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Jamfo's Replies
You also need to look at the timeline when you take box office results into consideration. Prior to the release of the Nolan Batman trilogy (starting with "Batman Begins" in 2005) and Iron Man (in 2008), comic book movies were still a pretty niche market that supposedly catered to the "nerd crowd". Yes, there were some breakout hits like the Tim Burton "Batman" (1989) film and the Richard Donner "Superman" film (1978), but those were the rare exception to the rule and not something that happened commonly.
For example, "Batman Begins" only earned $374-million world-wide... and it was a critical and financial success.
But then, along the way, something happened... comic book-based movies went from being perceived as the purview of the nerds to becoming popular in the mainstream. In 2008, you had the surprise hit of "Iron Man" and "The Dark Knight", and comic book movies morphed into popular mainstream "event" movies.
Since that time, the track of box office results for ALL comic book movies has been on a general uptick. In the case of the Marvel movies, each sequel to the origin movies has earned more than its predecessor, and the box office totals, in general, continue to increase. We are now at the point where a movie that earns $650-million at the box office is considered a failure, when back in 2005 "Batman Begins" was considered a huge success earning nearly half that total.
By 2013, when "Man of Steel" was released, the hard work had already been done and comic book movies were now a mainstream cash cow, and even poorly received films earned box office that would have made their predecessors green with envy: $644-million for "Thor: The Dark World", $668-million for "Man of Steel", and $1.2-billion for "Iron Man 3".
So, while it is technically true that the DCCU's initial movies had higher box office earnings than their Marvel counterparts, it's largely due to the fact that Marvel and the Nolan Batman trilogy had paved the way to turn comic-book based films from something seen by geeks into something that attracted a larger, general audience. We can only speculate that, had "Man of Steel" been released back in 2005, its box office numbers would have been right around those of "Batman Begins", leveling the perceived playing field between the DCCU's and the MCU's initial origin movies.
01. Sweet Summer - Diamond Rio
02. Summertime - Janis Joplin
03. Those Lazy, Crazy Days of Summer - Nat King Cole
04. Summer in the City--Lovin' Spoonful
05. Summer Lovin" from Grease
06. Sittin' in the Sun - Louis Armstrong
07. Boys of Summer- Don Henley
08. Summer Song - Chad and Jeremy
09. In the Good Old Summertime - various
10. Hello Summertime - Bobby Goldsboro
11. Summertime Blues - Blue Cheer
12. Summertime Girls - Y & T
13. Summer's Comin' - Clint Black
14. Cruel Summer - Bananarama
15. Summerfling - k.d. lang
16. In the Summertime - Mungo Jerry
17. Summer of '69 - Bryan Adams
1. Absolute Beginners- 1986 movie
2. The Man Who Fell to Earth - 1976 movie
1. Hotel California
2. City to City
3. I Left my Heart in San Francisco
4. Oklahoma
5. El Paso--Marty Robbins
6. New York, New York--Frank Sinatra
7. City of New Orleans
8. The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia--Vicki Lawrence, Reba McEntire
9. Sweet City Woman - Stampeders
10. San Francisco - Scott MacKenzie
11. Alabama Pines - Jason Isbell
12. Jackson - Johnny Cash and June Carter
13. Miami 2017 - Billy Joel
14. One Night In Bangkok - Murray Head
15. City Of Night (Berlin) - Peter Schilling
16. Paint Me Back Home in Wyoming - Chris LeDoux
17. New York State of Mind - Billy Joel
18. Georgia on My Mind - Willie Nelson
19. Witchita Lineman
20. NY State of Mind
21. Jersey Girl
22. Wildwood Days
23. California Dreaming
24. Texas When I die
25. Tennessee Waltz
26. Back in the U.S.S.R- The Beatles
27. Kansas City--Fats Domino
28. Birmingham - Amanda Marshall
29. Vienna - Ultravox
30. Tokyo Skyline - Manic Street Preachers
31. Houston - Dean Martin
32. London Calling - The Clash
33. Galveston - Glen Campbell
34. The State Of Massachusetts - Dropkick Murphys
35. Galway Girl - Sharon Shannon
36. Tallahassee - The Mountain Goats
37. Philadelphia Freedom - Elton John
(P.S. "New York State of Mind" is on the list twice, #17 and #20)
When you use words like "crappy", you are passing a value judgement on those who enjoy it... by association, you are saying those whose opinion is they like the movie have "crappy" opinions. If you had just said that it will have the same type of comedy that is found in most Marvel movies, and that isn't your thing, that's just expressing your opinion. But when you start using inflammatory terms, you are thrusting that label on anyone who does enjoy those types of movies.
