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Forum - View topicNEWS: Live-Action Ghost in the Shell Film's Earns US$900,000 in 4th Weekend
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Primus
 Posts: 2815 Location: Toronto |
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Power Rangers' WW total is pretty pathetic. I know the brand doesn't hold much (if any) cache outside the Anglosphere, but even GITS, a film that's being flogged as a big bomb, outgrossed it. So much for Lionsgate milking 15,000 sequels out of it.
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Mr. Oshawott
 Posts: 6773 |
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With the Power Ranger film's earnings being so low, the chance of its sequel happening are looking pretty remote.
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HyperGatack
 Posts: 216 Location: MA |
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China is going to be the deciding throw, but I'm not that optimistic. |
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the green death
Posts: 128 |
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I haven't seen Power Rangers but I kind of liked he idea of a six movie series and planned to RedBox it when it hit video. Too bad it's faltered.
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SWAnimefan
Posts: 634 |
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I agree, they barely made their money back and a sequel would be too risky. Then again, this is Hollywood we're talking about. And with the cast wanting a "feminist twist", right there spells disaster. But with GitS, lazy writers and bad publicity is what done them in. And relying on ScarJo was a bad decision as well. At this point, Hollywood is really starting to questing investment in adapting Japanese manga and anime into Live-Action movies. Right now Sony is not reacting kindly to the failures of Power Rangers and GitS, and now questioning their investment with the Robotech movie (which hasn't even entered Pro-Production as of yet). And the Robotech movie commands a much larger budget and already receiving negative press over the origins of Robotech vs the original Macross, HG's practices, and our favorite - PC talk. And of course this news also supposedly put a damper the Naruto and Bleach Live-Action adaptations as well. Needless to say, we are on Strike Two. If there is one more major failure, they will surely give up on Japanese adaptations. |
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Dfens
Posts: 462 |
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Man GITS is struggling hard, I was going to see it for the hell of it this morning at the early bird special for $6.00 dollars since I've been working 7 days a week for the last 2 months and bam the new guy quits 2 hours before work starts.
So more overtime or a crappy movie that I was going to just kill time? I think we know the right answer. Maybe next week if it's still theaters that is. |
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PusoPimp
 Posts: 58 |
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Heh, also thought about seeing an early bird showing last week. Oh well. If it's STILL on track to lose that much money after making over 162 million bucks against 110 million dollar budget I almost would say I question hollywood's business model. It's getting almost like AAA video games where you just dump tons of money into a thing and hope to God it's a hit because if it's not you're gonna lose a ton of cash.
But I mean seriously, I'd say this is about as good of a box office turnout as anyone reasonable person could expect from a film based on something that's more or less a cult film to the general public. Guess they just spent too much on their crappy marketing campaign I dunno. |
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GATSU
Posts: 15559 |
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Power Rangers is like Pokemon in that, even though they still make money, they peaked really fast after they hit it big. Plus, even adjusted for inflation, that '95 Power Ranger movie wasn't really that big at the box office. Not sure why Bayformers and TMNT still do well as movies, though. But I'm guessing the reason is their concepts are more basic, and you don't have to put in a lot of effort to rework them for a newer generation of viewers.
SWAnime: Actually, GITS would be doing a lot worse without Scarjo. It's a testament to her star power that GITS has done as well as it did, given that it's not an Avengers tie-in, and doesn't include any of her notable co-stars from those films. Of course, that begs the question, would it have gotten a boost, if Robert Downey, Jr. was also included in the cast? As for Naruto and Bleach, they can't be done in live-action, outside of a PG-13 Game of Thrones-type series. |
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Kreion
Posts: 332 |
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The rule of thumb is to double the budget for big movies when talking about marketing, it's obviously not going to be accurate but we have so little actual information on the films budget beyond that (Hollywood loves to hide how much movies make and make it seem less) that this is all we can do. So based on that it still needs like 50 mill to break even. |
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Estelle the White Mage
 Posts: 51 |
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Ended up seeing Ghost in the Shell this past weekend, and overall I really enjoyed it.
