Brilliant Box Office Bombs

Oglaf is so good. So, so NSFW though. So very NSFW.

Oh, you know that establishing stroll that Mike and Sully take through Monstropolis?

In, like, two minutes there are three sight gags that show that these poor cursed creatures aren’t meant to live in this city. They suffer the injury-to-eye motif, their newspapers are burned to a crisp with a mere sneeze, and sidewalk grates dismember them. I know it’s just supposed to be funny, and in this movie monsters are just average Joes trying to catch a break (and maybe this is their penance for preying on the vulnerable at their most vulnerable) but give me the city design of Zootopia, where every creature has its place, any day. That’s my opening argument, anyway.

I don’t really see that as a failure of world building. The city is clearly modelled after a human city, for one, and half the point is how out of place the monsters are. The bit where the world building “matters” is in the scream plant itself, and it seems pretty successful. .

Now, Monsters University, sure, that’s some half hearted world building.

Just got around to watching Total Recall now on Netflix, and while I agree the production value was high, and an almost unnecessary effort for the fairly plain androids etc, I thought this was one plodding, boring flick. To be be more interesting than its predecessor, it need to be either more shocking or have more twists, and it failed in either category. The few callbacks it makes (three boobs, two weeks etc) wind up being as understated as possible to no real gain other than to remind you how great they were in the old movie, and they really didn’t expore body modification or the zany things people might be doing with technology (the phone in the hands was as far as that goes, and again Arnie pulling it through his nose was so much more entertaining.)

But more than anything else, the plot was as straight laced as it gets. After the recall moment, there are no zigzags or surprises… nothing. Just a lot of improbable moments dodging bullets and stealing helicopters (as if they wouldn’t put thumbprint ID on military hardware.) I wanted layers of memory misdirects, confusion on what was real and what wasn’t, and this at least could have worked in the no-nonsense direction they took. In the last moments of the film I desperately wanted him to wake up on the Recall bed, just to prove the script writer knew that he had to play with the concept a little bit, even if it would have been a deplorable it-was-all-a-dream movie.

Deserved to bomb.

Pretty neat website in the OP.

They had this article on July 4th releases that bombed:

I haven’t actually watched any of these. Though I did try to watch Wild Wild West once. Just like Batman & Robin, I just couldn’t get very far. It’s really boring.

I’m a Spike Lee fan though, so I really should get around to watching Summer of Sam one of these days. It never seems to pop up on streaming services though. I see that it’s current on Hoopla, but I don’t think Hoopla has HD movies, so I’d have to watch it in SD if I watch it there.

I haven’t seen it in forever, and it might have suffered a bit from so many other terrific movies released in 1999 (also Wild Wild West). As a serial killer movie I think Zodiac outshined it, but I remember it to be a cool slice-of-life period piece.

My mom had family out on Long Island then, and she told me how nervous she (pregnant with me) and my dad were driving through the big city while visiting them. She worried that a maniac with a .44 might jump out at them. That didn’t happen, obviously, but that same low-grade fear ran through the Summer of Sam movie – except when John Leguizamo and Mira Sorvino started disco dancing.

Kind of bananas that movie cost $40m. I assume it’s all in the co-stars salaries.

I just watched Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret, finally. It had a famously troubled and litigation-plagued post-production/release saga. It’s quite good, with three or four really strong performances.

According to Wikipedia it had a box office gross of $623,292 versus a $14 million budget.

Huh. I figured any Spielberg movie would make money. But I’ll admit, my daughter and I have really trawled through Netflix to watch a family movie together, and we’ve passed the cursor over it about a hundred times. Maybe it’s that I’ve read and seen so much Dahl in my life already, or what my imagination makes of what could happen in the flick isn’t interesting to me, or something, I don’t know.

My girlfriend and I enjoyed The BFG a lot more than we expected. Mark Rylance is perfect as the giant.

I’m not sure I’d call John Carter brilliant, but it deserved a lot more love than it received.

My son and I would both agree.

Lake Mungo had a $1.7 million budget.

It made $29,850 at the box office.

(I’d have to imagine through rentals and streaming it’s finally earned back a chunk of that. I’ve personally put in for the new limited edition version of the film that’s just come out.)

The King of Comedy only made $2.5M domestic against its $19.5M budget.

You’d think Scorsese and DeNiro in their primes would’ve moved more butts.

Me too.

Wow. We absolutely loved it and to this day get chills from the thought of that scene.

Have to imagine it made its money back in DVDs/licensing. It’s definitely a word of mouth movie.

Gattaca is pretty close to my favourite movie of all time. I had no idea that it had bombed so badly.

I actually saw it in the theatre. I’m in that 12 million!

Same! I liked it, and while I can understand why it wasn’t a mainstream hit, it still surprised me how completely it sunk without trace. I’d’ve thought the cast alone would have drawn more attention.

Locally, the sci-fi book club members went to see it, but apart from one or two paid up members of the Jude Law fan club, practically no one else did.