Hahaha....who in the world greenlights a movie like 47 RONIN or JACK THE GIANT SLAYER with budgets near $200 million? That probably doesn't even include the marketing costs!

Comcast Corp's Universal Pictures movie studio has taken unspecified write-downs for its $175 million, Keanu Reeves film "47 Ronin" that opens on Christmas Day, the studio has acknowledged, as Hollywood neared the end of a year of big budget bombs.

The film, a fantasy action film about a group of samurai in 18th century Japan, cost $175 million to make, according to people with knowledge of its budget.

It is expected to gross between $17 million and $20 million for the five-day Christmas Day holiday period through Sunday December 29, Hollywood experts have forecast, a particularly weak showing for a big budget film.

"Universal Pictures regularly evaluates its film slate for potential adjustment," said a Universal official. "In the case of '47 Ronin,' we adjusted film costs in previous quarters and as a result, our financial performance will not be negatively impacted this quarter by its theatrical performance."

Universal did not disclose the size of the earlier write-downs.

Although Hollywood executives cautiously predict a record year at the box office, many had their own big budget misfires. Walt Disney wrote down the costs of the $215 million Johnny Depp western "The Lone Ranger," which it had said lost more than $160 million.

Earlier in the year, Dreamworks Animation took an $87 million write-down for its 2012 holiday film "Rise of the Guardians," while Warner Brothers' "Jack the Giant Slayer" generated $197.7 million in worldwide ticket sales and cost $195 million to make. (Studios generally get half the ticket sales.)

Sony cited the "theatrical underperformance" of the $150 million thriller "White House Down" as one reason its studio recorded a $181 million loss in its second quarter.

Universal's "47 Ronin" tells the story of a half-Japanese former slave, played by Keanu Reeves, who joins a band of outcast samurai intent on avenging the death of their master and who battle mythic beasts and shape-shifting witches.

It was initially scheduled for release in November 2012, but was moved to February 2013 for more work on the 3D visual efforts, before it was postponed to Christmas Day.

The film has grossed an estimated $6.2 million in three foreign markets, including Japan and Singapore, Universal said.

Powered by hits "Despicable Me 2" and "Fast & Furious 6," the studio had a record year at the box office in 2013, it said earlier in the year, crossing $2 billion mark in international ticket sales for the first time in its 101-year history.

It also had its best year in the domestic market, with $1.4 billion in North American film sales, third behind Warner Brothers and Walt Disney, according to Box Office Mojo.

On December 23, Universal said it had pushed back its car chase movie "Fast & Furious 7" by nine months to April 2015 after co-star Paul Walker died in a car crash.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/universal-t ... get-bombs/

Insane

What the flaming fudge?! I can understand blowing that kind of budget on a sequel in a successful franchise (a $300 million investment in a Pirates Of The Caribbean or Spider-Man sequel will net you a billion-dollar worldwide return, no matter how sucky the resulting movie), but franchise-wannabe fare like R.I.P.D. or Lone Ranger or this? A movie like District 9 could be made SEVEN TIMES OVER for that budget. I honestly think Hollywood mega-budget films like this are finally hitting the breaking point...why blow $200 million for a $75 million (if that) return? To quote the Angry Video Game Nerd, "What were they thinking?!"

Remember when Orion Pictures used to make truly great (and profitable) films on modest budgets?

If Dances With Wolves were made today, it'd cost at least $150 million...and it's not all due to inflation, either. There's something fundamentally broken about the Hollywood system when the $200 million budget has become commonplace, rather than a rare anomaly. I remember when Titanic's budget swelled to a then-astronomical $175 million (probably not counting advertising costs), and it was seen as impossible to make back in the months leading up to its release, and, indeed, had it tanked and pulled in $55 million in the U.S., that might have killed the megabudget Hollywood movie dead in its infancy, and it would have been better for the industry in the long run. Movies just don't have the staying power to earn back this absurd budgets anymore...back in the 80's, even a moderately popular film would stay in first-run theaters for sometimes MONTHS in a row, making steady money all the while, whereas today there's this awful "Pump & Dump" strategy where it's ALL about the opening weekend, and everyone who wants to see a movie sees it in the first three days and everything after that is just gravy leading up to the Blu-Ray/streaming release three or four months later. Every now and again there's a word-of-mouth hit that's modestly-budgeted and yet sticks around, making a solid profit (like last summer's The Conjuring, which cost about $40 million and made about three times that in theaters), but there are way too many unreasonably expensive movies out there, all competing for the same increasingly-jaded audience. 25 years ago, I remember reading about how Tim Burton's Batman cost $45 million, and that figure was staggering to my then-fifteen-year-old self. These days, that budget would barely cover star salaries.

