walking_carpet

not quite $23 million.  actuals came in at $22.469

OTOH, The Vow and Safe House BOTH cleared $40 million!

zombie84 said:

And, you know, thinking about it--they already have converted most of ANH3D. They have spent more than the original budget, and have been working on it since 2007 I think.

 thats weird.  why is it taking 5 years to convert that movie?  did it not pass the eyeball test and they had to start over?

Fang Zei said:

Wow, I finally saw the edit in AOTC that everyone's been talking about since September. Some guy recorded it off his camera while it was playing on his tv and put it up on youtube, I couldn't find a better version.

hi

you got a link for this? wanna send it to a few people cuz its always hard to describe.

thanks

CO said:

I am telling you that Lucas could make a 2 hour movie of Darth Vader taking a shit in trash compactor of the Death Star, and fans would flock to it.  They would say, "Well, its still Star Wars!" 

 well yeah, thats why he dedicated 20 years to cultivating a sycophantic fan base and constructing scores of brainwashing mechanisms (including free publicity and talking points masquerading as 'interviews', a sycophantic producer that lies, aggressive marketing of the mythical aspects of star wars and how lucas is a 'modern-day mythmaker', nonsense about the PT being a 'digital cinema trail-blazer',etc, etc).

most of these are from the OT generation however.  kids who grew up with PT make honestly like it, but I doubt they are apologists.  And if they are anything like my cousin, they prefer to download star wars to their iPhone!! BWAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAAHAHAAHAHAAHAHAHAHAAA

thats why he has to cater to toddlers that were born after 2005.

im starting to repeat myself with these posts, so i'll just say we still need to see the second week.  Its still not 100% if they will continue with the 3d conversions and at a 1 per year rate (I believe the former, not sure on the latter).  and our focus should be to continue advocating the OOT and highlighting lucas' lies. 

looks like $23 million and 4th place for this weekend.  always wondered how they accurately predict sundays grosses so early.

so, after everything said and done, its about what was expected by the prognosticators.

question now is what next week will be like?  its hard to predict multipliers and drop-offs for re-releases. Especially for ones that are already on blu ray. and thats not counting the fact that this is a star wars movie -regardless of how horrible it is.

Again, this weekend was surprisingly active - 4 movies over $20 million in february.  having 2 would be impressive, but four!?

yeah its ridiculous.  as I first said when I saw it, Im not someone who normally notices DNR or subtle color shifts. But it was so obvious to me, I cant believe any hometheater enthusiast with an eye for these things would give the blu ray releases high marks.  lol, yoda is a cgi character, but he is more detailed than ki-adi mundi, who was a live actor!!

and im still baffled at why the botched recut of the ending of the yoda/dooku duel in AOTC hasn't received more criticism. 

good to hear you are skipping 3d.

evan1975 said:

walking_carpet said:

you forgot the quote where he says fans wanted star wars to be like the matrix ;) these are all just his trademark cop-outs.

copouts, excuses, laziness, selfishness, deceit, dishonesty, greed, incompetance, god complex and cult of personality.

I wonder if we should have some sort of well-sourced, bulletproof rebuttal to point people to with regard to George's talking points and fallacies.  So many people take him at face value. It's bad enough when Lucas fanboys believe the revisionism, but it's especially troubling when journalists do it.

Something brief  akin to a FAQ that dispells the myths, but not so dense that people will go "tl;dr".

 Secret History of Star Wars is a good start.  It wouldn't be easy but it can be done - they guy has done more 'interviews' than every filmmaker in history combined.

In one of the 70s articles, he said SW was for 14 year olds.  that would conflict with what he says now about star wars being for little kids.  unless you think 7 year olds and 14 year olds are the same.

its funny he is saying he is improving his movies with technology. How come he never improves Howard The Duck? the big problem with that movie was the duck suit looked fake - why not CGI it?

oh snap...I forgot, a re-release of howard the duck wouldn't make any money.  its not a cash cow that you can just milk, and milk and milk and milk and milk...

i dont think cars 2 had as many ads as TPM3D.  Then again, based on merch sales, they probably dind't need it.

