetted the appetite for the big guns coming down the pike.  It was The Mummy, the Deep Impact, or the Twister of the summer movie season.  But as I discussed four years ago, sometimes the summer kick-off films surprise you.  Even so, with buzz building and free press galore coming from mainstream entertainment sources, pundits like myself were optimistically predicting an $80 million debut, followed by a somewhat quick plunge once Attack of the Clones brought the thunder 1.5 weeks later.  But as we all know, something very different happened.

Classic Marketing: Universal teases The Flintstones a year in advance...

It was no secret that Universal was planning a big-screen adaptation of The Flintstones for the summer of 1994.  I remember actually being on the Universal lot while visiting a cousin in the winter of 1993 so I could shoot portions of a Bar Mitzvah movie (long story... another time) and being told by the Universal guy that if we got caught to say "We're here working on stuff for The Flintstones... nobody knows what the plot is yet anyway."  But a six months later, as my dad and I watched the lights go down for our advance-night 10:00pm screening of Jurassic Park (arguably the best single movie going experience of my life... ask me about it next summer), we were stunned that Universal had already cooked up a teaser for the seemingly un-shot and certainly unfinished Flintstones feature.  As you can see, it was basically just a bouncing ball version of the theme song, climaxing with an in-costume John Goodman screaming 'Yabba-dabba-doo!' at the top of his lungs.  Let me tell you, the entire audience roared with applause and I admit I was caught up in the infectious excitement for a project I couldn't really care less about.  That was the start of something new.

The newly announced Before Watchmen is a prime example of what's killing DC Comics - Chasing the converted at the expense of new readers.

The big news this morning (really early this morning, like around 3:04am) is DC Comic's announcement of a seven-book prequel to Alan Moore's groundbreaking Watchmen series.  Titled Before Watchmen (covers) the mini-series will involve the likes of Brian Azzarello, Darwyn Cooke, and  J. Michael Straczynski with each of the seven chapters concerning a specific major character.  I have no idea whether this project will be any good or not.  But it sits as a shining example of the fundamental flaw that exists in the comic industry, especially within DC Comics.  They spend most of their time chasing the readers that grew up with their iconic characters rather than attempting to attract new readers who are growing up right now.

Weekend Box Office (07/18/11): Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part II dethrones The Dark Knight, earning $169.1 million in its opening weekend.

The Harry Potter series finished where it started, at the top of the box office with a record breaking opening weekend. Nine-and-a-half years ago, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone opened the series with a $90.2 million, breaking the 4.5 year old opening weekend record set by The Lost World: Jurassic Park ($72 million).  Over the next 9.5 years, said record was broken four more times, with the last such toppling this very weekend three years ago with The Dark Knight's $158 million Fri-Sun take.  With nearly ten years of anticipation, The Boy Who Lived has returned to the top of the opening weekend charts with a massive $169.1 million Friday-Sunday gross.  That includes a record $91 Friday (best single day, best opening day, best Friday) which in turn included a record $43.5 million at 12:01am alone.  As expected, the picture was massively front-loaded, ending the weekend with the second-smallest weekend multiplier on record, 1.85x (for newbies, weekend multiplier is the final weekend total divided by the first day).  It also set another 'negative' record, earning 25.7% of its weekend total in those Thursday at 12:01am showings alone (the previous such record was set by the last Harry Potter film, which grossed 19% of its $125 million Fri-Sun haul at midnight).

In a pop-culture based on recycling, will our children have icons for their own?

