Dwayne pees in bottles, causes $50 million budget increase

[AndyDursin]

Nice, maybe I'll check it out! (The reviews weren't bad...).

In all seriousness though -- even though it's fun to dump on something that cost $200 million+ -- all this year is going to do is reinforce that the only thing worth releasing are mind-numbing cartoon sequels for 10 year olds. MOANA 3, FROZEN 4, MOANA 5, LION KING 1.5, TOY STORY 16 -- that's the future at the multiplex. And it's sad.

[Monterey Jack]

In all seriousness though -- even though it's fun to dump on something that cost $200 million+ -- all this year is going to do is reinforce that the only thing worth releasing are mind-numbing cartoon sequels for 10 year olds. MOANA 3, FROZEN 4, MOANA 5, LION KING 1.5, TOY STORY 16 -- that's the future at the multiplex. And it's sad.

Thirty years ago, a (great) adult movie like Juror #2 would have been the kind of movie that quietly crept up to an $80 million gross and dominated the year-end Awards-season buzz. Now it's dumped on fifty screens and is a "Max Original" less than a month later.

[AndyDursin]

That's a good example, the adult audience is gone. It was already going before COVID, then that killed what was left of it, and they are making scant effort to get it back.

[Monterey Jack]

That's a good example, the adult audience is gone. It was already going before COVID, then that killed what was left of it, and they are making scant effort to get it back.

It's weird, because when I see an adult-oriented drama (usually on "Senior Wednesdays"), there's usually a FAR larger crowd for early matinees than I'm used to. I saw Juror #2 in Boston a month back, and despite being a re-noon showing, it was fairly packed. When I saw Kenneth Branagh's Belfast in 2021, it was almost a sell-out crowd (with the caveat that it was shoved onto one of the smallest screens at my multiplex). George Clooney's The Boys In The Boat was also very well-attended this time last year. There is an audience for adult cinema, but by indulging babies and people who refuse to let go of childish things, they're strangling what the movies are, or should be, a place where you used to be able to go and find something aimed at all age ranges and interests, year-round. Here's what was on-tap in December of 1994:



Yeah, plenty of kids' fare and F/X pictures, but also juicy, buzzy adult thrillers like Disclosure, R-rated action films like Drop Zone and A Low Down Dirty Shame, a star-driven horror film like Interview With A Vampire. Right now, if you wanna go to the multiplex, there's Wicked and Moana eating up 80% of the available screens, and Gladiator II taking up another 10%. The reason why Gladiator II is actually mildly overperforming is because it's one of the only things for adult men to see. Unless you have regular access to an arthouse place, you're stuck with the same drecky F/X bombast, week after week after week. After the Christmas rush is done, we'll get Oscar hopefuls on a handful of token screens in January, but it's a depressing landscape. I'm hoping that the recent success of movies like Anyone But You and The End Of Us will open the floodgates for low-budget "chick flick" fare, because good romcoms and romantic dramas should have a chance at finding audiences in theaters, instead of getting dumped on Netflix and Prime alongside the likes of garbage like Hot Frosty. One of my favorite films this year was the sparkling Anne Hathaway film The Idea Of You. Never heard of it? Exactly, because it was dumped on Prime this past May with almost no fanfare. That's a film that could have hit theaters around Mother's Day and been a small-scale success, but now it's like it never existed at all.

[AndyDursin]

The thing with Juror is it's showing on a very small amount of screens in a limited amount of theaters so your experience, in a big city like Boston, isn't necessarily indicative (and probably isn't) of what's going to happen if they throw it out there on 4000 screens nationwide, where it would probably die.

The problem, like we've said, is the world isn't what it was 30 years ago when nobody had a phone and movie-going was a major outlet for people. It's become much less of an outlet with the alternatives out there today, AND none of it is helped by the fact the programming has gone in a certain direction where they are all, as we've said before, swinging for the billion dollar fences in a model that is simply not sustainable to cultivate audiences or remain viable over the long term.

\Maybe for a corporation like Disney which consumes other IP and rehashes it ad infinitum, it'll remain viable, but as we've seen, studios like Fox are gone, theaters are still struggling, and Paramount is hanging on by a thread.

None of this is good news.

[Monterey Jack]

-Red One (2024): 2/10



Ho-ho-hum. I knew this would be bad, but I had no idea how BORING it would be. Basically a charmless riff on Arthur Christmas, this has no earned Holiday Spirit, no good jokes, special effects that would have seemed state-of-the-art in 2004, and boasts a cast that phones in their performances with listless think-of-the-paycheck competence. The world-building tickles no sense of awe or childlike wonder and is cobbled together from countless other sources, the action is lame, the CGI is as weightless as the screenplay...this is a giant lump of cinematic coal that it's no wonder theatrical audiences rejected thoroughly, and will become the same type of "Folding Laundry" movie that Dwayne's blah Netflix movie Red Notice was a few years back, the kind of movie people throw on and half-watch on the couch while wrapping gifts, occasionally looking up at the screen, grimacing, and going back to their seasonal chores.