The Golden Compass made ***$372,234,864 ***at the box office. I’m sure most films wish they could utterly, utterly tank in such a spectacular fashion. That’s more than Toy Story made, to name a movie that went on to have 2 sequels. To name some other PSRRs (Prequels, Sequels, Remakes & Reboots) or those that spawned such, that’s more than X Men: First Class, Oceans Twelve & Thirteen, Fast and Furious, Alvin and the Chipmunks, Captain America, National Treasure, Rush Hour 2, Resident Evil: Afterlife, and The Bourne Supremacy made among others.
I know, I keep forgetting that only the US box office is important, that the rest of the world doesn’t exist and is of trivial importance even if it did. Since it “only” made $70,107,728 in the only market that matters, it’s considered a flop. Like John Carter, a more recent “failure” even though it made $282.5, it’s a handy go-to flop reference.
The sequels should have been made. The executives who decided against it are idiots.
I’m curious if those who complain about Prequels, Sequels, Remakes & Reboots have seen or have plans to see and support (assuming they’re playing or will play in your area) excellent (IMO) movies like Moonrise Kingdom, Bernie, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, The Intouchables*, Bully, Monsieur Lazhar, and The Cabin In The Woods? Coming soon we’ll have big originals like Pixar’s Brave and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, and small originals like Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Take This Waltz, People Like Us and others.
A great example of the disconnect between the US and the rest of the world. In the US, The Intouchables is considered a tiny arthouse film, that’s made less than $800,000 in its run, which for “arthouse” is considered pretty good, whereas worldwide this accessible comedy has made $345,232,000.
The first Alvin and the Chipmunks movie grossed $361 million and $101 million in DVD sales, while the second grossed $443 million and the third grossed $343 million. The Harry Potter films grossed $7.7 billion (averaging $963 million) while LOTR grossed $2.948 billion (averaging $737 million). Even the Transformers films grossed $669 million on average. So certainly they’re looking at every book series, toy, children’s TV show, etc. looking for a film franchise to be based on a known “brand.” I think that explains the recent Muppets and Winnie the Pooh movies.
There was a brief fad for multi-part franchises in the 1970s - Richard Lester’s two Three Musketeers films springs to mind, as well as the two Richard Donner Superman films. In both cases the films were expensive to mount and there was an assumption that filming them back-to-back would save money, but in practice it didn’t work out (the Musketeers wanted to be paid twice over, and Richard Donner fell out with the producers mid-way through Superman II). That probably soured Hollywood on the idea of committing itself to multi-part franchises at the outset.
TVTropes has a page about “two-part trilogies” here, where they discuss cases where a standalone film is a big enough success to prompt a pair of closely-related sequels; the Back to the Future and Star Wars films are the best examples of this.
As with Chronos, I’m still amazed that Lord of the Rings was made; if you had asked me to give the director of Meet the Feebles and his tiny special effects studio eight years and $300 million to make a film out of that book with bloody Tom Bombadil in it - in New Zealand - I would probably have made my excuses and left. I would have been worried about Peter Jackson having a heart-attack midway through production, or the film being decent but not particularly popular.
In general the wave of franchise films that followed Lord of the Rings seems testament to a certain level of competence in Hollywood. I’m sure it’s been pointed out at The Onion and so forth, but there are fewer awful big-budget disasters than there used to be (John Carter, The Golden Compass, Eragon et al were at least watchable, and made $250m worthwide apiece despite being “flops”). Whether because Hollywood is more formal, less willing to take risks on obscure personal projects, has less money to waste on crap than it used to, dunno.
I always thought it was odd that the pre-Daniel Craig Bond films were self-contained. The producers had a machine going, they could churn the films out once every couple of years, and people would queue up to see 'em. Making a series of films would avoid the problem whereby a particularly interesting villain has to be killed off at the end. And yet no, they were islands.
“Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel is the 116th most successful film of all time. That’s after you’ve adjusted for inflation and before you factor in DVD sales, video game spin-offs and merchandising. So the story of three preteen cartoon beatboxing rodents is 3,707 places higher up the chart than Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life.”
According to Box Office Mojo it now seems to be 126th. Number 150 is Gone with the Wind.
Well, until very recently, that is all that seemed to matter. Because America invented movies, their response has always been not only the biggest, but is also why “opening weekend” gross seems to matter so much - because that’s when most movie-goers in America see films. Overseas markets do not, though. They’re more likely to amble in any old time over the first few weeks, and be slow burners.
But something has changed in the last year, and I’m seeing releases overseas first, quotes of international box-office as positives, and a slight decline in US box office opening weekend numbers on even the most anticipated movies.
