Is 47 Ronin the biggest BO Disaster in Years? (1 Viewer)

[Ejanss]

My first reaction when I saw the trailer for this film was....WTF, supernatural monsters in 47 Ronin?! However, now, I have to say, "so what?" It is not like Hollywood hasn't taken the title from a book or property and proceeded to make a film that has little to no relation to the original source. Why should "47 Ronin" be any different? Why should they tell that story the same way as umpteen tellings before it.

It's sort of like having the bandit leader from Seven Samurai turn out to be the Dark Lord of the Vampires, and the Seven and the village are the only thing standing in the way of Armageddon...

 

[schan1269]

It's sort of like having the bandit leader from Seven Samurai turn out to be the Dark Lord of the Vampires, and the Seven and the village are the only thing standing in the way of Armageddon...

Are you trying to say this movie pretense would work as a quest on Castlevania?

 

[Edwin-S]

It's sort of like having the bandit leader from Seven Samurai turn out to be the Dark Lord of the Vampires, and the Seven and the village are the only thing standing in the way of Armageddon...

Somebody should make that thing.

 

[Greg.K]

That's...certainly a contender:
According to Wikipedia's entry, in unadjusted dollars, "Mars Needs Moms" still holds the #1 spot at making $38M on a $150M budget, while "The 13th Warrior"'s delays boosted the budget up near $160M and only brought in $60M.
And even those just ahead of Ranger, RIPD, John Carter, Final Fantasy, and Jack, in order.

(Although, adjusted for inflation, 13th and Cutthroat Island still have the 90's advantage.
By comparison, Heaven's Gate only made back $3M on an "astonishing" $44M budget in 1981 dollars, which would adjust to about a $110M loss today. Or about equal to what RIPD lost.)

I see Ender's Game is already on that list (#38). Lots of bombs in the past few years.(What's an Oogielove? Seriously, never heard of 'em. Glad my kids are grown. The worst we had to contend with them was Barney).

 

[mattCR]

The list, though, isn't really as telling as it seems. You give a good example, Greg in Ender's Game.. Ender's Game had a lot of foreign markets that were 'presale' so the foreign revenue doesn't really make a huge impact; Evan Almighty is a better example, because it had post & TV deals before production happened. So, while they may 'lose' money, their post deals make them not that bad.

Meanwhile, a film like say, Mars Needs Moms had no real post deals, it and it didn't presale, so that's horrible. Two best 'non-bomb bombs' on the list are Green Lantern.. which bombed at the box office, but thanks to product placement, toys and hten secondary market didn't do crushingly bad, and even better Hugo, which lost money in initial run, but again, very strong DVD/BD/Digital sales + foreign pre-buys made it not as bad a bomb as it appears.

Ronin has nothing going for it. No foreign distributor bet through a pre-buy so that can't be banked, there is no secondary market for it..

 

[Ejanss]

I see Ender's Game is already on that list (#38). Lots of bombs in the past few years.

Up until now, 2001 and 2003 were considered the most disastrous summers in box office history, to the point that studios were treating '01 as if it was some Armageddon for the industry, and '03 put the Fear of Pixar into action-movie producers...But even AI, Pearl Harbor, Planet of the Apes, Hulk, Temrinator 3, and both Tomb Raider movies never actually cracked the Top Ten list, except for the industry bomb-fallout of Final Fantasy. (Gee, guess we're not "going to have virtual actors someday"...)
This year, we had three of them, and two after inflation.

There's already been some fallout (Disney fired Jerry Bruckheimer, Warner's backing off a bit on Chris Nolan-izing the superheroes), but let's face it, we got a big scenic vista of the Edge of the Cliff this year, and another all-time record-breaker right at the end was just the cap to top it off.

(What's an Oogielove? Seriously, never heard of 'em. Glad my kids are grown. The worst we had to contend with them was Barney).

That's hardly surprising, as they were supposed to be introduced in the movie (and even take the trouble to tell us "I'm the action one!" "I'm the cute one!"), as the Teletubbies producers wanted to branch out from their previous hit and get a piece of that WIggles/Doodlebops "Dance in the aisles" preschool kid-concert market. Which, if parents had taken their kids to see it, they would not recommend their kids do in cineplex stadium seating.
(Well, that, and they looked so darn creepy.)

Ronin has nothing going for it. No foreign distributor bet through a pre-buy so that can't be banked, there is no secondary market for it..

Ever since John Carter (whose overseas market was meant to be a do-over defense of "Let's see what happens when we promote it the right way!"), and Pirates 4 making almost all its money overseas (in countries where they're still amazed by big flashy Hollywood CGI effects, in big visual spectaculars with dumb action plots that don't require too much dialogue to be translated), studios have now made it official to tell us how much a movie made "Worldwide!"

Tough luck, suits: Japan ALREADY hates it.

