Saw Ponyo last night, and enjoyed it muchly. As should be expected, Miyazaki is incapable of creating a bad film.

However, I had a bit of personal amusement due to the character of Fujimoto, portrayed in the dub by Liam Neeson. He's Ponyo's father, so I heard this in my head throughout:

"What I do have are a very particular set of skills; skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that'll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you."

I met up with loopychew yesterday. We chatted, ate dinner, and then wandered to the Metreon where we decided to go see Speed Racer on IMAX.

I can't call myself disappointed, much to my surprise.

Full review here.

I've got a blog set up on my website, thanks to Calc. It's unmodified at the moment, but I've been mulling over what I want to do with it and how. Since it's WordPress, it's got a lot of options, but it'll take some work to get there.

Short To-Do list.
*Come up with a theme for the whole thing. It'll be on the goddOS.net space. I won't be playing up the fanfic that spawned it, but I'd like to try and tie it all together.
*Redo the layout so it doesn't suck. Ideally, I'd get a nice title bar, along with a nice framework, but mostly I just need to look through the themes and pick one.
*Get a feed for my Twitter to show up on it.
*Come up with a plan for what to write and when. I want to do it regularly, but not too regularly. Earlier this year, I tried to do a post a day on an anonymous blog, but it crashed and burned after about two weeks. I haven't gone and looked at it in months, and I'd probably be embarassed about it, now.
*Topics to discuss: game design, transhumanism, writing, baseball, entertainment media. I suppose it'll just be a blog about stuff that interests me.
*Might want to migrate over the fiction I have written and posted on the web, too. At least for the original stuff, I've pondered putting it up under Creative Commons. Need to research that.


I had written up a long post about the failure of WB over the past nine or so years to truly capitalize upon the films its released. For the most part, my gut observation (that WB is pretty much a marketing failure) seems to be on par, but I didn't really need to write a thousand words on it.

What struck me is the performance of franchises, and the success of a given franchise film based on expectations. I realized that it'd be fascinating to study WHY WB marketing tends to be so lackluster. Something to compare and contrast against the other big studios. It'd probably be particularly interesting to look at it relative to New Line (since they're both under the same Time Warner umbrella), but I'm not sure I have the time or (more importantly) media and marketing understanding to really have a go at it.

Even so, it's something to look at. I could probably work something up. At the very least, I can look at a few types of franchises (for a given movie series, for the actors involved, and for any name-recognition branding that might apply), check out track records and go through internet archives to see what various places predicted these movies would hit.


I'm getting close to the 40 hour mark on Eternal Sonata. I'm in Chapter 7, and know I'm pretty close to the end. I've enjoyed it, but I'm nearing the end of my interest at the moment. Unfortunately, I'm sure I've missed some stuff, so it may require a second play through. It's neat that I've been able to play it without feeling the urge to check out guides to help my every move. Since it's so close to the release, there aren't many to check.

I did find out about one thing, but I have no idea how to do it or when, so I'm not sure if I've missed it or still have a chance to catch it. Odd bit of anticipation there.

My biggest disappointment is that the combat system is fairly typical for an RPG. It would have been AWESOME if they had tied making music into it somehow.

A full review is necessary, once I finish.


The Girl Wonder auction is still going. It's got about 4 days left to go.

I like movies.

I like comic books.

Usually, I like movies based on comic books. (But not so much the other way around.) So, it was rather neat when I found out that a JLA movie is going forward. In fact, I'd been dreaming of such a thing for years, and had had multiple conversations as to "who gets what part".

Dream movie, and it might happen. Cool, huh?

The plot is (and I'm taking this from a rottentomatoes report) apparently that the big 7 in the JLA (Supes, Bats, WW, Flash, GL, Aquaman, and Martian Manhunter) end up in a battle against businessman Maxwell Lord who controls the One-Man Army Corps cyborgs.

Ooookay, so the plot is pretty much DC Countdown, without the magic stuff and the super-society.

Slightly less cool, but hey, it can fly.

However, somewhat related to this is the news that Jessica Biel isn't in talks to play Wonder Woman. Not really a problem for me, as I just want someone who portrays the role well. It won't be my first choice regardless. But the reason for this is, apparently, negotiations may have stalled because WB wouldn't guarantee a spin-off film.

The possible reason? A rumored decree by WB production president Jeff Robinov: "We are no longer doing movies with women in the lead."

I had to stop and stare at that statement for a bit.

Seriously, what the FUCK?