Yup... an $850-million opinion apparently shared by millions world wide.
Of course, if you prefer dour, dark, and lifeless, you are welcome to your opinion, too! Just don't knock others who have differing opinions.
It will have the same crowd pleasing, entertaining, and light-hearted humor all Marvel movies have.
There... fixed it for you.
So now the line is to blame the lack of box office on the release date and the proximity to "The Last Jedi"? My goodness, wasn't there almost four full weeks between the release of JL (11/17/2017) and TLJ (12/15/2017)? How much of a gap do you suppose JL needed so it could have performed to full box office potential? I'm also pretty sure that JL was labeled a box office failure WELL before TLJ came out... it had already failed by week 2, for crying out loud.
By comparison, JL was released only two weeks after T:R, and, while it did cut into T:R's third weekend box office, it didn't seem to do much to damage its total box office. JL had almost a FULL MONTH with no major releases to compete with and failed spectacularly!
If you're going to make the claim about "technical issues releasing overseas", you really need to follow that up with some kind of proof. I did a quick search for "Justice League overseas release issues" and couldn't find a single article detailing any kind of overseas problems. In fact, unlike T:R, which had a staggered release, JL released everywhere in the world at the same time.
So your excuses here as to why JL "didn't fail" are totally bogus and are just that... excuses!
It sounds like you're mixing up the classic 1960's theme song for the Spider-Man cartoon:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUtziaZlDeE
which was given homage in the Raimi movies, with Homer's lyrics for "Spider-Pig" in the Simpson's Movie:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BARjPuUN36Y
I'm sure it's got a $24-million "favorable weekend bump" out there yet! I'll bet Doctor Strange is quaking as if Dormamu himself were nipping at his heels!
****SARCASM MODE OFF****
Not only that... if you read the article he links to, it only states that Justice League was the highest grossing film in Brazil. In China, it was the highest grossing DC FILM, not the highest grossing film of 2017. Fate of the Furious pulled in almost $400 million in China, compared to just over $100 million for Justice League... so it wasn't even close!
Apparently the "imbecile" title you have imbued upon him is accurate, as his reading skills are shown to be wanting!
I very much enjoyed this as well... I've always liked the show, but with each episode, their footing becomes more and more secure, and I think you can tell the actors are becoming comfortable with their characters, and it shows.
I always ground myself by going back and looking at the first 10 episodes of all the Trek series. TNG really didn't hit its stride until season 2, and even TOS dropped a few clunkers in there... so I've always approached this series with the attitude that it would take some time until it found its groove.
I'm willing to bet your second option, "they erased all records of it..." is the most likely answer.
Upon their return to the origin universe, I could see the Discovery making the report to Starfleet, who would then catalogue and classify the information as Top Secret. Or it's possible that they didn't even classify it; it just helped confirm scientific speculation that parallel universes exist. However, since the ability to get there involved some kind of malfunction with the spore drive (and we must assume this leads to the spore drive being classified as far too dangerous to use), no one ever gave travel between parallel universes a second thought.
So this became nothing more than a scientific curiosity, one that Kirk knew nothing about. (Let's face it... in Star Trek's future, the amount of scientific knowledge available would be incredible! There's no way Kirk could know about every type of anomaly, parallel universe, scientific theory, etc.). And, the ONE person who might know about this report, Spock, was left back in the original universe, so he wasn't there to tell Kirk about this one paper he read at some point that proved the existence of a parallel universe where everyone existed in a slightly different form.
It's also possible that they'll just use some kind of "Enterprise" style big reset button and everyone's memories will be wiped in the process of returning to our universe.
However, given how vast the amount of knowledge must be by the time of Star Trek, it wouldn't surprise me if Kirk knew nothing about it... some of our best scientists today may know TONS of stuff about a subject, but little about something else. There are limits to what we can be exposed to, after all!
At this point I have to ask... did you even WATCH the original Trek? Kirk was a NOTORIOUS womanizer, and his escapades with the sexy "babe of the week" were legendary. And yes, that included sex with aliens (green Orion slave girls) and other alien species who may have been humanoid... but not human. Spock was the product of a Vulcan and Human marriage... again, a human female having sex with an alien. B'Elanna Torres (from Voyager) was the product of a human and Klingon marriage. Kirk was strongly getting it on with some shape-shifter of unknown form in "Star Trek" The Undiscovered Country".
