Wanted scored a larger-than-expected opening this
weekend with a whopping $51 million. While Wall-E took the top spot with $63 million like everyone
thought it would, Wanted actually had a higher per-theater average
because it's playing in about 800 fewer theaters.
Particularly interesting in Wanted's case is that it
was originally scheduled to be a spring release. Universal had planned on giving Forgetting
Sarah Marshall a spot on their summer schedule, mimicking the successful
release of Knocked Up in 2007, but when they decided that the comedy
would work better in the Spring, that left a hole in their schedule. Plugging it with an action thriller, based on
an unknown comic book, starring a skinny Scottish guy most people don't know
was risky, and now they get to reap the rewards.
It's been a strange summer for business. No sooner had my "5 Predicted Flops This
Summer" arrived that Speed Racer -- not on my list -- crashed and
burned. Okay, if I was better at this, I
might have been able to predict that. But then even Narnia disappointed: while The Lion, the Witch,
and the Wardrobe made $290 million, Prince Caspian only stands at
$138 million to date. You can pull out
the very valid reasons -- the book was less popular than the first, it opened
too far before kids were out of school -- but even taking those into account,
it was "supposed" to do much better.
Only two movies on my top five list have been released so
far, and my track record is 50%, give or take. Thwarting my prediction, Sex and the City
was a success by all accounts, but The Incredible Hulk trails even Ang
Lee's scorned 2003 version. That's a particularly
strange case, since the reactions on the whole have been significantly better. Despite his legendary status as a comic book
character, perhaps the Hulk can just never tap into widespread appeal.
Other surprises: The Love Guru crashes and burns --
and at least part of the blame has to go to the execs who didn't move it away
from the release of Get Smart. The
Happening kicks off with a much-stronger-than-expected $30 million opening,
only to plummet in subsequent weekends thanks to a horrific response from
critics and audiences alike.
Even You Don't Mess with the Zohan, which opened
exactly in line with Adam Sandler's past movies, hasn't followed the formula:
while his films usually hit $125 million each summer like clockwork, Zohan
is currently struggling to reach $100 million.
Lessons to be learned? Who knows? Last summer was the
Summer of Threequels (or the Summer of Apatow, take your pick); the year before
that was the Summer of Pirates 2 (it made double its nearest
competitor); the year before that was the depressing Summer of Remakes. This year? We've got a little bit of everything. It might be harder for us bloggers to categorize, but that just makes it
all the more exciting, right?
In honor of the upcoming -- and awesome-looking -- Pineapple
Express, it's time to look into the past and count down the top five stoner
movies. Ever.
This is of course my own opinion, so feel free to
argue. But just for clarification
purposes, my definition of a stoner film is a movie that (a) contains at least
one instance of pot-smoking, and (b) is widely known to be beloved by actual
stoners.
It goes without saying that merely labeling these
"stoner movies" is a bit shortsighted -- indeed, the reason they're
all classic is because they're so much more. Well, at least the top three. #5
and #4 are pretty straightforward.
5. Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle I had the privilege of interviewing Kal Penn -- a.k.a. Kumar
-- a while back, and he insisted that this movie isn't a stoner movie because
the heroes are actually pursuing hamburgers, not weed. Sure, Kal. Except that the reason they're pursuing hamburgers is because they're so
high. It doesn't matter -- Harold &
Kumar is a relentlessly hilarious one-night-long road trip that
single-handedly brought Neil Patrick Harris back into the national
consciousness.
4. Up in Smoke You cannot create a list of stoner movies without paying
homage to this film, which is the stoner-movie-ist stoner movie of all stoner
movies. Cheech and Chong at their best:
playing two guys who smuggle a van, made entirely of marijuana, from Mexico to the U.S.
3. The Big Lebowski For quotes alone, this is one of the best movies of all
time. "You're out of your element,
Donnie." "She kidnapped
herself!" "The royal
'we.'" "This is what happens
when you f--- a stranger in the a--!" "They're nihilists, dude." "The rug really tied the room together." Shall I go on? The Big Lebowski also has the rare
honor of paradoxically being a highbrow stoner movie, in that it comes from
Joel and Ethan Coen, the writer-directors of No Country for Old Men and
tons of other terrific movies. Get
involved in the super-complicated story, stay for the pitch-perfect dialogue,
and remember the Saddam Hussein/Viking costume/bowling dream sequence forever.