as for 1997, noway were they expecting this to come close to that.  probably just enough to make profit , spread good word of mouth and pay for the next conversion.  apologists are probably thrilled it didn't bomb and site these numbers as 'proof' that TPM is not hated.

the thing no one seems to be talking about is this 'one film per year' strategy.  its too long for 5 more movies and momentum can't carry over. plus a ton of things can change in that time. 

lol, but what a way to honor the 40th anniversary of the once proud franchise formerly known as star wars - watching ROTJ and hearing "No....NOOOOOOO!!!" and seeing hayden ghost.  gotta love it.

evan1975 said:

CO said:

Sadly, George Lucas has bought into the internet bitching of a few, and lumped us altogether.  Pretty sad if you ask me. 

I just don't buy that.  There are things he's said that I've never heard anyone say.

"Those fans want Star Wars to be like Terminator."

No one said this.  All we asked for is that the same level of realism from ANH and ESB be maintained and cartoonish slapstick be kept to a bare minimum. 

"Those fans want the prequels to be three movies of Darth Vader just killing people."

No one said this.  All people wanted was to see Obi-Wan's line about Vader hunting down and destroying the Jedi depicted in some manner at some point.  And George screwed it up by showing the Clone Troopers actually killing the Jedi and Vader murdering children when it should have been the other way around.

Now he's saying that people want Han to be a cold blooded killer when no one has said such a thing.

 you forgot the quote where he says fans wanted star wars to be like the matrix ;) these are all just his trademark cop-outs.

copouts, excuses, laziness, selfishness, deceit, dishonesty, greed, incompetance, god complex and cult of personality.

thinking about all this, its kinda surprising that the 20th release of ET wasnt a big hit.  yeah, a lot of us were mad at the walkie-talkies but those did not have near the notoriety of the SE changes.

I don't recall if it had near the promotion of SW, but im sure it was equal to Lion King. The economy in 2002 was crap, but so is this economy.

[shrug]

maybe a lot of people were still bitter about the crap atari game. BWAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAA

well you cant be too surprised by that.  this was not going to be Gigli or Mars Needs Moms.  Lucas has a sycophantic fan base - and now they have kids.  So thats one percentage of the audience that is absolute automatic. 

 just based on comments of posters from this forum and elsewhere, there are people who dislike this film but will still see it anyway - maybe thats another 5%.  combine that with the fact that this is almost strictly 3d, with $12-15.00 a ticket.  and it appears Fox and LFL's own internal models were forecasting $20 million minimum.

if its any consolation, nobody is gonna mistake this re-release with 1997 (even then, ROTJ made just a quarter of SW, but is funny that this week had all 3 of the OT in the top ten - how cool is that)

come to think of it - looks like several movies had a good opening haul. kinda unusual for mid-february. 

dang, i just checked something - Lion King 3D made $94 million ?!?! wtf!?

i thought it was like $55-60 million or something. I guess I was so surprised it reached that far, I stopped keeping track ;P

Yesterday, i figured my estimates of $35 million for TPM were short, but I was also using BATB and Lion King as a model - one of which i was dead wrong about the gross.  maybe it'll reach $50 million.  hopefully not.

Im suprised there wasn;t more media coverage for lion king 3d for making that kind of money.

[sob] Hugo still has made only $60 million.  aw shit, it'll really suck if tpm makes even 3/4 of this.  want titanic 3d to bomb too; teach cameron a lesson for focusing on that instead of abyss blu ray.

ray_afraid said:

eiyosus said:

walking_carpet said:

friday the 13th part II and III

Part 3 was bad, but part 2 was awesome!

YES! Part 2 is my favorite of the series!

 nah..the original has a grittiness and moodiness none of the others had.  no question, it ripped off halloween, but it also dripped with atmosphere and dread.  part 2 tried to do that, but it was too well-lit, the chi-chi-chi-ma-ma-ma sounded to synthesized and the music was lame and the POV was out of control.  you just like part 2 cuz of ginney, terry and vicki :P

and mrs.voorhees was 10 times scarier than jason.

good point.  I have no intention of seeing battlefield earth, batman & robin or Gigli.

i've seen bad movies that i've enjoyed more:

death wish 4

friday the 13th part II and III

godzilla

superman IV

Independence Day

but those were intentional camp/explotation movies (well, maybe not superman IV)

