Monday Morning Quarterback Part III
By BOP Staff
January 9, 2013
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Bruce Hall: I'm not. Lost in all the usual press about Tarantino's penchant for ultra-violence and ultra-naughty language is that this might be his very best film. Tarantino flouts convention, logic and often, the limits of good taste. But his chaotic stories are usually populated by unlikely heroes and villains whose stories are compelling in unexpected ways. Just when you think you feel yourself losing interest, something pulls you forward in your seat and suddenly you're into it.
And he's getting better at it. His ratio of style to substance comes more into balance with each effort. Even if you don't like his methods, it's hard to argue with the steadily increasing stream of revenue and critical acclaim. Tarantino is legit.
Felix Quinonez Jr.: I'm very surprised by how big it is. Don't get me wrong. I'm a huge Tarantino fan, but if you look at his career before Django he only had two movies cross the $100 million mark domestically. To me it seemed that Pulp Fiction and Inglourious Basterds deviated from the way his movies usually perform and I thought after the career high of Inglourious Basterds Django would level out a bit and perform more similarly to the Kill Bill movies. But I am very happy to see that I was wrong and I hope it gets enough Oscar attention that we see the first Tarantino film hit $200 million domestically. I know that's still a long shot but we can dream can't we?
Jay Barney: I saw it over Christmas break and liked it a lot. There are a couple of slow moments, and the end drags on a bit more than I would like, but Tarantino didn't disappoint me with this one. His appreciation for 1970s westerns really comes out. The cast, characters, and performances were all first rate, and I think word-of-mouth has had a lot to do with the success of Django Unchained. Westerns as a genre have been pretty much ignored of late, so it is nice to see a worthy entry.
The one down point I would note, with all of the fun of the blood spatter and characters meeting gruesome deaths, is the prism of looking at the real world. I have to admit that during one of Tarantino's creative depictions of villains getting offed in nasty ways, my thoughts returned to the school shooting at the elementary school several weeks ago. I enjoyed the film, but cringed at the excess gore and violence a few times.
The parent in me hoped there were a few other people cringing as well.
Brett Ballard-Beach: Yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes. At the bare minimum this will be Tarantino’s and The Weinstein Company’s highest grossing film. Last year there was talk about how a dark film like The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo would do as an Xmas offering. It wound up surpassing $100 million in the end, a figure DjUn, which is both darker and lighter, has already blown past. I don’t think anybody (not that I read and certainly not myself) thought that this might wind up as the True Grit of 2012 but the masses are happy, and the critical praise, and probably a few Oscar noms on Thursday support it. It’s captured a zeitgeist talking about slavery, and reimagining history, whether it’s worthy of all that is another matter. QT with a $100 million budget, a near three hour running time and little in the way of restraint is not a great thing in my opinion. Having seen it, I’ll take Jackie Brown, Kill Bill Vol. 2 and Death Proof, over Django, Basterds, and KB Vol. 1.
David Mumpower: A meta aspect of this topic that I’m tracking is that Tarantino was one of those buzz content creators of the 1990s. Like Aaron Sorkin and Joss Whedon, he was largely hyped more often than he achieved the popularity commensurate with such notoriety. All three of them have weathered the storm of criticism that their personal styles are not conducive to mainstream acceptance. And now all three are achieving their greatest success after what seems like a lifetime of trying. I believe that part of it is that younger movie-goers are unfamiliar with the struggles. Their entire lives have been spent with an awareness of who Whedon, Sorkin and Tarantino are. It has never dawned on this generation that these extraordinarily talented people would be anything other than accomplished artists. So there is only upside to having that sort of built-in awareness. For Tarantino, Django Unchained includes the biggest star he has ever had in a film, Leonardo DiCaprio. So he is a name director with one of the five or six most famous actors in the world. Even with the uncomfortable subject matter, this title always struck me as a massive hit. I still must confess the sheer volume of tickets sold still surprises me, though.
Shalimar Sahota: $100 million within two weeks is impressive and not something I expected Django Unchained to accomplish. He may not appeal to all but the lack of studio interference means that Tarantino is one of the few directors that seems to get away with whatever crazy idea he has. The quality is there and it's nice to see the success that the film is having and that people are being drawn to this, if only because I'd like to believe that it'll spur on more creatively outlandish films. Probably unlikely, though.
