Zeigen

Back on April 22, I posted a contest to predict the Summer box office champ.

Just as a reminder, I picked one movie from each of the 18 weeks of the Summer movie season (between Memorial Day and Labor Day). Entrants had to guess the movie from that list with the highest opening weekend U.S. box office, the highest worldwide box office as of Labor Day, and the highest Rotten Tomatoes score.

(Box office data comes from The Numbers and was pulled as of the evening of September 10th.)

Here are the results for each of the 18 films:

And the same results plotted as a graph:

18 Summer movies plotted to show U.S. box office for opening weekend (blue line), worldwide box office (green bars) and Rotten Tomatoes score (red triangles); data from The Numbers (as of 9-10) and Rotten Tomatoes. Click to enlarge.

So, for the three questions, the correct answers were:

1. U.S. Opening Weekend Box Office: Transformers 2 with $108,966,307.

   Second place was Wolverine, but it wasn’t even close; Wolverine took only $85 million in its first weekend.

2. Worldwide Box Office: Harry Potter 6 with $917,436,218.

   Surprising to think a film that some consider to be a kids’ movie can take in close to $1 billion. Even more surprising is the second place finisher: Ice Age 3, which edged out Transformers 2. (Separately, I was not expecting Star Trek to be so far behind, ranking sixth out of 18 for worldwide take.)

3. Rotten Tomatoes score: Up with 97%.

   Star Trek was close with 95%, and third was Inglourious Basterds at 88%.

A few points of interest:

• Final Destination 4 was initially slated to open August 14, but moved to August 28, same week as Halloween 2. (It trounced Halloween 2, although both did pretty well for horror movies in Summer.)
• I didn’t give District 9 nearly enough credit. With an unknown director and actors, and scant plot details available at the time I made the contest, I didn’t pick it as one of the 18. If I had known about Final Destination 4 changing weeks, I probably would have selected District 9 anyway, but as it was I made a bad call. District 9 out-performed about half the films on the list, but wasn’t close to the top, so it didn’t ultimately matter.
• The worst performers of the 18 movies were Halloween 2 (taking both the lowest opening weekend and also lowest worldwide box office, although it has had less time than the other movies for that latter metric) and Year One, for worst Rotten Tomatoes score (16%). The three that performed the worst on the three metrics when combined were Land of the Lost, Year One, and Halloween 2.
• Including District 9, there were eleven other Summer films not on my list of 18 that did well. They all are in The Numbers’ list of the 50 films that have grossed the most in the U.S. so far in 2009 — and all of these 11 out-performed Halloween 2. (None of these films beat out the winners listed above.) These films are (in order of worldwide gross):
  1. The Hangover — June 5 ($440,227,055)
  2. Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian — May 22 ($410,687,642)
  3. The Proposal — June 19 ($285,837,964)
  4. Public Enemies — July 3 ($192,103,415)
  5. District 9 — August 14 ($126,517,464)
  6. The Ugly Truth — July 24 ($116,065,314)
  7. Ghosts of Girlfriends Past — May 1 ($96,736,445)
  8. Julie & Julia — August 7 ($83,260,082)
  9. Drag Me To Hell — May 29 ($79,525,024)
  10. My Sister’s Keeper — June 26 ($69,147,713)
  11. The Time Traveler’s Wife — August 14 ($63,728,728)
• There’s a good correlation between U.S. opening weekend box office and worldwide box office: r = 0.79.
• There’s very little correlation between Rotten Tomatoes score and either U.S. opening weekend box office (r = 0.15) or worldwide box office (r = 0.11). Some movies with bad reviews, such as Transformers 2, did very well, while some movies with good reviews, such as Inglourious Basterds, did relatively little business.
• Looking at production budget data from The Numbers, the three most expensive films to make were Harry Potter 6 ($250mm), Transformers 2 ($210mm), and Terminator 4 ($200mm). The three cheapest to make were Year One ($60mm), Brüno ($42.5mm), and Halloween 2 ($15mm).
• Only three films lost money: Land of the Lost (lost $35.4mm), Funny People (lost $12.2mm), and Year One (lost $2.4mm).
• In terms of percentage of investment return, Ice Age 3 pulled in an impressive 846% return, Harry Potter 6 returned 267% of the production budget, and Angels & Demons returned 223%.

So, who won the contest and can claim the free movie tickets as a prize?

Twelve people entered the contest.

For the first question, only Dave Zatz guessed the correct answer of Transformers 2, with some sterling analysis in his comment where he correctly pointed out that the first movie did enormous business worldwide despite being horrible.