TPM is unique because almost every aspect of filmmaking was extremely poor.  combined with what was required of TPM to support the next 2 movies and the saga at large. It was the wrong movie at the wrong place at the wrong time.

  hmm...now that I think about it, transformers 3 truly was a POS.  I hated the first one, but saw the third one in the theatres cuz they said the 3d was like avatar, it was filmed in chicago and...well, I guess cuz im a dumbass.

maybe I need to re-edit my comment.  at least for TPM, i was willing to see more than once. 

review was terrible. it says that a positive is that 'we get to see the jedi for the first time' !  wtf!?  it ends it by saying, it 'goes back to a galaxy that we thought we would never revisit again'. again, wtf!?!?

and it uses the old 'the OT had bad stuff too' argument.

save for the production values (which were apparently ripped-off from dinotopia), TPM is the worst movie ive ever seen (correction: a case can be made for transformers 3).  as a kid, I still wouldn't have liked it because the movie is so damn boring, unless you really find jar jar funny. and 30 seconds of obi-wan vs darth maul.

and for all the talk about how it sets up the saga, I think thats the biggest failure of TPM.  it hardly setup anything.  maybe i shouldn't hold it against TPM for introducing crap like anakin making 3po, virgin birth and midicholorians - because thats more of a "PT-at-large" defect. but the toothpaste was out of the tube in that movie and irrevocably damaged sw.

and maybe thats the only reason TPM shouldn't be singled out for contempt because the entire PT was a failure in almost every aspect.  Its just TPM came first.

maybe judging the PT movies need to come in 4 categories:

-filmmaking craft

-story

-storytelling

-character depth and relationships in its respective stage of the trilogy

example - ROTS probably has best story, but because of the awkward handling of anakins betrayl and stupid padme losing the will to live, the storytelling is not as good.

or AOTC has worst story cuz obi-wans detective story was lame, jango fett making clones was lame and anakin/padme romance was lame.  But the filmmaking craft was the best.

or is the love story bad, or is the storytelling of love story bad because of stupid dialog and completely implausible character behaviors? 

aw fuck it.

not necessarily. sure, the objective would be completed, but we can then talk about how cool OOT is and not lament the once proud saga formerly known as star wars.

hmmm...

i would say the answer is.....both.  he is an incompetent filmmaker - there are plenty of more suitable examples.  But he is lying in this case.

does anyone know if this 'interview' talked about the "No....NOOOOOOOOOO!!!"  ? would have been hysterical to see him explain that one.  someday he should - the apologists need their talking points.

really, we should be shocked that he didn't replace the yoda puppet in ESB and ROTJ.  maybe not while frank oz and stuart freeborn are still with us. shit, ford better stay healthy,  otherwise bye bye "I know"

[sigh] anyway, have a good feeling my estimates of $35 million max are going to be exceeded based on the number of posters from this site that plan on watching it.  so again, he gets to take his money and laugh all the way back to skywalker ranch.

Bingowings said:

Gendershock didn't do Metroid any harm now did it?

 nope. but what a shock that was, indeed.

now i got this image of vader with natalie portmans voice (especially that nasal voice she had around the time of tpm)

sorry to hear you guys had a poor experience.

regardless of the PTs quality, one positive takeaway I had was the theatrical experiences were still pretty fun.  I'll never forget when we went to see ROTS, there was a huge line and there was this little kid in a darth vader costume running back and forth.  took off the helmet at one point and it was a girl!!  bwaaaaaaaahahahahahahahaahhaahaha

I never went to midnight premieres so maybe its best to avoid those.  and avoid this release altogether.

its funny you mention these things Zombie because I also think despite his dedication to cutting edge technologies, there isn't a filmmaker more poorly suited for 21 century filmmaking.  Its not just art-house and serious dramas that demand strong actors, directors and storytelling - people want these from blockbusters as well (except maybe transformers, lol.  but how the hell does michael bay continue to get such great casts!?)

thing is, and correct me if Im wrong, lucas does NOT live at skywalker ranch.  He lives in San Rafael.  so he is not cut-off from civilization. he just dislikes people unless they are sycophants.

