Can JACKASS save 3D from itself?
Jun 08
Six months ago the news broke that a third Jackass feature was going into production, and that it would be shot in 3D. Collider recently chatted with series director Jeff Tremane, who confirmed that the shooting is near completion; they’ve got a bit of international shooting to do, and then they’re done, aiming for a mid-October 2010 release date. He also says the 3D aspect of the footage is “awesome.”
I don’t know why I love Jackass (and spin-off Wildboyz) so much. I could waffle something about how our agriculture-based society tends to indulge in self-destructive activities in a bizarre mating ritual (e.g. showing off to potential mates that our harvest is so plentiful that we can afford to drink ourselves sick every weekend), and that watching people like Johnny Knoxville and Chris Pontius take that to the next level is magnetically appealing; or I could concede that I was just a teenager at the right time and Jackass was the anarchic antidote to the systematic dullness of high school.
Either way, having projectile vomit, snakes, bees, genitalia and goodness knows what else coming at your face in 3D will do one of two things for me: it’ll galvanise for me the belief that 3D is a waste of time and money, and that I can never buy into it; or it’ll show me that with the right context 3D can be immersive and fun. Avatar was supposed to help me sort that problem out, but it didn’t. Now, instead of pinning my judgement of the format on a James Cameron-helmed monster, I’m putting my faith in the hands of a bunch of alcoholic sadists.
How the rest of the world will react to Jackass 3D is beyond my ability to predict. The first two flicks did moderate business, but the market’s pretty niche. I’m just hoping that Jackass 3D will be the movie that proves to studios that 3D movies don’t all have to be fantasy flicks and Dreamworks talking-animal pictures. Maybe that’ll lead the way for more mature, intersting projects in 3D.
Jackass 3D: a force for good in the world, or the bane of humanity’s existence? You be the judge.
ALICE IN WONDERLAND box office makes Tim Burton a $1billion director
May 27
Disney is jumping for joy and rolling around in large wads of cash as Tim Burton’s CGI-heavy version of Alice in Wonderland just become the sixth film in history to crack the illustrious $1 billion mark at the worldwide box office. To date, Alice has earned over $332 million in the US and almost $670 million in worldwide cinemas. This makes Tim Burton a billion dollar director– just think of the wild and crazy things he can dream-up and shoot now!
With the 3D movement and inflation continue to gently nudge movie ticket prices upwards, certain milestones in film box office takings become easier to obtain. Like Avatar reaching a staggering $2.7 billion, for instance. Technically, more people still saw Gone With The Wind in theatres back in 1939/40, but we let that slide because, unlike the music industry, the Hollywood spotlight is shone on how much money a film earns and not how many people bought a ticket (which is a shame).
As slashfilm reports, Alice in Wonderland now sits with other $1billion earners:
- Avatar ($2.7 billion)
- Titanic ($1.8 billion)
- The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King ($1.1 billion)
- Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest ($1.06 billion)
- The Dark Knight ($1 billion)
Shouldn’t be much longer before the entire Top 10 earners of all time crack $1 billion. Christopher Nolan’s third Batman, perhaps?
3D ticket prices may have dented SHREK 4′s opening weekend
May 25
Paramount must be blushing with embarrassment right now. Shrek Forever After recently debuted in the US, pulling a $70m opening weekend (by no means to be sneezed at); 61% of that gross came from 3D and Imax 3D screenings. It appears about half of the audience chose to see Shrek 4 in 2D; why fork out more cash when it’s just Shrek 4 and not a “big deal” film like Avatar? Paramount was expecting a somewhat bigger haul, especially when factoring in the exorbitant 3D prices.
59% fewer people rocked up to Shrek 4 than did Shrek 3 in their respective opening weekends. 3D or no, consumers know the Shrek franchise is an ailing one, and won’t drop $20 on it when they know they could spend a few bucks less for the same movie without the glasses. Lesson learned for Paramount — and all other distributors of 3D movies — 3D is not a selling point: the movie itself is.