Max Braden: I'm a little surprised in that I imagined a lot of America would by shy about going to see it, as if they wouldn't want their neighbors to see them buying a ticket. But as Django says, "What's not to like?" Every red-blooded American loves a revenge fantasy.
Edwin Davies: I'm not surprised at all, since I was expecting it to act as a sequel to Inglourious Basterds. Few contemporary film-makers are as indelibly associated with their work as Quentin Tarantino, and I think that the way Django Unchained has performed demonstrates the goodwill people have towards him following critical and commercial success that was Basterds. On top of that, the trailers were terrific, there was plenty of discussion about the film prior to release, and it functioned as great counter-programming to all the more family-friendly fare over Christmas.
Kim Hollis: Les Miserables finished in fourth place this weekend with $16 million. It has earned $103.5 million, which surpasses Dreamgirls to become the seventh most popular musical of all-time. Why do you think Les Mis has achieved such spectacular success for a musical?
Bruce Hall: Les Miserables is a well done adaptation of one of the most beloved stage musicals of all time, which in turn was adapted from one of the greatest novels in the English language. It is well delivered by a well known and well respected cast, and it has a moving, egalitarian message that can't help but resonate with an audience full of ordinary people, living in extraordinary times. Right place, right story, right cast, right time.
And it's a musical. Good word-of-mouth counts double when you can set it to music.
Felix Quinonez Jr.: I think Bruce makes a lot of good points but if I'm just being honest its success still boggles my mind.
Jay Barney: I'm surprised too, but people enjoy quality work. It appears as though this has been put together in a very nice way, and audiences have responded. It was released at the right time, and took in the rewards from the holiday season. It is still going fairly strong. Perhaps this is a note on how much musicals have been embraced as a legit choice of entertainment again. The recent history is pretty good, and even ones like Rock of Ages released last summer were not out and out failures.
Brett Ballard-Beach: I don't think the accomplishment here should be undersold: In the last eight years, two of the most popular and acclaimed musicals of the last four decades became critically savaged, underperfoming features. One was 2004's The Phantom of the Opera, which somehow creeped to $51 million against a $70 million budget simply by hanging around for several months. It was only in the top 10 for one week and never played on more than 1,500 screens. 2005's Rent petered out at $30 million on a $40 million budget and earned over half its gross in the first five days, opening at nearly 2,500 screens. I think an air of prestige surrounded Les Mis from the beginning and was borne out by the trailers (which left some weeping) and then the early reviews. The cast is respectable to acclaimed and this became a must-see on opening day for a lot of its target audience. The tremendous word-of-mouth has sustained it from there and Oscar noms should help push it a lot closer to $200 million than anyone might have imagined.
Max Braden: In my mind, this can be narrowed down to one thing: Anne Hathaway singing "I Dreamed a Dream." I'm not big on Broadway productions, but the moment I first saw and heard the trailer, I thought you'd never hear anyone get as heartfelt as she does with that song. She seems like an instant lock for Best Supporting Actress based on the trailer alone. Of course, when the pretty young thing in my office heard Russell Crowe is in it, her eyes lit up, so there's that too. Aside from cast, I think you can see a difference when you put the movie up next to Anna Karenina, too. Karenina looks like an artsy costume drama that industry eggheads would be interested in. Les Mis looks like the kind of big screen commercialized drama that Hollywood started doing so well in its golden age of musicals. It looks like a big budget, must-see Oscar movie. Finally, and the reason I think Les Mis can give Lincoln a run for Best Picture, is that it features a lot of the 99%, 47% themes that this country dealt with all year because of the presidential election. I would not expect a pure musical to win the weekend, but this looks like the Oscar movie to see this season, even more than The Hobbit wanted to be.
Edwin Davies: I think Max has hit the nail on the head. Les Miserables had a lot going for it in the first place - based on a wildly successful stage production, great cast and an Oscar-winning director whose previous film did pretty well - but there was still the question of whether or not it would live up to the promise. A lot of films based on popular musicals don't do well, and I think that people might have been on the fence unless something about the film struck them as special. Putting "I Dreamed a Dream" front and center in the trailer provided that something. It's easily the best moment in the film, and it seemed to galvanize fans and non-fans to check it out.