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Post a Comment On: Steve Sailer: iSteve

""Nobody knows anything""

21 Comments -

1 – 21 of 21
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Charitably, you can say that the filmmakers ran out time and money to make the finale as good as it should have been. Uncharitably, you can say that this is where they finally cashed in big time."

Do I hear Sailer's Inner Child speaking?

7/21/11, 6:18 PM

Anonymous Disgruntled said...

The Potter movies have been so crazy profitable, that I think they'll have to somehow keep making something based on the world if Rowling will(has?) license it out.

At this point, I'm not even sure how many of them I've seen. While sometimes amusing, they're pretty forgettable. They never really made much sense, but I guess that's an advantage of writing about magic. I lost interest after the one in which one of the characters had a time machine.

7/21/11, 6:57 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

You misunderstand the time, logistics and technology of film production so much as to be risible. Not to mention two more seconds spent in earning credits as a Wikipedia scholar would have told you that the sixth movie was in the can and ready for a November 2008 release when it was delayed "to guarantee the studio a major summer blockbuster in 2009."

7/21/11, 7:43 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Lucas managed to cash in big time on the entire prequel trilogy, not to mention the multiple re-release of the originals in various guises.

I'm not sure if there was anything left to cash in on Jurassic Park III, since JP2 was so amazingly awful. Sam Neill's character even manages to get in a dig at JP2 the beginning of the third movie.

I presume the Harry Potter filmmakers had to work fast in order to cash in on the excitement, lest the original Potter fans be grandparents by the time they were finished. My young cousin who was in elementary school when she began reading the books and is now a happily married mother of 2.

7/21/11, 8:25 PM

Anonymous Daniel said...

Very interesting to read this summary in contrast with the summary at Bruce Charlton's blog

Different strokes for different folks, it would appear.

7/21/11, 8:41 PM

Blogger Truth said...

Never saw one HP picture, Avatar, or Titanic. NOW WHAT, FOOL?!?!?

7/21/11, 8:44 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

are you playing movie-critic/Hollywood-observer again?

7/21/11, 9:14 PM

Anonymous eh said...

I am willing to admit that, after eschewing the whole phenomenon as, ahem, something beneath me, I read the first four Potter books...because they came in a set. And I saw the first two Potter movies. After that I lost interest.

7/21/11, 11:35 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Young people comprise most moviegoers, and their tastes are easier to figure out that those of older people.

7/22/11, 12:15 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epagogix

7/22/11, 1:09 AM

Anonymous Henry Canaday said...

Never having read or seen a “Potter,” my ignorant theory is that they succeed because: 1) they, like so many Spielberg movies, are about the last years very clever and adventurous pre-adolescents spend before sex becomes an obsession and misery; and 2) the source books are reasonably entertaining because most British novelists, unlike so many of their American counterparts, do not double as college English professors.

7/22/11, 4:14 AM

Anonymous Marlowe said...

Goldman also observed how Lucas & Spielberg had changed the rules of the game and simplified the ecology of Hollywood by 1982 in what seems to me, now, 30 years later, a true feat of brilliant extrapolation. By the early 80s the two men had only produced a handful of hits between them - Jaws (1975), Star Wars (1977), Close Encounters (1977), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) - and one huge flop in Spielberg's case, 1941! (1979), which not even the cream of young American comic talent could redeem, yet Goldman saw that they were something new under the sun and not merely a pair of lucky producers: rather a new kind of mogul, reshaping the nature of film production (and I mean the actual process as well as the content).

Quite simply without these two men & James Cameron, a rival innovator, we wouldn't have Michael Bay and the dominance of giant spectacle movies awash in CGI.

Tim Burton is probably the fourth stooge in this vaudeville act: his 1989 Batman movie prepared the ground for the modern superhero and the triumph of the literal comic book movie Goldman described metaphorically.

I would add however that the magic doesn't always work: The Golden Compass died in the cradle possibly because its original was too much a literary conceit and far too cerebral.