2. Dazed and Confused Recall your high school days with warm nostalgia in Richard
Linklater's ode to teenagers, which follows a group of 13- and 17-year-olds
over the course of about fifteen hours following the last day of school in Texas in 1976. The plot is (by design) not
cohesive and the pace is leisurely, but the characters will all have a hold of
you by the end. Plus there's that
immortal line: "That's what I love about these high school girls,
man. I get older, they stay the same
age."
1. Super Troopers "That little guy? I wouldn't worry about that little guy." One of the best comedies of all time,
watching this movie for the ninth time is like hanging out with your closest
friends -- if your closest friends were a hundred times funnier than they
actually are. I can't even describe the
simple pleasures of Super Troopers, except that they involve plenty of
shenanigans.
People tend to think viral marketing is a relatively new
thing, but it's actually almost a decade old. In the lead-up to 1999's A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, word got
out that if you did a Google search for "Jeanine Salla," you would
find a website about a woman living in the future, doing research on A.I.
children. That website linked to other
sites with even more information, and collectively they all told a story
related to the robotics company seen in the film. (Most of the websites are still up; try it
for yourself.)
Back then it was simply an experiment - something cool for
the marketing department to tinker around with to see if it would work. And, truth be told, there was no evidence
that it did work - A.I. topped out with less than $80 million at
the box office. But it seemed to open
the floodgates for a bunch of new films.
The appeal behind such unconventional marketing is simple -
it makes the fictional world of a film more "real." In 2004's Godsend, Robert De Niro
plays a doctor who promises to give a married couple's dead child back to
them. If you went online, you could find
the website for the Godsend Institute, the company that the doctor founded.
That attempt didn't seem to make much of a difference,
either - the movie grossed less than $15 million. One of the main problems with viral marketing
is that the amount of people who get into it, seeking out all the websites
actually finding it an enriching experience, is negligible. The other problem is that at first glance, by
design, the average person would have no idea the website they stumbled across
is actually part of a movie's advertising campaign.
Then again, viral marketing campaigns can prove useful. Knowing that there would be an eight-month
hiatus between seasons two and three of television's Lost, ABC hired a
team to create "The Lost Experience," which went beyond creating a
few random websites - it was a full-fledged game. Go to TheHansoFoundation.org, find out more about one of the shadowy
organizations from the show, receive a hint about another website you could go
to, and so on, and so on. New websites
popped up periodically, old ones radically changed, and the Lost fans
involved in the Experience were treated to an enriched backstory for the TV
show's dense mythology. For ABC, it
meant retaining fans who might otherwise forget to tune in to the third season.
One of the original creators of Lost, J.J. Abrams,
decided to use viral marketing again when he produced last January's Cloverfield. Disenfranchised with the way fans in this day
and age increasingly knew everything about movies before they were released,
Abrams wanted to bring back a sense of mystery to filmmaking. So he made sure the first trailer for the
film didn't even include the title - just the release date, 1-18-08, and an accompanying website. A few other websites - so cryptic that there
was speculation about whether or not they were even related to the film at all
- sprang up. Excitement built. And thus a relatively simple monster movie
was transformed into a sensation that scored a $40 million opening weekend.
For pure coolness factor, though, the best viral marketing
campaign is one for a movie that hasn't even been released yet - The Dark
Knight.
Basically, Warner Bros. pulled out all the stops. First there was IBelieveInHarveyDent.com, a
website advertising the District Attorney candidate played by Aaron
Eckhart. Then
IBelieveInHarveyDentToo.com appeared - the same website, only
"vandalized" by a criminal called the Joker. (Go there, then hit Ctrl+A.) A slew of websites followed - some run by
citizens of Gotham City,
or the Gotham police department - and some run by the
Joker, encouraging his faithful "clowns" to go on missions for him.
What kind of missions? Well, that's where the internet and the real world collided in The Dark Knight's viral campaign, which is part of what made it the best-executed
viral campaign yet. There weren't just
viral websites for viral marketing's sake - follow them closely enough, and you
were rewarded, with scavenger hunts held in major cities that any fan could
embark on. At the end of the hunts were
various prizes - most notably a chance to go in a theater and watch a new
trailer for the film, or even, in one instance, the entire opening scene.
