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§ As expected, JONAH HEX did not do well at the box office, with a very modest take of $5 million. The poor showing brought on an unusual amount of analysis:

As one Warner Bros exec said about the lesson learned; “You don’t take a handsome actor and disgfigure him.” The studio is so embarrassed that it took great pains to points out that the pic was greenlighted before Diane Nelson took over as DC Entertainment prez. About the cowboy with the disfigured face and legend that he can’t be killed, a minor character in the DC Comics galaxy of stars, Jonah Hex was attempted on the cheap.


In fact it’s kind of become legend:

Why Hex was Cursed: Where to begin with the Josh Brolin bomb? A film with a horribly disfigured leading man, directed by a live-action neophyte, troubled by reshoots, and marketed like the studio couldn’t quite commit to admitting it existed. Result? A supernatural Western comic book movie that was rejected by occultists, fans of Westerns, action movies, comic books and Josh Brolin alike. Warner Bros. might have invented the first no-quadrant movie.

§ Johanna Draper Carlson finds that the Archie comics website is the very last place she found an Archie cover she was Googling for, and wonders if file upload sites will soon be targeted by comics companies on their continuing campaign to root out the pirates. Before Archie’s site, the follwoing links came up, she notes:

* three sites that search file upload sites (such as Rapidshare and Hotfile) for the comic and provide direct download links
* one torrent site (that doesn’t actually have the book)
* two links to well-optimized online comic stores
* one shopping comparison site that wants to send me to TFAW.com to buy it
* two digital comic sites (Comixology and iFanboy) that gave me the Previews solicit and cover image; the first also had preview pages and also wanted me to buy from TFAW.com. Dark Horse may not have much in the way of digital comics yet, but they sure know how to promote their online store.


§ Tom Spurgeon interviews Gene Luen Yangm who talks about lots of things:

Well, there are expectations in that more than my mom and my cartoonist friends read my comics now. To be honest, I do feel some pressure. I think a lot of it comes from the advance system that the book industry uses, that the comics industry is slowly adopting. Not to complain about the money that a publisher is willing to invest in me, but with money comes pressure. If you make a sucky mini-comic, nothing really prevents you from making your next mini-comic. If I lose a lot of money for my publisher, I don’t know… I can’t imagine them wanting to continue giving me advances.

§ We didn’t cover the passing of Al Williamson in nearly as much depth as we should have, but tributes are still rolling in, like Rick Veitch’s account of the making of THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK adaptation:

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Carlos was a master at getting the tech details of the Millennium Falcon and Star Destroyers to perfection. But both he and Al were having trouble envisioning the Imperial Walkers that showed up in the script. Lucas Film had only sent two grainy polaroids of the model used to create the scenes in the movie. Al was fretting so I offered to try and make sense of it with some sketches. I’d worked as a mechanic in my early years and had a reasonable familiarity with how machinery worked. I spent an hour or two figuring out how the thing would have to function and what the parts we couldn’t see in the photos might look like. Al was so delighted he put me to work penciling the Walkers throughout the whole sequence. When the film came out we were delighted to see we’d somehow caught the whole flavor of the Walker attack as staged by director, Irving Kirshner.


§ The NY Times had an obituary for Williamson.

§ Profiles of G. Willow WIlson keep on coming, like this one in The Boston Globe.

§ A librarian explains her reaction to some disturbing comics content:

And then there’s the more disturbing issue of rape scenes that aren’t unsettling enough. I was reading a graphic novel yesterday that included two rape scenes. While they weren’t graphic, something about the art was so pulpy–the woman’s clothing clinging to her breasts in artistic shreds, her mouth a perfect “o”–that I couldn’t get the images out of my head. They were sexy rape scenes. The more I thought about it, the more angry I was.

§ Another librarian, Robin Brenner, looks at what adult women are reading in libraries:

When I speak to women patrons in my library about comics, they are clearly interested in titles aimed at them. I’ve let them know I do the buying for the graphic novel section. As a result, a few women, from their twenties to their fifties, now approach me to request titles from creators like Lucy Knisley, Marjane Satrapi, Rutu Modan, Posy Simmonds, Alison Bechdel, and Hope Larson. They request the giant multi-creator Tori Amos comics anthology Comic Book Tattoo. They get excited when they see our collection has josei (women’s) manga series including Yayoi Ogawa’s Tramps Like Us and Fumi Yoshinaga’s All My Darling Daughters. Many young women gravitate toward the yaoi titles we collect, relishing the romance, and I’ve had a number of requests for more titles from both women and one young gay fan.