For the second question, nine of the twelve entrants correctly identified Harry Potter 6; the franchise has always done well worldwide.

For the third question, four commenters (Dave Z., Lani S., Ken G., and Jim G.) correctly predicted that Up would have the highest Rotten Tomatoes score.

So, overall, no one got all three correct. Two entrants got 0 correct answers. (Roger’s guess of Land of the Lost for all three questions may have been less than serious.) Most people got at least one correct answer thanks to question 2. Four people ended up having two correct answers. Dave Z. got question 1 and 3 right. Getting question 2 and 3 right were Lani S., Ken G., and Jim G.)

In the comments, I identified that the bonus question — who would win in a fight? — would be used as a tie breaker.

(If I had used the metric of who was closest on the one they got wrong, Lani S. would have won. But I went with creativity of bonus answer.)

Dave Z. and Lani S. both failed to answer the bonus question, so get zero points for creativity. Jim G. answered Wolverine, but didn’t back up his answer with any creative analysis. I award him one point for creativity. Ken G. answered that the Transformers would destroy all the others, and gave a tiny bit more analysis, but his answer was still very skimpy. It was more than Jim’s, though, so I award Ken three points out of ten for creativity. (Personally I think magic is a huge advantage, so I think Harry Potter would be the sole survivor. I’m open to hearing counter-analysis.)

So, with the highest score for creativity, winning the two free movie tickets is Ken G. Congrats, Ken!

This was fun, so I hope to do this again next year, and perhaps a few more folks will enter. My thanks to everyone who entered! (more…)

I have no problem in saying that Hayao Miyazaki is the greatest creator of animated movies. My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, and Princess Mononoke are his best-known works, but there are many more. Currently my son is obsessed with all things Totoro, and that’s not far different from his father.

Miyazaki’s son, Goro, is the same age as me, 42.

In 2006, Goro directed Tales from Earthsea (and I’ll write more about that film later this week). While making that movie (which is not yet available in the U.S.), Goro wrote a series of blog articles that have been translated at a fan site called nausicaa.net. Goro is very plainspoken about his father in his 39th blog post:

Hayao Miyazaki, to me, is “Zero Marks as a Father, Full Marks as a Director”.

My father was almost never at home.
That’s why for me, when I was a child, my mother had to fill the place of my father.

My father came home every day in the middle of the night, after I had already gone to sleep. He was always very conscientious in this regard – apparently, no matter how late it was, he always made sure that he came home.
But almost every Saturday and Sunday he was still at work regardless. That’s why, from my earliest awareness to the present day, I hardly ever had the chance to talk to him.

More details appear in Goro’s next two blog posts. In post #41, Goro states that he studied the work of his father closely because that was the only way he could know and understand him.

When Goro was chosen to direct Tales From Earthsea based on the storyboards he created, there was a public argument between Hayao and Goro over whether or not Goro was ready to direct. Goro later states in the blogs that he and his father then avoided each other completely.

Apparently that rift was mended after the film was released, and the picture above shows sitting Hayao and Goro together. Hayao wrote Goro a note to say that the film was made honestly, and that that was good.

It’s easy to fill in the blanks and imagine Hayao as an obsessed workaholic, often absent from home. Many of Hayao’s works deal with children and their relationship with their parents. My Neighbor Totoro, for instance, was completed in 1988, when Goro would have been in college. I don’t know Hayao at all, but it seems to me that the price he paid for releasing such wonderful films was a very steep price indeed.

This summer features a surprisingly large number of well-known franchise films competing for your entertainment dollar, despite the great recession. If I were a major studio, I might hold off on some of these, but I suppose they’re gambling that summer movie escapism is recession-proof.

The upcoming potential blockbuster releases are listed below. For each week of summer, I picked the most buzz-worthy film.

1. X-Men Origins: Wolverine — May 1
2. Star Trek (dir J.J. Abrams) — May 8
3. Angels & Demons (The Da Vinci Code 2) — May 15
4. Terminator: Salvation — May 22
5. Up (Pixar) — May 29
6. Land of the Lost (Will Ferrell) — June 5
7. The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 (Denzel Washington) — June 12
8. Year One (Jack Black, dir Harold Ramis) — June 19
9. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen — June 26
10. Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs — July 3
11. Brüno (Sacha Baron Cohen) — July 10
12. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince — July 17
13. G-Force (Disney guinea pig flick) — July 24
14. Funny People (Seth Rogen, dir Judd Apatow) — July 31
15. G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra — August 7
16. Final Destination 4: Death Trip 3D — August 14
17. Inglorious Basterds (dir Quentin Tarantino) — August 21
18. H2: Halloween 2 (dir Rob Zombie) — August 28

(Certainly I’m leaving off a lot of films that are coming out this summer. And some, such as the new Woody Allen film Whatever Works, June 19, will probably do better than some of the 18 I’ve listed. But to keep things simple, let’s just consider these 18.)

