3D STAR WARS for the masses...has ARRIVED! — Page 37

negative1 said:

Anchorhead said:

My love of the first film is completely separate from the sequels.  Sequels, by the way, made by a director who has given me a lifetime of very cherished and favorite films. He doesn't get a pass just because I feel some sense of duty or allegiance.  Make a good film, I'll see it and support it. 

 how do you know if something is good.

if you never watch them in their entirety(sequels)?

It didn't take more than five minutes (if that) to realize The Room was the worst movie I had ever seen.

Which is why I kept watching.

An article with some details of the 3D work:

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/star-wars-3d-george-lucas-289377?page=2

Prime Focus set up a process for the 3D conversion of the 115-minute movie,  which was mostly done at their facilities in India and in London. It involved at various times 600 of their employees. “Everything was sent back for review,” said Malhotra, “by (the Lucasfilm team) and George Lucas himself. We would get notes from them, suggestions for enhancements and any direction they had. It worked pretty smoothly.”

 

Still it was an intense eight month process *CUT*

and look who get's quoted:

Michael Kaminski, author of the unauthorized 2008 book The Secret History of Star Wars, who has been critical of Lucas in the past when he changed things in the movies, is on board with this re-release. “A lot of people say ‘3D, oh its crap,’ because there are so many 3D releases done badly,” said Kaminski. “And it’s true. Often the film is done badly. But the fact Lucas is a supporter of 3D and spent a lot of time getting it right, I think it’s a fun way to re-energize the movies.”

none said:

An article with some details of the 3D work:

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/star-wars-3d-george-lucas-289377?page=2

Prime Focus set up a process for the 3D conversion of the 115-minute movie,  which was mostly done at their facilities in India and in London. It involved at various times 600 of their employees. “Everything was sent back for review,” said Malhotra, “by (the Lucasfilm team) and George Lucas himself. We would get notes from them, suggestions for enhancements and any direction they had. It worked pretty smoothly.”

 

Still it was an intense eight month process *CUT*

and look who get's quoted:

Michael Kaminski, author of the unauthorized 2008 book The Secret History of Star Wars, who has been critical of Lucas in the past when he changed things in the movies, is on board with this re-release. “A lot of people say ‘3D, oh its crap,’ because there are so many 3D releases done badly,” said Kaminski. “And it’s true. Often the film is done badly. But the fact Lucas is a supporter of 3D and spent a lot of time getting it right, I think it’s a fun way to re-energize the movies.”

 

Nice catch! Kind of random quote though.

zombie84: Nice catch! Kind of random quote though.

Unfortuantely fame sometimes requires one to speak in soundbytes...  Did they actually interview you specifically for the 3D or was this pulled from a message forum or something or other?  Is this part of your 'make over' like Simon Pegg's Dengar to gain access to la Ranch.  (good plan)  Why would the article author use 'when he changed things'.  Oh. yess that Shakespeare he wrote ...things.  Ahh Public Enemy, doesn't Chuck D rap things well.  Rem Koolhaus really architect's things for living.

Anchorhead said:

negative1 said:

 how do you know if something is good.

if you never watch them in their entirety(sequels)? paradox?

Having seen about 30 minutes total of Back To The Future II and finding it terrible, I decided to err on the side of caution and not bother watching either sequel.

Funny that because I loved the second one more than the first when I saw on the time of release.

My opinion has changed a bit on re-watching, the cast swaps and the latex necessary to pull it off and some of the gags don't hold up to repeated viewing but it certainly was audacious. 

It is still one of the few time travel stories that actually played with the possibility of divergent timelines by literally traveling into the previous film.

The letdown for me was the third one which opted to play safe instead of doing what I hoped, which was to travel back into the second and first ones and becoming even more twisted.

^ THIS

Any people with distaste for the current state of the SW "brand" or LFL in general feel any vindication by the floppage of TPM 3D? Between the flopping of TCW in 2008, and now this re-release, it's clear that Star Wars has lost a great deal of esteem amongst non-hardcore fans. 

I'll paste parts of a post I made at TFN (that started me getting banned, again) to sum up my thoughts:

[TPM 3D] will make about 60% of its net overseas. Absolutely standard for action/adventure movies. Everybody appreciates that money is money no matter where it's earned. The reason for the focus on US BO is because it's easier to generate comps that way and, in many cases (such as most re-releases) you can't generate good overseas comps, or even get the figures until many months after their release.

So let's quit this charade of saying it was some sort of epic triumph overseas. It wasn't. It did the same business overseas as it did in the U.S.....crap business.

