Burton and Depp keep on Burtoning and Depping in...Dark Shadows!

but tbh this will do nowhere near the box office Iron Man did.

again, remaking 40-year-old TV "properties" reminds me of Steve Martin's Sgt Bilko movie.

Iron Man was a minor player in the public's consciousness of the comic universe, methinks.

nah - Iron Man cartoons have been in TV rotation in America for at least a decade, and he's all over the comics. Nothing about Dark Shadows has been in wide distribution in America for decades.

Burton, Depp, vampires, comedy, how can it lose? I think the people that will stay away *are* the ones that are familiar with the source.

The trailer's winning, the subject's of the moment, and the Depp/Burton team-up is still a big enough draw to get a good opening weekend crowd in the seats. If enough people come out thinking it is funny and charming, then the obscurity of the source material probably won't matter at all. It'll just be "that funny vampire movie with Johnny Depp".

nickn otm

And I'm an exception to my prediction, I loved the show in the original run (as a pre-teen, and probably into my teen years), and think this looks good.

The original developed a whole teen fandom thing, along with Bobby Sherman, Partridge Family, etc - the mags referred to it as "DS."

RIP Jonathan Frid

what was the last blockbuster based on little-known material that succeeded

Eventually, John Carter.

lol by what standards did that succeed...? I thought it bombed

According to boxofficemojo, counting worldwide receipts it made back its cost with a little profit, but since the studio only gets half of that, still a bomb.

Half of the profit, or half of the gross minus all of the cost? Obviously it's not what anyone there was looking for when they green-lit it, but I thought it was interesting that a staggeringly mismarketed film could overcome terrible first-week sales by dint of word of mouth (also, being a good film, which I do not suspect Dark Shadows will be).

Also likely to make a lot on DVD sales I suspect.

the old formula was that a movie needed to make around 3x its budget in worldwide ticket sales for the studios to expect a profit. this has probably changed with the advent of dvd/blu-ray/netflix/etc.

The trailer for this was actually kind of....funny?

is it true that he died becuase the new movie is terrible?

Yes, yes it is.

i have to admit the trailer made me realize i'll be watching this at some point in the next few years on pay cable whereas you couldnt force me at gunpoint to watch burton's last few trips up his own baroquely whimsical asshole.

Have we posted this bit about the production of the show:

http://badassdigest.com/2010/12/14/terror-tuesday-how-burtons-dark-shadows-could-be-great-but-wont-be/

Also, an obit:

http://www.avclub.com/articles/rip-jonathan-frid-dark-shadows-barnabas-collins,72682/

While going into the offscreen lives of the cast members, that article didn't even mention that one of them was later the mistress of Claus von Bulow.

OTM about the "panic filled frames" of Frid's performance-so endearing! Also one of the main sources of suspense on the show.

voting for Sweeney Todd in the horror poll btw

Am I the only one who remembers the early 90s remake of Dark Shadows? I've never seen the original series, but I really liked the remake as a kid. I guess it wasn't very popular though, because it only lasted for one season; frustratingly enough, the final episode ended with a cliffhanger, with the female protagonist discovering the guy is a vampire.

I remember that the remake existed, but I haven't seen it.

I was thinking of nominating the earlier, Todd Slaughter version of the Sweeney Todd story in the horror poll, but didn't because I don't remember a thing about it.

From wiki

In 1991, a short-lived primetime remake was produced by MGM Television and aired on NBC from January 13 to March 22. The revival was a lavish, big budget weekly serial combining gothic romance and stylistic horror. Although it was a huge hit at introduction (watched by almost 1 in 4 households according to official ratings during that time period), the onset of the Gulf War caused NBC to continually preempt or reschedule the episodes resulting in declining ratings. It was canceled after the first season.

The final episode ended with a cliffhanger: Victoria Winters (Joanna Going) learning that Barnabas Collins (Ben Cross) was a 200-year old vampire. It has been reported[who?] that the opening episode for a proposed second season would have had Victoria collapsing, after seeing Barnabas, and losing her memory of his terrible secret.[citation needed]

It also starred veterans Jean Simmons as Elizabeth Collins Stoddard and Roy Thinnes as Roger Collins, British character actress Lysette Anthony as Angelique Collins, Barbara Steele as Julia Hoffman, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt as David Collins.

