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I’ve been a HUGE fan of comic book movies since I can remember.  Superman: The Movie was one of my first real comic-book movies that I saw, and I was totally entranced.  Tim Burton’s Batman was another fantastic film that really did justice to the character.  These were and still are truly great movies.  But after the release of Batman And Robin, the film industry and audiences pretty much turned away from the genre for a number of years until the X-Men movie was released back in 2000.  While we did see a number of fantastic movies based on comics like The Crow and Blade, people really didn’t take comic books or the movies based on them all that serious until 2000.  When X-Men came out, people really started to take notice of these movies again.  We had entered into a new age of comic book-based cinema.  While X-Men got really popular, Marvel Studios really kicked things off with Iron Man in 2008.  This was the movie that kick-started the MCU, or the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  During the decade that followed, Marvel had established characters like Captain America, Thor, and Iron Man in movies that were interconnected.  While some films were not nearly as good as others, the overall quality of the movies that were released was high.  People and critics responded quite well.  Soooooo….what did DC have that matched?  NOTHING.  They had Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Trilogy, which was a trilogy of phenomenal films, but didn’t connect with anything else that DC was doing at the time.

It wasn’t until Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel, that DC and Warner Bros. decided to have a go with their own universe of comic book heroes.  While I loved the hell out of Man of Steel, it was not necessarily the film that a lot of people were expecting.  It did really well, so a follow-up film was inevitable.  People who loved Man of Steel were really looking forward to a Man of Steel 2.  HOWEVER, Warner Bros. had a different plan.  See, when The Avengers came out in 2012, the dynamic of comic book movies changed.  Marvel and Paramount/Disney had given us our first real superhero ensemble film.  It blew everybody’s minds.  It was awesome.  So…to try and compete, DC Comics/Warner Bros. decided to step in the ring with Man of Steel.  But it wasn’t until some time later that they decided to go for an ensemble movie of their own with Batman V. Superman: Dawn of Justice.  This was NOT the movie that people were expecting.  They were expecting another solo Superman film.  They’ll get another one, alright.  Just not for a while.  Anyways, I digress.  Batman V. Superman was supposed to be the real jumping off point for what is now known as the DC Expanded Universe or DCEU for short.  The film was not particularly well-received.  I liked it well enough, but it was loaded with problems.  You can read my review by hitting the Reviews tab at the top.  Warner Bros. was expecting the film to hit the 1 billion dollar mark, and when it only reached 800 million, they were disappointed.  Really?  $800 million is not chump change for a movie like that.  Critically, it got wasted, so an extended version was released on Blu-Ray that fixed a majority of problems.  People were excited when Wonder Woman stepped on screen for the first time in a live-action film.  Gal Gadot knocked it out of the park.  But that still doesn’t address where DC stands when it comes to comic book movies.

DC has a number of films lined up like Wonder Woman, Aquaman, The Flash, The Green Lantern Corps, and the big enchilada: Justice League.  Unfortunately, DC was about a decade late to the party.  See, Marvel Studios already had an established world with THIRTEEN movies released, and DC’s Expanded Universe currently only has three which includes Suicide Squad.  I realize that DC and Marvel are the two top competing comic book companies in the world, but Marvel is coming out ahead in terms of the live-action film arena.  DC has fantastic animated movies, so they aren’t slouches there.  For the foreseeable future, though, Marvel has the upper hand.  They did it first and they did it well.  DC’s playing catch-up and they aren’t doing a very good job of it at all.  It’s a shame, because I am looking forward to seeing the stuff that comes out of DC over the next couple of years.

With Captain America: Civil War, Marvel has pretty established their dominance in the live-action comic book movie arena.  They keep upping the ante in terms of story, character development and action.  DC’s got some really cool stuff coming down the pipe, but a lot of people are wondering if it’s a case of “too little, too late.”  I could be wrong, and DC might knock it out of the park with Justice League.  It’s entirely possible.  But if DC and Warner Bros. don’t start getting it right with movies like Wonder Woman, they are going to be faced with a situation that could spell doom for the entire DCEU.  I don’t want that to happen.  Most comic book movie fans don’t want that to happen.  But if DC doesn’t start paying attention to what they’re doing instead of trying to ape the competition, it could be disastrous for everybody involved.

