Is there a reverse inflation widget on the net somewhere?
Can I see that "take" in 1985 dollars and compare it to Back to the Future?
Right
here. I entered $60,000,000 in 2011 dollars and it gave me a number of $28.5 million in 1985 dollars, a inflation rate of -52% over the last 26 years.
Its opening weekend Back to the Future made $11 million its opening weekend in 1985 dollars, it opened in pretty much half as many theaters as the Green Lantern did and spent most of the summer in the #1 spot, being dropped to #2 for one week due to National Lampoon's European Vacation. It was #1 pretty much from it's opening in the first weekend in July until late September, taking in about $210m (in 1985 dollars) over the course of the Summer in the United States, equal to about $440in today's dollars.
Keep in mind we're pretty widly comparing things here, back to the future paid for its budget ($11 million) inside of two weeks, opened in far fewer theaters and in a completely different market than what exists today. But $-for-$, Green Lantern's opening weekend was a lot larger than Back to the Future's, the latter featuring a rising star in the acting world (Fox.)
Thank you
it would be almost impossible for a movie today to hold onto the number one spot for that long but if it did, we'd be talking about the first movie to gross over a billion dollars in the box office alone.
Yeah. I remember when
Jurassic Park came out, once you counted its time in the dollar theater, it was in theaters for about a year.
Of course, I think part of the difference is that every movie that comes out now has aspirations of being the next big blockbuster and gets a big push at the beginning. Even successful movies disappear from theaters in a few weeks because the new stuff crowds it out. At a couple of the big Harkins Theaters in the Phoenix area,
Thor is already down to about 1 screen, and that in 2-D.
From what I understand, DC is goin' for a Justice League movie just 'cause Marvel is makin' an Avengers movie. The difference is, Marvel is tyin' all their movies together, with character crossovers & such, while DC's plan seems to be to make seperate movies for their characters & then throwin' 'em together & callin' it Justice League.
Well, they'd have to do a lot of re-tinkering with a
Justice League movie. I mean, Batman would need to be recast, for one, since I don't see Christian Bale taking part in a larger DC universe. Warner Bros. is always struggling to get Superman right (and doesn't seem to recognize a good thing when they have it, considering Brandon Routh isn't coming back). They seemed to abandon their
Wonder Woman movie plans in place of the David E. Kelly TV show, which got rejected by NBC. So right off, DC's 3 biggest heroes are in flux.
It took something like, what, five years for the second Hulk movie? When all is said and done the gap between Superman movies will be even bigger.
The Incredible Hulk was a reboot, not a sequel to
Hulk.
It was a soft reboot. Fudge a few details in the flashbacks and
The Incredible Hulk is surprisingly consistent with
Hulk (apart from the recasting, of course). Hell, it's easier to reconcile the 2
Hulk movies with each other than it is certain portions of
X-Men: First Class with
X-Men: The Last Stand or
Highlander with ANY of its sequels.
"
Green Lantern... because your eight-year-old son doesn't know what the Cuban Missile Crisis was!"
Damn kids.
The Guardians of the Universe. Obnoxious people like Guy Gardner often refer to the Guardians as "Dwarfs" or even sometimes "Smurfs".
I call them Talosians.
Again...I see we're writing off films based on opening weekend. While incredibly important yes, it's not the be all and end all in studios green lighting sequels now. Overseas/international sales are taken into consideration and DVD sales are looked act before studios decide on a franchise's fate.
True enough. It's taken a while, but 20th Century Fox has finally started moving on a new
Percy Jackson & the Olympians movie.
Part of me wants to believe it's simply fans' hatred for Reynolds and the CGI suit that's coloring their judgement of the movie.
Fans hate Ryan Reynolds? I didn't know this. Frankly, even in such an uneven, controversial, frequently negative thread as this, people don't seem to be hating on Reynolds too much. (Certainly not when compared to how fanboys loved to dogpile on Ben Affleck when
Daredevil came out.)
When Iron Man came out, I thought that Robert Downey Jr. was totally miscast as Tony Stark and I couldn't figure out why everyone was raving about him. It was only later that I realized that RDJ's fun and charisma was probably needed to make the film a bigger success. A more accurate version of the character might not have made the movie what it was.
Just out of curiousity, who do you think would have been a more accurate actor to play Tony Stark?
I certainly won't argue that GL was very deep or complex, but then I never felt that way about Iron Man, Donner's Superman, Burton's Batman, or the first two Spidey films either. Those were all very simplistic movies as well, and yet most fans still manage to love those.
I'd rate
Iron Man on the same level as
Green Lantern as far as engaging emotional complexity. The difference there, as has been frequently noted, is Robert Downey Jr. That man is endlessly interesting to watch being a clever, charming asshole (even moreso in
Sherlock Holmes, IMO). He was such a surprising rapscallion and such an unlikely hero, nether boyscout nor brooding antihero, he's like the comic book movie equivalent of Captain Jack Sparrow.
Ryan Reynolds is very good sometimes, but generally plays his heroes very straight with just a little bit of wiseass thrown in. He singlehandedly makes
Blade Trinity watchable. I'd love to see him really cut loose in a
Deadpool movie. However, there's a subdued, compromised attitude towards his performance in
Green Lantern. The plot takes itself so seriously that he doesn't get a whole lot of opportunities to just start riffing. But then, Martin Cambell seems like a director intent on focused narrative momentum. He's not like David Goyer, who seemed to give Reynolds a very long leash in
Blade Trinity.
As for Richard Donner's
Superman & Tim Burton's
Batman, I would agree. Neither film really seems to get much of an emotional grasp of the character. They're more like a collection of random vignettes which capture the spirit, if not the psychology of the character. Frankly,
Batman Begins is the only Batman movie out there that's actually really about Batman. But to Tim Burton's credit, I think he did achieve a measure of emotional complexity when dealing with damaged freaks like the Penguin & Catwoman in
Batman Returns.
As for
Spider-Man, I'll admit it's a pretty simple story but it's also a profoundly eternal, universal one about the guy that can't get the girl to notice him. And it's done with such ambition, intending to be THE DEFINITIVE nerd gets the girl fantasy.
Probably my biggest problem with
Green Lantern is that it lacks ambition. It's clearly a comic book movie attempting to be one of many, cashing in on the popularity of the genre right now. I think, were we not so glutted with comic book movies right now, we might have gotten a more suitably epic treatment of the material. As is, no one stepped up to put their own stamp on the material because they were too busy making it fit in with all of the other comic book movies out there.