Several classic episodes were based around relationships and the conflicts that arise from lust and longing. The TOS episode "Is there no truth in beauty" involved the strong reaction one human male felt when the woman he loved was more in love with a Medusan. Kirk used sexual attraction to turn Shahna to his side in "The Gamesters of Triskelion". The conflicted feelings between sexual love and paternal love led to the death of the android Rayna in "Requiem for Methuselah". I could go on and on...
So, your whole point about sex, sexual relationships, and sex with aliens has been with us since the advent of Star Trek.
To your bullet points, as well:
a) Not all homosexual relationships between men involves anal sex... that is a gross generalization made by people who have no real understanding of relationships and use the "well, it's anal and gross, so that's why gays are bad" excuse. Just because two men enjoy a sexual relationship does not mean it involves anal, any more so than a heterosexual relationship (and trust me, there are plenty of straight men who DO love anal sex... just with a woman).
b) Actually, 4% of the US population identifies as LBGTQ... which equates to roughly 12 million people. I was also not aware that love and relationships were races, and we had to quantify the order in which they were presented.
Your rantings here are totally unwarranted and show that you are simply espousing your agenda of hate, without any basis in fact. The very fact that you have no understanding of the history of Star Trek itself, how it has always pushed cultural boundaries, and how SEX, yes, SEX, was always popping up in the show somewhere, shows you aren't really speaking as an informed fan of the series. For crying out loud... we're talking about the show that had an episode banned for years in the south because it had the audacity, in the 1960's, to show a white man kissing a black woman. Star Trek has ALWAYS been about pushing preconceived notions of what constitutes "normal".
Your comments, on the other hand, are just hate, pure and simple.
The only thing that makes me nervous about NOT rebooting is that, with the exception of Zac Snyder, any additional movies to follow will be the same core group of folks doing the same thing over and over again.
As well received as the Wonder Woman movie was, and I did enjoy the film, we must be honest and admit that, after a wonderful first two-thirds of the movie, the last act devolved into the same dark, grey, colorless battle scenes with generic, uninspired "monsters" to fight, that we've come to expect from the DCEU. It's like they ran out of creative ideas and fell back on what they know best. Even with Snyder gone, without a real shake-up from the top-down, I'm afraid we'll get more scripts by committee and the movies will fail for the same reasons with which we've become far too familiar.
A full reboot and house-cleaning would be the best way to avoid that.
However, if they can move away from the director-centric formula they've followed so far and bring in fresh writers with up and coming directors with unique visions, perhaps you are right and they can save this iteration of the universe. It will entirely come down to making sure the studio heads and big-wigs can keep their noses out of the picture and allow the DCEU to grow organically, instead of being directed by bean counters, that will make or break the upcoming films.
WB is the top grossing studio of 2017, beating Disney ($2-billion to $1.75-billion). But WB's total comes from the cumulative of 30 movies tracked in 2017, versus only 11 movies tracked for Disney!
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/studio/
In other words, WB had 19 more movies tracked over the course of 2017 than Disney, but only managed to eek out another $250-million. Given that producing, advertising, and distributing 19 more movies than Disney means much higher costs, in the long run, Disney (Buena Vista) is BY FAR the more lucrative and profitable operation.
One other hiccup that is sure to change those ratings... in less than two weeks, Disney will be releasing the next film in the Star Wars saga. You think that might make a BIT more than $250-million by the end of the year? It's quite possible that in a month, we might be talking about how Disney is the highest earning studio for all of 2017... all while releasing 18 fewer movies than WB.
If I'm on the WB board or a major stockholder, I might want to ask Kevin Tsujihara why my profit margins are so small, while the folks over at Disney are rolling in dough. So, while I agree that he's not going anywhere, he may start to feel his seat getting a little warm...
from the initial three or four members to five, six, seven, etc... And, we'll be invested in each character.
The only way that a proper Justice League film will have gravitas is if we come to care about the individual characters.
It will also be helpful to have those characters have marked differences that naturally play off of each other. Superman's hopeful, "Boy Scout" persona which is counterbalanced by Batman's darker vigilante tactics. Aquaman's unique perspective as an "outsider" from the aquatic realm. Wonder Woman's innocence and naiveté coming from her sheltered upbringing. Give us characters with flavor and color, as opposed to dull, dour, grey characters who all seem to be the same shade of depressed grey.
