That’s another good episode of “How Did This Get Made?”.
Because it was ‘This year’s Anaconda’
I knew I was working at the wrong company when I saw that copy on a desk while the campaign was being wrapped up. I was right.
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How often are you working on projects that make you think, “I’m glad I’m getting paid, because this film is going to bomb.”
I never think about a film bombing when I’m on it (sort of did on a recent one that’s come out the gate well because more potential work was attached to its success/failure) and money is just a by product of working and not something that drives me.
These days, I work on a lot of movies that don’t get much of a theatrical release, so they’re low budget (my budgets aren’t hurt) and low expectations (I usually see them show up in the home page of Prime). I usually get to sprinkle a few blockbuster type movies in per year and those are pins and needles hoping they don’t bomb, because they can dramatically change how much work you do or get in the future for related titles.
I’ve been associated with a few recent bombs and we did good work in support of all of those. Sometimes I get to see the full movie, sometimes I don’t. It really depends, but my work quality is the same whether it’s a turd or good because I care about the end product of everything being the best I can make it can be no matter what it is.
Is it guilt-by-association on a bomb, even if your sound work was fine?
It’s a business thing. The studios want to go all out for the type of work we do when there’s an expectation that it will do well and are excited when it does (often adding more). If it bombs they want to throw all that work in the trash, so everyone murders themselves in the last few weeks before a release to get it all done so nothing gets killed before the movie comes out. No one knows how a movie will really do until it comes out. High pay high stress.
Having the filmmakers have approval of our stuff is also a big wrinkle. We wait and wait and wait depending on how much capital the filmmakers have. We waited for approvals on The Flash up to nearly the deadline (highest stress title I can remember). When the movie came out and bombed, everything was magically approved with no notes to finish (probably would have had no notes and we were in good cohesion with the director/producer), because Warners was immediately over the title. And they wanted everything right that second. I had to do the craziest mix I’ve ever done in a post mix on one of the Blu-ray pieces because I had zero time to complete it and had creative differences that delayed us on the piece when we had no time for that.
The last time I was under that kind of stress was in the 2010 Vancouver Olympics when I got a 30 minute highlight show at 5am that had to be on air at 9am. Right there is 1.5 hours just burned in run time. I was flyinggggg on both shows but the feeling on The Flash was probably 10 times worse and more stressful because hardly anyone saw the Olympics show and potentially hundreds of thousands might see this and it’s preserved forever.
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I just watched Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Bad Boys (1983) back to back. Can’t think of any greater range by any young actor on movies made within the same year than Sean Penn in those.
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Awesome, totally awesome.
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Watched Repo Man for the first time on Netflix. Not perfect but I want more movies like that being made. The 80s were awesome
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Great movie. Thoroughly original and enjoyable.
Godzilla Minus One
9/10
A monster movie where the monster plays an ancillary story to the story of the main character. A great homage to the older Godzilla movies, the score especially, while being a modern meditation of redemption for WW2 Japanese soldiers.
Eileen
6/10
A movie with the trope of a boring timid person whose life gets interrupted by someone with some charisma. In this case it’s Anne Hathaway and she sizzles as a force of nature 1950’s blond bombshell coming into Thomasin McKenzie’s life. The twist was pretty surprising too, but the pay off fizzled for me and ultimately didn’t work out.
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I still need to catch up on seeing the older Godzilla stuff. My reaction after the fact had been that the movie seemed pretty Jaws-coded, but maybe Jaws wasn’t really the originator of “common people banding together to deal with a seemingly impossible monster to kill.”
Your 6/10 for Eileen is very kind IMO.
What was missing that cost a point?
Are you saying the movie was good but the ending didn’t work and thus reduces the overall score? Looking at your comment that Hathaway sizzled.
There is not an Anne Hathaway movie where she doesn’t sizzle. No matter the material, she brings it. It almost feels like she’s a little underrated at this point?
Of course, that’s not a guarantee of a good movie if she’s in it. If you’re not specifically John Cazale, you’re gonna make some bullshit.
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It was great but for me a 10/10 is kind of like pornography, you know it when you see it. Something like Terminator 2 or Fury Road where it’s so audacious and confident that it blows me away.
10 minus one equals 9
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Curses for beating my pony to the line
The movie wasn’t good. Ann Hathaway was great at playing a coy, sophisticated, seductive woman though. The movie’s shot in Massachusetts in the winter so a lot of grey dreariness and shot with a lot of average looking actors so when Hathaway shows up wearing vibrant red and looking like, well, Ann Hathaway, she stands out. Everything else, the plot, the choice of scenes, the plot resolution, were not good.
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Too good