Of course, The Dark Knight is going to be huge anyway. The only viral marketing
campaign that you could truly call a success story was Cloverfield's,
because of the attention the secrecy brought to it - otherwise, these sorts of
campaigns are impossible to quantify and haven't led to any other surprise
hits. So why do they keep at it? Perhaps more than anything else, they're
compelled to keep things creative - and in an idea-starved Hollywood,
that's an encouraging thought.
If all goes according to plan, this November, we'll be able
to see a movie I'm anticipating more breathlessly than any other: The Road.
It's based on the acclaimed 2006 novel by Cormac McCarthy
about a father, with his young son, traveling across the United States some time after the world as he knew
it ended. McCarthy describes the
cataclysmic event as "A long shear of light and then a series of low
concussions...A dull rose glow in the windowglass."
But it's no science fiction story - The Road is
instead a parable, almost a myth. No
character is given a name, which in some stories comes across like a gimmick
but here seems almost necessary. The son
was born only a few days after the man and his wife "watched distant
cities burn." Some time thereafter,
the wife took her own life.
Since then, father and son have been traveling the landscape
in search of food (the sky is always gray, and nothing will grow), coming
across old relics or survivors, and avoiding roaming bands of cannibals. The father's only goal is to keep his son
alive.
McCarthy is an abstract writer, and not at all easy to read,
but his prose is powerful and more often than not beautiful. But since I'm a movie lover more than a book
lover (sorry, English teachers), I read the book fantasizing about what its
striking setting would look like as a movie.
The movie filmed this past spring under the direction of
John Hillcoat. An Australian director
responsible for the violent Outback drama The Proposition, he has the
uncompromising vision able to bring McCarthy's tale to life - and The
Proposition was also quite visually striking, so it's a good sign that he
has brought along the same cinematographer, Benoît Delhomme.
Viggo Mortensen plays the father in what is perhaps the best
casting decision of recent memory. Aside
from having the right look for the role, Mortensen can portray the sadness,
desperation, and also
devotion and love that's so important for the role. Relative newcomer Kodi Smit-McPhee plays the
young son; he had a major role in the little-seen 2007 drama Romulus, My Father, starring Eric Bana.
Even the smaller roles have attracted top-tier talent; Charlize
Theron appears briefly as the wife, and Guy Pearce (Memento) plays a man
on the road. Likewise, Robert Duvall appears
as an old man that the father and son meet one night.
During a set visit from the New York Times (the article also
includes stills from the film), Mortensen had nothing to say but praise for his
co-stars, especially Smit-McPhee. "It’s
a love story that’s also an endurance contest. I mean that in a positive way. They’re on this
difficult journey, and the father is basically learning from the son. So if the
father-son thing doesn't work, then the movie doesn't work. The rest of it
wouldn't matter. It would never be more than a pretty good movie. But with Kodi
in it, it has a chance to be an extremely good movie, maybe even a great one." It certainly sounds like one.
The release and (accompanying never-ending press) of Indiana
Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull has caused me to get quite a bit
more nostalgic for the original three films than I ought to be. I suppose nostalgia is the whole point of the
new one, but it feels a bit like cheating for me, because I wasn't even born
yet when Raiders of the Lost Ark was released. In fact, I've always been a bit annoyed that
I arrived too late to get in on the ground floor of those three brilliant
adventure trilogies from the late '70s and '80s: Star Wars, Indiana
Jones, and Back to the Future.
Then again, catching the films on video as a young kid, with
little knowledge of their impact on pop culture, probably made for purer experiences. Heck, I didn't even understand until well
into my teenage years that Star Wars and Indiana Jones were elaborate
homages to B-grade serial adventures of yore – I just accepted them for what they
were: really awesome movies that succeeded in giving me the truest sense of gee-whiz
wonder I've ever experienced.
While the collective experience of these movies is
unmatched, my mind always goes back to a couple of specific scenes – scenes so
pitch-perfect that I want to capture every individual frame of film and lock
them in a vault. (Or maybe in a giant
warehouse, right next to the Ark of the Covenant.) Since I'm being all nostalgic, I'd like to
share them.
