- Joined
- Jun 10, 2003
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- Real Name
- Josh Steinberg
Something there is going to underperform.
I think Pirates is a possible candidate for that; there was a time when having the name "Johnny Depp" was a license to print money, and then it started becoming apparent that the asterisk to that was only in Disney franchise movies, and then Alice 2 flopped hard. I think the first Alice massively overperformed so it was probably not as giant a correction as it seemed, but if they were genuinely expecting another billion, they must be disappointed. I saw the first teaser for Pirates before either Doctor Strange or Fantastic Beasts, sold out crowd, and it didn't get any response from the audience, no cheers or reaction or anything - that said, I don't recall Depp even being in the teaser, so maybe it was just the wrong piece of footage, and not an indication of people's feelings about the new film.
The Transformers movies seem to get longer with each new installment, and less well-received critically or by audiences. I've seen every one except the first one, which is the one my friends tell me was actually good. We're all stuck in this cycle of seeing them for some bizarre reason, where it doesn't seem anyone actually going to them is loving them, but we're all going anyway. At some point, that can't last forever; they'll either need to make the movies a little bit better (or at least stop making each one worst than the last), and probably need to cut the bloat. Each one is about 15 minutes longer than the previous one and the last one was about ten or fifteen minutes shy of three hours; at some point, a three hour Transformers movie that no one really asked for will underperform.
Cars 3 will probably do less than Cars 2, and doesn't seem like a strong or beloved franchise, but people are amused by them, and generally not being offended by something and then being amused by it are decent first steps to summer megabucks. It's Pixar. They used to be bulletproof just on the name alone, but if nothing else, The Good Dinosaur proved that it's not enough to just slap a "Pixar" label on a movie and count the money. I didn't see The Good Dinosaur and maybe it's great, but my point is that just because it's Pixar doesn't automatically mean it'll be a #1 smash.
Despicable Me is probably as safe and sure a bet as you can get right now; people love their minions. I think eventually they'll hit a wall there, but I liked the second movie more than the first, and I'm finding a lot of people felt that way. That sort of thing builds up enormous goodwill for future sequels.
And I think Spider-Man will do fine. It may not exceed the numbers of Amazing Spider-Man 2 (which actually had a huge opening, it just fell off a cliff once people saw the final product and didn't recommend it to anyone), but the ASM2 opening was in line with a typical Marvel movie opening. And I think people will react very favorably to Robert Downey Jr. being in it. People won't pay to read Downey read the phone book (not many people saw his non-franchise picture "The Judge" which he had high hopes for), but they will pay big bugs to see Downey-as-Tony-Stark reading the phone book. I was probably gonna be seeing it anyway, but Spidey isn't one of my favorite superheroes. I didn't like the Raimi movies, I think the Garfield ones had more potential but didn't delivery on any of it, and I would have been fine if we didn't see Spider-Man for a long time after those. But make it part of the MCU, and all of a sudden I have to care, because it's not really a Spidey movie anymore, it's just another episode of the Marvel Movie Show that comes out two or three times a year.
Long rant without a point. Should be an interesting summer! I wish Episode VIII had kept its original date.