So we can look at its BO in several terms:

1) On its own terms: It was advertised in the Super Bowl and was heavily, heavily marketed (as most of us will attest, and as detailed in the Hollywood Reporter article linked to above). Movies advertised in the Super Bowl are supposed to make more than 40m.
VERDICT: Flop.
2) Relative to other re-releases: Here, we can look to (a) the recent Disney re-releases - even though they had probably less than half the ad budget of TPM, and were only released for a limited time, (b) the SE releases, and soon (c) Titanic. It did less business than any of these where it can be comped to them. The SE also blew this away. Any international comps are rendered irrelevant by the fact that international BO has grown tremendously since 1997. Only include true nearest neighbor comps, not cherry-picked random countries to bolster a pre-determined argument.
VERDICT: Flop.
3) Relative to SW: SW is obviously (or at least it WAS) a major franchise/brand. The movies are considered more than just hits, but also cultural hallmarks. They are NOT supposed to open at #4 (in fricking FEBRUARY) and then absolutely TANK each successive weekend, with worse legs than Joe Swanson.
VERDICT: Flop.

Starting with the embarrassing TCW in 2008 and continuing with this re-release, SW has clearly lost a great deal of esteem in the eyes of the common man. It has become cheap and the value of the words "Star Wars movie" don't have the same value (culturally or monetarily) as they used to. Yes, parents still reflexively scoop up armfuls of SW merchandise for their third-graders, but that's a fundamentally different value than being able to get tens of millions of people to pay money to sit in silence for 2+ hours and give you their time as they watch and listen to what you have to say. Lots of companies can get hording Americans to buy tons of junk, but not many people can get them to truly give their time and attention. Now, sadly, SW cannot get that from people.

LFL has largely just become another cheap plastic crap company, and the utter floppage of the TPM re-release demonstrates this starkly. (Maybe that's expected when the brand is entrusted to weirdos like Dave Filoni. But whatever.)

For awhile it was going to be AN EVENT, a touchstone moment for a new generation that had never seen blah blah blah. It ended up preaching to the choir and doing quite well for a 13 year old movie I guess. Which is fine, whatever, a great accomplishment, millions of dollars, lots of rendering time and shit, etc. So, well done, and here's to spending money and a year of life on episode 2, feel the excitement. 

The only thing TPM3D has really done is vindicate all the critics that they ban for "blasphemy" at places like theforce.net. No, the kids who were 7 years old in 1999 and who are now 20 years old are not swarming the internet to praise the childhood cult classic. No, critics who review it again 13 years later do not have some "enlightened" perspective. And no, the general populous does not care to see this film again. It turns out: it was just a shitty movie. Oops!

In 1999, TPM had hype and no one had seen it yet. It made $400 million domestically. In 2012, TPM no longer is the new Star Wars movie, and everyone knows its quality. It makes $40 million domestically. And this is the second thing vindicated: no, the hype did not kill TPM, did not cause the criticism or the unfair expectations. Hype, in fact, was the one thing the film had going for it. Episode I minus the hype gets you a flop, with the same bad reviews but this time barely any money and barely any audience.

Okay, the 3D re-releases aren't turning out to be the money-sponges that Lucas thought they would be. Does this mean Lucas is finally going to give up the Star Wars ghost, or is he going to try rendering another cash-grabbing scheme out of its dessicated corpse?

There was a rumour a couple weeks ago that the disappointing performance of TPM is making them consider releasing AOTC and ROTS a month apart, like they did in 1997. Just a rumour though.

TPM is not really a flop, because it stands to make a small profit, if flop equates to losing money. But AOTC has historically made less money than Episode I, even when it was regarded as better than TPM. Today, it is more often considered the worst of the bunch. So, it may stand have even less attendence than its original gross would suggest. That means that, if TPM walks away with $43 million or something, AOTC will probably pull in $35 million. I don't know if there is even any profit in that figure--it's likely a break-even.

Would that be enough to axe all of this? Normally, you look at the six films as a whole: yes, Episodes I and II may just break even, but Episode III will make decent money, and whatever losses you took up front on the first two will be made up for by Star Wars alone, and then Empire and Jedi are pure gravy. So in the end, you walk away ahead, because you shouldn't be measuring any film on its own if this is part of a series re-release. But Lucas is making veiled threats about not releasing the rest if TPM "doesn't work." While the term flop may be debated, TPM's release clearly has not worked. But I call bullshit. It's just an empty threat to goad people into seeing things they would rather not. And people called it. If anything, they will skip right to Star Wars. The reason being, by 2011 Lucas had already invested more money into converting ANH into 3D than the entire cost of the original film. I don't know how much of it has been converted, but they've been working on it since around 2007 and they've probably run up a $15 million bill by now. Lucas is too cheap to throw that down the toilet because no one showed up to see Jar Jar Binks.