(like last summer's The Conjuring, which cost about $40 million and made about three times that in theaters),

It actually cost $20 million...so figure that math out and it's even more impressive!

Good points on the overall marketing/advertising strategy of the modern studio film. You're right about TITANIC (the general sense in the press was that it was going to tank), and the fact the movie ended up doing so well did jumpstart the "bigger and better" mentality -- especially because of how well it performed internationally. That overseas element has made studios even more willing to shell out dollars because, as you say, even mediocre tripe like Amazing Spider-Man 2 or Pirates 4 is going to make it back one way or another. The difference obviously on TITANIC was that the movie DID have incredible word of mouth, quite unlike most of the blockbusters we see today which don't play for months on end.

It's funny that even back in the '80s there was a general sense that movies were "products" increasingly aimed at younger demographics. While it may have been the dawn of that line of thinking, those films -- generally -- seem much more "personal" -- even the big studio films of that era -- than what we see today. I also think there's much more a sense of craft in those films in terms of the directors making them. It's like what John Landis told me a few years ago -- studios in the 70s and 80s used to be run by individual men with their own tastes, who would let directors work their magic in turn. No such creative freedom exists on the bulk of these films today (save someone like Peter Jackson or Christopher Nolan), and the studios are run by corporations with committees producing films for focus groups.

Sure movies in the '80s were all trying to be profitable, but movies then, as you said, would stay in theaters much longer than today. Every film now has a video release date -- before it even opens in theaters! Sequels, remakes, kids properties -- it's a neverending line of pre-fab products that offer zero cinematic surprises. I mean, in all these comic book movies -- even the good ones -- when was the last time one of them actually offered something you haven't seen before? Even the ones I've found entertaining...there's been very little, generally speaking, I'd consider groundbreaking or fresh. It's all stuff we've seen, just dressed up in modern technology to younger viewers who never sat through SUPERMAN or Burton's BATMAN, etc. I see fanboys excited about AVENGERS 2 and every other sequel in 2015 -- but I can basically tell you right now what every one of those films is going to be like.

47 RONIN sounds like it was Universal's latest attempt to pander to overseas viewers, especially in the east, while maintaining a western sensibility (kind of like what they were attempting with the botched MUMMY III). To be fair, the movie was supposed to open over a year ago but was delayed, delayed, delayed and reshot...which probably sent the budget spiraling out of control. That said, was it worth all the reshoots for a movie that's going to be hard pressed to hit $20 million over its 5-day Christmas opening? This film domestically won't even come close to what THE LONE RANGER did.

This is going to be a bigger bomb than LONE RANGER...grossed under $10 million for the 3-day lol

I agree that the 47 Ronin budget was simply ridiculous. And that Universal had another bomb this year with RIPD. On the other hand, they had The Purge, which they're saying was only 3 million and which did a lot better. (I personally think there were a bunch of hidden costs in the The Purge budget, where people really got paid on the back end.)

And I totally agree that the now-annual stampede of the elephants during the summertime is becoming more and more tiresome. It seems every year that the major studios put all their eggs into one or two gigantic monsters, in the hopes that one of them can be the big cash cow of the year. When that idea works, you get The Avengers. When it doesn't, you get Lone Ranger or White House Down or After Earth, or you just get milder disappointments like Oblivion or Star Trek ID or Man of Steel. It's a spectacularly wrong-headed use of resources, and you get to see the flip side of it when all the Oscar bait movies come out in the fall and winter, and it's obvious those movies were made for a miniscule fraction of what the elephants got. Dallas Buyers Club was made for roughly what it cost to shoot a single 3 minute sequence in Iron Man 3. Iron Man 3 spent about 5 million on the "Barrel of Monkeys" skydiving scene, which runs about 3 minutes or less in the movie. Dallas Buyers Club had that amount to spend on THE ENTIRE MOVIE.

I also remember the continual reports on how far overbudget Titanic was going during its production. The thought at the time was that it was going to bomb and Cameron would never be able to make another movie. Instead, the movie was able to get people to keep coming back to see it OVER AND OVER AGAIN in the theater. And this wasn't the first time such a situation had happened in the 90s. We saw similar buzz happen over Waterworld, Last Action Hero, Hudson Hawk and other wonders - only in those cases, the movies DID go belly up without stopping the impetus for studios to make them.