There's so much to choose from in Star Wars, but I
love the showdown in Return of the Jedi between Luke, Vader, and the
Emperor. (Watch it here.) The dynamic between the three characters is
startlingly complex – will the Emperor turn Luke evil? Will Vader come away from the Dark Side to
help his son? How can Luke possibly get
out of this? And the setting – this is
all going down on a giant space station that can destroy planets, in the middle
of a fierce space battle fought by Luke's friends that will ultimately decide
the fate of the Rebellion against the Evil Empire.
And then there's The Moment, when all seems lost. The Emperor is using the powers of the Dark
Side to repeatedly blast Luke with what looks like very painful bolts of
electricity. Luke's on the ground, screaming
in pain, dying. And Vader: looking on as
his master kills his son. Cut to the
Emperor. Cut back to a close-up of Vader
– whose black mask, somehow portrays more emotion and depth than most regular performances. It's do or die: Save your son! You can do it, I scream in my head every
time I watch it. And, of course, he
does, as we always secretly knew he would: he picks up the Emperor and throws
him down the shaft to oblivion, an act which will result in his own death but
save his soul.
In Back to the Future, the coolest single moment is easy:
it comes in the first film, when Doc Brown swings down the cable from the clock tower as that classic score
is blasting and he plugs it in just in time for the lightning to surge
through the cable and rescue Marty McFly from being trapped in 1955
forever. (Watch it here.) The image of the Doc swinging down on that
cable was ingrained in my head when I was too little to follow the plot of the
movie at all -- it simply looked like one of the most exciting things I'd ever
seen.
But then the magic continues: Marty and the DeLorean
disappear, and the overjoyed Doc dances down the street, still burning from the
time machine. The familiar score comes
back on, but it's quieter this time, with one lone brass: some crazy stuff has
gone down, but everything's all right now.
Finally, there's the Indiana Jones franchise. I can honestly think of no better stand-alone sequence in any movie ever that tops the very first
sequence of the series for thrills and coolness: Indy's perilous journey in and out of a severely
booby-trapped temple. (Watch it
here.) The bag of sand he puts in place
of the legendary idol in hopes that it will stop the alarms from going
off. The traitorous companion, played by
a young Alfred Molina, who meets a gruesome end as soon as he selfishly leaves
Indy for dead. The temple itself coming
alive: poison darts springing from the walls, the giant stone door that tries
to trap Indy inside forever. And of
course the legendary boulder chase.
The structure is deceptively simply – a series of perilous
setups and adrenaline-rush payoffs – but it enthralled my ten-year-old self
like nothing else had. Just as important
as what was happening inside the temple, of course, was who it was happening
to. Indiana Jones was pretty much the
coolest guy alive: he got to journey through perilous jungles and legendary hidden
temples all day, and during his off-hours he made some money as a mild-mannered
college professor.
Perhaps the best compliment I can give the scene is that it
partly inspired me to be a writer. In
fifth grade, I wrote something like five stories in a row about an adventurer
who escaped from booby-trapped temples.
What are some other scenes you wish you could see again for the first time?
George Lucas, while in France for the Cannes Film Festival
premiere of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, mentioned to a
Fox News reporter that he'd like to do a fifth Indy movie: "I have an idea
to make Shia [LeBeouf] the lead character next time and have Harrison [Ford]
come back like Sean Connery did in the last movie," he said. "I can see it working out." This despite continual assurances from Lucas
for the past couple months that fans will hate Crystal Skull.
Yep, you read that right – while press junkets for the film
have been surprisingly few and far between, whenever Lucas has had the
opportunity to talk up the film, he's been doing the exact opposite:
The fans think it's gonna be the
Second Coming. And it's not the Second Coming. They've already written the
story [in their heads], and lemme tell ya, it's not that story. So they're
going to be very disappointed. I went through this with Phantom Menace.
Believe me, I've been there, I've done it, I know exactly the way they react.
And they're very vocal about these things. We're not gonna have adoring fans
sending us e-mails saying how much they loved the movie. We're gonna have a bunch
of angry people saying, "You're a bunch of a--holes, you should never have
done this. You've ruined my life forever. I loved Indiana Jones so much and now
it's ruined."