Over the next couple of days,  I will be discussing my favorite movies from each company.  With Marvel, I will be including films from other companies that use Marvel characters.  So, stay tuned for that and I will talk you later.

The topic of movie piracy has been debated for decades.  You’ve got people on one side saying it’s not doing any harm to the movie industry, while you’ve got folks IN the film industry saying that piracy is costing them money.  To an extent, piracy does affect the film industry.  Certain parts of the industry are getting hit harder than others.  Big blockbuster movies like Star Wars and Jurassic World aren’t likely to be dramatically affected by people downloading a copy here and there, do to the films’ enormous budgets.  I’m not necessarily worried about the big guys.  It’s the smaller and more independent film-makers that I’m concerned about.  Now, last night on Facebook, I was a part of a conversation with someone on the page of Scott Adkins.  Scott Adkins, if you don’t know, is a British martial arts actor/stunt-man who is well-known in the independent film scene.  He’s had some surprising success with films like Ninja: Shadow of a Tear, Undisputed III, and Close Range.  Pretty down-to-earth guy, actually.  Anyway, he posted an article about piracy and how detrimental it is to the film industry.  There are a great number of people who have basically come out in support of piracy on HIS page.  One of the arguments I read was trying to compare the theft of DVDs/Blu-Rays to multi-million dollar vehicles.  That argument doesn’t hold water, because theft is theft, no matter how expensive the object is.

The people on that page have basically said, “if you stop making crappy movies, we’ll stop pirating them.”  Here’s the problem with that whole deal:  The reason the quality of movies is going down, is because the studios aren’t willing to make a significant investment in the event they won’t see a return.  It’s simple economics.  If you invest in something, you would expect to get something out of it, right?  Piracy puts a rather massive dent in that investment.  Again, for the movies that have 100+ million dollars in their budget, I’m not overly concerned with, because half the time they end up making that money back eventually with home video releases and through other means.  It’s the independent film studios that get hit the hardest.  The most money that these guys can put towards making a movie is usually less than 10 million.  That’s a drop in the bucket when compared to the big guys, but it also means that the indie guys have to work harder in order to get their films done and out the door, which usually ends up going almost straight to video.  Not many movie theaters are going to risk playing a small independent movie when more money could be made by featuring a bigger movie.  Independent film-makers have to depend on audiences either renting or buying their films in order to make a living.  The residuals from those sales go back to the studio so they can help pay for the film.  I’ve talked about how complicated it is to make a movie, regardless of its size.  It’s not a cheap endeavor.  There’s a lot of overhead, and sometimes a lot of these film studios, even the big ones, don’t actually make a profit from their movies.  Pirates don’t think about that, they only care about getting the film now and not having to pay for it.

Piracy, at least in the States, is about a 20 billion dollar industry.  That’s not an insignificant chunk of change.  Studios have gone after groups like The Pirate Bay and several torrent sites, and even gone after individuals for severe copyright violations.  While the overall industry might not necessarily by overly negatively affected, the smaller studios and films are definitely going to feel the pinch.  Piracy is theft in every sense of the word.  It’s illegal and unethical.  You’re taking a product that somebody has worked hard to produce and you’re not paying a single dime for it.  People will argue that “oh, well, I was never going to pay to see that movie, anyway.”  And that gives you the right to break the law….how?  There’s also the excuse that pirating a movie gives it more exposure.  Maybe, but how do the film-makers benefit from that?  They don’t see the money from that particular copy, and when you pile on the amount of copies that are being uploaded to the Internet on a daily basis, that number adds up.  It’s not an insignificant number and it really hurts the smaller guys.  The big guys?  Not nearly as much, but they will still feel it.  Honestly, I don’t care what your “moral” justifications are for stealing somebody’s movie, it’s wrong.  “Oh, it’s too expensive.”  Save up your money and buy it later, or better yet, rent it.  There’s nothing here that I’m going to say or do that’s going to stop people from pirating movies.  That’s being unrealistic.  But I really do hope that people realize that pirating movies can hurt people.  It’s NOT a victimless crime as some people would have you believe.

