IT'S OFFICIAL - TFA is HIGHEST US Domestic Earner of ALL TIME!!!!

[MacLeod]

At least Americans seemed to catch on with the Transformers movies.
Transformers - 319 mill
Transformers 2- 420 (+30%)
Transformers 3- 352 (-17%)
Transformers 4- 245 (-31%)

Meanwhile in China.....
$37,218,823
$65,837,290
$165,100,000
$320,000,000

Which just highlights the point I made earlier, the market in China has increased in recent years. So whilst audiances in some places have declined new markets have made up for the shortfall.

 

[Mach5]

(Ex Machina, while good, just didn't grab me as much as I was hoping it would).

Really? That gut feeling that that ending gave me stuck with me for days. I thought the movie was amazing.

Fury Road, on the other hand... Two hours of shallow eye candy, no "zing" whatsoever.

 

[dahj]

Fury Road, on the other hand... Two hours of shallow eye candy, no "zing" whatsoever.

So your final grade... mediocre?

 

[Tom Hendricks]

At least Americans seemed to catch on with the Transformers movies.
Transformers - 319 mill
Transformers 2- 420 (+30%)
Transformers 3- 352 (-17%)
Transformers 4- 245 (-31%)

Meanwhile in China.....
$37,218,823
$65,837,290
$165,100,000
$320,000,000

That was because of the inclusion of Chinese characters and shooting in China.

 

[Joel_Kirk]

So your final grade... mediocre?

Ahh, Mad Max: Fury Road:

It's lives...it dies....it lives again!

 

[JirinPanthosa]

All you saw in Fury Road was shallow eye candy? Not sure we were watching the same movie there. First, the eye candy was some of the recent best. There wasn't just a bunch of CGI creating a lot of busy distraction and light shows in the background. They were a lot more visually interesting than the dull flaunting of technology you get in most recent films. The actions in the action scenes made creative stylized use of physical objects instead of just having hails of bullets and superhumans throwing around flashes of energy.

The emotional story in the movie was simple, just a woman trying to free a dictator's wives from slavery because one of them got pregnant and didn't want her son to be a warlord. That's more powerful to me than just the usual hero arc we get from the average action film. 90% of all superhero, fantasy and scifi films are emotionally identical and follow strictly to a template, and only 10% of those manage to do anything with that template that's actually interesting.

I'm glad TFA grabbed the #1 box office spot though it's not really a real figure until you adjust for inflation. The world is more fun when it's saturated with Star Wars, and this just guarantees it stays that way for the next decade.

 

[MacLeod]

Don't most films follow a set formula? The only difference being depending on the genre the formula is different. As much as we can bemoan about a lack of orginality in Hollywood aren't they just giving us what the majority of us want.

 

[fireproof78]

Don't most films follow a set formula? The only difference being depending on the genre the formula is different. As much as we can bemoan about a lack of orginality in Hollywood aren't they just giving us what the majority of us want.

Indeed.

 

[Mach5]

All you saw in Fury Road was shallow eye candy? Not sure we were watching the same movie there. First, the eye candy was some of the recent best.

Agreed, but I don't get off on eye candy as much as I did back in the day. Eye-candy peeked for me with LOTR.

There wasn't just a bunch of CGI creating a lot of busy distraction and light shows in the background. They were a lot more visually interesting than the dull flaunting of technology you get in most recent films. The actions in the action scenes made creative stylized use of physical objects instead of just having hails of bullets and superhumans throwing around flashes of energy.

You made a good case for the technical side of the film, which was never in question.

The emotional story in the movie was simple, just a woman trying to free a dictator's wives from slavery because one of them got pregnant and didn't want her son to be a warlord.

That's roughly 1.5% of the movie. The other 98.5 is pew pew.

 

[Mudd]

"Adjusted for inflation" is a shell game. It sounds logical in principal, but so many factors have to be adjusted and accounted for that you'd be better off arguing baseball stats.

 

[Mach5]

"Adjusted for inflation" is a shell game. It sounds logical in principal, but so many factors have to be adjusted and accounted for that you'd be better off arguing baseball stats.

Still, dismissing inflation entirely seems kinda unfair to older movies.

 

[Campe]

I'm positively thrilled with the success TFA has received both critically and at the box office. And I am of two minds on the inflation issue. First, yes, it comes down to a matter of ticket sales and that's what a lot of people look at. I think that is an important consideration.

At the same time, you have such a fragmented audience that its hard to suggest that a film that makes $100 million at the box office (or whatever) isn't a successful film when you take into consideration home video (in all of its current incarnations), streaming, cable, etc. Plus, back in the day, there was less competition and longer engagements at the theaters so while Gone With the Wind may have 202 million tickets* sold in its lifetime and TFA has 95 million sold, its apples and oranges because there's so much more competition vying for our attention and our dollars.


* Accurate box office records were not kept until sometime in the past 40 years or thereabouts.

 

[Kor]

I don't get the complaints about eye candy in movies.

Cinema is a visual medium by its very nature. That's the whole point. What's wrong with making full use of visuals?

Kor

 

[Mach5]

I don't get the complaints about eye candy in movies.

Me neither.

Good thing no one here complained about it.

 

[Similitude]

Are tickets sold maybe a good measure to go by? Has that been tracked at all?

 

[Magellan]

"Adjusted for inflation" is a shell game. It sounds logical in principal, but so many factors have to be adjusted and accounted for that you'd be better off arguing baseball stats.

Not accounting for inflation makes How the Grinch Stole Christmas appear "bigger" than Jaws. No comparisons across time will ever be perfect but essentially using two different currencies to compare them is the worse choice.

It's not "fair" that no shows finale is ever gonna beat the record that MASH set. The entertainment landscape is different but it is what it is.

Tickets sold can also be found on sites like BoxOfficeMojo. It usually tracks pretty close to the inflation adjusted numbers. For example TFA has 95 million tickets but Titanic had 128 million in its first run.

 

[Mach5]

There's hope for us yet.

 

[MacLeod]

I don't get the complaints about eye candy in movies.

Cinema is a visual medium by its very nature. That's the whole point. What's wrong with making full use of visuals?

Kor

Nothing is wrong with making full use of visuals but surely the balance is that visuals serve the story. The best SFX in the world can't make up for a poor script but a great script can overcome poor SFX (to a certain extent)

 

[Mach5]

By the end of this week TFA will have crossed $900 million domestically. An insane number what ever way you looked at it.

 

[MacLeod]

Should also break the US$2bn worldwide by the end of the week.