While Lucas does touch on the real-enough issue of Internet
"fanboys" being impossible to please, his comments are frightening
proof of his own blindness. Simply put,
he refuses to accept that the Star Wars prequels were bad movies. Nope, they weren't bad, it's just the fans'
fault – the people who didn't like them were just a bunch of nitpickers with unrealistic
expectations.
Imagine that kind of self-deception.
You can go on sites like Ain't It Cool News right now and
find plenty of comments trashing Batman Begins or Spider-Man 2,
for example. Somehow the attitudes
didn't stop those movies from being considered successful on all fronts – with
critics, audiences, the box office, DVD sales, however you want to tabulate
it. Sure, some fanboys will always thrive
on negativity, but their moaning will not stop inherently good films from
achieving success.
While all three Star Wars prequels were wildly
successful in terms of box office dollars, they left such a bad taste in
audiences' mouths because they were a betrayal not just to fans but to the laws
of filmmaking – i.e., the need to give us a good story, well told. Plot, and especially characterization and
dialogue, were secondary to Lucas's urge to make the movies showcases upon
which he could play around with new digital technology, and it showed. Painfully.
I'm not objecting to Lucas's exploration of new
technologies, even though his penchant for using digital sound stages for everything
instead of real sets and locations only makes the performances worse and the
visuals look faker. (That's a topic for
another post; to get some idea of what I mean, read the rest of the EW
article.) I'm objecting to Lucas the
screenwriter writing a horrible script. I
don't need to make a laundry list of atrocious lines, or explain how those
undeliverable lines begat atrocious performances. I don't need to explain why the concept of
midichlorians de-mystifies what was so awesome about the Force and is a perfect
microcosm for what Lucas did with the entire prequel trilogy. You've seen the films; you saw it for
yourself. Here's the first line of the
opening crawl of the original 1977 Star Wars:
It is a period of civil war. Rebel spaceships, striking from
a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire.
Turmoil has engulfed the Galactic Republic. The taxation of trade
routes to outlying star systems is in dispute.
Huh? It's not hard to
spot where things went wrong. But you
heard the man: it's not his fault the movies were received poorly; it was the
fans' fault for receiving them poorly.
So where does this leave Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of
the Crystal Skull? Luckily, it
leaves it in the capable hands of Steven Spielberg, the director; David Koepp (Mission:
Impossible, War of the Worlds) wrote the final script after no one
could agree on previous scripts by Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption),
Jeff Nathanson (Catch Me If You Can), and others. Lucas only came up with the concept of
Crystal Skulls and served as an executive producer – which doesn't mean much
other than that he originally created Indiana Jones with Spielberg and got to
visit the set whenever he wanted.
I don't know if the movie is good or not, but if it is, I'd
love to see Lucas trying to rationalize it getting a good reception. Will he realize that unlike himself, his
friend Spielberg hasn't forgotten the importance of characters, dialogue, and
honest-to-goodness stunt and locations work? The unfortunate truth: of course he won't.
Two weeks ago I wrote a post predicting which movies would
flop this summer. Little did I know that
the first big one was sitting right under my nose.
Speed Racer, the re-imagining of the old Saturday morning
cartoon by The Matrix's Andy and Larry Wachowski, made an estimated $20.2
million, which, just to be clear, is unconditionally awful. Before the marketing had even started, Warner
Bros. was dreaming up a $50 million plus opening – sure, it wouldn't match Iron
Man, but there was no reason it couldn't hold its own, right?
As the release date grew closer, perilous signs appeared. Initial studio tracking – in-depth studies
that survey how aware and how excited potential moviegoers are about the film –
pegged it at a $40 million dollar weekend. Which then turned to a mid-thirty million
weekend, with some people whispering the number was actually somewhere in the
high $20s. Apparently people just weren't
nearly as interested in the film as Warner had hoped. Said Deadline Hollywood Daily on Thursday:
Warner Bros is figuratively on its knees praying for at
least a mid-$30 million weekend opening for its kiddie anime Speed Racer -- already down from a hoped-for $40 million
just a few days earlier. [...] As a Warner exec told me this afternoon,
"I remain optimistic that families will go. I’m hoping we mirror something
like Alvin and the Chipmunks. Industry
projections based on tracking had it opening at $25M, but it opened to $44M."