Scarlett Johansson did a great job with her character, and the plot flowed really well as an action and philosophical set. Though, I've never seen the GITS anime or read the manga, so I'm sure I'm in the minority when it comes to who liked the film. Everyone I personally know who has done the two above said they hated it/wasn't faithful to the source material. Which is a chief complaint to probably every novel/anime/manga adapted to the big screen nowadays.... |
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trilaan
 Posts: 1073 Location: Texas |
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I enjoyed the original and I really enjoyed this version as well. The only real difference is the original took it's concepts one step farther and did so in a shorter runtime. Still, for as far as the live-action remake went it was really good. One thing I noticed about ScarJo's performance is, when she's not moving, she holds her body like a marionette at rest, an interesting addition to the character. |
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chronos02
Posts: 272 |
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It's obvious the GITS movie has done so bad, leaving aside the supposed whitewashing, I'd say it's one of the most faithful to the source material movies that have ever been made, however, it fails very hard on many aspects.
SPOILERS AHEAD The story is a blatant copy of Robocop, well, maybe not, since it's so simple that even a kid could think of it. In other words, it's bad, with an obvious bad guy, an obvious good guy, and the obscure character that used to be on the MC's place and was betrayed by the obvious bad guy and turned rogue. The second problem comes with the visual design of the movie (not the quality of the effects, which was rather good), which mimmicks Blade Runner, instead of using Ghost in the Shell's designs and overall atmosphere. If you're asking what the difference is, it's in the usefulness and efficiency of the device design; whereas GITS in both the manga and anime adaptations use simple designs with utility and usefulness in mind, with a lot of RAW mechanical parts, Blade Runner goes with over the top lights and superfluous elements to adorn everything it can, and this new GITS movie falls into that category, adding lights to the cables, annoying useless sounds, plenty of weird ads all around the city landscape, useless decorations in many places, and leaves aside the raw usage of mechanical things, such as the masks of the bad guys, which... well, are useless masks a la friday 13th instead of helmets with different kinds of devices. Being blunt, GITS is not a ciberpunk series, it's a futuristic and realistic portray of the potential future we're to follow, there are no over the top designs, lights, or whatever, it's usually sober and as simple as it can be. Its third problem, related to the story, is how the characters are portrayed as... competely different from the source material, and though this shouldn't be a problem, it is in this adaptation, since they removed everything that made each character cool, fun, or whatever. In Batou's case, he's become a run-off-the-mill easy-to-laugh policeman, when the original is a Ranger with war experience and a serious face, but that has lots of humor packed inside and is rather sarcastic with his remarks, and, well, he's obsessed with Motoko. Also, he's usually damn angry. Togusa is portrayed as a too-serious policeman that for some reason hates prosthetics, but is not given a reason for that, when in the source material he's a family man with a kind heart and takes his job seriously and sometimes stiffly (different from being simply serious and stern as in this new movie). Also, he didn't hate prosthetics, he simply wished to be a normal human as much as possible, to be as close to his wife and child as he possibly could while being in section 9, which forces some augmentation prosthetics. Aramaki... I admit having Takeshi Kitano limits things a bit, but being fair, the problem doesn't come from his physical aspect, and rather with his personality, which seems somewhat satirical and mocking, instead of a bureoucratic man who knows what to say and when, is never exposed to danger, and gives orders in a systematic manner, while giving lots of liberty to the major and trying to accomodate her whims, since she knows what she's doing. Instead, we're presented with that, the satirical and mocking boss who acts always serious and is a wolf in disguise that loves being in the midst of it all over having verbal arguments. Ishikawa... is presented as a prosthetic junkie, and... nothing else. He's one of the richest characters in the series, the second thinking head of Section 9's agents, with superb hacking skills and a personality to fit that, who thinks about the most proficient way to act. He's also an experienced veteran on the field and is able to go on-site to provide support in the backlines. This was one of the greatest losses of this new movie. Paz and Borma make super minor appearences in the mvoie, as for Azuma, as well as Yano and Proto, they were simply left aside. As for Saito... seems like the director wanted to make him a deus ex machina, being the savior at the last moment, mimmicking loosely what happens in the Oshii movie, though it's so random it doesn't even make