Over the past several months I’ve discussed at length about sequels, remakes and reboots.  I’ve gone over good sequels, bad sequels and varying qualities of reboots/remakes.  But there is a group of films out there that deserves a special mention:  Movies that deserved a sequel.  For this particular list, I will be talking about movies that needed a sequel, but never got one for one reason or another.  I will not be including movies that have established franchises, so you won’t be see any Star Wars or Star Trek on this post.  Movies that deserved BETTER sequels is a post that I will get into soon, because it’s just as relevant, but for now, we will be focusing on those movies that could have used an extension or two.  Now, the main reason why some of these movies never got sequels is due to one major factor:  Money.  They didn’t pull in enough money in the box-office for movie studios to re-visit.  I will also not be including direct-to-video sequels.  These are going to be about big-screen movies.  Now, these are some of the movies that I personally enjoyed a great deal, so let’s see what we’ve got here:

The Rocketeer

Of all the superhero movies that I’ve seen, this one is one of the most underrated.  Directed by Joe Johnston and released in the summer of 1991, The Rocketeer was an absolute blast of a movie.  With an all-star cast including Bill Campbell, Alan Arkin, Terry O’Quinn, Jennifer Connelly, and Timothy Dalton as the villainous Neville Sinclair, it was an amazing and original adventure movie.  Set during the late 1930’s, The Rocketeer was an old-fashioned kind of movie, the kind they don’t make anymore.  The acting was great all around.  It was exciting, romantic and funny.  It’s just a shame that the audiences never really took to it.  It’s not surprising as 1991 had some major-league sluggers in the field with Terminator 2 and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.  When The Rocketeer ended, it left it open for the possibility of a sequel, and had it earned enough money, we would have gotten one.  But something happened that few people would have expected:  The movie garnered a massive following despite its lackluster box-office performance.  Apparently, when they screened the film during the film’s 20th anniversary, fans dressed as the character lined up for blocks.  It was about this time that Disney started thinking about the idea of a sequel, and it looks we might actually get one.  Details are scarce at this point, but apparently, the film is going to be another period piece set six years after the events of the first movie.  I’m all for it, although I wish it didn’t take 20 years for it to happen.

Willow

Willow is a movie that I truly wished had a legitimate big-screen sequel.  Now, some of you may not know this, but some years after the film’s release, there were novels based on that particular universe that nobody read.  It was a trilogy that saw Elora Dannon grow into a teenager.  I personally never read the books.  I wasn’t particularly interested.  I WAS interested in the universe that the film had established, but never re-visited.  It was a movie with some surprisingly dark tones to it.  Visually, it was spectacular.  You also had the acting talents of Warwick Davis, Val Kilmer, Joanne Whalley, Billy Barty, Jean Marsh, and Kevin Pollak.  It had the right amount of humor, romance and excitement to make it an epic fantasy adventure.  Val Kilmer’s Madmartigan stole the show with as a wise-cracking master swordsman.  It was extraordinary how Warwick Davis and Val Kilmer bounced off each other.  The acting was great.  The story was good and the action was amazing.  It just didn’t connect with audiences or critics who railed against the film and Ron Howard for the supposed emphasis on special effects over everything else.  Charlatans and heathens, I tell you.

David Lynch’s Dune

Now, THIS is a real shame.  The initial plan was to have Dune as the first film in a trilogy detailing the exploits of Paul Atreides and his children.  However, during production, the suits at Universal Pictures didn’t particularly care for the idea of a 3+ hour film, so they forced David Lynch to cut some rather important material out.  Considering how dense Frank Herbert’s novel was, it came as a surprise to fans of the book, that a lot of what they were expecting was not to be found.  For the rest of the audience, it was a confusing mess of a movie.  But for those of us who did understand what was going and and DIDN’T read the book, we got a very solid and visually spectacular science fiction epic with some really big-name actors including Patrick Stewart, Jurgen Prochnow, Freddie Jones, Virginia Madsen, Jose Ferrer, Linda Hunt and Kyle MacLachlan.