BATTLE: LOS ANGELES gets exciting new release date
May 24
Battle: Los Angeles sounds like a good old-fashioned military sci-fi flick, the likes of which hasn’t been seen since 1997′s Starship Troopers. It’s got aliens, warfare, gritty realism, and aliens. Did I mention the aliens?
Originally slated for a February 2011 release, Battle has been pushed back to March (the 11th, to be precise.) This is apparently quite exciting, because while February is something of a graveyard month, where studios send their movies to die, March (particularly the 11th) is the time 300 was released, and managed to drum up mass profit.
I don’t know if this has something to do with US school or uni breaks, or the pre-Easter cinema lull, but I’m pretty sure 300 did good business because everyone loved it and told their friends to see it. If you released a Twilight movie in February, it would do mammoth business; if you released a Woody Allen movie on the best day of the year, somewhere in June or July or whatever, it would still tank. It’s as much about the movie in question as it is the release date.
Anyway, enough of my jibber-jabber, here’s a small slab of text describing what goes on in Battle: Los Angeles:
When unknown forces put the City of Angels under attack, it’s up to a Marine staff sergeant (Aaron Eckhart) and his new platoon to come to the rescue. As the invasion hits the streets of L.A., the Marines become our first and last line of defense against a highly powerful enemy. Bridget Moynahan (I, Robot), Michelle Rodriguez (Avatar) and Michael Peña (World Trade Center) co-star alongside an ensemble cast including Ramon Rodriguez and Ne-Yo.
Studio Sony is more interested in name-dropping than plot, apparently, but I guess the vague ambiguity of the above synopsis will help keep intact the bubble of surprise that this film is cultivating. Aaron Eckhart is a fine actor, and what I can remember of everyone else is pretty good too, so I’m sure the characters are in good hands. Jonathon Liebesman is in the director’s chair, and while his earlier horror stuff was poorly received, his 2009 sundance film The Killing Room made more of a positive impression on critics. This bodes well for Battle.
One last thought: the “Battle of Los Angeles” is an event well-known in ufology circles, and I wonder whether Battle: Los Angeles’ premise was inspired by that supposedly real-life occurrence? Regardless of all that, it’s about time we got a thumping good, gritty, real-time alien war movie. Bring it on.
Yarr: piracy is a crime, especially if you downloaded THE HURT LOCKER
May 19
Internet piracy has always been a fraught venture: there’s the difficulty of finding a good quality file of the right size; finding enough seeders to allow you to download the film in a timely fashion; the monthly internet usage juggling-act, often divided between games, movies and porn; and then the hassle of burning the film onto a DVD so you don’t have to watch it on a crappy little PC monitor (I realise I’m tempting Poe’s Law here, so I’ll just point this out: I’m being sarcastic). As if that weren’t enough, there’s also the small matter of piracy being unethical and potentially damaging to a variety of industries, but that’s been a relatively small issue — until now.
The internet is many things: it is a global stash of porn, easier to hide from your technophobic mother than stolen Playboy magazines; it’s a source of instant knowledge (albeit of dubious authenticity) and breaking news; it’s a place where people with similar hobbies or beliefs can hang out and pat each other on the back in some kind of solipsistic circle-jerk; it is an effective tool of communication; and it is also an unpoliced Wild West-like frontier with few rules and fewer enforcers where you can get anything –literally anything — for free, as long as it exists somewhere in 1s and 0s.
Apparently the internet looks like this.
Now, though, the US has finally decided to criminalise piracy. Piracy has, of course, been illegal all this time, but nobody ever seemed to do anything about it. Now the US Copyright Group is cracking down on movie pirates, starting with those who downloaded The Hurt Locker. In order to catch the people who download movies, the Group requested hitherto-private client information from Internet Service Providers (ISPs) all over the US. That’s right: they know how you surf and they know where you live. Scary, huh? (But, as I’ll explain later, disclosure of your internet usage is actually justified).