[ LInk via Tom Mason

§ We are really jazzed that this got quoted!

§ Nerdlebrity corner: This really is sweet.

1 COMMENT

  1. The leading actor had a scarred face, that’s what they thought was wrong with Hex? This just goes to show what goes wrong when you let the suits play fast and loose with the source material. All they had to do was make a good western. No super-natural elements, just Hex and his six gun. How hard is that?

  2. “The studio is so embarrassed that it took great pains to points out that the pic was greenlighted before Diane Nelson took over as DC Entertainment prez.”

    LOL! Like Diane and/or Jeff Robinov didn’t have the power to kill the project once they knew it was a dog.

    The old saying “success has a thousand fathers, failure is an orphan” comes to mind.

    This thing had flop-stink on it from the beginning.

  3. It just goes to show you that the people upstairs still don’t get it. And at this if they don’t see it at this stage of the game, they probably never will.

    To believe the movie did bad because the leading character had a scarred face is a convenient way to shift focus, like an illusionist showing the audience one hand while the other conceals the real architects of the bomb.

    But the rest of the world isn’t as dumb as the WB would like you to think.

    Movie insiders, like comic insiders, always seek to blame ‘the character’ for their own defiencies, their own lack of ability. But characters are like puppets thus only as good as their puppetmasters.

    The puppetmastes of today might be tired of hearing the audience ‘whine’ and ‘moan’ about all the ‘wooden’ performances but frankly, the audience is getting tired of hearing the puppetmasters bitch and complain about the puppets while delivering shows that are about as entertaining as, well, ‘dead wood’.

    The true artist can take anything that looks ugly, disfigured and turn it into a work of art: in comics, it was done with Swamp Thing and in movies, in Mask w/Eric Stoltz, the leading actor who was horribly disfigured which was a critical and box office success.

    So can all the creators out there stop whining, “There’s no good stories to tell about a married so and so” OR “There’s no good stories to tell about X because he’s too powerful”

    If you can’t tell or film a good story about so and so because the character or situation isn’t to your liking than chances are you shouldn’t be telling the story.

    For years, you’ve had companies alter and replace the character to ‘suit’ the needs of their ‘artist’ but as time has clearly shown, OVER AND OVER, many ‘artists’ just create a mess and then what you have is a Crisis of Infinite Versions, most of them now scarred and not very appealing.

    Seems to me if the producers stuck to the original, core concept of the Jonah Hex character, they would have had a better movie (as tons of Clint Eastwood westerns have shown). Because altering Jonah Hex to ‘suit’ the producer ‘artists’ just created a scar on Hex, WB and DC worse than the one on his face.

    Maybe this will teach WB and DC a lesson.
    Then again, maybe not.

  4. Mark wrote, “All they had to do was make a good western. No super-natural elements, just Hex and his six gun. How hard is that?”

    Even the supernatural elements could have worked with more thought and some actual follow-through; although, I agree that there was no need to turn Jonah into (Keanu Reeve’s) Constantine in the Old West. The tone switches drastically in the second half and suddenly we are in steam-punk territory. The film (keeping in mind that I have not actually seen it) seems to be ridiculously schizophrenic.

  5. From BoxOfficeMojo:
    “The weekend’s other nationwide debut, Jonah Hex, was a complete misfire, rustling up a paltry estimated $5.1 million at 2,825 locations and ranking eighth. That was the weakest start for a DC Comics adaptation since Steel in 1997, and was much lower than the $9.4 million of the last DC bust, The Losers. The fantastical Western action movie was an attempt at counter-programming Toy Story 3 but couldn’t muster much niche support let alone broader interest with its feeble presentation: not serious and dramatic enough for Western buffs and too obscure for fan boys. It had one of the worst openings on record for a Western, let alone a comic book movie.”

    Methinks there will now be more meddling with “Green Lantern” to make sure it succeeds.