Now, your tasks:

1. Predict which of the above 18 films will have the biggest box office opening weekend in the U.S. as determined by The Numbers.
2. Predict which of the above 18 films will have the biggest worldwide box office take as of Labor Day, as determined by The Numbers.
3. Predict which of the above 18 films will have the highest Rotten Tomatoes score.

Bonus question: In a fight between the protagonists of the above 18 films, who would win?

To enter, just leave a comment here or in FriendFeed.

Update 4/25: Prize is two movie ticket passes to the AMC chain. Deadline to enter is April 30th.

The first movie I’ve seen in the theater in 2009 is Coraline.

A vivid expansion of the 2002 Neil Gaiman book, genius drips off of every hand-crafted frame. If you liked A Nightmare Before Christmas or The Corpse Bride, the creepy stop-motion musicality of those films is propelled further by the 3-D, which is not used just for gratuitous look!-in-your-face!-a-trident! thrills here, but is instead used to enchant and vivify the pocket world of the film.

Dakota Fanning manages to make you forget it’s her talking. I knew it was John Hodgman playing the father going in but never recognized him once. Saunders and French are memorable, if brief, in appearance (but should have been given richer lines, I think).

The visual vocabulary is enthralling. I’m captivated by this film. The haunting choir soundtrack is a perfect match as well.

If I have a quibble, it’s the abbreviated nature and plaintive voices of the ghost children. Everything else is perfect. See this movie. I honestly can’t imagine many adults who wouldn’t like it. (But it’s not for young children.)

Updating my earlier post, it seems The Happening scored a horrific 20% on the Rotten Tomato meter, continuing the downward trend.

It’s too early to tell total box office, but it does look like it’ll do better business than Lady in the Water, and when I substitute opening weekend gross for total box office, you can see that The Happening is playing against trend. It’s doubtful, however, with ratings like these, that’ll it exceed the total box office for Signs or The Village.

(Click on the graph to see a larger version.)

Caught Cloverfield last night, after the kiddies went to bed (and after a super great date night where Kimi and I had a wonderful dinner out at Castro Point).

Look, this is a really well-made version of The Blair Witch Project reborn as a giant monster movie, and if you get motion sickness at all, the camera work here is going induce severe nausea.

It’s basically real-time (playing back the tape of a home movie), and so that means there’s no explanation and less resolution than you might hope for. There’s really less of everything that you might hope for. That said, I thought it was well-acted and exhilarating, unconventional, and even unpredictable (all things I’m really looking for), with first-rate production and special effects — and I’d rather it left me wanting more instead of feeling it had overstayed its welcome.

My main complaint is I’m not ready for 9/11 imagery to be reused in a monster movie. Early on, you get the clouds of smoke billowing down New York streets as panicked Manhattanistas take cover. I know this is 2008, over six years from 9/11, but trivializing the terror of that day by co-opting those emotions for a $10 carnival ride of a movie seems reprehensible to me. The movie would not have worked as well set in L.A., but I think Boston or San Francisco or Chicago or London or Paris would have served much better.

Despite being one of the worst-reviewed movies in recent history, I still wanted to see Requiem, which picks up immediately after the previous Aliens vs. Predator flick left off. So I caught it last night after the kids were in bed. (Thanks Kimi!)

Kimi thought I was nuts to want to see this instead of something, well, decent… But I’ve actually wanted to see this movie since 1991, ever since the teaser trailers for Alien 3. Those brief audio-only trailers made it sound like the Aliens had landed on Earth and were attacking us at home. Turns out, those trailers were a lie and Alien 3 ended up being my least favorite movie of the series by far. (They should have gone with the “Saturday Night Live” sketch’s idea and called it Alienses.)

Sure, the first Aliens vs. Predator (2004) was set on Earth, but it was confined inside some magic temple, so it wasn’t what I was expecting or wanted.

And while Requiem isn’t the most tightly-plotted or superbly-acted movie you’ll ever see, I think it’s far more entertaining than any of the others in the series since Aliens, and it really does deliver on the scenario that scared me 16 years ago. This movie does not pull any punches: animals, children, and lead characters are all in jeopardy.