Unfortunately, what they got was the opposite – whatever the
tracking estimate really was, it had to have been higher than $20.2 million. According to IMDb, the budget for the film
was $100 million, although some sources peg it at closer to $125. Add another $40 million (at least) in
advertising, and you've got the studio on their hands and knees praying for the
movie to do well in international territories.
In the days of yore, movies didn't live or die by their
opening weekends. Advertising focused
less on when films opened; they would wait patiently in theaters for
word-of-mouth to kick in. That won't happen
for Speed Racer – the reviews are mixed to bad, and the family audience (and
most everyone else) will completely abandon it next weekend when The Chronicles
of Narnia: Prince Caspian opens.
I really should've seen it coming: on the calendar, it was
sandwiched between two surefire hits, Iron Man and Caspian. And it wasn't a sequel or a superhero movie or
anything like that – just an adaptation of a TV show I honestly had no idea
existed until I saw the Geico commercial spoof.
But the movie looked legitimately creative. The Wachowskis are brilliant visual
directors, and their "live-action cartoon" style really seemed to
work. The advertising made it look like
a lot of fun – and when I went to see it, some talkiness aside, I honestly
thought it was a lot of fun. And
last year, another movie came out based on a Saturday morning cartoon I never
watched that I didn't really understand the hype for: a little flick called
Transformers. $300 million later, I saw few reasons Speed Racer couldn't also hit big.
While last year was the summer of threequels and a few years
earlier was the summer of remakes, this year has a little bit of everything –
and I'm liking it. No, the upcoming
month of May won't have third editions of Spider-Man, Shrek, and Pirates of the Caribbean – and that has box office forecasters nervous
– but it will have Iron Man, Prince Caspian, and Speed Racer, all of which look
cool in their own ways, and even unique. Sure, they're all based on pre-existing properties – you can't release a
summer movie unless it is – but Iron Man's not that well known, and it looks
like it has a great director in Jon Favreau. Meanwhile, Speed Racer looks like a wildly re-imagined, brilliantly
visual adaptation of the old cartoon show.
Yet all is not roses. Amidst all the cool stuff there are bound to be a few failures – there's
gotta be The Invasion for every Knocked Up. So without further ado, what follows are my predictions for the biggest disappointments of the summer. Read it again in
three months to find out how wrong I am.
I may be crazy, but since when does a movie adaptation of a
show on a boutique cable network become a blockbuster? And not to sound like an old-fashioned studio
executive, but they're all women in their forties, which usually doesn't scream
"big summer movie." The target
audience will surely line up opening day, but after that expect steep drops
and, once it's not in theaters anymore, lots of boyfriends high-fiving each
other about how they dodged a bullet.
The Hulk as a comic book property = license to print
money. The Hulk as a movie franchise =
not so much. Ang Lee's 2003 version got
mixed reviews, but most of the fanboy crowd rejected it and it limped to around
$130 million. They decided to just do a
complete do-over, hiring Edward Norton to star and re-write the script. That was a great move, but since then it's
been getting bad press over a blown-out-of-proportion dispute between Norton
and Marvel, plus the same old "The Hulk doesn't look good enough in the
trailer" complaints that are so five years ago. Plus, it's currently opening against The
Happening, which has a good chance to become M. Night Shyamalan's comeback
movie.
I haven't brought myself to watch the previews yet, but all
I've been hearing is bad things. Add in
the problem of Brendan Fraser not starring in a blockbuster since 2001's The
Mummy Returns and you've got major problems. That was seven years ago. Hm,
actually, that doesn't bode well for The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor
either, but that one might succeed once the publicity train gets rolling. This one won't.
Hey, I've got a great idea: remember that weirdo superhero
movie we took a chance on in Spring 2004 and it was sorta-kinda a success but
not really since it made less than $60 million? The director of it just made this awesome foreign-language, R-rated fairy
tale that was actually a success by foreign-language, R-rated fairy tale
standards! So let's let him do a sequel
to the weirdo superhero movie, only inexplicably, this time position it as a
big summer movie and hope no one will know the difference!
