February Showdown Deadline is THIS THURSDAY! It is the “First Line Showdown.” Details are here at this link. Get those submissions in!!!
I think it’s now safe to say that if you’re a Superhero Movie…. “Uh oh.”
I have to give it to the box office media. They will do ANYTHING to spin the numbers.
Madame Web made 26 million dollars this weekend.
There’s a small caveat to that: OVER SIX DAYS.
Somehow, the industry has created a six-day weekend. In all my years of covering this stuff, I’ve never heard of a six-day weekend! Nobody has. Therefore, nobody knows what to make of these numbers. “One Love” made 51 million bucks. Which is a good take. But they had three extra days to do it. So it’s confusing.
However, it does prove that music biopics continue to be one of the safest bets in town.
Now you’re probably wondering, “Why don’t they make a million of them then?”
Well, as I found out, personally, they’re very tricky to produce because you’re usually dealing with bands. And the nature of any band is that they don’t all get along. Therefore, the band members don’t want to make a movie that benefits the other band members. Or they hold up approval just to spite the person in the band they hate.
Imagine writing a script that Paul Simon loves more than anything. But then you send it to Art Garfunkel and Art doesn’t come off as strongly in the script. So he says, “No, I don’t like it.” Now you’ve got to rewrite it to make Art look better. But then in the next draft, Paul thinks he’s being overshadowed by Art so he says no. Now you’ve got to go back and write it again.
And these rewrites take time. Months. And when you send it to each artist again, you may not be a priority. Musicians have other things going on in their lives. So they get to the script when they get to it. Which might be half a year since the last draft. And if one of them says no, now you gotta write another draft.
And you’re a screenwriter so you need to make money so you may have to go work a job before you have time to work on the next draft of Paul & Art. You can start to see why it’s so hard to make one of these movies.
This is why people choose singular artists like Bob Marley because, at least that way, you’re only dealing with one person. However, even singular artists, if dead, mean you’re often dealing with multiple family members who own the rights, which puts you right back in the same position you were in with the bands. Musical artists may have multiple kids with multiple partners, and a lot of those kids don’t like each other. So now you’ve got to make all of them happy.
Then you’ve got to see it from the writer’s and producer’s side. They know that, in order to make a good movie, you have to show the BAD along with the good. But the artists and the families only want to portray the good.
So you have to find a way around that. Luckily, these iconic musicians are so beloved that you’ll have people who show up just to celebrate the music and don’t really care that the movie is, basically, a commercial for that music.
By the way, this is why it’s so much easier to write a biopic about a historical figure. Because you can just base the movie off a book, like Nolan did for Oppenheimer, and not have to get any approval from the family. It’s good PR if you get the family on board, of course. But you don’t have to.
Technically, you could do the same with musicians. You could make a movie based on a book about them without their approval. You wouldn’t get sued either. However, you wouldn’t be able to use any of their music. For anything music-related, you have to get the artist’s permission. That’s why the musicians and bands have you over the barrel versus traditional biopics. You can’t tell a musician’s story without putting their music in the film, which places you in that unenviable position I was just alluding to of trying to win everyone involved over.
To that end, just getting a Bob Marley movie in front of audiences is a monumental achievement. Just to reiterate HOW HARD it is, they’ve been trying to do it for 25 years.
I’m not a music biopic guy, as you know. But based on the trailers, it looks like they got it right. They cast it perfectly. That actor, who I’ve never heard of before, looks great in the main role (ironically, he looks nothing like Marley in real life). And I’m always happy when any movie outside of the studio superhero machine does well. Which brings us back to superhero talk.
Madame Web’s disastrous box office is the result of several things.
Number 1 is the danger of trends. There was this period 2-3 years ago where it was female superheroes or bust. You didn’t even think of introducing a new male superhero. This is why The Marvels was greenlit and it’s also why Madame Web was greenlit.
But the viewing landscape changes quickly and people got tired of being pandered to and told what to like. People want movies that their creators are passionate about. They want the people involved to say, “I’ve got an amazing idea for a superhero movie.” Madame Web is clearly designed to fit into the “all-female” superhero trend. And it paid the biggest price for doing so. This is a mega-bomb.
How does it affect future superhero movies? At this point, only two types of superhero movies are going to work. Sequels to mega-franchises with already beloved actors playing the superheroes. That’s why Deadpool 3 is going to be the biggest movie of the year. Or fresh ways into the superhero genre – movies that disrupt the typical formula and tone. The latter is getting harder and harder to do. Movies like Ragnarok, Dark Knight, X-Men: Days of Future Past, Logan.
I noticed they just announced a new Fantastic Four movie. It sounds like they’re TRYING TO DO something different with it, as it will be set in the 1960s. But let’s be real here. This franchise has never worked. It’s failed on three separate occasions (yes, there’s a little-known 1994 Fantastic Four film that turned out so bad, they never released it!).
I don’t know why it doesn’t work. Having the main guy have the lamest powers (stretchy power) probably factors into it. But Johnny Storm is rad. Silver Surfer was my favorite superhero ever growing up and just oozes cool. And who wouldn’t want to watch a Hulk vs. Thing fight?
But, like I said, you’re releasing the film during the most competitive time in box office superhero history.
The big wildcard remains James Gunn. James Gunn has made a name for himself for doing things differently. So we know that he’s going to bring something different to the DC films. But, I mean, how different can you be? To be clear, I’m not giving up on him. I’m only saying that the job is going to be SOOOOOO hard.
I think he’s got the right idea, though. He’s doing what Christopher Nolan did when he revolutionized comic book movies with Batman Begins, which is going in the opposite direction of what everyone else was doing. Everybody else was making these off-the-wall superhero characters who could do anything. Nolan grounded his hero in reality, which made him more relatable than any other superhero character. Technically, anyone could be *this* version of Batman.
It sounds like Gunn is going away from this ridiculous multi-verse insanity that’s quietly destroying the Marvel universe and basing his first film, Superman, on that purity and idealism that made the movies so popular in the 80s. I don’t know if it’s going to work. But it’s the best route for success.
So, did anyone see Madame Web or One Love over the weekend? What did you think?
