47 Ronin: Good, Bad, or Ugly?

The person in charge of our movie outing today balked at making other people watch after she saw the low percentage on Rotten Tomatoes.

RangerWickett said:

A guy on reddit claimed to have worked on the movie, and says that originally Keanu Reeves wasn't the main hero, just a POV character. But the studio balked and recut the movie, adding extra scenes to make it more, you know, sh***y.

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Thank you, Hollywood!

When will the movie studios realize that making a good movie will get more people to watch it than making a crappy movie with a big star?

Well that was waste of my time.

TarionzCousin said:

When will the movie studios realize that making a good movie will get more people to watch it than making a crappy movie with a big star?

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When making a good movie actually gets more people to watch than making a crappy one with a big star?

Or, perhaps less cynically, when we can actually agree on what qualifies as a good movie? That's the problem with entertainment - the subjectivity gets in the way.

goldomark said:

Well that was waste of my time.

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How so?

Homicidal_Squirrel said:

How so?

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It has nothing going for it.

Where to beging? The action scenes are subpar, nothing exciting with them. Badly thought out and choreographed. I was half a sleep during the final battle. The FX were ok in some scenes (the tengus), but looked fake in others (the fox, eating sushi with chop stick hair).

The story is thorn between Keanu's character who is just a supporting character and the leader of the ronin. Who do we follow and identify with? Keanu story just breaks any momentum the story of the ronins trying to avenge their master could build up.

The acting is campy and full of lines we saw coming a mile away. Like the witch, in a quasi lesbian sedution scene, informing the princess that Japan is the next step in her master's plan... It doesn't help that the Japanese actors often sound like they are reciting their lines, probably because they do not know English.

Some elements are not clear. Like what are the beliefs that got the tengus exiled? Keanu knows the true nature of the witch, but we are not informed of that. Where was the Shogun before he popped up at the end?

The whole thing felt cheap and directionless. You will not believe it cost 225$ million dollars to make.

goldomark said:

The whole thing felt cheap and directionless. You will not believe it cost 225$ million dollars to make.

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Because it didn't. The numbers in Hollywood accounting are bogus, money goes round-robin through companies all owned by parent companies with bulked up bills to inflate supposed costs.

It's all a conspiracy.

The sad thing is that the actual Japanese folk tale of the 47 Ronin is a pretty cool story. It makes sense that someone would try to make a movie out of it. But then apparently someone else decided that it needed lots of special FX and kung-fu (which is NOT what the story is about at all). And then someone else decided that it also needed to star a white guy. Remember, you can only make a movie about another culture if an outcast white guy is actually the hero!

I actually enjoy a good, cheesy kung-fu flick but this film is just a travesty.

Learning all the wrong lessons

Umbran said:

When making a good movie actually gets more people to watch than making a crappy one with a big star?

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They do, actually. But it's amazing how seldom Hollywood is willing to step outside it's usual formulas.

For instance, good action films with strong female leads tend to do very well (see: Hunger Games). Yet Hollywood still balks at letting a female superhero have her own film. You might point to failures like Elektra and Catwoman as the reason why not, but those films were crap. They would have been bad no matter who was starring in them.

Besides, when a superhero movie with a male lead flops, Hollywood just shrugs, gets back on their horse and tries again.

There IS a formula. Mainstream movies seldom venture outside it. But somehow they are surprised on the rare occasion when they actually do and they make a crap-load of money.

I'm sure if 47 Ronin flops at the box office it will be held up as evidence that movies based on Japanese folk tales don't sell. When in reality it's only evidence that BAD movies based on Japanese folk tales don't sell.

Dungeoneer said:

They do, actually.

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Not reliably. There are any number of supposedly "good" movies that bomb at the box office. And people will go to see crap in droves in many instances.

But it's amazing how seldom Hollywood is willing to step outside it's usual formulas.

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The problem is that there is no formula for "good movie". There is a formula for "movie that generally sells a lot of tickets". If you *aren't* working by formula, then you don't know if the result will be crap or not before you make it.

Let us compare two movies, in roughly the same genre. According to Box Office Mojo, they were in theaters for about the same amount of time (18-19 weeks), within about a year of each other, so there's not a lot of inflation or economic change between them

Movie A ran at 78% on the Tomatometer. So, generally, we can say it was an okay film. It cost $200 million to make, and grossed $1,200 million at the box office. That means $1 billion in profit, and a 5x return on investment!

Movie B ran at 85% on the Tomatometer. So, we could say that it is at least as good, if not better, than Movie A. It ran in about half the theaters, though, so we should expect half the gross. But, instead, it only made $126 million at the box office - half the theaters, but only 10% of the gross!

So, clearly, how good the movie is by no means determines ticket sales!

In reality, the saving grace of Movie B was it's low production costs: Movie B only took $12 Million to make, and so made nearly a 10x return on investment! You'd think that the rational choice is for the studio to make a whole lot of things like Movie B, and skip on Movie A. But Movie A was pretty clearly a sure thing to do well, while Movie B was not nearly so close to formula. If you made Movie B2, and it flopped, maybe the combination would only be a 5x. If they kept at it, and made a B3, and it flopped, the return ratio for the trio might be even lower. It is not irrational to take a 5x sure thing over a several 10x risks.

For the curious: Movie A is Iron Man 3. Movie B is Chronicle.