    Or… Warners could put Bruce Timm in charge of making some serious 2D and 3D animated features based on DC properties… or new properties.

  6. Now that the Jonah Hex movie has bombed, I wonder if DC Comics will cancel the Jonah Hex comic book?

    The monthly comic book is selling in the low teen-thousands [11,327 copies in May 2010 according to ICV2] and previous titles in that sales range have been given the axe.

    I can understand continuing the book in support of the movie, and vice-versa, that the movie might generate increased interest in the comic book and graphic novels. But that doesn’t seem to be the case here.

  7. Yeah, I’ve never read a Jonah Hex comic in my life (before Jimmy Palmiotti pops in, let me apologize profusely and say I’ll get to it ASAP!), but the characters disfigurement was always his hook to me, the thing that made you say “Whoa…this can’t just be any ol’ Western, something interesting has to be going on.” And Josh Brolin was great casting. The problem came down to the advertising just made the movie look like Generic Summer Action Movie #484, and after already having plenty of movies that fit the bill already score lackluster performance at the box office, Jonah Hex didn’t stand a chance.

    Then again, Armond White liked it.

    http://www.nypress.com/article-21356-jonah-hex.html

  8. from Torsten’s BoxOfficeMojo quote:

    “The fantastical Western action movie was an attempt at counter-programming Toy Story 3 but couldn’t muster much niche support let alone broader interest with its feeble presentation…”

    You know, the entertainment press seems as dimwitted as the industry stooges they cover. Was Jonah Hex actually intended to be a serious challenger to Toy Story 3, or is that just an idiot reporter’s inane musings to amp up the drama?

    I see it as just the opposite: WB released Jonah Hex on the same weekend as Toy Story 3 so this abomination could be immediately steamrolled and forgotten, not to steal Toy Story’s thunder. In other words, Toy Story 3 was the distraction while WB put a bullet through this radioactive fustercluck.

    Nothing short of the Second Coming could have stolen the weekend from Pixar (and even then, I’m not completely sure), so where does this kind of “reporting” come from? Was there a WB source that actually thought an obscure cowboy character was even a molecular challenge, much less a serious challenger to the “beloved by millions” Toy Story property?

    The hubris and stupidity in that entire industry, from the boardrooms on down to the “reporters” never ceases to amaze me.

  9. All that WB had to do was make a rough and tumble western with Hex meaner than a wet bobcat, but still the hero of the movie filled with righteous anger. That would have worked.

    The problem is I can just hear a studio exec saying “Eastwood already did that.” The thing is American audiences do not tire of a bad man with a good heart doing terrible things to evil men.

  10. Jonah Hex could have made money…if say, it had a good trailer that made it not look like a crazy shattershot of ideas, like a new Wild West with Megan Fox. Was a plot even detailed?

  11. “You know, the entertainment press seems as dimwitted as the industry stooges they cover. Was Jonah Hex actually intended to be a serious challenger to Toy Story 3, or is that just an idiot reporter’s inane musings to amp up the drama?”

    It’s mostly just stenography of the suits making up excuses for the disaster that happened on their watch. Nobody wants to be responsible for WB’s continuing box office failures. The next Harry Potter simply cannot arrive soon enough to save them from their hubris.

  12. “Now that the Jonah Hex movie has bombed, I wonder if DC Comics will cancel the Jonah Hex comic book?”

    I suspect the movie tie-in was about the only thing keeping it going. Palmiotti and Gray are already falling back on their low-selling Plan B, Uncle Sam and the Freedom Fighters.

  13. The utter failure of Jonah Hex is also a double-whiplash against WB’s Jeffrey Robinov who, was giddy for brooding, darker character treatments following the success of Dark Knight:

    “Robinov wants his next pack of superhero movies to be bathed in the same brooding tone as The Dark Knight. Creatively, he sees exploring the evil side to characters as the key to unlocking some of Warner Bros.’ DC properties. “We’re going to try to go dark to the extent that the characters allow it,” he says. That goes for the company’s Superman franchise as well.”

    It was most likely Robinov who green-lit Jonah Hex, possibly while in the throes of his post-Dark Knight epiphany.