My wife is currently excited because my 3.75 year old daughter has just discovered She-Ra: Princess of Power (otherwise known in our house as He-Man's incestuously-inclined sister).  We happened to play an episode on Netflix Instant and said daughter was relatively entertained.  It's never been a major sticking point, but pretty much from the time Allison was old enough to periodically watch television, it's been a constant debate of 'when will she be ready for (insert show or movie that my wife and/or I enjoyed as a kid)?'  Should we show her Star Wars when the Blu Rays come out in September, or should we wait and take her to see The Phantom Menace in 3D next February?  Or should we just wait a couple years until we know she can 'handle' them and merely allow her to like them or dislike them on their own merits?  We've mellowed out considerably in that regard, basically realizing that she can watch Star Wars or Harry Potter or The Muppets when she damn-well wants to.  I know we're not the only parents who do this.  For those who were raised in the 1980s and came of age in the 1990s, there seems to be an unwillingness to let go of our childhood entertainments.  Combined with a need to expose our children to the same things that we loved as soon as possible, this begs a question.  In an era when the biggest movie of the summer is a live-action variation on a 1980s cartoon and most of the major films are based on comic books that stretch back to the 1940s, in a time when studio executives are trying to 'bring back the Looney Tunes' and 'revive The Muppets', in a place where everything from the 1980s and 1990s seems to be being groomed for a remake or reboot (Teen Wolf? Another Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie?  One more Thundercats cartoon?), will our children actually have entertainment icons of their very own?      

How 2001 was a film game-changer I: When Opening Weekends Attack! (or How the Mummy Returns kick started the modern blockbuster!)

This is one of a handful of essays that will be dealing with the various trends that were kicked off during the 2001 calendar year, and how they still resonate today.

When 2001 started, there had been exactly one $70 million+ opening (The Lost World: Jurassic Park, with $72 million over the Fri-Sun portion of the Memorial Day 1997 weekend), and one $60 million+ opening (Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, with a $64 million Fri-Sun weekend take). There had only been a handful of $50 million weekends, and they were pretty much all from the biggest of big franchise pictures. Jurassic Park ($50 million, including Thurs-night sneaks), Batman Forever ($53 million), Independence Day ($50 million), Men in Black ($51 million), Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me ($54 million), Toy Story 2 ($57 million), X-Men ($54 million), Mission: Impossible 2 ($57 million), and How The Grinch Stole Christmas ($55 million). Of those nine weekends, three of them had occurred in 2000. So getting to $50 million was a reasonable objective if you were one of the biggest franchises around. But 2001 was the year when everything went nuts. Back in the day, I still talked with my father about box office with him on a somewhat regular basis. That slowed down over the years, as we found arguably more important things to talk about and he started just reading my blog. I distinctly remember the phone call to my father on Saturday morning, May 5th of 2001. The Mummy Returns had just opened with $24 million on its first Friday, and I knew right then that, in terms of box office, nothing was going to be the same.

The 24 Hour News Cycle of Movie-News part II: Obsessing on the Unknown.

In a continuing feature of sorts on how the 24-hour news cycle hurts the world of film news (part I), we'll be briefly (I hope) discussing the weird phenomenon whereby countless column inches are spent dissecting and analyzing that which is either not-yet known or painfully obvious. Would you have guessed that Warner Bros. wanted a young male heartthrob to play Clark Kent in Zack Snyder's Superman picture? Most of us would have, yet Nikki Finke reported this obvious fact as some kind of shocking new development. I don't mean to pick on Finke (her main sins come in the realm of box office analysis... come back next week), and the real problem is that every other blogger to just repeats the rumor/speculation/lie, complete with their own personal casting list or counter-point commentary ("Why Taylor Lautner shouldn't play Spider-Man!").

Oh, so THAT'S why Sony released the first Spider-Man image yesterday...

I don't think it's a coincidence that Sony released the first image from their Spider-Man reboot right before this New Yorker cover hit the stands. I wrote this elsewhere last night, but Sony must be a little pissed at all the horrible press that Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark is getting. So no, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that they released the official still this week, since they don’t want people exclusively talking about Spider-Man in the same breath as Springtime For Hitler.

Scott Mendelson

First look at Andrew Garfield as Spider-Man reveals that... Peter Parker is indeed Spider-Man!

