Haters!
Don’t be fooled by the title and the Judge Dredd picture, I’m not going to defend that movie.
Alright, so, I’m constantly posting articles pertaining to Hollywood and their fascination with gimmicks. Among those gimmicks include high-budgets, bad stories, and ruined adaptions of beloved franchises. I’d like to think that my input is overall positive as well as constructive. Articles like American Movies Could Learn a Thing or Two from Anime, Just Let it Happen, Fox, and the most popular of them all, Freaking Comic Book Movies were all meant to be more than just entertaining, but also call to light the annoyance of our favored properties being ruined and everybody just being cool with that.
I like to think that we’re all in this together, as viewers and as nerds, and that we could recognize a good thing and condemn a bad one.
But then some crap happened.
Last weekend, Dredd came out. On a 45 million dollar budget, which we know is pretty reasonable given how much more expensive those suckers get, they managed to craft an Action/Sci-Fi film that breaks away from the dredge of the Stallone version with a movie that, as mentioned in the review, is quick, simple, violent and fun. The writer of 28 Days Later (2003) and Sunshine (2007) penned the script which should give everybody an idea of what was to come within the story; blood, drama, intensity. And that’s exactly what the movie gave me. A comic book movie given the proper treatment for the character. Not my favorite character, no, but they took it as seriously as they felt t should be and it just works.
Then nobody went and saw it.
Not cool, bro.
Now, on one hand, this is understandable, as Stallone’s was horrible, school is in, sports season, blah blah blah. But if you really want to see a movie, you’ll see it. Writer Alex Garland says that if Dredd makes fifty million, a sequel will go forward. Based on the fact that opening weekend for Dredd resulted in a mere seven million gross, I don’t see that happening. Why am I writing this? Why am I actually trying to make you care that you didn’t see Dredd? So what, right? Oh, forgive ME, I didn’t want to see a crappy remake/comic adaption/whatever. I understand.
But if you’re one of those jerks that helped contribute to Resident Evil: Retribution then you can suck it!
All I can gather from people is that that movie sucked. Well, couldn’t “somebody” figure that out by the first one? Okay, I’ll be generous- the third one? Could you not figure out that these movies are awful by the third time they decided to put their precious millions into these crapfests? After my vaguely written article the other night wondering why bad movies make so much money, it got me thinking.
It’s not pretty when I think.
I’m taken back to August 16th, 2006. The release of…wait for it…Snakes on a Plane. I’d stated hearing about people’s Troll 2-esque love for the movie before it was even screened. The reason people were latching onto it the way they were was mostly due to it B-movie simplicity, in title and story, The movie had actually gotten so much press by word of mouth alone that the filmmakers were actually given a bigger budget. I got hooked as well. I was interested in the idea of the Hollywood higher-ups paying attention to what people were actually saying they wanted in a movie rather than the “be happy with what we give you” attitude that comes along with so many releases. So on that day, I sat in a theater that seemed relatively full. Upon asking an usher if the movie has been doing well, she responded “Not really. Just your theater.” At this point, I was crushed. I lost sleep. I stopped eating. I stopped defecating. I didn’t actually stop any of those things. But I was disappointed. Man, we all talked about watching this crap together, then nobody came!
PICTURED: Not me
A year later, Spider-Man 3 would be released, SUCK, and still make nearly a billion dollars. People whined before the movie came out about how this character didn’t look right, there were too many villains, I don’t like this or that….and then they go and see it anyway. What the heck.
This is the kind of thing I’ve been talking about. I’m not the only one, I know. All I’m saying is that we’ve got to support the movies like this to show what kind of action/ comic book movie we really want. Last year, Universal Studios Chief Ron Meyer addressed some of his praises and criticisms for a few of his studios’ movies over the past couple years. Remember Scott Pilgrim VS The World? Here’s what Meyer said at the Savannah Film Festival.
Band together and banish Ryan Reynold’s and his disproportionate fists.
Zombies Ruin Everything 
Discuss!