    Though unlikely, hopefully the failure of Jonah Hex will teach many lessons…one of which is that simply making movies of “dark” characters isn’t enough. Without an experienced director, a good script, competent marketing, and…hell….a reason for existing, these “tentpoles by committee” will always, always, always fail.

  14. I see it as just the opposite: WB released Jonah Hex on the same weekend as Toy Story 3 so this abomination could be immediately steamrolled and forgotten, not to steal Toy Story’s thunder.

    That’s not what “counterprogramming” is. The term means airing a show which will attract viewers who aren’t interested in the big event dominating the time slot. An example would be a Rachael Ray special or a documentary opposite the Super Bowl.

    SRS

  15. Ket: falling back? Plan b? we have been trying to get a new FREEDOM FIGHTERS series going for the last two years and it was finally green lit a few months ago after we decided to willingly leave Powergirl. We look at this as an awesome thing and ultra cool that DC supports us and the characters. we never look at any job or characters as “b” characters, we treat them like “a” listers each and every time.

    As far as JONAH HEX…honestly, If we had ANY say in the movie, which we didnt, I would just have adapted issue 50 and added a sequence in the beginning with his real origin. simple as that… since they already had some fine actors.

    And last: JONAH HEX is not being cancelled as far as we know…we have in the drawer 3 jordi bernet issues, a brian steelfreeze issue, a giancarlo caracuzzo issue , and 6 more guest artists to be announced soon.

    looking at only the monthly issue sales is like looking at half the screen on your tv. the trades are selling well…the new hardcover o.g.n. is on the New York Times top 10 graphic novel sales chart and because of the talk of the film last year, the book is collected in a wide range of countries in many volumes.

    Sure it ucks the movie didnt do well…and was not what a lot of people wanted, but its full steam ahead with us…and we dont think anyone that loves the comic is going to dump the series because of the movie.

    and jason…want me to send you a free couple of issues?

  16. “That’s not what “counterprogramming” is. The term means airing a show which will attract viewers who aren’t interested in the big event dominating the time slot. An example would be a Rachael Ray special or a documentary opposite the Super Bowl.”

    Right, but the assumption of counter-programming is that reaches an identifiable audience demographic….like when a chick flick is released the same weekend as, say, Transformers 2…..or when a macho explodo-fantasy is released the same weekend as Sex and the City 2. Who’s the counter-programming demographic for Jonah Hex?

    The anti-Pixar crowd (all ten of them)?

    The coveted supernatural-western-steampunk constituency?

    …and that’s assuming any of those demographics head even HEARD there was a Jonah Hex movie hitting theaters. So if there WAS an identifiable demographic who’d be interested in the movie, I can guarantee you they weren’t told about it.

  17. Too bad about the movie sales. Maybe it will catch a cult buzz.

    The comic is a lot of fun to read, and I am excited to hear Jimmy P mention that there are 3 issues of Jonah Hex upcoming with the Jordi Bernet art already drawn! Life is good!!!

    Wonder who the 6 Guest artists are?

  18. The story that I heard on how Jonah Hex got greenlit was that someone threw a copy of Jonah Hex’s first appearance in Weird Western Tales on Greg Silverman’s desk without even opening the book and the lightbulb went off over his head thinking: Supernatural meets Spagetti western: ‘yeah we can do that’.

    and Nate: they’re going to just have to lump it and move on. WB is probably kicking itself for jettisoning the Justice League now that Marvel’s got the Avengers freight train running at full steam and seeing succeed beyond everyone’s wildest expectations.

    Green Lantern is their response to the opening salvo fired by Marvel.

    ~

    Coat

  19. “The Jonah Hex failure does not bode well for the future of DC properties to other media.”

    No, the failure of Jonah Hex doesn’t bode well for supernatural-western-steampunk movies with inexperienced directors, bad scripts, and phoned-in performances.

    It’s kinda silly to condemn DC’s entire slate of marketable characters due to the failure of a lone (and very badly mis-handled) character. Using that same “all or nothing” mentality, the success of Dark Knight, would mean that everyI DC property should be a goldmine…which is equally preposterous.

    That said, I think Nate’s got a future as a Hollywood exec!

  20. The amount of ill informed posts in this thread is staggering, from a lack of understanding of what “counter-programming” is to analyses of what was wrong with the movie by people who haven’t seen it.