The net has been buzzing with all kinds of speculative silliness regarding 'clues' that can be deduced from this first official image from Marc Webb's Spider-Man reboot. Here's what we know: Andrew Garfield plays Peter Parker. Peter Parker is secretly Spider-Man. Andrew Garfield's Spider-Man wears a costume that's pretty similar to the comics and/or Tobey Maguire's suit from the Ram Raimi trilogy, but with a darker red/blue color scheme. Peter Parker apparently carries his backpack around with him at one point in the film, or perhaps only in this photo. Other than that, stop the speculation, people. It's a terrifically moody photo, and the blood on his face is a nice touch.

Oooh... Exciting. Will Batman and Spider-Man face off, in their next respective films, against the unforgettable what's-his-name?

"Who the hell is that?" - My wife, upon hearing that the villain for The Dark Knight Rises might be Dr. Hugo Strange.

"Huh? Who is that, exactly?" - My friend and ex-roommate, Mike Hahn, upon hearing that the villain for The Dark Knight Rises might be Dr. Hugo Strange.

"Whaaa? Who the f... better look that up." - Me, upon reading that some guy called the Proto-Goblin may be the villain in Marc Webb's upcoming Spider-Man reboot.

"The Proto-what?" - Most of my readers, upon reading that some guy called the Proto-Goblin may be the villain in Marc Webb's upcoming Spider-Man reboot.

Batman and Spider-Man have two of the deepest, most recognizable, and just-plain best rogues galleries in comic books. Obviously both rumors could be malarkey. But playing devil's advocate for a minute, could it have killed Nolan and Webb to pick villains that anyone actually wanted to see onscreen?

Scott Mendelson

First Looks: From X-Men to Green Lantern, ten years of comic book-film trailers.

It's hard to believe that it's been ten years since the modern comic book movie revival kicked off with X-Men and (kinda-sorta) Unbreakable. With the lukewarm response to the trailers to Thor and Green Lantern, and the Nolan Batman franchise wrapping up, we may just be on the tail-end of this particular run. For the sake of my own amusement, let us take a quick trip down memory lane with the most memorable trailers in the current comic book explosion. After all, in many ways, getting that first glimpse was often more exciting than seeing the actual film. For the record, this list will only include originals; no sequels (with one exception that I'll point out). And away we go...

Sony confirms: Emma Stone cast as Gwen Stacy in Spider-Man reboot.

Now that this is fact, I can share what little I have to say about it. As has been rumored for the last half-week, Emma Stone has in fact been cast as the 'female lead'/'love interest in Marc Webb's Spider-Man reboot. To the surprise of many, she has been cast not as Mary Jane Watson, but as Gwen Stacey. Yes, we had heard early on that Mary Jane would not be the lead female character, but the rumors that Emma Stone was on tap led to obvious suspicions that MJ was going to be in the film after all. I know hair color can be changed, but it's funny how they cast a blonde (Kristen Dunst) as Mary Jane and then two redheads (Bryce Dallas Howard and now Emma Stone) as Gwen Stacey. Although, as noted in the press release, Stone is apparently a natural blond.

As the search narrows down to just five actresses, just how 'token' will Spider-Man's girlfriend be in the new reboot?

Melissa Silverstein over at Women and Hollywood took understandable umbrage at the flurry of articles discussing just which young actress would be playing Peter Parker's girlfriend (who apparently might not be Mary Jane) in the upcoming Spider-Man reboot. The finalists are apparently Emma Roberts, Teresa Palmer, Lilly Collins, and Imogen Poots, and Ophelia Lovibond. Her annoyance stems from the phrasing of these articles, which basically amounts to 'which promising young actress gets to play the quasi jail-bait piece of meat that Spidey rescues and then makes out with?' I wrote about this back in March. It’s the dilemma of most working actresses, forced to choose either no mainstream work or be stuck playing the ‘token female character/love interest’. I’m less offended in this case because we’re talking about Spider-Man here. If we knew which one of Parker’s comic book girlfriends was in the reboot, the articles simply would have read ‘who’s playing Mary Jane Watson/Gwen Stacey/Betty Brant/etc', and they would likely contain a token amount of comic book backstory. But the obstacle that actresses face, being cast only in relation to the male lead, is a fair charge and one worth repeating.