As for him saying that films are cut and modified without directors consent - well, I hope for his sake there is no truth to the rumor that the director of red tails was fired and lucas took control (I don't buy for one second that those were just normal reshoots and pickups).

Mrebo said:

They must be eating this up over at TFN. Not only are we stuck in the past, failing to realize that art is technology, but we want Han to be a cold-blooded killer. Not sure how slandering a large portion of his fan base is helpful.

 lol, more 'interviews' !!  as I said before - this guy has given more 'interviews' than every other film director in history combined. He loves to give interviews infinitely more than filmmaking - fact.

all kidding aside, you really shouldn't be surprised at what he said.  I am not going to read the full 'interview, but I read the excerpts, and unless they are out-of-context, its what I expected.  His take on Han/Greedo is not even worth dignifying with a rebuttal.

The post above highlights what I've been trying to say.  The primary (if not sole) purpose of these 'interviews' is to dispatch new talking points for the apologists and sycophants.  Why do you think on the AOTC dvd, he says 3 times that he is a 'visual' filmmaker? Becuase he knew he was discredited on the idea he cared about story and characters.  So he needed this talking point - and it worked.  Go check out some of the posts at TFN from that timeframe.  Of course, this excuse is totally bogus because ALL FILMS are visual (thats why they have these things called cameras).  And truthfully, except for a few shots in AOTC and ROTS, there was no visual flair to the PT - it was pretty sterile. So the next talking point was - 'lucas has a documentary style approach to filmmaking'.  I have already discussed the repulsive appearences on Jon Stewart and Oprah.  You need to keep this in mind everytime there is an 'interview'.

As far as thumbing his nose at the fans that made him a millionaire - it was confirmed in the Blu ray thread that he did not have a 'thank you' note, like he did for the VHS releases.  Those thank you notes were disingenious.  Now that he has his billions and was able to finance his Letterman center for 'Digital Arts' (bwaaaaaahahahaahahaha) he can drop all pretense.  "I got mine, so screw you!"

zombie84 said:

I think he actually wanted Williams to use either classical pieces a la 2001, or Korngold's music from stuff like Captain Blood. And then Williams said he could do something like that but original and better and he came back with the SW score.

didn't know if this was already mentioned but want to take this moment to wish cinema's greatest composer a Happy 80th Birthday!!

this man is a living treasure.  If you made a top ten list of the most recognizable film scores of all time, he would have at least 5.

zombie84 said:

I think he actually wanted Williams to use either classical pieces a la 2001, or Korngold's music from stuff like Captain Blood. And then Williams said he could do something like that but original and better and he came back with the SW score. I'm probably mixing up the details but that's sort of how that happened.

 for the 1995 vhs releases, he told leonard maltin that he writes his screenplays to music.  he wrote this on one of the CD releases as well.  But the PT footage of him writing doesn't have any music playing in the background. not to mention it sort of conflicts his 'non-linear 3 dimensional editing' philosophy.

was this yet another lie? or another exaggeration - like how we all listen to our ipods when working, but thats not the same thing as 'writing to music'.

Bingowings said:

That but also include long discussions about tax and beheadings, immolations, infanticide etc.

 now be fair, no babies were killed. just kids - er, i mean younglings

TheBoost said:

 He probably doesn't rationally know why his films were genius anymore than he knows why his other films are so dissapointing.

 i think he knows. he ended the Making of TPM book by saying "for every perosn that likes star wars, 3 people will hate it". WTF!?  then he did all those 'interviews' preceding the premiere saying how everyone hates him, etc.  it was all cover because he knew the movie was bad. 

the problem is - for a great deal of classic moments, characters, designs etc -  he wasn't actively and as intimately involved in the creations, so he cannot recreate it even if he knows what he is seeing.  The score is I think the greatest example.  Credit him for wanting a symphonic score as opposed to synthesized music that was trendy in the 70s.  but he didn't expect in a million years for john williams to come up with THAT.  any symphonic score would have been fine and thats why we have all those annoying cut/paste jobs in the PT :(

plus the fact he almost certainly does not care and will continue to infantilize SW and just aim for lowest, easiest common denominator :(