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Spidey Knocks Out Harry Potter at Box Office
RasputinAXP writes "According to this Yahoo article, Spider-Man picked up an Amazing $114 million dollars at the box office, squishing Harry Potter's $90.3 million like a bug. More coverage is available at Box Office Prophets' new Weekend Wrapup, including analysis."
This is fabulous. This will prove Sam Rami as a real director capable of handling the big flicks and making them profitable. Maybe now someone will fund Evil Dead 4... maybe...
Im not particularly suprised, altho the parallel definitely exists. While Harry potter was catering to a much more central audience (I.E the people who read the books), Spiderman is something that everyone can identify with. Im pretty sure we've all seen the comics, the cartoons, the video games. There is just a lot more Spidey propaganda. Now, what I want to see is in 2 weeks, how much Episode 2 crushes the market...
all my
this movie would have been perfect for Katz to pontificate about the ramifcations from 9/11 on the setting of the movie to how Peter Parker was really just like a Columbine geek, but with superpowers.
SIG:Slashdot: indymedia for nerds.
There's a better link with all sorts of box-office statistics here
I can't believe TItanic made that much!
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"Those who choose proprietary software will pay for their decision!"
Spider sense... tingling.
Harry Potter... bitchslapped.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
"Comic Books and a children's book"...
Are you one of those people who thinks that they have to "grow up" and take things seriously? Public Art, like movies, is at its best when it gets over itself and focuses and making a movie that's both FUN and GOOD. A perfect example of movies needing to "get over themselves" would the TPM, and any "brainy" movie that died at the box office.
Forget that Spider-Man is a comic book, and forget that you're supposed to put away comic books when you grow up. It's a story about a kid who gets something no one else has, and how he deals with it. It's every bit as "grown up" as a good novel, epic play, or any other bit of nonvisual art that I'd actually pick up outside of a classroom.
Oh, one more thing: RIAA and the MPAA so far haven't "suppressed" any of my rights, although I do have a dry technical complaint against them.
Now now, less of the hyperbole. I won't have financed the RIAA until I've done my fiduciary duty by buying the soundtrack as well. :p
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
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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Who can forget the multi-millionaire Hollywood stars begging for attention just days after the terrorist attacks, all too eager to remind the rest of the world that they're better and more important than the lowly common folk and the situation at hand.
Or how every movie in production at the time was trying to figure out "how to best address the attacks" (Translation: how to best market it to the public).
You had the P.C. goons at the studios rushing to erase the Trade Center from their movies, past and present. ("Oh no! The sight of the buildings actually standing might offend or upset someone!")
You also had script monkeys trying to shoehorn patriotism into situations where it was not necessarily appropriate. ("Hey, I know! Let's put a bigass flag behind him!")
What's the message they're trying to get across? Spiderman standing next to the U.S. flag? Do they mean to say that we as Americans should applaud our fake heroes as "Real American Heroes" instead of our real ones?
Hollywood is trying to show that it's still important in this day and age. It clearly is not. Let fantasy be fantasy, and reality be reality. For God's sake, life is short. Let's get on with it.
Thank you.
For that matter, I've never seen them adjusted for population growth or the general economic climate. Star Wars came out when there were 200 million people in the U.S.; now there's something like 270 million plus. That's gotta make a difference, as does a movie's showing during boom times versus a recession.
"Hardly used" will not fetch you a better price for your brain.
actually most of the marketing i saw was in the 80's when i was about six and addicted to the cartoon. those tricky bastards.
four-oh-four
1 Gone With the Wind: $1,146,081,811
2 Star Wars: $1,025,027,477
3 The Sound of Music: $850,020,681
4 E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial: $823,800,033
5 The Ten Commandments: $760,123,752
6 Jaws: $743,173,676
7 Titanic: $725,045,021
... 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:
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.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
The deal for Spiderman, and for Daredevil and Hulk in the next year or so, is more normal, and they will get royalties.
The web shooters were always the one weak element of Spider-Man lore. The very idea that a tube of fluid small enough to not be seen under skin-tight spandex sleves could possibly produced even a single ten-story strand of webbing strong enough to hold a person's weight is preposterous. And Paker was shown as a science genious, in that he pretty much had his choice of colleges, his friend implies that he consistantly dominated the science fair circuit while growing up, got into a leading technology company right out of high school (remember him talking about getting fired for his chronic truancy?), and yes, writing papers about Osborn's work does establish him as a genius, because Osborn himself is stunned to learn that a HS student has even managed to read his stuff.
John Romita Sr. (pehaps the writer most involved in creating Spider-Man lore, after Stan Lee himself), personally came around to admiring the organic webbing as "clever", and didn't consider the change that big of a deal upon reflection.
MJ has been the main love interest of Spidey in the comics for over a quarter of a century. Did you really expect the first film to trot out the Gwen Stacey story, when she has not been a living character in the comics since 1973?
If all he's got going for him is his super powers, then isn't that exactly what he is, just another superman?
No.
What defines Parker is not that he is Nobel-prise-worthy smart (which he would have to have been to invent that webbing), but his social alienation as a brainy geek. The film captured that perfectly.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.