    The movie was heavily advertised on TV (including during the NBA Finals). WB was obviously going for the young male demographic who would be interested in a violent comic book based film (with Megan Fox) over a G rated animated Pixar movie.

    Whenever a film performs this badly it is usually because of overwhelmingly poor reviews and/or poor marketing. I know who Jonah Hex is but I thought it was impossible to tell what the movie was, (or what it was about) based on the ads WB put together.

  21. That’s the problem with high concept storytelling. The thought is, combine the supernatural with a Western, and the movie will attract both Western fans and fans of the supernatural, as if viewers are programmed to watch movies with specific tags attached. The thought that the movie has to work artistically doesn’t occur to the producers until it’s too late.

    People were working on a JLA movie a couple of years ago, but the movie had script problems and a low-profile cast. Other attempts at doing movies about DC heroes have been hampered by script problems as well. If a movie isn’t going to rehash the hero’s origin, problems include introducing the character effectively and picking a villain. What age group(s) should the movie target? Is the movie set in a real city or in one of DC’s fictitious cities? If it’s a JLA movie, how do they end the movie effectively? It can’t end with “To be continued. . .”

    I would hate doing a single story about a hero that has to be entertaining but can’t sum him up.

    SRS

  22. Cary, actually…there was a Jonah Hex script done over 10 years ago that went nowhere.

    we started the series up again and the same person shopping the old screenplay pitched it again, and this time it got interest and a new screenplay was commissioned.

    and yeah…a lot of ill-informed info is common on a monday. lol…

  23. Support the comic! SUPPORT THE COMIC!

    I haven’t seen the movie–it doesn’t look like it’s my cup of tea (come to think of it, I don’t drink tea, so I don’t know what my cup of tea is)–but the comic is fantastic. When you complain that movie studios won’t just follow a good idea and get out of the way with all the cross-marketing focus-group nonsense.

    JONAH HEX the book is simple, straightforward storytelling. Fun and beautifully drawn. A comic that is worth your three or four dollars each month. A book where the creators like you and think you’re just as smart as they are.

    How rare is that, eh?

    And support Jimmy Palmiotti. There’s a guy that wants nothing more than to make good comic books and spread good will, and he does both every month.

    I want to end this note with a cymbal crash but don’t know how to type that.

    CYMBAL CRASH!

  24. “When you complain that movie studios won’t just follow a good idea and get out of the way with all the cross-marketing focus-group nonsense. ”

    Ahem.

    I meant to say that this book follows an idea and doesn’t worry about all that other bullshit.

    A big-company comic that reads like an indie comic in the sense that the writers and artists are doing it like it’s fun, not like it’s an ad for a company crossover or action figures.

    Finger cymbal crash.

  25. “The movie was heavily advertised on TV (including during the NBA Finals). WB was obviously going for the young male demographic who would be interested in a violent comic book based film (with Megan Fox) over a G rated animated Pixar movie.”

    Funny thing is, most of those normally sex & violence-worshipping young males went to see Toy Story 3 this weekend! Since most of ’em (literally) grew up watching Woody and Buzz, it seems nostalgia trumped Megan Fox and…whatever else Jonah Hex was supposed to be about.

    Also kinda funny, despite extensive advertising during the NBA finals, you (Joseph) still didn’t know what the movie was supposed to be about…which I’m sure was the same conclusion the young male demographic came to. So, no, I don’t think the talk here is that far off the mark.

  26. Agreed, Mark. Hex was advertised heavily on Adult Swim as well (again, aiming right at that young male demo) and it didn’t seem to matter. It’s not that the film wasn’t marketed: it’s that it wasn’t marketed well, or that it’s marketing made it clear that it was a turkey.

  27. I’ve got to agree. The movie was heavily advertised. I was really looking forward to it until I caught wind of the “supernatural” angle, then the alarm bells went off.

    Well, we still have the comic.

    If you’re not buying it, go do yourself a favor and pick up a couple of issues.
    Consistently one of the best books published.

  28. I like that Mr. Palmiotti showed class in his responses here. It fits my image of him, as I relish each issue of Jonah Hex. The stories are better than the original run (and I really liked those stories!).