In the 30s, there was a glut of gangster films and westerns. In the 40s, there was an excess of war films. In the 50s, there were too damn many John Wayne and Marlon Brando movies. Hollywood studios would rather put their bets behind something they’re pretty sure won’t lose money. This decade is all about superheroes and sequels. It’s just the same pattern, and there’s nothing unusual about it.
I think this is arguable, but I’ll let it slide, since I’m not in a pedantic or citing mood. America, fuck yeah and all.
This is all true and a very interesting turn of events. I hope it continues. I’m still amused that The Avengers was released in dozens of other countries a week or two before it opened in North America.
Edit to add, Krokodil, good point, and I agree with you.
Comparing Toy Story with The Golden Compass is silly. They spent $150 million more making Compass. Toy Story had a $30 million budget and made $360 million, that’s 12 times its budget. Compass had a $180 million budget and made $370 million, or roughly twice its budget.
However, the most important reason the foreign markets didn’t matter was that the studio that produced Compass sold the overseas distribution rights in order to finance the film’s production. So the film was a huge bomb from their perspective, because they weren’t getting any of the overseas money.
As far as the film The Intouchables is concerned, IMDB describes the plot as, “After he becomes a quadriplegic from a paragliding accident, an aristocrat hires a young man from the projects to be his caretaker.” That sounds absolutely terrible. Not that it necessarily is terrible, it just sounds like something I wouldn’t watch unless I was being held at gunpoint. Also note that comedies do not always translate well, as humor is often heavily dependent on language and cultural expectations.
If it makes you feel better I know how you feel. I’m a huge fan of Pullman’s arch enemy Lewis. It looks like they’re not making any more Narnia movies, despite the fact that Dawn Treader made $415 million on a $155 million budget.
The next Narnia was tentatively announced as skipping the next one, and going straight to the one after that. I don’t know which is which and Google isn’t playing nice with me today, but it was something like not The Silver Chair, and instead it was going to be The Magician’s Nephew. Maybe.
Anyway, they were steadily getting lower in budget, and lower in box office returns and critical appraisal, plus Disney abandoned them and Walden Media weren’t doing so well, so it’s quite likely they’ve stopped making them.
I understand, but only $166 million of that $344,500,000 came from France (it’s the 5th highest-grossing film in French history, partially because it’s based on a true story that most of them know), the rest came from people in other countries who presumably didn’t have to have guns pointed at them. The humor and story must translate pretty well. I’ll find out sometime this week when I go see it for myself. It’s going to be remade for American audiences so we’ll see just how well it translates.
I get your point about Toy Story and the foreign distribution rights, but it still irks me that The Golden Compass is considered such a bomb and is always used as an example as such. I can never help myself from defending it.
While you can argue the technology may have originated elsewhere, the modern movie business was certainly invented in the US.
As far as why movies ave started opening over seas first, I imagine that studios learned that pirating hurts foreign box office more than it does domestic so they decided the little bit they lose in more US pirating they gain in more foreign box office.
(Bolding mine.) Is this true? It seems unlikely to me that the producers would commit to making a movie for each book before they first movie was a known box office success. In the case of Harry Potter the first movie was made before the last half of the book series had even been written, and I doubt the later movies would have been made if the later books hadn’t continued to be popular. Or do you mean that they committed to give each book its own movie if they did indeed keep making the movies?
Anyway, in both cases I suspect the two-part final films were due to some extent to the studios’ desire to drag out successful franchises.
It happened sort of the other way around with The Neverending Story, which is one book but was adapted into three movies. The first (1984) is based fairly closely on the first half of the book, the second (1990) inspired more loosely by the second half of the book, and the third (1994), which I’m told is truly terrible, has a plot totally unrelated to that of the novel.
Others have already mentioned The Golden Compass as a movie that didn’t get a sequel and the Narnia movies as a series that seems to have run out of steam, but there are other examples of recent book-to-movie series that didn’t get a separate movie for each book. The first three (out of 13) Lemony Snickett books were condensed into one movie, A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004), and although it did okay critically and commercially there’s never been a sequel. Wikipedia indicates that there was talk of a sequel for at least five years afterward, but it didn’t happen and I think the moment has probably passed now. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants book series (four parts) was adapted into just two movies. Wikipedia tells me that while the first movie was based closely on the first book, the second movie was based primarily on the fourth book but included elements from books 2 and 3.
According to that fount of all knowledge, the producer bought the rights to the first four books. Whether he was committed to actually making the movies is another matter, but considering the success of the books, that was probably never in doubt.
As for the current wave of franchising movies, the one thing I’ve noticed is that they’re more willing to reboot a series much much quicker. Batman’s been rebooted a couple times, and they’re going back to the well with Spider-Man a decade later. It’s like a mental block has been removed (helped by success at the box office) that gives producers permission to tell and retell stories.