Well, we are definitely experiencing that movies aimed at demographics that don’t usually get as many movies aimed at them can do well.
Crazy Rich Asians exploded.
We’ve gone over how there aren’t many big budget studio comedies anymore. Barbie is funnier than about any movie I can remember seeing for a while.
And obviously, when was the last time a group of women could all go to a movie together and be excited? Event movies are huge. That you’re not just going with your bf/gf, but grabbing 5 friends.
I’d say there are weirder blockbusters still. People thought Titanic would bomb until it came out. It got a ton of bad press. Barbie had just an exhaustive, but ultimately amazing marketing campaign. Gosling and Robie sold the shit out of this movie.
I feel like there was a moment in the film that sort of captured the contradiction.
Paraphrasing.
Barbie pitches something like “everyday Barbie” Will Farrell says something like “that’s a terrible idea we aren’t doing that”. Money guy behind him “It’s going to make us money” Will Ferrell “I Like it”!
Yeah, this. I knew this was going to be an epic success months ago. There is a huge underserved audience out there, Gerwig is cooking with some powerful ideas about nostalgia and coming of age. Robbie and Gosling have once-in-a-generation charisma and they both seem to have understood the assignment perfectly.
The best part is, the studios have no idea why this worked. They’re going to light unimaginable piles of money on fire trying to make cookie-cutter movies about Uno and American Doll and it’s going to be hilarious.
At this point, Greta Gerwig deserves eyes on everything she does until such time as she squanders that good will. Gerwig is certainly why I knew that it was likely to be a good movie, and I’m not sure what I would have expected otherwise.
Dial of Destiny is a good movie and deserves better than the reaction it’s getting; you would think that they went out and released Crystal Skull 2.0, and they absolutely did not. It’s clearly better than Crystal Skull and Temple of Doom, which is the only reasonable expectations bar you could hold it to. The action sequences are a lot of fun and Phoebe Waller-Bridge is as delightful of an addition as you would expect.
Disclaimer: I feel like I wasn’t as negative on Crystal Skull as others either, so perhaps I’m out of step with how other people process these. Basically I thought Crystal Skull was a solid movie until its final act, when it melted into a pile of utter nonsense, making it overall not a very good movie, but still one that provided some fun before it collapsed. Thankfully with Dial of Destiny I have no real “but this part was really bad” caveats to give as I assess it.
That’s what’s so amazing about Hollywood. You think after a century of existing they would’ve dialed in what makes a great movie and they still haven’t.
On an intellectual level someone can understand why Barbie dolls may have been an objectively bad toy for young girls. But if you played with Barbie dolls as a kid and liked them, then you are gonna see this movie.
There is a lot of money to be made if you hit that nostalgia button just right and make people think of the happier days of their childhood.
We dragged the entire family to Barbie, and somehow I was the only one who liked it. I thought it was great, and I’m glad I saw it in the theater. There were several times where I was like, I think I’m enjoying this but I’m not entirely sure why. That was helped by a really energetic audience—I’m not sure I would have enjoyed it nearly as much at home on my TV.
Advance lol at whatever ip-inspired garbage Mattel is going to try to follow this up with.
Agree. This was not a guaranteed success by any means. They put the right people on it and marketed really effectively. Obviously helpful also that the movie is good, keeping the positive momentum going on word of mouth. Not at all difficult to imagine a world in which a Barbie movie was just a huge money-losing joke.
I do understand this is very unfair of me, but her association with Noah Baumbach, and especially his recent movie White Noise, undermines this assertion.
This isn’t really true. No one in the industry thought the movie would bomb, they just thought it had no realistic chance of making its money back because it was so much higher budgeted than any other movie that had previously existed and was way outside of what had been done at that time budget wise.
A-titles in that era were usually in the mid-$60 million budgets to the very top ones having a production budget of a little over $100 million, with most big A-titles having production budgets of $80-85 million. Titanic’s was $200 million and rumored to be higher at the time with me seeming to remember all overages above $200 million coming directly out of Cameron’s pocket. There’s a quote on wiki from him saying he wrote two separate checks to Fox, saying they didn’t force him to do it but they were happy he did. I do not buy it wasn’t a stipulation.
If Fox thought it would do extremely well, they wouldn’t have sold the domestic distribution rights to Paramount in the hopes of recouping some of their production costs. They just knew, at that time, asking a movie to make $400 million worldwide to break even wasn’t an easy ask. Only 24 movies had made $400 million worldwide prior to Titanic’s release. They figured if they were going to make money on the movie their best bet was internationally. If they thought it was the other way around, they would have sold the international distribution rights to Paramount instead. They were right and both of them laughed all the way to the bank while sweating every day coming up on its release.
If it bombed it would have likely destroyed a significant portion of the industry and its success set a horrible precedent of what’s come since, insanely high cost productions that need to be saved by their international grosses because so few movies make a ton of money domestically. $400 million domestically is still good for number 45 all time ($400 million is number 346 internationally, with only 24 of those movies coming before Titanic’s release), showing how hard it still is for movies to make a ton of money outside of international grosses.
I feel like it could it could have been great if they’d taken Amy Schumer Barbie in a direction like Legally Blonde, which was an EXCELLENT subversion of ultra femme stereotypes. But right reports are that we’d have gotten something more like Legally Blonde 2.
They Cloned Tyrone (Netflix) is fun. Stylistically interesting - had a slightly grainy look that made it look a little older, sort of like a blacksploitation film and was clearly designed to be quasi-present day, but not a specific year.
It’s a comedy/mystery/intrigue movie with clear social commentary. The leads are all great and obviously Jamie Foxx playing a fast-talking pimp is always going to be a winner.
Im a sucker for this series regardless of the fact that a majority of them are just bad, but im very optimistic for this. The plot sounds perfect for a Saw movie.