Then I stopped and considered and realized that, no, this isn't really much of a stretch. I just checked the schedule for WB movies with defined release dates for the next year. Outside of films labelled as "Romance" there is a whopping one on the schedule that's going to have female leads. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 comes out August 8, 10 months from now.

This is a sequal and based on a novel. The first film cost $25m to produce and earned $40m in domestic receipts. Greenlighting a sequel wasn't a stretch, becuase it's chump change that has low expectations. Success is practically guaranteed, but isn't likely to break out.

Take note of that last bit, it's important.

The reason for the decree is the poor peformance of the Nicole Kidman headlined "The Invasion" and Jodie Foster's "The Brave One".

What we have here is shitty reasoning to try and excuse and step aside from an existing problem. The problem is that WB is a shitty movie company. It is a company that has to struggle to have films meet expectations.

Seriously, over the past several years, how many WB released films can you think of that had a surprising success at the box office?

Try one. That was 300, which seemed to come out of nowhere. Everything else? At best, it's just toeing the party line.

Harry Potter? It sells itself. It's fucking Star Wars, for crying out loud. The movies are pretty good, which helps, but given the level of success of the property, it should be disappointing that only the first managed to cross $300 million.

Batman? $200 million for a spectacularly good superhero film? Shameful.

Superman? Didn't even recoup the budget.

The Matrix? Please.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? Riding on the success of PotC should have gone so much further.

WB has a long history of not being able to market the good films, nor recognize when the bad ones are coming.

The Invasion was a mess leading up to release. There was no secret about that, and frankly, what resulted wasn't a surprise.

The Brave One has a stupid title. I don't know what the movie's like, but convincing an audience to see it wouldn't be easy in any case.

The problem is not, nor has it ever been, leading women. It is a combination of poor movie choices and even worse marketing. If nothing else, at least a few films should have managed to break out and steamroll. But just one has since the release of Harry Potter in 2001. (However, given the expectations for HP1 were upwards of $400 million in some camps, it may be considered just acceptable, as well, leaving the last real eye-opener was 1999's The Matrix.)

So, no, Mr. Robinov. The problem is you do your job poorly. Even if I accept that the AVERAGE of a film's release will be meeting expectations, that means that some will exceed it.

You can't even do that part.

Blaming your inability to do your job on women? Well, I'm struggling to find a better adjective than despicable.

A full tabulation of sequels and remakes to be released between now and the end of summer

Spider-Man 3 (second sequel)
28 Weeks Later (first sequel)
Shrek the Third (second sequel)
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (second sequel)
Hostel 2 (first sequel)
Ocean's 13 (second sequel)
Fantastic Four 2 (first sequel)
Evan Almighty (first sequel)
Live Free or Die Hard (third sequel)
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (fourth sequel)
Hairspray (remake)
The Bourne Ultimatum (second sequel)
Daddy Day Camp (first sequel)
Rush Hour 3 (second sequel)
The Invasion (remake)
Halloween (remake)
Mr. Bean's Holiday (first sequel)

First sequel: 6
Second sequel: 6
Third sequel: 1
Fourth sequel: 1
Remake: 4

Eighteen movies out of fifty-five that are getting wide releases in the summer. That's one movie out of every three.

We can add in a few others as "based on an existing property", too:
Nancy Drew
DoA: Dead or Alive
Transformers
The Simpsons
Underdog
BRATZ
Stardust

For twenty-five total.

Friday: Superman night. We're going to watch Superman and Superman II in preparation for Superman Returns.
Saturday: Anime night: Infinite Ryvius, Rune Soldier, possibly something else (Aria?)
Sunday: Superman Returns. Looks like we're going to shoot for an early matinee showing at the Lakewood 15.
Monday: Laundry. No, not you, that's me.
Tuesday: Big ol' picnic and firework whattodo, probably in Steilacoom.

We should probably consider when to go see Pirates. Perhaps another early Matinee on Sunday.

In completely different news, I ate too much.

For movies, frontloading is the name of the game. Movies open bigger and fall faster than ever before. Whereas in the past a big movie would likely be prominent in theaters for weeks at the very least, if not months, nowadays it's not too suprising to see something open large and be gone from public memory within a month.

This has been cited as one of the examples of the problems with the theatrical experience. And it will tend to be news if something opens large and crashes hard. What's ironic is that this is exactly the behavior that studios want from films, because it makes them the most money, proportional to the total take. Studios get the lions share of the receipts from the early weekends, later weekends tend to go to the theaters.

Of course, there's a case of diminishing returns. No matter how much you make percentage wise, if you cut the total take by a third, you're not going to get as much.

