Tuesday, 24. November 2009, 10:07:13
I had prepared a post about Avatar before, and didn't quite put the finishing touches on it. That was after "Avatar Day" (21. August 2009) where audiences were invited to see 15min of James Cameron's Avatar in 3D. "The movie that will revolutionize 3D cinema...." (Oh boy) What I saw of the film, made it look more like 'Dances with Wolves in space, with a touch of Ferngully and Battlestar Galactica.' I found the 3D made it hard to concentrate on and it seemed at times out of focus. I think that the scenes that were showed were poorly chosen as they seemed to raise little or no interest, conflict or WOW-effect.
The 2D trailers were a little better, but seeing the that movie is now only weeks away, I'm wondering why I can turn on the TV and still
not see a trailer for this every single commercial break! Apparently James Cameron's group is over looking the overseas market, (although it made almost double the money of the US market for Roland Emmerich - see below)
Here's where the movie really gets me though: a few movies recently have had a budget over $200million dollars: 'Transformers : Revenge of the Fallen' 'Terminator: Salvation' and '2012' - but they were all pretty crap. This is the 'Michael-Bay-money-making-film-scheme.' Now, Transformers : Revenge of the Fallen went on to make an insane $830million!! (worldwide) So Mr.Bay might have a point. Terminator Salvation raked in $370million worldwide. Keep in mind too that they were both building on previous movies and their fanbase and they were both PG-13.
Now, look to "Twilight: New Moon." Here's another sequel costing only $50million, but now holds the position for the third biggest opening ever (with $140million) next to cinematic heavyweights like "Spiderman 3" (another $200million+ movie that opened with $140million) and "The Dark Knight" (which opened with $158million). Interestingly, all these movies are sequels (even without considering all the fans of the extremely long running comic books and the novels of the Twilight series.
But Twilight proves another rule that I think that James Cameron has forgotten : you need hot people to attract the 14-30 female audience. This is no joke, when you see people interviewing Cameron they talk about "the man that brought us Terminator, Aliens and Titanic" and they say Titanic with awe, but I doubt that all the exuberant girls were going to see Titanic four and five times because of his movie (or because of his special effects). Twilight's got it and Transformers : ROTF has got it for sure. Sex sells. James Cameron is hoping that we'll still want to see some of that action between two 10-foot tall lanky Navi: Oh boy...
Also, think Viral Marketing. District 9 amd Paranormal Activity both come to mind for 2009. D9 with a budget of only $30million was a summer hit of over $200million. That's serious profit. Paranormal Activity hasn't left the states yet, but with a budget of $15,000 (yes, fifteen-thousand-dollars - I think that's something like 500€) has already made $100million dollars - in the US alone! Marketing can turn anything into gold, you either have something good, and let the product speak for itself, and let everyone Twitter and Facebook the thing into oblivion or you have something crappy and you throw your millions that you got making Transformers 1 and put commercials wherever money can buy 'em. Either way, I don't think Avatar has a clear concept. Their "viral" marketing site had a huge Coke Zero logo on it (erm, you're missing the point guys...) and I don't feel the flood of standard marketing that I have come to expect from these films.
My point is, that I think this movie is going to fail. There's no star allure, there's no cool marketing campaign, there's no previous movie or literature to get behind and defend...and with it's incredible budget still swelling, it's going to have to make INSANE-Transformers-2 kinda money and that's not possible without the three rules (ask Michael Bay) - plus with the added pressure from good movies like District 9, that show that a small budget can still turn a big profit (they also had no sex appeal in that movie unless you like calamari faced cockroach aliens and it was rated R) I think this film has massive hurdles ahead...
But what do I know? Recently, I've come to doubt that I know anything about movies; when I first heard that Ronald Emmerich was doing another catastrophe film, I thought : "Man, after how terrible 10,000 BC was? No-one's going to forgive him for that. That film is going to bomb!" Well, it's budget was on the $200million dollar team, but its grossed over $450million worldwide! Over $340million outside the US alone! What the heck? People seemed to have forgiven and forgotten pretty darn fast. Thinking on that, Avatar is going to make a ton of money...just look at the price of a 3D movie ticket.
I finally got a chance to play though Halo ODST. And it breaks my heart to report that I was a little disappointed. It just felt like it could have been more, like it SHOULD have been more. I expected a more stealth based HALO episode - something along the lines of SPLINTER CELL meets HALO. Dang, just like that sounds super rad to me. The problem is that this Orbital Drop Shock Trooper was still pretty invincible. I mean, sure he doesn't have shields like Master Chief, but you could still take quite a beating (thats without mentioning that you're incredibly strong when it comes to running around with a freaking turret in your hands).
What really rubbed me the wrong way, was that there was no Master Chief appearance. I know I know, this can't happen because of the story, where they are etc etc. But thats not what I'm saying. To really get the idea of how cool and powerful our hero Master Chief really is, wouldn't it be cool if our little protagonist Rookie got saved by the big man himself and watched Master Chief completely rip through a bunch of the Covenant baddies....I dunno I was really really sure they would be smart enough to place this cameo in there, but it wasn't there, and I was sad.
The trailers seem to show quite alot, but all i can say as a fan of the video game series (perhaps the best trilogy to date) is YES YES YES YES YES!!!
WIDGETIZE