Forum - View topicNEWS: Pokémon: Detective Pikachu Film Ranks #4 in the U.S. in 3rd Weekend
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j_plex
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Looks like Detective Pikachu and Battle Angel will wind up with about the same global box office total. Pikachu will make more money for the studio due to having a $20 million smaller budget and making less money in China where the studio gets only 25% of the take instead of 50%. It is curious as to whether WB will continue their sequel plans.
Reasons why Detective Pikachu underperformed: political correctness. A global audience based on expectations built off nearly a quarter century of very successful video games and the biggest global anime hit in history expects two things: pokemon battles a capable male action hero lead Instead WB listened to the American PC crowd - meaning the ones least likely to watch the movie in the first place - and gave us no real pokemon battles (just brief hints of a couple) and made Tim Goodman a standard beta male dishrag with all the excitement of cardboard while the female lead took the initiative and did all the work - including action/fighting and detective work - dragging a moping, whining Goodman along with him. By the way: not even feminists actually like male protagonists like Goodman. Instead, what they really want are female hero leads. Feminists want useless males like Finn and Poe that female heroes like Rey can (very easily) outshine. So the movie would have done (slightly) better had they just made Newton's character the lead and made Goodman the generally useless maybe not really boyfriend like the Bumblebee movie. So no pokemon fights, no lead that reminds anyone of Red/Blue/Ash/Brendan = huge wasted opportunity. Hopefully if a sequel comes about, the writer/director will make a movie aimed at the actual folks who will buy tickets to see it instead of trying to please the critics, only for them to give the the movie a mediocre score - critics hate video game movies because gaming remains a male dominated medium - anyway. Far better for a video game movie to just lean in to the actual heavily male audience that plays the game the way that Angry Birds - which was all about guys acting like guys and being ridiculous - and Rampage (which 25 years ago would have been an Arnold Schwarzennegar movie like Eraser). |
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AmpersandsUnited
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When they first announced Detective Pikachu, I assumed they did so precisely because of the elephant in the room of if they tried to adapt the first generation games or the anime they'd no doubt cast a white guy instead of an Asian lead for Red or Satoshi, which would be absurd So they avoided that and instead went with Detective Pikachu because the lead was already white so there'd be no need to do that But then they revealed they blackwashed Tim so in the end they still changed it. Aside from that, it is kind of amazing to think a Gunnm adaption was a bigger success than a Pocket Monsters adaption. I guess most Pocket Monsters fans were turned off by the direction of the movie, myself included. |
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EricJ2
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And, that they may have considered doing an Ash vs. Team Rocket movie back in '99, when it would have been near-impossible, got tied up in Japanese rights, made a mint off the first cartoon, and let that handle the hard stuff. (It was hard enough doing that Pokemon tie-in episode of the Drew Carey Show at the time.) So, when Nintendo was pumping the hype machine for their new 2016 Detective Pikachu game, Warner suddenly had a brilliant idea for how to make their old memo NOT look twenty years old... |
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BadNewsBlues
Posts: 5958 |
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....What political correctness?
Which is interesting because Pokemon Snap didn't have PKMN battles (and I presume neither did the original Dectective Pikachu game) so that's an interesting assumption.
Yeah no a movie can have a capable action hero lead and still underperform there's a reason for why Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Wesley Snipes, Jason Statham etc have have had an inconsistent run at the box office the last few years.
LOL if you think that's why this movie had no PKMN battles you should look at how PETA has over the years actually criticized the games because of how the battles reflect animal cruelty and how in turn Nintendo and GameFreak have ignored them repeatedly. Where in the world did you even reach in to grab this bad argument from?
Yeah y as if wasn't made clear by your first point you officially don't know what you're talking about right now. Finn was so well liked that part of the reason for why The Last Jedi was criticized was because some fans felt that they did less with Finn in a meandering sub-plot than they did in The Force Awakens......and this is in spite of the fact that Finn has a hatedom because he's black not because he's a "disgusting" man. Poe likewise is liked just as well as Finn and is shown to be pretty competent and capable in his role.
Yeah he wasn't supposed to be anything like the main characters of the main games (who're a flat characters with no personality) and this movie was never supposed to focus on Pokemon battles.
Noooooo critics hate video game movies because they have a tendency of being bad Detective Pikachu is not a bad film and whatever criticism it has, has nothing to do with video games as a supposedly "male dominated" medium. Detective Pikachu also had the problem of coming out like around two weeks after Avengers Endgame so it was never going to make out with whole lot of money.
The Angry Birds video game was popular among male and female, casual and traditional players, so no. Also the Angry Birds movie is rated PG which should tell you who specifically that movie was aimed at.
Most of the PKMN featured in the trailers and the movie proper are gen 1 PKMN you know the generation that a substantial portion of the PKMN fandom considers the best? I think it's safe to say they knew who they were marketing this movie to eventhough the PKMN franchise at it's core is still meant for kids.
Kind of funny you cite PC as being something that hurt DP but then cite a movie which has a half samoan-half black man as it's male lead and a black woman as it's female lead....which some "types" would complain about "political correctness gone mad".
Which is funny for simple fact that all almost all the Pokemon games and animes have leads that are Asian (or have asian names) in the original material who then have their names changed in the localization/dub. So if they were to do that that'd be pretty on-brand. If anything though they'll just make a new character rather than make an adaptation of any of the original games. Especially as basing the characters off their video game counterparts will lead to a bunch of babies complaining about how the writers got the characters (who as previously mentioned have no personality or any spoken dialog in the games) wrong. Not unlike the Satoshi-Red debate.
...Detective Pikachu's box office take is presently about 48 million dollars give or take less than Battle Angel Alita's final box office take that's not really that big to say nothing that's it's final take may very well match or surpass Alita's
Which would be interesting given all the hype that was being generated by these same people especially after the Sonic trailer dropped. The movie as mentioned also had the unfortunate problem of coming out two and half weeks after Avengers Endgame. |
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