B+ CinemaScore, similar to the Suicide Squad movies. One made a $bazillion and the other was a major flop.
DC Movies - To Infinity and Beyond
- Thread starter dahj
- Start date
I'm not talking about starting points but end points. Captain Marvel/Shazam is based off Superman but he's better off as his own character than as the Superman of Earth-S. (Yes, yes, setting aside that he was originally from a different publisher so couldn't be.)
Let me put it this way. One of my best friends and I are always talking MCU and DCEU movies and which one we want to go see and are excited about. She and I have never once talked about Black Adam. And we're also not into The Rock that much.
I think had this movie been made with a less crowd-drawing lead, it would not have gotten this attention.
I just heard an interesting reviewer of Arabic ethnicity saying that this movie did some really interesting things with the effects of colonialism--and that he felt it was "messy" in a good way. The biggest weakness of the movie, according to this guy, was The Rock--the reviewer said the movie could have really been something with a lead of greater acting ability.
If you're referring to nations directly doing this, China is King of the Hill right now. In the western world, this is mostly done by corporations. Many of those are doing it to obtain metals that make our cell phones go.
Which is fine for that, but there's nothing wrong with having revisionist takes on Superman also (e.g. Smallville). Every work is different, so there's no logic to saying "Because X did this, everything else should do the same." Like I said, there's a whole spectrum of approaches. No matter what approach you look at, there are some examples that succeeded and others that failed. Because quality is not about what category of thing you do, it's simply about how well you do it.
Just to add, estimates for international box office are at $73 million, for worldwide estimates of $140 million.
That does not include China, where the film has not passed the censorship board yet, but is expected to, given Dwayne Johnson's popularity in China and his own interest in maintaining said popularity, so he probably will allow for major edits to ensure a Chinese release.
It is, of course, important to remember that these are estimates and not final numbers. Final numbers will only be available Monday afternoon at the earliest.
I don't understand how these movies can be called successful when they're costing as much or more but making less. Wasn't that roughly the same opening Star Trek Beyond got, which killed the Trek movie franchise? It was a massive plummet from Into Darkness' $87m or somesuch opening which was also seen as disappointing when Marvel movies were routinely smashing $100 million on opening weekend??
If it does as well in China as they think it will, they will make money. The domestic gross is getting less and less important with each year.
The Chinese box office doesn't generate much income for the studios. Most of the money stays in China. Which is why in the last year or so most studios have started to say "fine, ban the movie" instead of making cuts to please the Chinese government. It's not worth the extra effort and potential blow back for cowardice/pandering from the US audience (where studios make the most money from ticket sales) or other large western nations. The Rock does have a big following there, and the extra money from it will be nice, but China making or breaking film franchises like this just doesn't happen anymore like people thought it might a few years ago, due to how little studios get from the box office.
Well, first, I don't consider Smallville an example of an adaptation that bears little resemblance to the source material. (Which is a subjective call, but I've never claimed otherwise. It's art. It's all subjective.)
Secondly, again, I don't think anybody's saying adaptations that bear little resemblance can't be successful or good or high quality. Whether they're good is a separate matter from whether they'd be better off as original works instead of latching onto their vestigial IP connection to the source.
That's because you're looking at it from the tail end. Smallville started at a time before superhero movies ruled the box office, when comic-book-based projects were still considered something of a disreputable niche. So the original intention of the series was to reinvent the Clark Kent story without any comic-booky elements at all -- "no flights, no tights" -- and present it in a form palatable to mainstream audiences, something more in the vein of Dawson's Creek or Roswell. The same principle as the same network's short-lived Tarzan adaptation that was reinvented as a New York City detective drama -- take the characters and premise, but strip away all the genre elements in favor of something more conventional and crowd-pleasing. The express purpose was to transform the concept into something palatable to audiences who had no interest whatsoever in superhero comics, who didn't even know the show was inspired by Superman (and there were indeed fans of the show who did not know that).
But as Smallville went on, it changed massively in its approach. It ran so long that it drained its original premise dry, so it had to draw more ideas from the comics in order to sustain itself. And by that point, superhero movies had become more popular and respectable anyway, so the show didn't have to try as hard to conceal its comic-book roots. So in retrospect, people look at it as a heavily comics-influenced show. But I'm talking about the original intention of the show in its early seasons, when it aggressively avoided anything that even hinted at superhero comics.
And that very transformation within a single series highlights what I'm saying. Art is a continuum. You can't define impassable walls between different kinds of storytelling.
The problem there is making it a blanket generalization -- whether "they" would be better off, as if every one would have exactly the same result. That is utter nonsense. As I said already, quality is not determined by category. If it were, then everything of a given type would be equally good or bad, and that is obviously not true. Look at all the cases where one movie or show is a huge hit, and a dozen attempts to copy it are flops. It's not what you do that matters, only how well you do it. The ones that are "better off" are the ones that are done well, and whether they use existing character names or change them is a trivial consideration by comparison. That's the surface, not the substance.
Henry Cavill promises there's more to come for Superman
https://www.instagram.com/p/CkGjGIZL4rk/?hl=en
https://www.instagram.com/p/CkGjGIZL4rk/?hl=en
Wonderful news.
Did anyone else notice that it's the old Man of Steel suit he's seen wearing, with the bigger S and none of the writing in it which was introduced in BvS then in JL?