By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
Soundwave on 05 June 2024
Edit Thread
curl-6 said:
Soundwave said:

I think people don't understand that it's pretty damn hard to make a great movie. A lot of things have to go right and even greater writers, directors have many misses. 

Hollywood would make more experimental and riskier films ... if people bothered to show up. There's lots of examples too of movies that are actually decent to great where people just didn't show up. If a studio released a movie equally as good as Kramer Vs. Kramer or Annie Hall or Dances with Wolves or Rain Man or Forrest Gump or the first Rocky today or even E.T. (ie: hit films that didn't rely on being based on a comic book or special effects), would it be a lock that people show up and support it? 

I think it's a lot harder I think to make a great movie than a great video game (you can basically just iterate on a proven formula in gaming and it mostly will work) or even music album. 

The amount of great movies even in the 80s, 90s, 2000s, etc. is not as high as people think it is, it's not like every 3rd movie released back then was fantastic. 

People will show up if a movie is appealing; we saw that with stuff like Dune, Godzilla, Mario and Barbie.

But much like with AAA gaming, budgets have ballooned out of control, discouraging creative risks in favour of appealing to the lowest common denominator, which tends to result in bland, mediocre products.

But a good film can still find an audience. Look at Godzilla Minus One late last year; it was made with a comparatively tiny budget of under $15 million, was a foreign language film which hurts is appeal to a Western audience, and had no star power behind it, yet it became a breakout hit because it was really, really good.

Well it's easy after the fact to say a hit movie had appeal, it's harder to guess before hand. A lot of people for example didn't have the Mario movie being a hit, even Barbie, I think it only dawned on some folkes about a few weeks before release that it was going to be a massive hit.

Godzilla Minus One made 116 million worldwide (56 million in the US) which is impressive given it's a Japanese language film with a small budget, but Furiosa has already made more than that or is about to. 

Mad Max isn't really a hit franchise, even the Mel Gibson one's peaked with Beyond Thunderdome, and Beyond Thunderdome was the 18th biggest domestic grosser of 1985 below things like Pee-Wee's Big Adventure. Fury Road, the franchise's "break out" wasn't even a top 20 worldwide hit for 2015, coming in below a flop like Terminator Genisys. 

Mad Max is a niche franchise, if anything Fury Road probably overperformed as 2015 was a boom time for ticket sales and Charlize Theron was a fairly big star still.