    It’s a shame that they didn’t use one of his scripts for the movie. Why are movies such as Ghost Rider and Jonah Hex even made, when a simple plot ought to be required first?

  29. I stand by my original post. I still can’t even tell if anyone posting here has actually seen the movie (I haven’t).

    And I never said the advertising was effective. I was arguing that Warner Bros obviously did not just “dump” the film against Toy Story so that it would go away. It was heavily advertised, during what was expensive airtime, and the idea to counter program against Toy Story was solid. In my opinion it just didn’t work because the ads were unclear about what the movie was – funny?violent?Western?superhero? – and the reviews were too overwhelmingly bad to entice anyone who was unsure whether or not they wanted to see it.

  30. It does seem like a no brainer that the film people should have gone to Mr. Palmiotti for his input on the film during the pre-production process, but as was indicated in the original story the film was well underway by the time WB saw the light and started bringing in DC people to consult on the film adaptations.

  31. I actually saw the movie.

    I’m not a purist, I wasn’t expecting that much from Hollywood. I did expect at least some good story telling, and it’s not the worst movie ever, but there were some pretty simple things they could have done to make this a lot better.

    I agree with Mr. Palmiotti adapting issue 50 would have been the way to go.

  32. @Joseph

    I would give up trying to make a point today. A lot of the Beat commenters are being cranky and resorting to personal insults over a movie’s performance. My guess is the insane heat has everyone worked up today.

  33. I encourage people to not only buy jimmy’s comic, but to get the jonah hex episode of BTAS off itunes.

    That’s a great version of hex (written by joe lansdale) + steampunk + ra’s + malcolm mcdowell as the villain + elizabeth montgomery in (I think) one of her last roles.

  34. Jimmy – I was simply going by over what was posted on Deadline Hollywood over the weekend. The comments from insiders in the industry on there are more rabid than what you’re likely to read here.

    I haven’t seen the movie yet, but I do plan to sometime in the next couple of days to reserve my own judgement despite it already being badmouthed by the comic book shop owner of where I’m picking up my books these days ( and he’s already got it in for Scott Pilgrim too).

    But I knew the first thing that this movie was in trouble when I heard the running time was only 82 minutes long. So I knew from right there and then that this wasn’t going to be no epic like Seraphim Falls (which could have been easily disguised as a Jonah Hex story in my opinion ) , Appaloosa, or The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford – three modern day westerns that I’ve enjoyed over the last couple of years.

    But don’t worry, I’ve got your back, Jimmy. It’s better than not having a movie at all.

    ~

    Coat

  35. “It’s better than not having a movie at all.”

    Not necessarily. If someone who’s never heard of Jonah Hex sees the movie and doesn’t like it (apparently the common reaction), my guess is they’re not going to be hunting down the comic book version anytime soon.

  36. Mark –

    I don’t think it really matters to comic book retailers nowadays if a movie released based on a obscure comic book does extremely well at the box office helps sales or not. These days with a whole slew of them coming out with rapid fire – it’s starting to come across as gluttonous. This same retailer who I mentioned earlier was telling me that when Kick Ass & Wanted came out- it didn’t help him move sales of the graphic novel at all, those normal everyday joes who don’t frequent comic book shops are probably picking up the graphic novel at a B&N or a Borders instead.

    ~

    Coat

  37. Sure DC-WARNER screwed up on Jonah Hex; win some lose some. I wouldn’t go as far as some bloggers claiming the end of DC movie-property. I mean all studios will bomb a movie at some point.

    Heck, even Mighty Marvel has a slew of misses and horrible movies (daredevil, Punishers, FF 2, Blade 3…).

    I think DC took a risk with Hex and thought it would be a hit as Western movies usually are popular, throw in Megan Fox and bang! a Hit…surely someone’s head will roll for this flop. DC should focus on their core caracters like Wonder Woman, GL, Flash…as they intend to. Everyone on the planet knows Wonder Woman, Superman, Batman….HEX? Heck alot of comic readers don’t even know who he is.

    Aside from this, I am a superhero movie fan, but aren’t there just too many of them nowadays? Seems like every month a super hero movie comes out!

  38. “Seraphim Falls, Appaloosa, or The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford ”

    none of which really made any money.