Dredd

This one bothers me, because despite the amount of praise that the 2012 film got with Karl Urban as Judge Joseph Dredd, it failed to ignite the box-office.  Considering that people were still trying to forget the disaster that was Sylvester Stallone’s take on the character, it wasn’t really a surprise that people stayed away.  It’s too bad, Karl Urban makes for a more convincing Dredd than Sly ever did, and not once did you ever see his face.  Yeah, it was definitely violent and gory, but the film stayed true to the roots of the comic book character.  Karl Urban clearly loves the character, and he’s willing to put on the helmet again, but it seems that a full-blown theatrical sequel may not happen after all, despite multiple conversations.  HOWEVER, there is a possibility that the character might be getting a series on Netflix, which I think would be appropriate.  Considering the amount of scrapes and battles the character gets into throughout the comics, a Netflix series would probably be the best option.

Well, that’s my list for movies that I felt deserved sequels but didn’t get them, at least not yet.

Movie-making is a risky and expensive business.  There’s a lot that goes into movie-making than most people realize.  It’s more than just hiring actors, directors and producers.  There’s a lot more than that.  You have to rent equipment, hire costume designers, location scouts, catering, music, and sound design among other many small details.  These smaller details can actually add up to a lot of overhead, sometimes causing a movie to lose money, despite how much it may earn at the box-office.  That’s part of what I’m here to discuss.  I’m here to discuss some of the biggest box-office flops of all time and I’ll explain why.  Just to let you know, I will be talking about big-budget movies with some of the biggest names in the industry.  I will prove to you that despite having a massive budget and big names, your movie can still bomb at the box office.  Just so you are aware, not all of these movies are necessarily bad, some of them are actually rather good movies that just failed for a number of reasons.  In order for a movie to be considered successful, it has to make back more than twice its budget.  That being said, these are the biggest box-office disasters.  Side-note: currency devalues over time, so one has to adjust for inflation.  Also: These are going to be ones that I’ve seen.

Krull

Let’s start with something relatively small here:  Krull.  Krull is a fantasy film that takes place on another planet that’s being conquered by a mysterious being known as The Beast.  Initial budget was about $27 million at the time.  Kind of mid-range fare if you ask me.  However, the domestic gross of the film was approximately $16.5 million dollars.  I grew up watching this one, so I have a fondness for the film.  It’s not actually a horrible movie.  It’s mediocre at best, but was not the worst film that year.  So….why did the film bomb?  One reason and one reason only:  Bad timing.  See, the movie was released during the summer, in which the big blockbusters where coming out.  So, the film was going to have trouble finding an audience anyway, but there was one movie that the makers of Krull failed to take into account:  Star Wars.  The third and final entry in the Star Wars trilogy ended up being one of the highest-grossing movies of 1983.  THAT was the movie that people wanted to see, not Krull.

Cowboys & Aliens

This one kinda hurts.  I really enjoyed the hell out of this one.  It combined two of my favorite genres:  Westerns and Science Fiction.  It was an interesting combination, that while it had its issues, was a thoroughly entertaining romp.  Alas, the critics and the audiences didn’t really see it that way.  Despite having an ensemble cast that included Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford, Olivia Wilde, and Clancy Brown, the film brought in a paltry $175 million on a $163 million budget.  Despite strong acting from nearly everybody on the cast, the film failed to resonate with audiences and critics world-wide.  Personally, I loved the film, but a lot of people didn’t and it’s a shame.

The Chronicles of Riddick

Oh, here’s another painful entry.  This is another of my favorites.  I loved David Twohy’s Pitch Black which featured the series main character, Riddick, played by Vin Diesel.  While the first movie was a low-budget film that was set on planet of perpetual darkness surrounded by flesh-eating beasts, the follow-up film expanded Riddick’s universe exponentially.  We traveled to more worlds and faced a massive enemy force known as the Necromongers.  With a budget between $105-210 million, Chronicles of Riddick brought in a grand total of nearly $116 million.  What went wrong?  For one, the tone of the film was completely different from that of Pitch Black.  Instead of a close-quarters claustrophobic struggle for survival, Chronicles opts for a more space operatic along the lines of Star Wars.  It’s not a bad idea, and the execution was mostly okay.  The problem is that David Twohy didn’t have the experience necessary to craft a story on that level.  I loved what I saw, but I could definitely see why people didn’t like it.

