I have a new favorite movie.
It’s called For The Win.
Okay, it’s not a movie. It’s a burger joint. And it has supplanted In and Out as the greatest burger in the world. For those of you in LA, it’s on the corner of Vine and Franklin. It’s a smash burger joint. And it has a really great backstory.
It used to be this really popular French restaurant that all the celebrities went to. But then Covid happened. So they were forced to improvise. The owner decided to turn the restaurant into a temporary burger joint so they could deliver burgers to people during Covid.
But then something unexpected happened. People fell in love with the burgers. Now, it’s one of the fastest growing restaurant chains in LA and everybody wants some. Comment down below if you know the movie reference.
Why am I talking about this?
Because this weekend I had a choice between going to Jurassic World Rebirth or going to For the Win. And it wasn’t even CLOSE. I picked For the Win straight up. And then you know what I did? I went home and watched the original Jurassic Park to accompany my devouring of those state-of-the-art cheeseburgers. That’s right, I had more than one.
One of the worst things to come out of this new era of studio filmmaking is the sequel to the reboot. I can understand reboots. If something’s been gone for a really long time and we’ve worked up the appetite to have it come back into our lives, that’s a reason for the movie to exist.
But when you make a sequel to the reboot, it defeats the whole purpose of the reboot. The purpose of the reboot was we hadn’t seen these guys in forever. But now that we’ve seen them, we’re okay. We don’t need to see them again. Yet Hollywood keeps forcing this on us. It’s like when they announced the second season of the Full House reboot on Netflix. Everyone collectively said, “Uhhhhh, do we really have to do that?”
But Jurassic World Rebirth takes this issue to the next level. It’s a reboot of the reboot happening directly after the end of the last reboot. It’s like making a copy of a copy of a rebooted… copy?
And based on the reviews coming in, that’s exactly what this movie is. A trashy reboot rushed into production. And guess what, the audience knows. You can’t trick the audience anymore. But believe me, Universal and the rest of the industry is trying.
They are touting this movie as a giant success. It made 147 million dollars domestically, they said.
Well, let’s look at the numbers a little more closely. For starters, they’re using a 5 day weekend opening to get that number. The first three days it actually made 85 million.
To give you some perspective on where that lands on the Jurassic World money list, the original reboot, Jurassic World, made 212 million dollars in three days. The second film made 145 million in three days. And the third made 135 million. This means Jurassic World Rebirth made 40 million less than the lowest moneymaker in the series.
And it ain’t going to make that money up on the back end. Cause Superman’s coming to town next weekend and that movie’s going to make WAY MORE MONEY than everybody thinks it will. I believe in James Gunn. The dude actually cares about screenwriting, unlike these Jurassic World bozos.
I point this out because the Jurassic World Rebirths of this world are really bad for the industry. The industry will tell you they’re good. They’re not. If this movie had blown the doors down with its opening, you would’ve had every single rebooted trilogy rebooting again within two years.
It is important that this movie fails, if only because by every metric of goodness, based on everyone who I’ve talked to who’s seen it, it is the most generic movie ever. And I don’t support movies where money is a priority over giving the audience the best experience the studio is capable of giving. Cause the irony is, if they do the latter, they get the former! But if they only focus on the former, like they did here, you get trash. This movie is trash. You can smell it from 3000 miles away.
Why did that first movie work so well?
I did glean a couple of new lessons after watching it – that was, when I wasn’t shoving crispy meat down my gullet.
The big secret I learned about Jurassic Park is it may be the best movie ever at dangling carrots. Why did you come to that movie? You came to that movie because Spielberg dangled the dinosaur carrot in front of us. So when we sat down, we were a captive audience due to us only wanting to see some dinosaurs. So, for the first act, we just sat there drooling, until those first dinosaurs showed up.
But Spielberg did something clever. He then dangled a second carrot – the T-Rex. You could’ve had Jeff Goldblum reading an iPhone Terms of Service contract for 60 minutes and we would’ve been captivated because of how much we were looking forward to seeing the T-Rex.
And then, when we got the T-Rex, they dangled the next carrot in front of us – THE RAPTORS. The raptors were cool because not many people knew what raptors were going into that movie. And Spielberg did a great job setting up how terrifying they were. So, of course, we had to keep watching to see those raptors.
By that time we were so invested in the story, that they didn’t need to dangle any more carrots in front of us.
Granted, these new Jurassic World movies don’t have that same luxury since we’ve already seen all the cool dinosaurs. But that’s why you gotta put more effort into the movie than slapping together a screenplay six months after the last trilogy ended. It’s not going to end well. And it didn’t. And this movie will FALL OFF A CLIFF in its second weekend. And they deserve it. Cause they’re taking the single greatest movie idea ever and they’re driving it into the ground and making it not special anymore.
That’s all I gotta say. Next week, I’ll be reviewing Superman as well as my latest burger from For The Win.