I don't agree about the 1980s, when it comes to blockbusters and bloated budgets. I agree that the problem wasn't nearly as pronounced as it is today, but I wouldn't think of the 1980s as a time when studio execs were that lenient with "personal" films. I'd say that moment happened in the late 60s and early 70s - when all the studios wanted to duplicate the runaway success of Easy Rider, which was made for a miniscule budget and did gangbusters business. And up to about the mid-70s, you saw quite a few smaller, more independently minded movies get through the cookie cutter. But the impact of Jaws and Star Wars really swung the door shut on most of the little guys.

Orion is a good example of a company that specialized in making smaller, more interesting movies. But we should keep in mind that Orion was formed by Arthur Krim and the others as a direct response to the corporatization we're decrying in this thread. Krim and the others walked away from UA because UA was acquired by Transamerica, which was meddling big time in their business - as well as trying to limit the salaries of Krim and the others. And of course when Krim walked away, taking most of his business with him to Orion, the next big event for UA was the disaster of Heaven's Gate, the 1980 version of today's bigger bombs. (And all of this is excellently captured in Steven Bach's book Final Cut) Orion stood in stark contrast to what the major studios were doing during the 1980s, and we've all benefited from the fact that they were there to do so. I would think of them as the equivalent of what the Weinsteins have done over the past 20 years, first with Miramax and then with TWC. The difference now is that Orion actually backed their movies from the beginning, and the Weinsteins just pick up the movies after they're finished. So it's actually harder to get these smaller movies made today, because the filmmakers have to come up with their own funding much of the time. As we see with smaller budget entries like Dallas Buyers Club and 12 Years a Slave, the little movies have to really scrounge to even get through a very short shooting schedule. (Granted, we could argue that many great movies from the 1930s and 40s were made on such short schedules - but those were done on stages and sets at the major studios, using talent under contract at those places. They weren't trying to create their entire infrastructure on their own in a limited time with few resources.)

I remember the 1980s as a time of major corporate filmmaking, best typified by the work of Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer in their runs at Paramount and Disney. This was not independently minded filmmaking where the studio execs let the directors just make their movies. This was corporate-run profit-driven production. Ghostbusters, for example, wasn’t made because someone had an independent notion of a fun movie. It was always intended as a big SNL alumni movie with large scale effects, and it was packaged as such. Sequels were absolutely the rule throughout the 80s, with Universal giving us 2 horrible Jaws sequels, Paramount throwing out sequels to both Airplane! and Grease, and with multiple new iterations of Rambo, Rocky, Dirty Harry and anything else they could come up with. Even the Indiana Jones movies were designed as a franchise from the beginning by Lucas. Paramount had both the Star Trek franchise and the decade’s biggest star, Eddie Murphy, in multiple productions that we’re all familiar with now. Heck, Paramount execs even tried to combine the two by having Eddie Murphy appear in Trek IV before that idea thankfully fell apart. The Superman movies were a bit different, as those were initially controlled by the Salkinds, but even that situation didn’t end up the way any of them had wanted, with the third and fourth movies in the mid-80s. In 1989, I remember listening to a local LA radio show called “Hour 25” in which the guys were talking about recent movies, most specifically Batman. I still remember one of them describing the decade as a series of bloated, empty corporate movies “and Batman topped it off!” Looking at the 1989 Batman today, it really doesn’t hold up that well. Some of the bits with Jack Nicholson are pretty good, but a lot of it just looks like a slightly dimmer version of the 1960s TV show, with a few shadings from Frank Miller’s “The Dark Knight Returns”. There’s a bit of Tim Burton’s flavoring in Batman, but this is absolutely not the kind of work he was doing in earlier movies, even at the level of Beetlejuice. I think you could argue that he returned to form with projects like Edward Scissorhands and Ed Wood, but the Batman movies he did are pretty bloated works.

If anything, the movies we’re seeing the studios make today are a refined version of the corporate works we saw 30 years ago. And those movies were a refined version of the corporate works that were going on in the 1950s and earlier. At each point, we’ve seen the studios pour massive funds into their big productions. The difference today is that they don’t seem to be making the smaller movies they used to. The middle range productions don’t seem to get made very often, and the lower-end movies aren’t made by the studios at all. Instead, the studios wait for the independent filmmakers to produce the low-budget items on their own, and then they acquire them via their “prestige” divisions – like Focus at Universal or Sony Pictures Classics, Paramount Vantage and Fox Searchlight. That is, if the Weinsteins haven’t already grabbed the best properties from the big film festivals. In some of the cases, you have the studios or the Weinsteins looking over the movies before they’re completed, each hoping to leap frog the others, but we’re no longer at a time when Universal or any other studio is going to directly fund a small passion project about a difficult subject.

Let's get real here:

"Starring Keanu Reeves"


Any questions?