I saw this trailer for the first time this weekend, and I coudn’t tell what tone they were going for with that damn song – a Jaws-type thriller, or a light-hearted dramedy.
Just from that I’m not wasting my time with it – it’s what Redbox is for.
I would like the movie to do well. Even though I haven’t read him in a while, I still very much respect Alten as an author and the access he gives his own fans (especially when he first started) is unprecedented. I also know this movie has been in developmental hell for the better part of a decade.
For his sake I’d love for the movie to do well…I…sigh…just don’t see it.
Jason Statham punching a Megalodon to save the McGuffin? Hell yes.
The important thing is that the movie leans into the insanity. If it knows what it is and embraces it, it could be a great movie. It’ll never win any awards, sure. But it’s also not trying to win any awards.
HEA??
Happily Ever After
Nothing like a nearly empty theater, 7 people, there was audience participation. It was a good summer movie. There were many jump points. I enjoyed it.
There were bits and bobs of the books, different enough that if you read the books, you were not distracted by what they did to the story.
I saw it. The theater was almost full. I really liked it. Good summer popcorn movie. I rate it about a billion times better than the book, although still not something you see for the science. After the third time my daughter squawked about an inaccurate scientific detail, I leaned over and said “Pretend the shark is a monster, like Godzilla”. She was fine after that.
Very good effects, good action, great shark, most of the right people get eaten. One of those “don’t pull on the threads” plot lines, but I wasn’t seeing it for the story, I was seeing for the beautiful, wonderful shark.
If you want to get out of the heat and like monster movies, this is a good choice.
The Meg was tracked to do about $22-24M for the weekend. After the Thursday night previews came in it was clear it was going to run past that. It looks like it will be $44+M! That’s a big fish!
Again, this just confirms my suspicions that WB blew the marketing on this. Maybe left $10 on the table for opening weekend.
All is not good news:
The CinemaScore rating for this is B+. Note that CinemaScores tend to be packed into the B+ and up range for a lot of films anyway. Quite a few crappy horror films can get a B+. A movie that seems to breakout like this should be at least A-. Not esp. good news going forward.
Also the budget is surprisingly high. I’ve seen numbers from $130M to $170M. The latter might include some, but not all marketing.
It’s going to need a lot of dough from China to break even, and since it was adapted to make it friendlier to that market it could help. Still doesn’t like it’s going to make back production and marketing costs in the theater.
Hell, it wasn’t adapted to make it friendlier to the Chinese market. It was mostly financed with Chinese dollars. You want that cash, you better have some Chinese characters speaking chinese.
Anyway, yeah. $45MM domestic but early reports have it outperforming that number internationally. I think this is going to do well overall.
And it should. Me and my girls watched it today about 12:30 in a half-filled theater. It was a pretty good and entertaining movie. It sure knew what it was and what it wanted to do. The Jaws references - the dog was named Pippin, for Heaven’s sake - were many and knowing.
I think it did what it had to do, puns and all.
I like that they got a bigger boat.
I saw it today.
My wife picked it as a surprise for me. I wouldn’t have considered going otherwise, based on the cheesy trailers.
But, I thought it was pretty entertaining. Very, very formulaic, but Statham is always fun to watch, and the Rainn Wilson was pretty great as the not-too-one-dimensional bad guy.
I’d give it a solid B, as a fun, middle-of-the-summer movie.
have you read the book? if so what did you think?
the shark’s appearance in the book would have been more logical and a bit scarier than what they did in the movie.
The weekend actuals are in: studio estimate: $44,500,000, actual: $45,402,195. WB underestimated by $900K! Again, looks like they really didn’t know what they had on their hands.
(Not sure what’s going on this past weekend. Usually the Sunday estimates for films are quite good. But many were quite off. Just a standard late summer weekend, no holidays or anything.)
It was a fun summer monster movie; it doesn’t need to be anything else.
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I enjoyed it. Pretty good special effects. It’s what I expected.
I did too, then I saw the commercial. And tho I was disappointed that it wasn’t about meg, I realized that it looks like Peter’s script for Big Jaws.
I pretty much agree as long you add the word dumb in there somewhere. Take the kid and the dog out and it could’ve been a lot better.
I was a bit disappointed not to see the surfer scene hinted at in the early concept drawing.
The book sucked giant donkey balls. The science was horrific. It was sexist. It insulted the reader’s intelligence at every opportunity. The whole thing read like bad Jaws fanfic written in the 50s (yes, I know that’s impossible) that nobody bothered to fact check. The movie was a vast improvement in every imaginable way.