 

[FoxyMulder]

I have seen far too many films that i liked that got bad reviews or made absolutely no money at the box office so i'll reserve judgment until i watch it for myself, the trailer was okay, i tend to like these sort of films although i think it would be nice to have a straight samurai film without the supernatural elements, does everything out of Hollywood need huge effects these days!.

 

[Edwin-S]

I still might go and see it. There's too many people who seem to get pleasure when a film that tries to be a bit different bombs, but then start complaining that Hollywood has no imagination when film studios give people what they apparently want in the form of endless sequels and rote remakes.

 

[Jari K]

Is this another "I haven't see it, but it must be bad and it must be a failure in the box office" type of thing? Like you know, WWZ?

 

[Michael Elliott]

Unless I misread it, this opened to the same numbers as GRUDGE MATCH and just $3 million shy of WOLF and HOBBIT. Not too bad except when you see the budget.

 

[Brandon Conway]

www.the-numbers.com is a good site for referencing actual losses between box office and budget, though it also doesn't take into account pre-sales and product sales. The entire Top 20 biggest losses are all from films released 2006 or later.Sent from my VS920 4G using Tapatalk

 

[Colin Jacobson]

RONIN 47 (and to a point, OLDBOY) just aren't interesting enough to mainstream America. I had forgotten all about this movie coming out and in all honesty, I actually mixed it up for the earlier Keanu movie that he directed earlier this year. If this film actually has a budget of $250, you really can't blame the movie or Keanu. That goes back to whoever said this was a good idea and turned over a check.

I've probably seen around 130+ movies at the theater this year and have yet to see a trailer for this thing. Considering the "big" movies opening tomorrow, I'm guessing Universal is just hoping for some crumbs.

Really? I saw the trailer at least 2 or 3 times - I got to a lot of movies but not 130+, too!

 

[JoeDoakes]

I saw the trailer for this when I went to see The Hobbit. What really struck me about it is how much a lot of CGI films and modern action scenes look the same. The Hobbit suffers somewhat from that, but it really has the imagination of Tolkein going for it visually. Most other recent CGI/action fests have nothing close to that. One thing that struck me recently is that after The Quiet Man, a lot of John Wayne films included brawl scenes and just about any one of them is a lot more fun to watch than 99% of recent kung fu cum CGI action sequences. In Robert Downey's Sherlock Holmes, the action scenes were even worse in that, in large part, they were in slow motion. However, there was a silver lining. After the first SH action sequence, I knew that the next provided the perfect opportunity to hit the Men's room.

 

[JoHud]

I really don't think this is one of those undeserved bombs that the critics "got wrong," akin to John Carter. It doesn't even look that interesting, just another CGI wall-to-wall actionfest set in Japan, but what do I know?. Seems like they attempted to cash in the same fantasy/historical epic formula as the lucrative 300 franchise but failed spectacularly. Though I guess there aren't many films that bomb this badly that deserve it and these sorts usually develop niche cult fans. Every movie ever made has at least a few fringe fans after all.

Other bombs often have some kind of auteur factor going for it, but this one really seems nil. The screenwriters aren't notable and the director, Carl Erik Rinsch, made his feature film debut with this feature--most likely his last as well and very likely only to be remembered in its infamy.

This one also seems to have the earmarks of a turkey that the studio deliberately kept from stinking up the cinemas while making a futile effort to patch it up in post-production before reluctantly releasing it to theaters. Having its release date held up for over a year solely for post-production tweaking is usually a telltale sign that the producers knew they had a dog on their hands once the rough cut was done.

Perhaps this one would have done better if they went for a more grounded historical retelling. The Last Samurai did very well in the BO 10 years ago despite lukewarm Japanese reception. Personally, I'd much prefer seeing a more genuine samurai/Edo period film.

 

[Wayne_j]

47 Ronin earned $9.9 million to finish 9th in it's debut.

 

[mattCR]

Sticking closely to my thought this may never break $20M domestic, or 1/12th it's budget. Yeesh.

There are some films that lose at the box office and make good money through DVD/BD/digital sales. Some films have great overall tie ins.. I pointed osme out earlier. But this has none of that. You can tell it's been re-written repeatedly and it just looks bad.

 

[Michael Elliott]

But now it has become a must see for me (due to its now horrid reputation).

 

[Bob Cashill]

It's awfully dull, not at all camp. And the 3D is poor. Rent the 2D version on Blu and save yourself a dreary night out at the movies.

 

[FoxyMulder]

It's awfully dull, not at all camp. And the 3D is poor. Rent the 2D version on Blu and save yourself a dreary night out at the movies.

The trailer shows a dragon heading towards you and it looks like it should come out of the screen, so does the 3D have any pop out moments, is the depth poor ?, it's been shot native 3D using the same camera system as utilized by Avatar, Life of Pi and Hugo.

 

[Brian Dobbs]

It's so easy to hate on something for being unsuccessful.

They should have released this in February or March. Not on Christmas. Duh.

But I think the production troubles led to its demise.