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Spidey Knocks Out Harry Potter at Box Office

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the way-to-go-raimi dept.

RasputinAXP writes "According to this Yahoo article, Spider-Man picked up an Amazing $114 million dollars at the box office, squishing Harry Potter's $90.3 million like a bug. More coverage is available at Box Office Prophets' new Weekend Wrapup, including analysis."

3 of 368 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Not surprising.... by Com2Kid · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Am I like the ONLY person in the world who has not seen ANY hype at all for this movie? I have seen like ONE preview before a movie (I forget which movie it was in fact) and I have seen no ads on TV, no billboards, nothing.

    What hype? Hell I thought that only Geeks and Nerds would even be INTERESTED in the movie, or even know it existed for that matter.

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  2. Is it just me... by Rogerborg · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ... or did the visual FX in this movie suck donkey dong? And the trailers for AOTC look really ropey as well.

    This isn't uninformed griping, I used to work with CGI artists in a games company. A typical conversation with a client would go something like this:

    • Client: Can you...
    • Artists: Sure, we just need to double the size of the render farm. You can afford that, right?
    • Client: Uh, I haven't told you what I need yet.
    • Artists: Bah, we can do anything you want, exactly as you want it, and as realistic as you want it. All we need to do is throw enough hardware at it, and buy enough third party lightwave plugins.
    • Client: Uh, OK. Here's a bushel of money.
    • ... time passes ...
    • Client: Deadline time, hand it over.
    • Artists: Uh, the thing is, we were planning on just buying all the models, but they all sucked, so we had to do our own. And then we had some trouble with the animation paths. And there was a bit of an overcommitment on the render farm, so we had to prune a few million poly's on some of the scenes, but if you just give us another two weeks, we can buy more hardware and re-render...
    • Client: The fuck? We go gold tomorrow! What part of "deadline" didn't you understand? Aaargh! You know what this'll cost us in reviewer kickbacks?

    OK, I'm over generalising. They sometimes got it just right, but a lot of the time they vastly over commited themselves and ended up with a final product that nobody really liked, least of all themselves.

    The problem as I see it is that the answer is always "yes". Models and stop motion put a well understood limit on what was achievable, and scenes were set and shot around those limits. Even when pushing the envelope like in SW:ANH, they didn't over stretch themselves or try anything that they knew they couldn't achieve.

    Contrast with SW:TPW, SW:AOTC and Spider-Man. The answer was always "yes". Go ahead, give us anything to do, and we'll do it. Let your imagination go wild.

    And what did we get? Ropey looking integration of CGI into live action scenes, ropey looking integration of live action into CGI scenes, 100% CGI scenes that jar badly with the live action.

    You can counter with Ray Harryhausen, but then I'll just have to roll out Alien, Aliens and Blade Runner. Do less, but do it well. Learn to say "no", guys.

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  3. This one will make Marvel some real money by harlows_monkeys · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Interesting story on CNN yesterday about this and other Marvel movies. Marvel sold the movie rights for X-Men for a fixed fee of $350,000. They got no royalties at all. X-Men was a big hit in theaters, and on DVD, and none of that went to Marvel.

    The deal for Spiderman, and for Daredevil and Hulk in the next year or so, is more normal, and they will get royalties.