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X-Men: Dark Phoenix.

Started by Glebe, June 07, 2019, 12:34:55 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

Dr Rock

Quote from: Phil_A on June 09, 2019, 09:38:35 AM
I agree, I've been thinking for a long time there will come a point where people are sick of the Marvel formula and will stop going to see those kinds of films. It'll be interesting to see what happens when the next round of MCU movies are out, now that they've lost several of the key stars and two of the key directors, will we see a drop-off?

Disney seem like they're too big to fail at this point, but it pays to remember they've had periods in the last forty years where a run of successive flops have really damaged the companies' fortunes. It could happen again.

I think eventually big studio superhero movies will go the way of the likes of Westerns or Musicals that were once the bread and butter of the entire industry.

Maybe, but I heard people saying that ten years ago. I think superhero movies are lasting because they are not formulaic, there's not much in common between Guardians Of The Galaxy, Deadpool, Logan and Winter Soldier. Also what would replace them? if you take a year like 1998, when superheroes were in the wilderness, the top ten grossing movies of the year were mostly dogshit.

Phil_A

Quote from: Dr Rock on June 09, 2019, 09:45:12 AM
Maybe, but I heard people saying that ten years ago. I think superhero movies are lasting because they are not formulaic, there's not much in common between Guardians Of The Galaxy, Deadpool, Logan and Winter Soldier. Also what would replace them? if you take a year like 1998, when superheroes were in the wilderness, the top ten grossing movies of the year were mostly dogshit.

The year after that you had American Pie though, which kicked off the trend of edgy teenage gross-out comedies. It's not easy to predict what the next big fad will be, but I'm sure something else will come along.

Dr Rock

Yeah it would, but I meant what might replace them could be a lot be worse.

greenman

Quote from: Dr Rock on June 09, 2019, 09:45:12 AM
Maybe, but I heard people saying that ten years ago. I think superhero movies are lasting because they are not formulaic, there's not much in common between Guardians Of The Galaxy, Deadpool, Logan and Winter Soldier. Also what would replace them? if you take a year like 1998, when superheroes were in the wilderness, the top ten grossing movies of the year were mostly dogshit.

That does stand out to me as well, people talk about the current era negatively but the reality is that with the odd exception like Lord of the Rings blockbuster cinema has been pretty weak since the early 90's, lots of terrible CGI showcases and action films that were arguably much more generic. The culture of a large amount of blockbusters being driven by creative people really started to come under threat by the late 80's IMHO and if anything Marvel feels like somewhat of shift in the other direction, not total freedom but rather more freedom.

Marvel specifically I think had an obvious turning point around 2014 were people were becoming somewhat burnt out on their style and we saw Winter Solider and Guardians take things in rather different direction.

johnlogan

Quote from: Dr Rock on June 09, 2019, 09:45:12 AM
Maybe, but I heard people saying that ten years ago. I think superhero movies are lasting because they are not formulaic, there's not much in common between Guardians Of The Galaxy, Deadpool, Logan and Winter Soldier. Also what would replace them? if you take a year like 1998, when superheroes were in the wilderness, the top ten grossing movies of the year were mostly dogshit.

I didn't think 1998 was that bad! Although there were some obvious howlers then, and the better films were the smaller ones.

That period is interesting, because it was around that time that studios were learning hard lessons about putting out any old shite, and expecting it to do well through blanket hype, with Godzilla and Batman & Robin being the obvious examples.

I'm not sure superhero movies would be displaced any time soon, but when two of the major studios are immediately locked out of the genre (and Paramount have suffered incredibly because of it), it does suggest that something's going to give way.

Paaaaul

The biggest mistake the filmmakers made was expecting Sophie Turner to portray a range of emotions onscreen.
She couldn't, so they have to to rely on the colour change in her eyes, and the electricity running across her cheeks to express her emotional state for her.

Kelvin

Quote from: Paaaaul on June 09, 2019, 04:40:04 PM
The biggest mistake the filmmakers made was expecting Sophie Turner to portray a range of emotions onscreen.
She couldn't, so they have to to rely on the colour change in her eyes, and the electricity running across her cheeks to express her emotional state for her.

The same is true of Sylvester Stallone in the Rocky films, of course.