If you downloaded The Hurt Locker and you live in the US, chances are you received an email demanding you pay a settlement fee or risk the Copyright Group sueing the rug out from under you. 75% of US ISPs have complied with the Copyright Group’s move (the other 25% have experienced technical delays), and out of all the people contacted regarding their pirate operations, 40% agreed to pay the settlement; the other 60% get one more chance before the Group starts issuing lawsuits.
The reason the Copyright Group is going after pirates is to provide “alternate revenue streams” for studios whose films are heavily pirated. The idea is that for every person who downloads a movie instead of buying a ticket or DVD, the studio loses cash. So to make up for that, lawsuits are being issued. In this case, The Hurt Locker earned approximately fuck-all at the box office, but people pirated it like it was Scarlett Johansson’s secret sex tape, their interest piqued by the film’s nine thousand Oscar nominations. So the Group is trying to recoup some of the perceived monetary losses suffered by studio Venture Pictures, who financed The Hurt Locker.
The problem with piracy is that it’s all so arbitrary, so up-in-the-air. People who pirate movies are usually: too poor or lazy to go to the cinema; scornful of the capitalist system of economy and government; morally deficient; or unable to leave the house, for whatever reason. So the vast majority of pirates wouldn’t have seen The Hurt Locker if they’d had to pay for it / leave their house / contribute to a capitalist society, right? So how much did the studio really lose? Are you sure a limited release and lack of marketing weren’t really to blame?
Recent studies on piracy in PC gaming showed that the average PC pirate downloads dozens and dozens of games each year — many more than they could possibly hope to play in their lifetime — and that piracy rates are inversely proportional to income (that is, unemployed students and people in Russia and India pirate like crazy). It follows that most pirates wouldn’t have bought most of the games they pirated — so how does piracy really affect profits? Most piracy occurs as an idle act of “oh, I’ll take that;” very few pirates single out only the games / movies they really really really want and download only those — say, one every three-to-six months. It’s usually “oh, I heard that movie’s good, and it’s got healthy seeders, so I’ll add it to the collection,” but then they never actually get around to watching the movie. So the MPAA’s annual “we lost $5 billion to piracy this year alone” cry may be somewhat exaggerated.
Let’s say then, conservatively, that piracy loses a film 5% of its profit: 5% of Avatar‘s profit would be $135 million; enough to finance four Hurt Lockers, if not more. In this case, all those pesky pirates are actually gouging a significant chunk of cash out of the film industry. For its part, the film industry is often thought of as a rich, affluent hotbed of extravagent expenditure and fiscal looseness, but this is not the case: most studios only make a profit on a very small number of films, and must use this profit to finance other films, which might not even break even at the box office. Make no mistake: every dollar is precious in Hollywood.
Aside from the strictly financial arguments, it’s pretty obvious that piracy is, at best, a morally grey area (as judged by a society dominated by the ideas of ownership and property). You could argue that you might simply record the movie when it comes on TV in six months’ time, and therefore own a copy without having paid for it; you could argue that the majority of ticket and DVD sales go to the cinemas and electronics stores, respectively (even if that is simply unture); you could argue that capitalism is busted and you want no part of it (in which case you should move to China); and you could argue that that street vendor in Bali flogging Iron Man 2 for $3 was totally legit, man; but in the end, someone, somewhere, is losing dollars, and it isn’t you. Keep that in mind next time you go to download that .rar file.
To come back to my previous point, there’s been some internet backlash against this “breach of personal privacy” thing. But you have to remember: the internet is a tool, not a toy; a privelege, and not a right. If the only way to track down the people who make child pornography, rape videos, snuff films or that gut-churning crush porn is to give up a small percentage of your privacy, then by all means, it’s justified. Piracy may be a lesser crime than those listed above, but it’s still indicative of the “the internet’s here for my pleasure and I’ll do with it whatever I want” attitude that can easily backslide into immorality and illegality.
Besides, what have you got to hide?
Oh, that's all right then -- wait a minute ...
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