sense having him, another sniper could've taken care of the situation, or Batou going on-scene with the anti-tank weapon from the Oshii movie. Finally, what breaks this movie, at least for fans of the series, is the photography. It's a blatant copy of the original, it adds nothing, and in fact, gives a wrong idea of what to expect. It's as if the director had no imagination whatsoever, and instead of grabbing the essence of those scenes and following it with scenes of his own creation, like they did in the SAC series, he simply copied them, because it was too much work to imagine something new. The fans of the series did not like it, and the general public was unaware, as for the middleground, those who watched the original might've liked it, but they're a minority. As a bonus, the horrible marketing they did ended up sentencing the movie. Who in their right mind creates a half baked movie thinking about the fans but aiming it at the general public, and then markets it only to the fans? That's nuts! And despite it all, it's one of the best, if not THE best adaptation of a Japanese manga, or rather, an adaptation of the Japanese Oshii movie, which was an adaptation of the original manga (with some bits of the SAC line). If they keep this up, but fix their horrible scriptwriters, designers, and directors, they might just end up making good adaptations. But I guess Hollywood cares more about the whitewashing backlash than any of those other obviously more important matters. |
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Stampeed Valkyrie
 Posts: 857 Location: PA |
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all in all this was not a bad movie, not a great movie but worth checking out.
What amuses me though is the amount of complaining about it.. between the social justice warriors and the "white washing" and the general bad mouthing by people who made their minds up before it was even released. It's one thing to critique a movie because it was generally bad.. it's another to just fall in lockstep with what everyone else is saying on the net like a sheep... just saying. how many of you went and saw it? Seriously? |
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ChibiKangaroo
 Posts: 2941 |
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They changed the villain and significantly altered Kusanagi's background story. These were not good changes, as it shifted the story from a philosophical drama to a corporate /military industrial complex conspiracy. This cheapened Kusanagi's and Kuze's stories, which were powerful and intelligently written in the anime series.
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WingKing
Posts: 617 |
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I went to see it with some friends over the weekend. All of us had seen SAC and the Oshii movie, and some had read at least parts of the manga. We all enjoyed it and thought it was a good movie - not a great movie, but a good one, and IMO one that probably deserved better than what it got. One of my friends did say that she probably would've thought it was a great movie if she wasn't familiar with the other versions, but even she still liked it and thought it was good. As for me, I loved the soundtrack and the visuals, and I thought some of the effects work (like in the scene with the hacked geishas) was top notch. I missed the "ensemble cast" feel of Stand Alone Complex, but that was always going to be hard to develop in film format; even Oshii had to sacrifice most of Section 9's development to focus on the Major's story. I was lukewarm on ScarJo, but I really liked Batou and Aramaki, and the person they got to play Kuze. The weak point for me (as for many people) was the script. Now to me, complaining about faithfulness to the source material with GitS is pointless, since every version of it over the years has always had its own alternate continuity and put its own spin on the story. It's more like Batman or Spiderman in that regard, where every comic writer and every movie director does something a little different with it - hardly anyone complains that Tim Burton, Christopher Nolan, Alan Moore, and Frank Miller are all telling their own Batman stories instead of just slavishly copying Bob Kane. If anything, the problem IMO was that it felt like the creative team with this version of GitS was trying to be TOO respectful to all of the previous material by cobbling together bits and pieces from every existing iteration into a mashup story (pieces of the manga, pieces of Oshii, pieces of SAC, etc.), instead of having the vision and the confidence to just take the base material and put their own stamp on it like Oshii and Kamiyama did. So as I was watching I was constantly thinking about which scenes and which characters were borrowed from which sources, and every time I'm doing that it's breaking my immersion in the movie. Like I remember the first time I saw the Oshii movie, when the Major spoiler[tore open the spider tank's hatch and tore her prosthetics apart in the process], I had a very visceral and sympathetic reaction to that scene. When they re-created that same scene for this movie, I had a very clinical/detached reaction to it, more like "Huh, I wasn't expecting to see this scene here in a PG-13 movie." |
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