The Roofdog

Had to have a little chuckle thinking about the fact that Days Of Future Past was supposed to cleverly bridge the continuity between the McAvoy and Stewart films. It already contradicted The Last Stand & The Wolverine and now its penultimate scene directly contradicts Dark Phoenix too. Time travel eh?

peanutbutter

Quote from: johnlogan on June 09, 2019, 01:44:39 AM
This was back before Netflix and the like were quite so ubiquitous, too. Whilst this attitude is easy to point and laugh at (and I believe it was at the time) when the new Avengers film makes a ludicrous amount of money, the big money is going to fewer films at this point, much more so than even 10 years ago. Even times of the year where decent mid-range adult pictures traditionally do well are now being flooded with tacky summer shite like Venom.
I feel like that mid range adult audience possibly just doesn't exist as strongly now and it has very little to do with superhero movies as its to do with the onslaught of self-proclaimed prestige-TV being shat out. There's too much media to take in, at least picking a tv series will free you from having to choose what to pick next for a few days.

Quote from: St_Eddie on June 09, 2019, 04:36:14 AM
Oh, well, in that case; my local cinema serves hot food too.  I always respected the Alamo Drafthouse chain of cinemas more for their zero tolerance towards noise making cunts.  I guess cunts with smelly hot food is okay in their eyes.  I suppose I'd take that over talking throughout films and checking phones every five minutes.  The lesser of two evils, I guess.  Having said that, on the subject of hot food...

Well, the difference from what I've seen over here is that the Drafthouse cinemas are willing to sacrifice quite a lot of seating space to avoid the whole serving process from being a huge distraction. I know I mentioned it to someone in London and they said one of the chains here done something very similar but the experience was a HUGE distraction in comparison to what I experienced in California.

The Roofdog

Odeon Whiteley's in West London is the only one I'm aware of that does something similar and it costs an arm and a leg because of, as you say, the space between the seats for the servers to run around. I saw Hobbits 2 there.

Glebe

Quote from: The Roofdog on June 09, 2019, 11:42:13 PMOdeon Whiteley's in West London is the only one I'm aware of that does something similar and it costs an arm and a leg because of, as you say, the space between the seats for the servers to run around. I saw Hobbits 2 there.

Merry and Pippin?


peanutbutter

Quote from: The Roofdog on June 09, 2019, 11:42:13 PM
Odeon Whiteley's in West London is the only one I'm aware of that does something similar and it costs an arm and a leg because of, as you say, the space between the seats for the servers to run around. I saw Hobbits 2 there.
Thats another issue with the format over here, Americans are seemingly happy to piss away huge sums of money on overpriced food from their cinema seats so the actual cinema tickets were still pretty cheap. Iirc cinemas make ALL of their money from concessions over there with the ticket money largely going to the studio for the first few weeks, whereas in europe the cinemas take the bulk of the ticket price.

SavageHedgehog

I'm not sure First Class was intended to be a complete reboot, or if it was they pulled back on that by the time of its actual release, as the opening prologue is set during, and includes footage from, the opening scene of the first film.

Did they ever explain how Stewart Xavier undied between Last Stand and the start of Days of Future Past?

Bad Ambassador

There's a post-credits scene that suggests Xavier transmitted/copied his mind into a homeless man.

That's all the explanation there is. RLM have noted that Jean defeated Apocalypse with her Phoenix powers, suggesting they can't even get basic continuity right from one film to the next.

mothman

In Last Stand there was a clone of Xavier with no higher brain functions for some reason. Like Dr. Manhattan's intrinsic field origins, after the DP'ed (EYY!) JG vaporises him, he moves his consciousness into the clone. A mid-or end-credits scene implying that was shot but I think not used, it wasn't the done thing back then. It doesn't explain why he still can't walk though.

Glebe

Dark Phoenix Had By Far The Worst Opening For An X-Men Movie.

