- cross-posted to:
- boxoffice
- cross-posted to:
- boxoffice
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/26522728
Overall weekend totals plunge 60% from last year as the absence of a “Dune: Part Two”-level hit is felt
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Yeah the movie is not very good. Saw it the other day.
To be honest, I didn’t find it very good. I don’t know about the books, but the movie makes it seem like there’s something interesting about the expendables, and ends up being about something completely different, much more boring and overdone. Characters are also basically useless.
I thought this was a direct to video/streaming release.
Now that I know it’s in theaters, I’m gonna go watch it.
This is pretty much exactly where I would exact an arty, anticapitalist lark of a movie to land. Anyone thinking this would do much more than $40m globally this weekend was probably fooling themselves.
It’s barely afternoon on Saturday as I read this - I don’t get how they can decide it bombed already. Feels like someone’s trying to make it bomb.
They release these on Saturday or early Sunday pretty frequently, projected from presales, previews, and Friday #s. They can be a little off but they’re usually pretty close.
The movie is critical of capitalism, it wouldn’t surprise me.
Maybe a little bit, but everything after the beginning of the movie seemed to take place in more of a monarchy situation where roles and resources are allocated directly by the ship/colony leadership and the only apparent economy was the black markets for drugs and extra rations.
The book is pretty clear on themes, and fascism is only distinguished from a truly absolute monarchy in the respects you mention by their laws of succession.
Fascism, btw, per Mussolini and Gentile, is the merger of state and corporation. At at least a small scale it will absolutely try to function without a market and pay its workers directly with necessities while using the withholding of such as both punishment and means of persecution.
They said capitalism, not fascism, I can see how the movie is being critical of fascism, but the primary setting seems distinctly un-capitalist to me.
Same end goal.
Just an FYI: the book also describes the fate of a colony world called Galt that gets genocided and consumed by a hyper-capitalist’s clone army. The logic is simple. He wants more clones, and the best source of more biomatter fit for making clones is human bodies. He’s also been told all his life that he’s a superior life form, so what use is anyone “lesser?” It doesn’t matter that the Galtists consider themselves “rugged individualists”, they are less thans and therefore useless beyond making his numbers go up.
The book and setting is not shy about criticizing capitalism’s commodification of human life and disregard for suffering. It’s the entire point of how Expendables are treated, lol.
I don’t doubt that a movie had less time to make some of the themes more obvious, but they’d have had to completely remove the concept for it not to be clear.
the book also describes the fate of a colony world called Galt that gets genocided and consumed by a hyper-capitalist’s clone army
If this was the explanation given for why “multiples” became taboo, I think they must have replaced that with the explanation that someone used it as a way to have an alibi to get away with smaller scale serial killing.
commodification of human life and disregard for suffering
This definitely comes through as the central theme of the movie, the idea of objectification in its various forms, how it’s internalized or goes unnoticed. And there is a connection to capitalism; the central problems of the movie are caused by sadistic villains who are in charge because they are absurdly rich. But that aspect of it seemed like less of a critique and more of a tropey backdrop and plot device (ie. the loan shark who’s too rich to care about being paid back and just wants a pretense to make snuff films). To me for something to be primarily described as a critique of capitalism, it would have to spend more time actually considering capitalism and how it works, and this movie isn’t really about that imo.
Honestly had little interest in this but you just sold me on it
havent watched this one yet, but arent these usually sprinkled with some anticommunism and doomerism to compensate for it?
Never heard of this movie but I too am now interested!
Ticket sales pre-orders.
If Friday’s pre-sales = x% final sales, and you know pre-sales for Sat/Sun, you can roughly predict the weekend.
Yep. Literally decades of sales data is used to predict various aspects of a films revenue.
Not just weekend sales but weekly drop off can be accurately predicted.
They often know how a movie will be perceived well before it hits theaters and use that determine how much to spend on promoting it.
LOL this is no Dune: Part Two blockbuster. Stop pretending that its supposed to be one.
Ruffalo does a solid, loathsome Trump.
It makes fun of all the Space obsessed billionaires, so I bet they have been making sure it bombs
There doesn’t need to be a conspiracy for the average person to have bad taste
