‘Star Trek 3′: Roberto Orci Wants to Direct

The protest that RT reviews are "hind sight" is a foolish one, given that complainers about the Abrams films like to counter their success with mumblings about "the test of time." Doesn't look like time's been real kind to some fan favorites.

 

Or, maybe it works at the box office because people don't think it's junk. Our personal opinions do not, and should not, mean that others will agree.

I do. If you release movies no one wants to see, then the franchise dies, and you and I never get to see new entries. And even if you don't like the new entries, maybe the interest in the new movies will make interest in the classic stuff rise, too.

But here's the problem: who is the judge of what is "good" writing ?

Well, yeah. How can you objectively say if a movie is good or not ?

Why did you fail to answer the question ?

Then why are we discussing this as if it meant anything about the movie itself, rather than the poster ?

What other "failure" could you be talking about ?

"Letters from Iwo Jima" comes to mind.

 

Sounds about right to me. (And glad you enjoyed the piece!)

 

That actually supports it. You can fairly compare new films with old films based on the reviews once time has passed and the new films have been reviewed in hindsight as well. Something is an "instant classic"? Well, just wait for it. Movies are a product of their time and can be received differently as time passes. You'd have to compare the reviews based on the time around the premiere to make a fair comparison. Just looking at the average Tomatometer or IMDb score or whatever says basically nothing.



btw, do you think in 30 years Into Darkness will be quoted by another Trek reboot, like it quoted TWOK? If so, what do you think would be the thing they are going to quote/pay homage to?

 

Rough outing there, Belz... -- most of the questions you're asking there have already been answered, sometimes in the very posts you're quoting. Perhaps a nice refreshing cup of coffee is in order?

 

No.

Reread the thread.

 

Much as I take RT scores with a sizable grain of salt, I'll give them this much: very roughly-speaking the "top five" of the old film franchise on Noname's chart pretty much are the "fan favorites" you'd expect to see there: First Contact, TWOK, TVH, TUC and TSFS. It's the order that looks more debatable than anything else, because First Contact is according to RT the most "critically acclaimed" and if you took a poll today, how many people really would say that First Contact was a better movie than TWOK, as the RT numbers contend? How many people would even remember First Contact better, despite its having been more recent? Probably not many, right?

The contention that movies' reputations change over time is of course trivially correct, I can't see why someone would bother dancing around it. (Excepting if they were trying to defend the Abrams movies as being the notional equivalent of Citizen Kane, but luckily we never see that here.)

 

I asked, "Everything other than $$$ is purely subjective?" You responded:

Let's start here.

You have committed to an absolute categorical claim here. It's not just that anything other than money is a subjective measure, but that anything other than money is a purely subjective measure.

Not only is this incorrect (we could, for example, go by the objective metric of "which director has the largest nose"), but there are reasons why we should doubt that profit is the best measure. Let's run through a few reasons...

1. Studios have a tendency to inflate production costs and this problematizes our ability to simply look at a profit/loss statement as a measure of success. There are all sorts of financial games that studios play, so it is unwise to assume that we've got raw/pure data. Subjectivity is in the frame of $$$ as well. Real-world financials are more complicated than headlines suggest http://io9.com/5747305/how-much-money-does-a-movie-need-to-make-to-be-profitable/all

2. Box Office is a pretest or "previewing" measure. You pay to see the movie before you get to see it. Box Office returns, therefore, reflect things like marketing, buzz, and demographic interests. When I pay my $20 to see the film I am not offering my assessment of the film, rather I am making an investment and hoping it turns out for the best.

3. In today's climate, most films have to make a lot of money on the first weekend, because there is a severe drop off as the next film comes into town. This mitigates the chance that people will invest in viewing (#2) as a result of strong word-of-mouth. Rather, it sharpens the effect that marketing and opening week hype needs to have.

4. People don't see movies in a vacuum. Competition matters. One film competing in a weak field of competitors in a strong viewing season (e.g., economic upturn, consumer confidence, weak TV and internet competition) may make substantially more money than it would have were it released in a more competitive environment.

5. Sometimes films will flop at the box office, but then find a second life as audiences rediscover the movie (e.g., Blade Runner).

