Yeah. I've heard Titanic also mentioned in the same vain.

It's interesting the way people's attitudes shift and change about the production. It honestly doesn't surprise me that some in Hollywood wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole, because it was such a ridiculously huge project-I mean, look at "John Carter." The only reason that "John Carter"got pushed through was someone at Disney wanted it to happen.
LOTR was fortunate that New Line was crazy enough to foot the bill. Perhaps the fact that the company was going bankrupt that it too the long shot bet on three movies. I think it was Trey who said that New Line bet its future on these movies and succeed-at least for 10 more years.

Middle Earth During the Cold War

Last edited by AshDigital (2012-03-16 17:49:46)

But, on the upside, his claim was "If it's flashy enough with a 3D release, nobody cares if it's good, it'll still make teh mad bankz," which JOHN CARTER handily disproves.

IO9.com ran a nice article on how a movie makes it's money last year.
http://io9.com/5747305/how-much-money-d … profitable

But those are the good ones!

America must be the far green country under a swift sunrise

I listened to them when NPR first broadcast them in the late 70's/early 80's. We had that, Hitchhiker's Guide, Star Wars... for a brief moment in the US, radio was cool!

Towers is definitely the best of the 3 commentaries that day. I wasn't there for the other two. So there ya go.

Just noticed "CM" Lloyd's handle tag.

I use The Numbers: http://www.the-numbers.com/

They post daily updates on revenue a day or two behind. They track box office and DVD sales. I think they lump DVD and Bluray together under "home video" or whatever. They don't track online sales yet as far as I know, but it wouldn't surprise me if they were working on that. That sort of info is much harder to come by because companies like netflix and amazon apparently hate letting people know anything about anything.

John Carter is sitting on $53 Million in the US and an additional $70 Million worldwide. If it can get up to $250 - $300 Million in the US, then they might be willing to make a sequel, but the movie cost $300 Million to make, so they probably assumed that they'd be able to pull an Avatar and make $150 Million in the US in just a couple weekends. Actually, the international gross for the film is pretty decent.

From watching the charts for a few years, the basic trend seems to be that so long as your movie breaks even in the US, then the international and video sales profits are generally good enough to warrant a sequel. The average 'big' movie will usually gross around $30 Million in DVD sales, and big huge hits like Twilight, Harry Potter, LOTR and Transformers and that sort of stuff can end up with well over $50 Million. International box office is generally larger than US box office, but not often by a hell of a lot. Some movies click with foreign audiences better, tho. Some movies fail in that regard.

But I don't buy some of the industry guys who talk about why movies don't get made. Some guy said that At The Mountains Of Madness would have to hit $500 Million domestically in order to make a profit off it's $150 Million budget, and I was like "huh wha-?" Basically it just sounded like Universal saying "We're not gonna give you that much money unless you give us a PG-13 movie. Our balls are too shriveled to take that sort of risk." Which is understandable, given that it's a lot of money, but really... making that movie PG-13 would have the opposite effect that you're looking for. It would be like making a PG-13 version of Predator or The Thing.