1. Meet Dave
The most terrible-looking movie since Norbit, directed by
the guy who directed Norbit. That's all
I really have to say, but I'll go on: did the studio execs forget The
Adventures of Pluto Nash? Why on Earth
would you put Eddie Murphy in another stupid-sounding, stupid-looking,
stupid-feeling sci-fi comedy? Wait, you
say – Norbit made a lot of money! You're
right – it made $90 million and was a big hit with African-American audiences
in particular. But whoops, this one has
a predominantly white cast, which muddles the target demographic, and thanks to
the special effects, the budget is a reported $100 million versus Norbit's
$60. Whoever greenlit this at 20th
Century Fox shouldn't just be ashamed of themselves, they should lose their
jobs.
Last month, Warner Bros. triumphantly announced that they would be
splitting Harry
Potter and the Deathly Hallows – the seventh and final book of the
landmark series – into two films in order to "do the book, and its
many fans, justice." Fervent fans, still ticked off that previous
Harry Potter films have cut subplots and characters, rejoiced at the
news: more Harry Potter to look forward to! Yay!
But they're wrong. This is a terrible idea, and I beg Steve Kloves –
who's dutifully writing Part 1 of Deathly Hallows as we speak – to see
reason and stand up to the studio. What follows are just a few
reasons why this is a really bad idea. And in case there are any
doubts to my motives, I'm a big Potter fan myself.
5. It's the most painfully obvious money-making scheme ever.
This one is such a no-brainer it almost doesn't need to be on the
list: Warner Bros. is not splitting up the films as a commitment to
artistic integrity. They're doing it because Harry Potter is a
license to print money. Worldwide, Harry Potter is already the
highest-grossing film franchise in history, beating the sum of the six
Star Wars films
and the sum of the twenty-one James Bond
films; apparently unsatisfied with merely being the best, they now
have three more films to add to that total.
4. The actors will get even older.
By itself, this doesn't bother me that much – on pretty much every
movie and TV show with high school kids, the actors are all 25 or
older, so having a 22-year-old Daniel
Radcliffe playing a 17-year-old Harry Potter won't be too
troublesome. What will be annoying are all the idiotic reporters who
don't realize this, and now have three more years to pester Radcliffe
and company about how old they are.
3. They're destroying the book's arc in favor of cramming everything in.
Actually two related points here. The first: cramming everything in
is good, right? We love all the minor characters and details! Right?
No. There are books, and then there are movies. If you literally
translated a 700-page novel to the screen, it would be the most boring
thing ever. The goal is not to fit as much in as possible, but to
keep the spine of the story and make it an exciting film.
The second: when you do the adaptation, you have to make a movie work
on its own terms. A movie only using the plot of the first half of a
book usually won't work. Case in point: what will the climax of Part
1 be? There is no built-in climax in the book! J.K. Rowling saves
that for the end, remember? This is an extreme example, but
it's like slicing the Mona Lisa in half, enlarging each half so
they're as big as the original painting was, and selling them each as
complete works of art.
2. It won't look pretty on my DVD shelf.
I'm a fan of the Saturday Night Live "Best Of" compilations, and I own
quite a few of them on DVD. They're all lined up nicely in a row, but
standing out like a sore thumb is the Will Ferrell
edition – because unlike the rest of them, he has two different
"volumes." The same aesthetic travesty will now beset the Harry
Potter series. (Okay...so I'm sometimes laughably
obsessive-compulsive.)
1. The First Half of Deathly Hallows Drags Anyway.
The dirty little secret about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is
that the first half of the book isn't that wonderful to begin with.
It's easy to forget this, because the last two hundred pages are some
of the most entertaining and memorable prose I've ever read – and I
really mean that. But the first half, after a promising start, soon
settles into an eternity of "hiding in the woods" sequences that seem
to exist only to make the book take place over one year (in order to
fit the format of the other books.) An eternity, let me again remind
you, that has no climax.
And I haven't even gotten to the point that the first half of the book
has no Hogwarts scenes. None. That's part of what makes the climax
of the book so spectacular – we finally return to familiar territory
for the mother of all showdowns. As it stands, the first Deathly
Hallows films will be all set up with no payoff, while the second half
will be all payoff with no setup. You have to have the films work
individually. But why care about that when you can make money?