Of course... this is all my opinion... but I think that giving each character their own personality, and allowing creative directors freedom to develop the characters totally independently, and only bringing them together for the big "event film" Justice League is the only way to do each character properly... and make the team up the big payoff we all want.
I think going a full five films before a new Justice League after a reboot might be too much... even with Avengers, Marvel only introduced a few characters, and then allowed new characters to "fold in" to the existing framework. This is smart from a storytelling standpoint, but also from a financial standpoint... this allows you to introduce new characters, with actors signed in to multi-film contracts, as older characters mature and, as the initial character's contracts expire, you can start to write them out. This is what I feel Marvel will be doing with a number of actors after Infinity War... fresh faces coming in as some of the old guard is on the way out.
If I were DC, I would reboot with a new Superman... a proper Superman who embodies the Superman we've all come to know and love. The next movie would be Batman, and that movie would have almost ZERO reference to anything that happened in the Superman movie. At this point, keep the characters totally separate. Allow each character to develop on its own, with its own distinctive flavor. The third movie would be Wonder Woman... again, distinct and on her own. Finally, the fourth movie would be Superman 2 and, for the first time, we start to pull on some threads that will tie those three together.
You would then, after four movies, do a proper Justice League, bring the three heroes, now properly developed in stand alone films, together. As you do, bring in one more character, Aquaman... he gets a bit of an intro in the new Justice League (much like Black Panther was introduced in Civil War).
After you do a proper Justice League, with characters everyone cares about, you can now do four films: Batman 2, Aquaman (who we now get to explore more in his own stand-alone), Wonder Woman 2, and Cyborg.
This slow trickling in of new characters allows each "hallmark" Justice League film to grow and be bigger than the previous. We'll actually get to see the development of the league... (continued)
That's what you're hanging your hat on? With the epic disaster that is JL, the ONLY thing you can find is to say the JL's third weekend drop is 3% less than Thor's weekend drop?
Wow... what a total, absolute, and epic failure that is. Given that Thor's drop opening to second weekend was less than JL's opening to second weekend drop, what does that tell us? Especially since, as you told us, JL had the nice, cushy, Thanksgiving holiday to fall into, and it still plummeted. Thor could drop 62% in its third weekend because it had such nice holds in its second! Thor 3 also knew it was going to have a drop in week 3 since it had to compete against the highly anticipated opening of JL, a film in the same genre. What did JL have to compete against this, its third weekend. NOTHING! No new movies of note. You think, just maybe, if Thor 3 had NO competition opening in its third week it might have done better than a 62% drop? Heck, I dare say it would have done far better than JL's 59% drop. I can make that claim because Thor 3 only dropped 22% its fourth week! Once people saw the unmitigated disaster that is JL, they went back to Thor 3 and gave it a nice, gentle drop in week four.
I will say this... your insistence on bringing up the ONE place you can say JL exceeded Thor 3, a slim 3% difference in the third week drops (in spite of all the ancillary reasons I just gave you above) is almost mind-numbingly insane. It's almost like I was dating Kate Upton and you were dating some butt-ugly woman, and you would constantly harp on the beauty spot on Kate's upper lip as some kind of proof that your hag was better. When Thor 3 is handing JL its proverbial butt in every statistical category, your instance on harping on this one minor item is COMICAL. So, please, keep bringing it up so the rest of us can keep laughing at your foolishness.
I'll also remind you that Thor 3 did so well opening to week 2 that it had a LOT more room to fall in week 3 that JL did.
What is really telling, and shows how looking at a single number can be so misleading, is if you look at each movie's drop from opening week to week 3, both Thor 3 and JL dropped an identical 83% drop... so Thor's strong hold opening to week 2 opened the door to a bigger drop week 2 to 3. JL's larger drop opening to week 2 gave it a slight boost to hold in week 3, since there was less to hold on to.
I'll also bet if you ask the studios would they prefer an 83% drop from $122 million or from $94 million, the answer would be EASY.
Oh... and also look into the small fact that Thor 3, in its third week, was competing against a highly anticipated OPENING weekend for JL, while JL in its third week had to compete against NO new major openings of ANY kind. The top 5 this week is almost identical to that of last week.
So yup... keep reminding us of that crushing 62% week three fall... I'm sure Marvel is weeping all the way to the bank. You know, with profits for Thor 3... something poor WB will probably never see for JL.