Barbara Steele as Julia Hoffman sounds good, I think.

I remember the remake, and remember hating it.

I doubt I would like it, but I'm curious to see it.

more re: John Carter

sounds like a bomb to me

if only John Carpenter remade Dark Shadows

I keep forgetting this is actually about to be released.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-k90hz1_9Amk/T5nC5zkrVHI/AAAAAAAABo8/shs6t0bSKf8/s400/450661-Dark-Shadow-12-display.gif

This seemed very random and strange to me.

The dingier bowels of marketing.

Whats weird is that they have individual character posters up all around Chicago right now, but I've yet to actually see one for Depp. The Chloe Grace Moretz one is near my office and I see it every day.

OPI had a nail polish line for the last pirates of the carribean movie

what's that nail color you're wearing?
oh this? barnacle

ORLY?

Seeing tonight. Along with DS TV cast members, a nonagenarian vampire legend and a rock geezer make appearances.

or as you like to call it, "Tuesday"

http://rjbuffalo.com/images/apertures/shining_3_185.jpg

It's overly concerned with the undead, ie early '70s pop culture.

HBC is most valuable player.

What I can't figure out is why Burton, undoubtedly a man of vision, hasn't made a movie that wasn't an adaptation or remake since "Ed Wood" (which, coincidentally or not remains the general consensus for his "best" movie)? Is it all about the bucks?

One of those adaps is among his best films, Sweeney Todd. Doing a 30-year-old Broadway musical classic is not "for the bucks" even if you make it explicitly gory.

(All of Stanley Kubricks's films (aside from the first two I think?) were adaptations.)

also Sleepy Hollow had pretty much nothing to do with Washington Irving aside from the basic Headless Horseman image.

really an aptly named movie

What I can't figure out is why Burton, undoubtedly a man of vision, hasn't made a movie that wasn't an adaptation or remake since "Ed Wood" (which, coincidentally or not remains the general consensus for his "best" movie)? Is it all about the bucks?

― Josh in Chicago, Wednesday, May 9, 2012 10:09 AM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark

isn't it clear that he's just more of a visual stylist than an ideas guy? the only full-length films he has a writing credit on are Scissorhands and Nightmare Before X-Mas and in both cases he came up with the basic story and then gave it to a screenwriter to flesh out (his next project is a full-length adaptation of the early short he wrote, Frankenweenie, but again he had someone else do the screenplay). the real shame, i guess, is that he never found a writer or writers that could serve as a longterm creative partner the way he did with Depp as a star, so remakes and adaptations kind of became a logical direction to take (although obv i agree that he has lost his touch in other ways and could've done better even with the projects he has done).

maybe there's just a pile of terrible spec scripts sitting in a pile in his office from kids who think they've written 'the perfect Tim Burton movie,' though. supposedly Jonathan Gems, who wrote Mars Attacks, has written a bunch of unproduced screenplays for Burton, maybe they're great, maybe they suck.

the real shame, i guess, is that he never found a writer or writers that could serve as a longterm creative partner

john august

As with many auteurs, Burton may do plenty of uncredited rewriting (have TB or any disgruntled writers weighed in on this?).

John August, the writer whose breakthrough was Go, has had a hand in four of TB's recent films (incl story credit on this) and is listed for the upcoming feature version of Frankenweenie.

xp

well i meant specifically someone who was coming up with ideas for original films, not someone to help him adapt Big Fish and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, etc. (xpost)

really i think Depp's embrace of CGI is far more tragic than his turn to remakes. he had such a gift for in-camera effects and then he just tosses them aside to make digital puke like Alice In Wonderland.

to my mind he's always been in favor of gimcrackery; it's just that his means of achieving it are less charming today than they were during - say - beetlejuice's claymation scenes.

on the commentary track to Ed Wood, Burton says it's the only script he's never changed/rewritten prior to production