Some time back, I became interested in the biggest opening movies which failed to get to x benchmark. I was mostly curious to see what was the minimum a movie could make after an opening of at least $30 million or whatever.

So, tracking down from the top of the chart, Spider-man is the biggest opening movie. Since it grossed $403 million, it's the biggest opening film to fail to get to any benchmark above that. Which is fine, because nobody cares.

Star Wars: Episode III is the biggest opening movie to fail to get to $400 million It's $108.4 million opening propelled it to $380. Curiously, the percentage of its total gross that came from the opening weekend (28.5%) is almost exactly the same as Spidey's (28.4). Of course, Sith opened on a Thursday, and pulled in $50 million that opening day, so we can probably take that similarity with a grain of salt.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, which opened to $102 million last November, only grossed $290 million... which makes it the owner of all benchmarks from $300 million to $400 million.

Its immediate predecessor, Prisoner of Azkaban, opened to $93 million two years ago, but only grossed $249 million... which means it's (barely) the biggest opening movie to not get to $250 million.

And entirely because of thsoe two HP films, the overblown heap that is The Matrix Reloaded doesn't have anything notable to its name. Which is both good and bad, I suppose.

X2 failed to get to the $225 mark, which means its $85 opening is the biggest of all films to get to that.

The Day After Tomorrow just -barely- edges out Planet of the Apes as the biggest opening film to fail to reach $200 million. Of course, it's a minor quibble. The two films had opening weekends less than a quarter million apart, but Day After Tomorrow earned $6 million more in the end.

And now we reach Hulk. Which is truly notable beyond any other film yet mentioned. The previous films are just signs of the times. They have all done respectable business and are mostly rememebered well, at least for that business. Hulk, though, cannot and will not shed its skin as a disappointment, if not a bomb. Its $62 million opening accounts for a whopping 47% of its total gross... It earned just $132 million. This is bad by any measure, and despite some words from Universal a couple years ago, there won't be a sequel. Of course Ang Lee is off directing gay cowboys and barely failing to get Oscars, so he's probably not hurting too bad.

Of course, it's notable that outside of the Spidey films, Marvel movies tend to typify bad legs. Even the well regarded ones, like X-Men, don't stick around for long. They are almost the perfect indication of what movie performance is like nowadays. Quality, it seems, is almost irrelevant to the performance of a film. Consider X-Men's opening and total ($54/$157) to Fantastic Four's ($56/$154). It's close enough to be nearly identical, and the two films actually matched each other quite well throughout their runs. Yet, while X-Men is well regarded, FF is typified as one of the problem comic book films. (Not by me, though. I enjoyed it... and it's got Jessica Alba. H_H) I wonder if it means anything that there's a 5 year difference between the films, during which we've seen movies open bigger and bigger and fall faster and faster... yet here's one of the "bad" films which can almost exactly match the pace of the better regarded one. No matter what I read, I couldn't see FF as a disappointment. It's got a sequel... somewhere. I think.

As box office totals shrink, it's easier to find films that get the bulk of their business from the opening weekend. Just below Hulk (although still not in its class, because let's be honest... you have to try to do that badly.) We've got a Trio of films which failed to get to the $125 million mark. Van Helsing, 8 Mile, and The Village. All opened within $1 million of each other, around $51 million. Van Helsing finished with just over $120 million. 8 Mile got $116, while The Village got $114. While Van Helsing gets the crown, it's just barely doing it.

If we're looking for the biggest opening to fail to get to $110, that goes to Batman and Robin. Which is also the oldest film yet mentioned. Before Hulk took its crown, it was probably the film most recognized as a bomb.

And, of course, we come to the whole point of this article. What does it take to guarantee a film gets to $100 million. For a long time, I thought it was $40 million. After all, Daredevil, loathed though it was, opened to that, and it passed the century mark, with $102 in the bank.

It's no longer the case. Daredevil specifically opened to $40,310,419. However with $40,222,875 is Scary Movie 4. And while it's still in theaters, it only has $87 million to its name. It's not going to get to $100 million pending an act of God or Gates. Of course, it's still performing better, leg-wise, than Hulk.

King Kong.
Lakewood Towne Center Cinemas.
7:30 PM.

I'll be going. Chris will be there, pending freedom in his schedule. Ro's expressed interest. Julianne's said she'll make it. If you can make it, post a response.

I don't expect there will be any problem getting tickets right then, so we don't have to worry about someone buying a load for everyone. We could also get food beforehand. There's a Taco Del Mar in the vicinity, which is good and inexpensive, IIRC.

( More finalized plans for the computer. )