itt: consternation and wailing about Zach Snyder's upcoming SUPERMAN/BATMAN film/sequel to MAN OF STEEL -- official title: BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE

despite jon peters having no credit, the movie features a pointless scene where a monster climbs to the top of a skyscraper and is shot at by helicopters.

haha good catch!

Yeah, that kind of thing is what makes the Ang Lee hulk so fun, I'm very suspicious of those that don't like it.

ulysses list largely otm, Thor 2 in "great" is sort of jaw-dropping though.

i don't think they should ALL be that, but if they don't have a really unique story they want to tell through the use of this particular character/milieu, better just to be like, this is the one where he goes to japan and fights silver samurai, than to reach instead for gratuitous darkness-as-depth and emptied-out fate-of-the-world non-suspense.

I actually watched this for the first time last week, it does have an awful lot of "Wolverine would like to die" in it.

best superhero movie nobody watched = the shadow easily imo

i actually kinda liked the green hornet

it was a mess but there were a few nice michel gondry touches and it was occasionally funny. as green-themed superheroes goes it was better than green lantern...

Most superhero movies leave me fairly unmoved, but I did find Amazing Spider-Man 2 quite eye-catching and fun. Then I learned that everyone hated it to such an extent that it killed the franchise.

I would like to see a Flaming Carrot movie, but I have no idea who could direct a good one. Harmony Korine, maybe...

gunn

alternately: best dumb sueprhero comedy picture from before superheroes were popular enough for this to make sense as a thing. blankman, mystery men, my super ex girlfriend...

http://cultfilmclub.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/spec.jpg

sky high was pretty good and mostly overlooked iirc

James Gunn has done (at least, arguably) two of these.

Really liked the Constantine movie though hard to think of it as a superhero, or a movie about Constantine for that matter. Something about Peter Stormare pulling hot tar out of Keanu's lungs to stop him from ascending to heaven still feels so right. Plus a movie with Tilda Swinton as an androgynous duplicitous angel can't be bad.

Yeah, the Constantine movie was quite good; I think of it more like a horror movie in the vein of The Prophecy than a comic book movie, though.

yeah constantine got trashed in popular opinion for reasons that have nothing to do w/ the actual movie on its own

I never saw them, but I thought there were some people repping for Push and Chronicle?

Constantine is good but off-topic - you might as well list the Matrix.

Constantine is considerably more on-topic than most of what we've been discussing over the past several days.

I'll never be able to give the movie a fair shake because I have some real affection for the character and can't get past yet another instance of WC/DC going wildly off-book in adapting their intellectual property. The recent short-lived show was mostly just okay but at least Matt Ryan was note perfect as the character.

aye, chronicle is def watchable, and much better than f4nt4stic 4 f4ur44four

Chronicle is a great unofficial X-Men/New Mutants movie

I like Push, but it's plot is very ephemeral

Here is my defense of Catwoman from way back in the ILX archives:

Catwoman featured many many shots of Halle Berry in skin-tight leather pants, ergo it cannot have been horrendous.

― HI DERE, Wednesday, February 20, 2008 5:54 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

half of those shots were of the adrianne version of halle berry, ergo it was horrendous. CG animated cats in non-cartoon movie = fuck you creepy weird bastards

― El Tomboto, Wednesday, February 20, 2008 5:59 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Ah, but half of them WERE NOT!

― HI DERE, Wednesday, February 20, 2008 6:00 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

"You can argue with me, but you can't argue with science"

sky high was pretty good and mostly overlooked iirc

yeah this was great! I should watch this with my kids.

i rewatched the shadow a year or two ago. it's really not very good, i'm sorry to say. some neat production/set stuff and a few cool sequences (the invisible building, the rube goldberg delivery of messages to the shadow or whatever), but most of it's just kinda some stuff that happens and the script/baldwin play our hero as such a horrible asshole that it's hard to be like "yeah! i can't wait for more shadow adventures!" i mean, he's introduced to us as a sadistic opium-dealing warlord. that's a lot to get out from under, and then when he is the shadow he spends a lot of time kinda manipulating randos into being his informants/helpers, and doing the hypnosis thing on whoever, which makes him seem creepy and unpleasant, not heroic.

if they were going for that, as part of a 'superhero noir' or something, that's cool, but it's at odds with the other pulp they're reaching for, the four-color biff-pow side of it. it's possible to straddle that gap if that's absolutely what you set out to do (see: darkman) but shadow doesn't quite work.

billy zane as the phantom is another one i never saw. never heard anything good about it though.

Spawn (1997): I think this might be one of the worst filns I've ever seen

god I love darkman

that "everything wrong with the ang lee hulk movie" video makes the ang lee hulk look awesome

Spawn is special. Twenty years on, it's still one of the worst movies I've ever seen.

Or 'filn', even.

the script/baldwin play our hero as such a horrible asshole that it's hard to be like "yeah! i can't wait for more shadow adventures!" i mean, he's introduced to us as a sadistic opium-dealing warlord. that's a lot to get out from under, and then when he is the shadow he spends a lot of time kinda manipulating randos into being his informants/helpers, and doing the hypnosis thing on whoever, which makes him seem creepy and unpleasant, not heroic.