How else could we measure success? Well, first we have to define success. It seems that people in conversations like these are concerned with what makes a "good quality film." OK, so what is a good quality film? There are a lot of possible answers (even objective ones!) to this question, but a typical feature, and one which appears to motivate discussions like these is "enjoyment." Did it please people?

Indeed, the vulgar measure of $$$ appears to be an attempt to measure how much people liked it in terms of how much of it they purchased. On the other hand, if you fall back to the tired line of analysis that "producers only make films to make money, therefore, quality is profit" then the discussion reduces quality to a hollow tautology. To highlight this, allow me to re-frame the question that has been put to me in these terms,

"How else could you measure how much money a film has made, except to determine how much money it has made?"

Not a particularly interesting question, is it?

So, working from the assumption that you're not falling back on a tautology and that you are attempting, at least in part, to determine "how much people liked it," how could we objectively assess this better than by the use of box office returns? Well, we could survey audiences with a standardized instrument after they see the movie using a Likert-type scale. We could conduct focus groups, using inter-coding techniques to establish objectivity. If we wanted to go buck wild, we could do fMRI scans of viewers' brains to see if the pleasure centers of their brains lit up. More practically, we could go online and use services like survey monkey to implement our survey. We might also look to MRQE, IMDB, and Rotten Tomatoes for aggregated critical responses. We might engage in multi-criterial analysis, awarding quality points based on different indexes of enjoyment. There are all sorts of things we might do which would give us valuable data on the question.


The easy thing to do, the rather lazy thing to so, is to simply point at reported box office returns, but this does not mean that we should accept that this is "the only possible objective measure," let alone the ideal measure.

 

Amazing Spider-Man 2 has pulled in 277 million worldwide thus far. Anyone who's expecting either Orci's career prospects or his influence on current commercial cinema to decline in the near future had better not be holding their breath.

 

Well to be fair I think that ASM2 is under-performing what Sony was probably hoping. I mean if I told you 10 years ago a Spiderman movie would make less than a Captain America movie........well you get it.

 

Forbes breaks down the numbers. (The cumulative total they give for its worldwide opening is actually $369m.)

 

Isn't it like the 5th Spiderman movie in 13 years?

And they're just rebooting not having further adventures.

 

Yeah totally. There are other factors involved also but Im just doubting any execs are jumping for joy over the money spiderman is making. In Hollywood they figure out ahead of time how much each movie is 'supposed' to make for all their financials to work out. Spiderman is gonna make a crap-ton more than most every other film of the year, but if they were banking on at least 260 million in the US, which is not unreasonable because the first movie did it, somebody is busy revising profits downward right now. The Forbes article seemed pretty optimistic but the B+ CinemaScore says general moviegoers aren't loving it either.

But more on topic, I think Orci will probably get Star Trek 3 just because of the performance of thelast two and a desire to continue along the same path, with or without JJ. How Spiderman does will probably not factor into that decision.

 

$92M, isn't bad, would that include today? If so, yea, they could have hoped for more like the International Box Office numbers, but, even though, it's International, $277M isn't bad so far, that doesn't appear to include China, The first one got $48M out of China?

 

10 years ago the idea there would be a Captain America movie was a bit far fetched to most people.

 

I think ASM2 will still be regarded as a success and therefore Orci.

Who knows whether Orci will make a good director?
I suppose I'd rather him do his debut on a another film but if he does get the gig I don't suppose there will be a big departure from Abram's style.

 

The problem with the answers is that they are inconsistent. If one is one's own judge of what is good, why would one then go ahead and call a movie a "failure", when the only failure is failing to be good for that one person ?

It's one thing to respond to a question, and another to answer. I also note that you thought it was more productive to be snarky than to actually provide any answers.

Yes, although asking this question is outside the scope of this topic. Why would you even bring it up ? The point is that any appreciation of a movie is subjective. Is the cinematography good ? Well, it can be good for you and bad for me, so that's out. Every question about any aspect of the movie itself has the same trouble. But how much money it made doesn't change from one individual to the next. Is there another such objective metric you have in mind ?

Yes, money is so unsophisticated...
How could you measure how people "liked" the movie in general ? The IMDB rating ?

 

This question has been answered.

I can't say much more than that.

 

Exactly so. A poll of angry fanbois is probably even better.

There's not another objective measure of a movie's success than what people are willing to pay to see it. It shouldn't need repeating that the studios produce movies in order to make money by entertaining people. Period.