I kid you not, I have no idea how they screwed this movie up so badly.
The source material is fantastic, an epic story of betrayal and loss, humiliation and redemption, honor, integrity and self sacrifice. The Wiki version
I personally like the version from the movie “Ronin”
This by “Hollywood Standards” should be a no brainer. This movie needs a 2000 word script, a few decent actors and a director that can make a movie. $225 Million should be enough to promote and make the movie.
Instead I get, Keanu Reeves, a chick that turns into drapes and David Bowie as the “Terribly Rendered Fox”.
Yep, from all reports they knew this was a huge turkey last year, and that is why they waited until now to release it. They have been cleverly including the loss in increments every quarter since then, so they wouldn’t have to take one huge hit from losing what they expect to be about $175 million.
I think they spent about 30 cents in marketing this film.
When does Hollywood learn not to drop that kind of money on these things? There has been a ridiculous string of very high budget flops over the last 2-3 years.
…and the time was like almost 5 years ago. They probably were too far in to just can it if they at some point realized it was turning out badly.
Can you blame them?
BTW…
Come he hell on, people in the movie biz, it’s 2013, enough, if you’re doing a movie of an epic story entirely set in a non-Western civilization, why shoehorn in a Western “star”? Nevermind, I know why: because nobody in Hollywood would sink $200 million into doing The 47 Ronin without some “Big Hollywood box-office-star name” to sell it in the Americas, Europe, the former Bloc, and the Middle East. The movie would simply not have been made, unless they got Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt or*… whaddya mean… damn, oh well, then what about… no good either, huh? oh… so, who do we got left… really?? Oh, all right, Keanu it is.*
What kind of money on what things? What things should they be financing instead? It’s easy to play savvy studio head when you know what the final product looks like.
Sometime the studios like to hire a young, inexperienced director who’ll do whatever the suits and focus groups say and won’t bother them with stuff like “artistic vision” or “integrity”. It never works.
Without knowing anything about it except what the commercial told me, I thought “oh, so seven samurai just weren’t good enough huh? Pffft, kids these days.”
I was hoping against hope that the title was just a coincidence, and that it wasn’t supposed to be based on the iconic Japanese story. So much for that. Dragons indeed.
NHK has their prestige, year-long an-hour-per-week historical drama, and one year they did this story. Most of the story was spent between the time the young daimyo commits seppuku, and the time years later when his followers finally get their revenge. A lot of this comprised fairly quiet domestic scenes, but with this huge obligation hanging over everyone’s head. It was one of the best dramas they ever did. There has also been at least one excellent Japanese movie of this story (that I have seen).
I think a lot of the problem with a story like this for American audiences is that they won’t understand, at first, what is the big deal. The philosophy of bushido is (literally) foreign to them. The solution to that problem, if you’re going to do an American movie, is to write the story in such a way that the unfolding story explains the philosophy and by the end, the audience knows what was the big deal. That would have required some thought, though, and some good writing. Dragons are easier, I guess.
Roddy
