Monday Morning Quarterback Part I

By BOP Staff

May 27, 2008

Behold cancer's worst enemy, the kid it can't keep down.

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The best part? No Jar-Jar Binks.

Kim Hollis: Do you think Steven Spielberg and George Lucas's decision to eschew modern CGI-driven special effects in favor of old school action sequences and set pieces helped or hindered the movie's opening weekend box office?

Pete Kilmer: I don't agreed that they eschewed CGI. In fact they used CGI and used a lot of it. Here is a CNN story about the special effects process.

David Parker: Coming from someone who has only seen the previews, it looks more CGI driven. All the pre-release buzz talked about the reliance on set pieces, but all I saw in the trailers and commercials were big effects. That had to be purposeful by Paramount. Bring in the special effect loving Transformer crowd with the trailers, but pull in the action lovers with talk of old school movie making.

Max Braden: The world of Indiana Jones isn't about laser weapons and spaceships, it's about stone and sand, so I think most audiences understood that this wouldn't be the effects-fest that was Star Wars 1-3. That said, some of the scenes looked to me like they were shot on 1950s MGM-musical stages with handpainted backgrounds. I was more impressed with the set pieces of Raiders of the Lost Ark, but that didn't hurt the box office either.

David Mumpower: I agree with Max's assessment. A movie may include a lot of CGI effects without giving any indication of doing so in its commercials. The meat of this question is whether Lucas and Spielberg made the correct decision in creating an old fashioned Indiana Jones movie as opposed to updating it with the shiny veneer of visual effects. The latter choice probably would have led to a more front-loaded title as a better series of trailers would have created more of a first weekend rush. I think that it would have alienated diehard Indy fans, though. They didn't want new and original. They wanted more of the same. Indiana Jones is comfort food to its fanbase.

Kim Hollis: Even if CGI was used, it wasn't overly obvious (other than in perhaps the finale). It still has the look and feel of an Indiana Jones movie, right down to the colors. I think I would have been disappointed if it had gone heavily and obviously CGI, just as I would have been if they had chosen to make Harrison Ford look younger than he is.




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Indy does have legs. The question is, does he know how to use them?

Kim Hollis: Do you expect Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal skull to have good legs or do you think it has already made half of its overall domestic box office, as has been the case with such films as X-Men: The Last Stand and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End?

Pete Kilmer: I think it has some legs. We've got Sex and The City next week and while groups of wives and girlfriends are going to see that...the husbands and boyfriends need something to go to.

Tim Briody: While it didn't really behave like an At World's End or Revenge of the Sith over the weekend, I think such is the nature of the beast that it's got a fairly sizable portion of its take already. Yeah, Temple of Doom and Last Crusade are well over $300 million earners adjusted to today's dollars (Raiders of the Lost Ark adjusts to Titanic levels, so we'll throw that one out), but I'd give Crystal Skull about $300 million and not much more than that.


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