QuoteDeadpool -- $132,434,639 (2/12/16)
Deadpool 2 -- $125,507,153 (5/18/18)
X-Men: The Last Stand -- $102,750,665 (5/26/06)
X-Men: Days of Future Past -- $90,823,660 (5/23/14)
Logan -- $88,411,916 (3/3/17)
X2: X-Men United -- $85,558,731 (5/2/03)
X-Men Origins: Wolverine -- $85,058,003 (5/1/09)
X-Men -- $54,471,475 (7/14/00)
X-Men: Apocalypse -- $65,769,562 (5/27/16)
X-Men: First Class -- $55,101,604 (6/3/11)
The Wolverine -- $53,113,752 3,924 7/26/13
Dark Phoenix --$33 million (6/7/19)

Cripes. Meanwhile:

Original Dark Phoenix Ending Included Skrulls And A 'Huge' New York Battle, According To Tye Sheridan.

Quote"It's really hard for me to remember what the ending of this movie is. [laughs] Originally, it was scripted that Charles and Scott go to the U.N. because -- man, I'm totally going to mess this up -- they go to the U.N. because they're going to try to tell the President that, 'Hey, we're under attack by aliens and, they've now captured Jean Grey.' Or, you know, whatever it is that we're going to tell him.

And then Jean comes down in the front of the U.N., and causes... there is this huge battle between the guards at the U.N. and Jean Grey, and all the guards turn out to be Skrulls. And then Jean and Scott are -- Scott is fighting Skrulls in the fountain. He gets thrown into the fountain in front of the U.N. And then Jean comes down and basically fights all of the Skrulls off, and then blasts back off into space. [She] basically says goodbye to Scott and Charles. And then it's all over, I guess."

Now the question becomes, will we ever see this original ending as part of maybe a director's cut home video release? Tye Sheridan isn't sure, but from what he told the ReelBlend hosts, they for sure shot an official version of the sequence, so it's finished somewhere.

"Oh man, good question. We shot that [sequence] like two or three times, actually. ... But I mean, it's part of the process, man. You never know. Something could read so great on the page, and then the second you put it on a screen in front of someone, it becomes something else. It's really hard to figure out, you know, what the best version of a movie is. And also, specifically, the ending of a film. The ending of a film is really hard to nail. And obviously these films set up a formula where you kind of want to see, you know, there's always a big battle at the end. For the X-Men, you kind of want to see them united together at the end. So that was, I think that was what led to the reshoots, and I could be totally wrong. ... But yeah, that's my 2 cents there."

Yeah, that's pretty much Avengers-meets-Captain Marvel.

It's funny, but I think in some ways this was actually worse than The Last Stand (which was on Film4 t'other night... as was X2).

colacentral

There's just too many big films out at the moment - Avengers, Godzilla, Aladdin, Pikachu, to name a few. It seems like a very bloated summer of blockusters. I'd put it's flopping partially down to that, as the typical cinema goer to these types of films would have been out alot recently, and a new X-Men film in this tired franchise with bad reviews isn't going to get them out. There's no real gimmick or hook to it beyond it being just another sequel too.

lipsink

It's weird, cos I was sure X Men: Apocalypse was going to be the last one with Fassbender, McAvoy and Jennifer Lawrence. That film seemed like the end of that era and a set up for all the younger cast to take over. Any spark that was in the first 2 films had also just gone by that point and that trio of actors (well, Fassbender and Lawrence at least) looked like they just didn't want to be there.

mjwilson

Quote from: colacentral on June 10, 2019, 05:12:02 PM
There's just too many big films out at the moment - Avengers, Godzilla, Aladdin, Pikachu, to name a few. It seems like a very bloated summer of blockusters. I'd put it's flopping partially down to that, as the typical cinema goer to these types of films would have been out alot recently, and a new X-Men film in this tired franchise with bad reviews isn't going to get them out. There's no real gimmick or hook to it beyond it being just another sequel too.

But also it has terrible reviews. I don't see why we need "lots of films" as an excuse for it flopping when the word-of-mouth is so bad.

colacentral

Yeah, I said that. And Wolverine and The Last Stand got terrible reviews too but did significantly better. It's not the only factor. Released in August or September and maybe it would do much better.

Why do you think it's an "excuse"? Like I give a toss about a film I'm not even bothering to watch.