Cutthroat Island

How many movies do you know of that have actually sent the production company into bankruptcy?  There aren’t a whole lot.  There was another movie that was notorious for shuttering United Artists: Heaven’s Gate but I haven’t seen that one, so I’ll go with the next most notorious film:  Cutthroat Island.  Renny Harlin’s pirate epic was released in 1995 to mostly negative reviews.  The film was made on a $98 million dollar budget and failed to recoup even $20 million.  While it was known that the production company, Carolco Pictures was in a state of ruin already, Cutthroat Island was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.  Carolco filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and was shuttered shortly thereafter.  What contributed to the film’s failing was a number of reasons.  One: Geena Davis was NOT a convincing pirate captain and the chemistry between her and Matthew Modine was completely absent.  Two: There were a lot of problems during production, before the movie even started shooting.  The situation was really, really bad.  Renny Harlin did the best he could with what he had, but it wasn’t enough to save the movie or the movie studio.  Personally, I had fun with it, despite its problems.

Jupiter Ascending

Is there anybody out there who thinks that the Wachowskis are anything more than a one-trick pony?  They really aren’t.  While I don’t necessarily think they’re bad directors, they are terrible writers.  The only thing significantly good that they have ever done was The Matrix, and only the first one, really.  Why?  Each of their movies has a kind of Wizard of OZ kind of vibe to it that gets old.  Jupiter Ascending had the potential to be something truly great. It had a great visual style with some really amazing set-pieces and action sequences.  There’s a problem:  The movie is boring.  There’s too much space between action scenes.  There’s WAY too much exposition for a movie that’s barely over 2 hours long.  The audiences and critics responded accordingly.  The film’s production was an estimated $175 million, and only brought in $184 million.  It has some good things going for it, one of them with Sean Bean not dying at all, which must be a first in his career.  Visually, this is a stunning film, with some really outstanding visual effects and CGI shots.  But THAT’S where the budget seems to go, instead of character and story development.

John Carter

Now we’re really getting into the big bruisers here.  John Carter was released in 2012 to mixed reviews across the board.  I didn’t really think too much of the film after I saw it, but a number of people seemed to like it.  My dad loves the hell out of it, so there must be some value to it.  However, this film demonstrates how bad of an idea it is to push a movie based on a book that not many people have read or heard about.  The movie was based on A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burrows.  There’s no getting around it:  John Carter failed and failed HARD.  With a massively bloated budget of $263.7 million, the film needed to break the $600 million mark just to break even, and it only got back $284 million.  Let’s forget the fact that the film is based on a book that few people have read nowadays.  The massive budget was due to the fact that the director had to do massive re-shoots.  In fact, Andrew Stanton nearly re-shot the entire film, which is unheard of.  Re-shoots are just a part of the film-making process, but not to this degree.  When word got out that these re-shoots were happening, people stayed away fearing that the movie had some massive problems.  It did.  The film lost nearly $125 million.  It also caused the then-CEO of Disney, Rich Ross, to resign.

The Lone Ranger

One major flop wasn’t apparently enough for Disney, so they ended up with two in a row.  First was John Carter, and now, The Lone Ranger.  The movie was based on the television series from the late 40s and 50s.  It had Johnny Depp in the film and Gore Verbinski directing, you know, the guy who directed Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean.  The film was released to mostly negative reviews.  I’m not entirely sure what movie THEY saw, but the movie that I saw was a very entertaining Western that had the right amount of camp, humor and excitement thrown into the mix.  I thought it was fun.  I think people targeted the movie because it ended up getting shut down at one point, because it went over-budget.  Speaking of which, the budget fell between $225 and $250 million.  But you could tell where the money went, to try and make the action as believable as possible without using CGI.  In that regard, it succeeded.  The final train sequence was brilliant.  Unfortunately, audiences and critics were less than forgiving.  The film’s final take-home was about $260.5 million, give or take.

Nobody sets out to make a bad movie.  Not even Ed Wood set out to make a bad movie, he just wasn’t any good at it.  But sometimes the film-makers end up biting off more than they can chew, and the final result is a movie that tanks both critically and financially.  As I said before, not all of these movies are bad, it’s just that the circumstances are really unfortunate.  Now, Disney being as big as they are could weather two massive flops, whereas most film studios would probably collapse.  Thankfully, Disney’s acquisition of Lucasfilm and Marvel Studios has put them in a position where they can really do some amazing things.  Not a lot of movie studios have that kind of leeway.