I have difficulty believing that major studios greenlighted movies like Battleship and Cowboys and Aliens and that big stars signed up.
Do you know of similar movies?
How do they get through the approval process?
My question excludes Uwe Boll-type movies where wily producers take advantage of badly government-distorted incentives.
3/4 of all the Batman movies, and most of the rest of the comic book hero movies.
“Ouija” - Michael Bay to produce, McG to direct
“Monopoly” - Ridley Scott to direct
“Clue” Remake
“Risk” - Will Smith to produce
That movie about the creation of Facebook. I can’t believe people were interested enough that it actually made money.
Disney made a series of movies about rides in their parks. Pirates of the Caribbean is the one everyone’s heard of. But there were also Country Bear Jamboree, Haunted Mansion, Mission to Mars, and Tower of Terror movies.
I’m still kind of shocked that they made Lord of the Rings. The Tolkien estate has been traditionally very tight about who gets to touch their legacy.
The Uwe Boll movies aren’t so bad conceptually since they’re mostly video game adaptations (though not all of them really deserve a movie, those make better sense than, say, Battleship).
This is I-can’t-believe-that on several levels.
I don’t see anything too remarkable about Cowboys & Aliens in terms of its source material. Comic books are a visual and narrative media so they’re a natural source for movies. And not just super-hero movies. American Splendor, The Crow, From Hell, Ghost World, A History of Violence, The Losers, Men in Black, Persepolis, The Road to Perdition, RED, Scott Pilgrim vs the World, Sin City, 30 Days of Night, 300, V for Vendetta, and Whiteout were all based on comic books.
Because the rights were sold when JRRT was alive.
Brian
Wasn’t there a film a couple-three years back about the guy who invented intermittent windshield wipers?
It’s been on again, off again for years.
I hear they went back and forth for a while before proceeding.
Back in the early 1970s when Woody Allen did his film of “Everything You always wanted to know about sex…but were afraid to ask”, originally a Q & A book, the radio commercials used “I can’t believe they made a book of” as a tagline.
For a serious answer to this question, yes - the movie was Flash of Genius with Greg Kinnear.
Why is that so weird? It’s a pretty huge phenomenon, even if you don’t use Facebook.
Yeah, a movie about a self made tycoon who realizes in the last scene that all his money can’t get him the one thing he really wants. That will never be a classic.
They’re about to release a film based on the advice book “What to Expect When You’re Expecting.” Earlier, someone made a film based on the advice book “He’s Just Not That into You” and the non-fiction book “Queen Bees and Wannabes” was turned into the movie “Mean Girls.”
According to Wikipedia, “Stretch Armstrong: The Movie” is scheduled to be released in 2014, starring Taylor Lautner. Basically, all of Hasbro’s toys are being considered for movies. Edited to add, here is a list of Hasbro toys. Which looks least likely to become a movie?
So the real question is, why aren’t the other toy companies doing the same thing? Well, they are. A film based on the Mattel brand Hot Wheels is under development, and “Lego: The Piece of Resistance” is scheduled for 2014. The storyline: “It involves many worlds. Basically, the least qualified Lego characters in the universe having to keep the world from being frozen together.”
I vote for Thunderpants (2002), a family comedy about a kid who farts a lot. Directed by the man who directed the second Bill & Ted movie. Not the first one, the second. Quoth the IMDB:
Patrick Smash (11) was born with two stomachs, and hence the uncontrollable ‘talent’ to produce ungodly farts. This soon drives his own dad away and makes his social life hell. His only friend is classmate Alan A. Allen, a prodigy genius, who has no sense of smell. Even Alan’s invention Thunderpants, which renders Patrick’s farts harmless, can’t make his space travel dream realistic. However after the invention of an adaptation which turns it into flying fuel, Alan is recruited by the US space center.
Basically it was a British National Lottery-funded piece of crap, but the cast was interesting - Stephen Fry, Ned Beatty(!), uncredited role for Keira Knightley(!!). If you gave me £5m and Stephen Fry and Ned Beatty and Keira Knightley I could have made a better film. A horrific, obscene film; a nightmarish torture festival of depravity. The tagline would be “This Piggy’s Gonna Make You Squeal, Bitch” and you can guess the plot. It’s horrible what they do to… no, that would be giving away the… no. Keira Knightley has such a pretty face.
Just like literally every British film in the last thirty years - literally ever single one, don’t argue - it was scientifically designed to be as unappealing and uncommercial as possible, probably for tax reasons. That’s the difference between the British and US film industries. The US film industry tries to make films that people want to see, as a means of making money. The British film industry is funded by the government and deliberately tries to make films that no-one except the director’s former university buddies want to see - and even then they don’t really want to see it. Viz this classic article from The Guardian in which some tosser who spends his days having expensive lunches paid for by someone else moans that no-one wants to fund his film about an 18-year-old boy from Glasgow who travels to Madrid to assassinate General Franco. Audience: nil.
The idea of Cowboys and Aliens is a good concept for a movie, although the movie they made was campy and overdone (albeit IMO better than its reputation). We’ve been doing alien invasion movies for more than a half-century now, but they’re pretty much all set in the present day (or occasionally in the '50’s, when the genre was born). But an alien invasion in an historical setting isn’t ultimately any more absurd than in a contemporary one.
–Cliffy