Dr Rock

I don't think Wolverine and The Last Stand got such negative reviews when they came out. And there was less internet then.

mothman

There's always a summer blockbuster bloat so I don't think that's a factor. Every time there is one and a couple of sure things fall short, you get all the think pieces coming out saying this is the end of the whole business model, and then suddenly it's the next summer and all is fine. Many of us have said in many threads here that the whole "$200million movie has to make half a billion to be profitable" thing isn't sustainable but they're not gonna stop.

colacentral

This time last year, the biggest films out over the summer were Avengers, Jurassic World 2, A Quiet Place, The Incredibles 2, Solo, and Ocean's 8. That's considerably weaker competition on the whole compared to this year. There's still Men in Black, Toy Story 4, and Spider-Man coming out shortly. That's alot of stuff vying for attention.

mjwilson

Quote from: colacentral on June 10, 2019, 05:55:18 PM
Yeah, I said that. And Wolverine and The Last Stand got terrible reviews too but did significantly better. It's not the only factor. Released in August or September and maybe it would do much better.

Why do you think it's an "excuse"? Like I give a toss about a film I'm not even bothering to watch.

Just how your post came across to me, sorry if I misread your intentions.

Phil_A

Quote from: Dr Rock on June 10, 2019, 06:09:21 PM
I don't think Wolverine and The Last Stand got such negative reviews when they came out. And there was less internet then.

Wolverine had a lot of negative buzz because a workprint version got leaked online with lots of effects shots missing, and they had to practically beg people to go and see the finished version(probably because they knew it was a stinker and were worried that seeing how bad the rough cut was would kill it at the box office.)

Glebe

Quote from: Dr Rock on June 10, 2019, 06:09:21 PMI don't think Wolverine and The Last Stand got such negative reviews when they came out. And there was less internet then.

The Wolverine starts off well but gradually goes off the rails... and that little X-Men sting at the end is bollocks.

I've still not seen X-Men Origins: Wolverine, actually.

Soz Phil, jumped in ahead of you there:

Quote from: Phil_A on June 10, 2019, 06:50:16 PMWolverine had a lot of negative buzz because a workprint version got leaked online with lots of effects shots missing, and they had to practically beg people to go and see the finished version(probably because they knew it was a stinker and were worried that seeing how bad the rough cut was would kill it at the box office.)

Dr Rock

Quote from: Phil_A on June 10, 2019, 06:50:16 PM
Wolverine had a lot of negative buzz because a workprint version got leaked online with lots of effects shots missing, and they had to practically beg people to go and see the finished version(probably because they knew it was a stinker and were worried that seeing how bad the rough cut was would kill it at the box office.)

Oh yeah I remember that. But it was reasonably self-contained amongst nerds that visited AICN and such. These days (ten years later) more people have access to all the online negative buzz, it can kill a movie stone dead which seems to have happened here.

kidsick5000

If this wasn't a finale (admittedly forced upon them) this could have been course correction.
Unfortunately, this is a very low-key compared to most recent superhero films.
The franchise is a mess as it it is with zero regard for its own timeline or the events in its own movies.

Apocalypse is the worst of the franchise in so many ways, minor to major. Just look how Olivia Munn is dressed at Auschwitz. It's an awful high cut purple bathing suit of a costume - one where the material is so reflective, all the focus is on her pelvis. In Auschwitz.

I feel that critics sometimes smell blood and go into a feeding frenzy.
It's a troubled film in a troubled franchise (especially given it's inextricably linked to Bryan Singer).

Quote from: Phil_A on June 10, 2019, 06:50:16 PM
Wolverine had a lot of negative buzz because a workprint version got leaked online with lots of effects shots missing, and they had to practically beg people to go and see the finished version(probably because they knew it was a stinker and were worried that seeing how bad the rough cut was would kill it at the box office.)

That was Wolverine: Origins. One writer wrote about what was in it and lost his job for illegal downloading.

Glebe

Quote from: kidsick5000 on June 11, 2019, 02:08:59 AMApocalypse is the worst of the franchise in so many ways, minor to major. Just look how Olivia Munn is dressed at Auschwitz. It's an awful high cut purple bathing suit of a costume - one where the material is so reflective, all the focus is on her pelvis. In Auschwitz.

Yes, that scene was actually offensive. Utter twaddle.

QuoteI've still not seen X-Men Origins: Wolverine, actually.

Quotestarts off well but gradually goes off the rails... and that little X-Men sting at the end is bollocks.

I would argue that there's a great little short movie hidden in X-men Origins. Indeed, here it is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xAQluuB8QI

There is more good stuff in that 2.50 introductory scene than in the rest of the movie put together.