In a triumph of the human spirit, 2 Guns was the #1 film, beating out two other comic book movies. @ Guns made $27.4 million, which is kinda tepid, but thank god, The Wolveirne was #2 and Smurfs 2 crashed and smurfed:

This 3D hybrid live-action/CG  animated sequel couldn’t even make in its first five days ($27.8M) what the 2011 original grossed in its first three-day weekend ($35.6M). Ouch! Guess little blue people creep me out and North Americans, too. The domestic total fell way short of the $35M first projected by the studio which blames too many PG films at the multiplex. But even the foreign cume was blah: $52.5M from 43 territories was “not enough to make up for U.S. underperformance,” a Sony exec tells me. That’s a worldwide total of $80.3M, far less than the $100M which Sony projected this weekend.


Clearly, normal humans were terrified of this hideous film, just as the Beat was.

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11 COMMENTS

  1. I wouldn’t call Smurfs a “comic book movie”. That reminds me of how my grandmother used to call newspaper comic strips “cartoons”. Just… no.

  2. Smurfs started as a comic book, hence “comic book movie”.
    The same can be said for:
    2 Guns
    Red 2
    RIPD
    Men In Black

    As for the late 1960s…
    There were lots of movies based on books.
    At least one (James Bond) became a very successful franchise.
    Quite a few of those adaptations were “tentpole” movies, although they were called “road show releases” back then.

  3. Torsten Adair said: “There were lots of movies based on books.”

    Yes, and they were usually based on books written for adults. Movies based on books without pictures are rare today, unless it’s a “young adult” or “chick lit” book.

    As someone comments in that article, Hollywood wasn’t making “Transformers 23” in 1968, because they hadn’t figured out how to make “big bucks with loud expensive junk.”

    The closest equivalent to “Transformers” would have been the Japanese monster movies — Godzilla and friends. But those were aimed strictly at children, and usually played at kiddie matinees. And Godzilla movies didn’t cost $200M, and they didn’t dominate the box office — at least, not outside Japan.

    “Quite a few of those adaptations were “tentpole” movies, although they were called “road show releases” back then.”

    I’d have no problem with “tentpole movies” if they were the likes of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” or “Bullitt” or “Blow-Up” or “2001.” Tentpole movies today are not made for adults. They’re made for adolescent boys of all ages.

    Back then, studios were still producing intelligent films like “Bonnie and Clyde” that opened with minimal publicity and became sleepers. That could happen when movies opened in just a few theaters and gradually made their way around the country, instead of opening in thousands of theaters on the same day. Now a movie has to be a big hit on Day One, or it’s written off as a disaster and no one cares.

  4. http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2013/07/hollywood_and_blake_snyder_s_screenwriting_book_save_the_cat.html

    If every Hollywood blockbuster these days seems to have the same elements — the hero getting dressed down by his mentor in the first 15 minutes, the villain who gets caught on purpose, the moment of disarray half an hour before the end — it’s not deja vu.

    There actually IS a written formula for blockbusters, and it dictates almost every minute in every big-budget franchise movie.

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