A Bleak Future for Moviegoers in 2003

Okay, there will probably not be another Superman movie for a long while, Star Wars starts shooting in July for a May 2005 release, Rocky 6 isn’t even greenlit yet, and Spider-Man 2 (known as The Amazing Spider-Man) officially starts shooting early 2003 for a summer 2004 release.

So you’re way off in your estimations.

Projected for sometime in 2003: Red Dwarf! It was originally slated for release this year but the project has been delayed so its Director of Photography can work on Tomb Raider 2.

I hope that’s a joke. I really don’t want to look it up to find out though.

I’m very frightened.

Havana Nights: Dirty Dancing 2

The horror…

Some early projected release dates:
Spiderman 2 - Late Spring 2004, Shrek 2 - Summer 2004, Mission Impossible 3 - Summer 2004, XXX2 - Summer 2004, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban - November 2004,Wallace and Gromit: The Great Vegetable Plot - Winter 2004, Star Wars 3 - 5/25/05, Indiana Jones 4 - Summer 2005, Spiderman 3 - 2006

All this just based on perusing movie websites. Obviously it will change over time.

Am I the only one to see a teaser(less than a minute long) before Spiderman advertising that The Hulk was being release summer 2002? Or rather, it said “this summer.” I wonder if that was a mistake.

People will flock to the theaters because they need to get their sticky-floor-n-stale-popcorn fix. Even if nothing especialy good is showing, people still go to the movies in droves. Maybe they don’t break any box office records, but they still go.

That’s why almost every studio comes out with a TV commercial shortly after a film’s release, proclaiming it “The #1 movie in theaters!” As long as they don’t release it on the same weekend as another film, every movie gets to wear the #1 hat for at least the opening weekend, just because it’s the only new release and people will go to see it for lack of anything better to do.

Matrix Reloaded is supposed to be amazing

One I just stumbled across that I’m looking forward to is A Walk Among the Tombstones starring Harrison Ford, from a book by Lawrence Block. It’s supposed to start shooting in January or February. The book is very hard-boiled and noir-ish - just what I like.

(The book itself is part of a series, but not really a sequel.)

But … but … but, you forgot The Core!

/runs away

Months of memory surpression therapy wasted…

Perhaps i have turned a blind eye to the onslaught of sequels in our new future. Call me greenhorn if you wish, but i am starting to get a bit irritated. Now, starwars needs completion, and so does LOTR. They are allowed that as they are unfinished tales, so to speak.

But what really busts my chops is when they make sequels when sequels aren’t really needed. I will not point out movies, because i really am generalizing here, but think about it. I am sure you have seen some previews for sequels or even sequels where you can only groan.

I don’t know. My personal pallette is for something original. It would be nice to have a truly epic, truly original movie that was just that and no more. Granted, money spins the wheels of hollywood, but i think creativity is slowly being ebbed away.

Any thoughts on this? Agree or not? I like some of these sequels, but i can’t say i want to be seeing the same franchises existing when i become a grandfather…

Oh, but you can’t forget Jim Carey as God. Saw the trailer when I went to see LoTR this afternoon. Gave me a bit of a chuckle when I thought of the Almighty finding the one person on Earth worthy to weild His power to be . . . Jim Carey.

First off, it’s Carrey’s character… Not Jim Carrey as a person.

Secondly, That’s the point, God gives him the ability because he doesn’t appreciate God’s responsibilities.

Third, Buffalo, NY. needs the publicity. I live there.

SO LAY OFF! Plus The Truman Show was one of my favorite movies.

Sure, lots of crap sequels being released, but we’ll see lots of other kinds of films…a handful of generic crowd-pleasing blockbuster sequels does not a film year make.

We had a ton of big-budget spectaculars this year (Spiderman, Episode 2, Men in Black 2, The Two Towers) but also had some smaller, quieter films like About A Boy and My Big Fat Greek Wedding that did pretty well. Not every studio can play the 100 million dollar mega-star cast game, so we’ll always see these smaller films that give a little break from the CGI effects and overamped soundtracks.

There is some question about this? Color me confused. I understand the debate about whether Evil Dead 2 is a sequel or not (I’m in the “It’s a remake” camp), but this one seems cut and dried. It continues the story begun in an earlier movie. That’s pretty much the definition of a sequel.

Merriam Webster:

se·quel
2 a : subsequent development b : the next installment (as of a speech or story); especially : a literary or cinematic work continuing the course of a story begun in a preceding one

se·quel
2. ** A literary, dramatic, or cinematic work whose narrative continues that of a preexisting work.**

Preview of the Matrix sequels

This reviewer sounds a little over the top, but they still sound cool.

What movie is this supposed to be? I’m pretty out of the loop on movies so please enlighten me.

Edited extensively…

Not to be hostile, but:

  1. You actually think no one’s going to see these movies? I can guarantee that X-Men 2, Spider-Man 2, and Episode III will all stay in the top five for weeks after their release, and quite possibly at #1. T3, and Matrix Reloaded ought to do fairly well, but I’d guess T3 will suffer from the time it took to release it, and Matrix Reloaded from Anti-Matrix backlash.

Superman and Rocky…well, between the time factor, and the absolute cheesiness of some of the earlier installments…

  1. Nowhere to start off? Did you see any of the movies they were sequels to? (Actually, T2 DID wrap that universe up pretty nicely, but with time travel workarounds are always possible. And I haven’t seen Matrix, so I can’t comment. The others this still applies to, though.)

Even though the stories told in the original movies were cleaned up, there are other stories to be told with the characters - heroic and villainous.

Yes, some of the villains died, but a) With Spider-Man, X-Men, and Star Wars, other villains were seen in the earlier movies (Although if you’re unfamiliar with Spider-Man, you might be surprised who this is in the movie), and are still alive; and b) As long as the heroes are still alive, you can always introduce a new villain. (Spider-Man and X-Men (The comics and cartoons) are good examples of this technique. Hells…so is the Rocky series. He fought a different opponant in each, IIRC.)

There’s the Tolkien-esque take that it’s really one extremely long movie divided into thirds which would make Return of the King not a sequel.
But then since each film is apparently having it’s own distinct narative arc the films can really be thought of as seperate more easily than the book.