All this comes straight out of the 1930s version, which is why it's great.

i mean, i grew up with a couple of cassettes of 'shadow' radio programs - not sure from when exactly - and loved them. they were basically just little creepy horror/suspense stories, much closer to 'lights out' (which we had cassettes of from the same box set) or whatever. his evil chuckle, the dramatic music. i'm on board with such a movie. it's just that stuff comports weirdly with the conventions of what is kinda played brightly and colorfully as a good vs. evil superhero kinda movie.

'darkman' otoh seems to be very aware that its lead character is demented, and that the brightness and colorfulness of his universe is a sick joke on him and his suffering. TAKE THE FUCKING ELEPHANT!, indeed.

also, it needed breaks every fifteen minutes for someone to earnestly discuss the virtues of our sponsor BLUE COAL in efficiently heating your home.

Another 60% drop in its third Friday. Among the various stats I read (including that both Deadpool and Man of Steel did better three weeks in), one of my favorites was that it failed to top the third Friday take of Tim Burton's Batman, a movie released over a quarter of a century ago, when you could've seen a movie with your whole family for the price of a single admission ticket today.

Oh, and that really dumb looking Melissa McCarthy movie beat it out for first place on Friday.

I look forward to Zack Snyder's upcoming commercials for Prius and Kellogg's Cornflakes.

omg I just busted a gut at being punked by The Boss.

the "audiences love it and critics are just jaded" narrative tends to crumble when you are now on pace to make less of a profit than even Man of Steel did and your supremacy is threatened by a shitty spring comedy about a ex-con leading a brownie empire.

Oh, another note on the Burton Batman: it was playing on about half as many screens as BvS currently is.

I remember the theatres near me didn't have anywhere near the # of screens today's theatres do. Lots of the run of the mill movie theatres of today where I live might have been considered "megaplexes" or w/e back in the 80s/90s.

The world needs more Punisher: War Zone features

anybody here see the infamous Lundgren Punisher?

I saw a timecoded pre-release VHS version that a friend got from a comic convention or who the hell knows where you got stuff like that back then. It was terrible. Terrible.

I watched it when it came out on VHS because it was filmed in Sydney, and got to see him fighting ninjas on the spinning wooden thing at Luna Park, so I consider it a success

I enjoyed this take on the Punisher movie:

http://www.moviefighterscast.com/?p=226

Where they take very vocal delight at the film's ninjas with Uzis entering the scene on slides

Oh, another note on the Burton Batman: it was playing on about half as many screens as BvS currently is.

4 screens (I think) in Boston this week. Crazy.

It's not as bad as it seems. Because the box office was so frontloaded for the first week it just seems a lot worse than it is - it has already made 296M domestically on a 250M budget, and international sales (currently 486M) should cover the ad budget + profit before video sales even kick in. I don't think this is enough to kill the DC agenda.
Still, it doesn't look great for a Snyder-helmed Superman 3, which I'm sure everyone here would be happy not to see.

This is an interesting comparison to Avengers 2, Iron Man 3 and DKR:
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/showdowns/chart/?view=basic&id=superherosmackdown.htm

don't think anybody was suggesting this was a 'disaster' at the box office, just that the talks of it being a blockbuster of a record-setting variety was premature.

also if you look deeper at the numbers in yr link - ie, the daily box office tab, you will notice that the film is neck and neck with the other three superhero films it is compared with the entire first week....until the second weekend, where it is significantly lower than all of the competitors, including 11 million less than Avengers on the second Saturday.

Its average gross per theatre is also significantly lower, starting with the second weekend.

Basically it's a solid performing film that unfortunately can't lay claim to being one of the most financially successful superhero films of all time like Snyder and co initially thought.

Ha, BvS's worldwide gross still isn't even as high as Iron Man 3's foreign gross alone, and it's still miles away from Age of Ultron's foreign gross. I believe that WB's projections were that this should've done Avengers-level business and it's nowhere close. No death for the DC movieverse but I expect it'll lose a few limbs.

The biggest issue isn't whether the movie itself was a blockbuster or not but rather whether a studio can justify like ten follow-ups to a film that didn't perform nearly as well as they'd hoped.

xxpost so while yes, the box office was frontloaded which did impact the magnitude of the drop the second weekend, I don't give it the same weight you do.

AFter all, Avengers 2 managed to do better than BvS domestically in Week 2, and then brought in 26 million more than BvS did in its second week. and it looks like about $15 million more in its 3rd week, when the numbers are all finally in.

"domestically in Week 1"

If Suicide Squad dries on the vine, I would not be surprised if Wonder Woman (which I believe is the only one of the follow-ups currently in production) is the last DC movie we see for a while.

also, that chart you provided is comparing BvS to the latest entries in both the Dark Knight, Iron Man, and Avengers series.

however keep in mind, The Avengers and The Dark Knight are the top dogs (domestically speaking only) in the superhero field. and its not even close to those movies.