7/22/11, 4:54 AM

Blogger bgc said...

The problem for me is that I have a very different evaluation of the relative quality of the movies:

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2011/07/harry-potter-movies-reviewed-in-one.html

But I see no reason to accept the initial assumption that (beyond a certain point) there is no reason to assume that extra money and time make for better movies.

Indeed I can think of plausible reasons why more money might be associated with *worse* movies - given what they spend money on (mostly, flashy special effects and set-pieces - which were what spoiled several Harry Potter movies - in my opinion).

7/22/11, 5:44 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Never read the Harry Potter books. Saw all of the movies. Wanted to see what it was about. Was obsessed for a few months to a year. Lost complete interest after that. Harry Potter isn't water, it's soda. It's okay and a litte entertaining but not engaging, lasting and a work of art (a literal masterpiece) like Lord of the Rings nor as good as say Star Wars, the Matrix or The Chronicles of Narnia.

7/22/11, 7:47 AM

Anonymous PN said...

There's another good reason film budgets can't be trusted (one which dovetails with another recent iSteve post)... films get tax incentives back from a number of states based on their budget numbers.

For instance, my own state offers a nice little payout for movies with budgets over 200k which conduct almost all principal photography within the state. The payout is a percentage of the budget, so less-than-scrupulous producers can claim a film budget of $2m was actually, oh, $4m and enjoy a nice paycheck.

Such shenanigans were not unknown in the Louisiana film industry recently - until the state finally got wise.

7/22/11, 9:09 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Steve:

Never, ever trust the budget estimates of big movies that you see online. Nine times out of ten, they're either spin from the studios that put them out, or rumor-spreading from rival studios trying to say "look how much money they spent on this turkey."

You generally only get accurate budget information when there's a lawsuit over profits after the fact.

7/22/11, 12:37 PM

Blogger Whiskey said...

Steve, Goldman said that when it was untrue. Even in the 70's producers knew that say, "the Sting" or Towering Inferno made money, and Taxi Driver and Raging Bull did not. But producers gave a big middle finger to audiences and made movies for their peers. Louis Mayer and Sam Goldwyn knew what made money -- stories middle class people would like.

The danger is social distance eroding the ability to understand what middle class audiences like. If Sting or Bruce Springsteen live like oriental potentates, with "wipers" (out of the Eddie Murphy movie) ... it does not matter because their skills as musicians and songwriters remain the same (even if their lyrics are stupid). But for producers and directors and screenwriters, social distance produces say, "Grace is Gone" instead of Taken.

7/22/11, 2:31 PM

Blogger Whiskey said...

When Goldman wrote that comment, audiences flocked to see Newman and Redford in Butch Cassidy, and the Sting. They went to see big budget disaster movies like Airport or Towering Inferno. With lots of movie stars. They did not like depressing, arty, made for fellow movie maker movies. Taxi Driver is a towering achievement -- but its not exactly a crowd pleaser. Meanwhile Death Wish, well was, along with Dirty Harry, and neither required a huge budget.

Taken is just Dirty Harry mixed with Death Wish. Its not that hard to figure out. People like that stuff. But you can't be arty and pull it off.

7/22/11, 2:36 PM

Blogger James Kabala said...

"the sixth movie was in the can and ready for a November 2008 release when it was delayed 'to guarantee the studio a major summer blockbuster in 2009.'"

Besides this undoubted fact, it is also true that 7a and 7b were filmed as one unit - which you sort of acknowledge, but I don't quite know how you incorporate it into your overall theory about the time gaps.

7/22/11, 3:51 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Whiskey, both Taxi Driver and Raging Bull made money, though neither were blockbusters. The former did make something on the order of 14 times its production costs. Looking that up took two minutes.

7/23/11, 7:33 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2jgs6H-teM

Funny. I miss the 80s.

7/25/11, 10:57 PM

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