Just out of curiosity, did any heads roll over Paramount’s first “big-summer-remake”, the disaster known as the Honeymooners? Come to think of it, if they remake Bad News Bears Parts 2 or 3, it’ll probably gross about the same as Schultz’s remake.
Did you forget The Longest Yard?
We went through the management change back in April.
The latest Newsweek had an interview with Billy Bob Thornton, where he says it’s crazy how toned down the movie is compared to what you can see on TV (such as South Park ).
He said the best line of the original movie has been removed. Would that be “you can take your apology and your trophy and shove them straight up your ass”? Because if that line’s gone, that’d be a shame!
I imagine it might be Tanner’s line about the team being “a bunch of Jews, spics, niggers, pansies, and a booger-eating moron.”
I thought that was pretty clear from the trailers.
Maybe Zebra might be able to answer why the hell Trailers give away all of the major plot points these days??
Can’t they get peoples attention through piqueing their interest? I remember Alien in 1978 had everyone I knew buzzing because of that weird Egg campaign in the papers and great tagline “In space no one can hear you scream”.
I feel if it were done today they’d show everyone who gets it and the secret about Ash and show who survives in the 3 minute trailer.
I may be wrong, but do we all have to be treated like booger eating morons these days?
Trailers today are made by a huge committtee.
So trying to make 5 producers, the director, the big star, and the studio, or several studios, leads to this sort of thing. You may not believe it but when you see a trailer, you are seeing about the 20th to 25th pass on it. Each version slightly different. And those are frequently tested with audiences. Then sometimes they test screen an entire movie, ask the audience what their favorite parts are and then just throw them together in the trailer. The problem is that the audience likes major plot points.“It was so cool when the hero threw the villian off the cliff!” Sure, we’ll put that in the preview.
Yikes!! That’s awful.
Kinda sucks any creativity out of the process… Has it always been this way and I just never noticed?
Or, conversely, a focus group will complain about the trailer, “I don’t know what the movie was about.” So the powers-that-be oblige by mapping out every plot point to even the dimmest bulb’s satisfaction.
Director Robert Zemeckis is notorious for wanting all major plot points revealed in the trailers to his movies. He’s actually given interviews on this, saying that Americans want to know everything that is going to happen.
Sadly, it appears he is correct. The trailers did not stop his films What Lies Beneath and Cast Away from becoming big hits. Those trailers give away everything.
Studio research has shown repeatedly that people don’t respond to trailers—that is, don’t go to see the movies—unless they do exactly that.
Marketing movies is a surprisingly difficult enterprise. As Edward J. Epstein put it:
I forget the term, but movies represent a type of product that is notoriously difficult to sell because the audience/market essentially doesn’t know what it is, and people are notoriously unwilling to go out of their way to spend time/money on something they don’t know (and hence may not like). Studios overcome this partly through using “name brand” stars, partly through franchises, and partly through advertising that preserves as few surprises as possible.
(BTW, I recommend Epstein’s Hollywood Economist articles to anyone interested in how today’s movie business works.)
…see… I think Dazed and Confused illustrates that he has no clue how to make interesting or even tolerable main characters do anything of note. That movie just pissed me off it was so bad.
Now on to trailers… Thinking that trailers outlining everything in the movie is a recent phenomenom is incorrect. Ever watch old trailers from the 70s and 60s? They do the same thing. IIRC, the Poseidon Adventure trailer actually shows Gene Hackman’s death scene.
The trailer for 2001 is about 5 minutes and it shows everything.
That’s funny, I thought that was kind of the point of Dazed and Confused. I also thought it was pure genius. I wasn’t even going to give the new BNB a chance until I heard Linklater was involved. Now it’s on my “must see” list.
You would only know that after the fact. Plenty of people at the premier, including hollywood types who should have had a clue, still had a giant WTF about the movie when it was over.
Same here. D&C captured the time period perfectly. I knew all those characters.
I remember when that came to commercial television. They replaced “the first girl to lose her virginity wins” to “the first girl to fall in love wins” throughout. It made no sense, of course.