Don’t misunderstand me, though: Aliens is about 500 times better than Requiem. Steven Pasquale (Garrity from “Rescue Me”) and Reiko Aylesworth (Michelle from “24″) are the closest thing to stars they got, and they ain’t really movie stars. Making Reiko’s character Kelly so obviously based on Ripley (protecting her daughter, driving the tank) seems like a misfire to me, but both leads do a decent job. (Whoever they have as the sheriff was terrible and badly miscast, though.)

There are certainly plot holes in this that defy any ability to suspend disbelief. But if you want to see Aliens attacking a town on Earth with Predators mixed in, and a nice twist (telegraphed by the ending of the previous movie), the action scenes work, the movie is decently crafted with good special effects and a tight pace, and it’s not nearly as bad as the critics say.

For the record, here are my ratings of the films in the series, using the -4 (truly horrible) to 0 (meh) to +4 (wow!) scale:

By the way, Defective Yeti nailed the whole “versus” genre a while back.

So Sunday night (after Kimi got her hair cut and hung out in the city that day), I saw the late showing of Beowulf in 3D.

This movie is a gimmick wrapped inside a gimmick wrapped inside an enigma. But it does succeed in being entertaining.

First of all, it’s computer animated. And the human expressions are, quite frankly, not very good. Robin Wright Penn’s character, Wealthow, is particularly wooden. While brief scenes are photo realistic enough to trick the eye, I was never able to suspend disbelief for long because of the uncanny valley effect. These animated characters aren’t cartoonish enough to be lovable or sympathetic, and they aren’t human enough to pass as realistic. The effect is ultimately as if you’re watching a movie starring stop-motion mannequins.

The second gimmick is the three-dimensional effect. I don’t wear glasses normally, so it’s distracting to have to wear the 3-D glasses. And every opportunity that exists for a spear to be thrust in your face or an axe to be hurled toward you is taken. It’s not immersive; it’s distracting.

The enigma is the cold story of a relationship built on a foundation of lies. It’s a bit more resonant than the actual Beowulf epic; in fact, this movie shares little with the original old English story other than its setting, character names, and the vague idea that a hero named Beowulf at one point fights a monster named Grendel. The story is a bit off-putting, preventing you from really forming any kind of attachment to the wooden mannequins parading around in front of you, waving swords, disrobing, and leaping from parapet to crag.

Brief scenes that work are amazing, and these are mostly the action sequences. Certain ones near the end involving an event and creature quite different from what happens in the Beowulf epic I remember from Freshman English are stirring and make this a movie worth checking out, as long as you’re forewarned ahead of time of the gimmicks.

Kimi, John, Yvonne and I saw Stardust this evening. Kimi’s cousin Miranda drove up with her boyfriend Alex to babysit, and unfortunately Sammy was a bit upset with Kimi and me leaving, and ended up crying so hard that he threw up a lot. (How’s that for a reproduction deterrent?) But he settled down with them and ended up having a fun night — and so did we. I had read the Neil Gaiman book previously (long enough ago that I didn’t remember it very clearly) and it seemed that the movie was a nice melange of the book, the comic book, with a dash of The Princess Bride thrown in.

Several times Kimi squeezed my hand in delight; it is really a magical movie, well worth seeing. Many things invented for the movie — Robert DeNiro’s expanded character, “Billy” the man-goat — really work well cinematically. While I’d have loved to see the seven brothers have a fuller role as they do in the book, the movie gets the point across, and the two leads do a marvelous job.

I can’t figure out why this movie doesn’t have better reviews and box office numbers. It’s wonderful. See it.

Kimi and I saw this Friday evening (thanks to Kimi’s Uncle Tom for babysitting Sammy), after gobbling down a quick dinner from Los Portales.

We both loved Ratatouille. Technically it’s an amazing achievement, with the human character animation, camera control and lighting incredibly advanced compared to previous computer animated efforts I’ve seen. That’s some realistic rat fur. As far the plot and story and acting goes, all very good but it’s more adult and not quite as universally engaging as some of the previous Pixar work. Overall, I’d rank it above Cars but below Finding Nemo. My favorite remains The Incredibles.

I have to say that there’s something a bit unappetizing about rats working on food that’s being served to humans. As much as they tried to work past that, part of me was a little repulsed. But there’s one scene, a flashback, that nearly brought a tear to my eye. Such a beautiful moment.

I had very high expectations for Ratatouille, and I wasn’t disappointed. And for a movie bearing the Disney logo, such a daringly non-Disney movie! The very name of the movie, a hard to pronounce and spell vegetarian stew, tells you that they’re not dumbing down anything for the audience.

Bravo, Pixar.