But the trailer looks really, really bad. Plus the book also basically sucked, and I'm a dude who generally loves that kind of wanky pomo antinovel.
They had a hard time finding a UK distributor. The Wachowskis have said this was a labor of love and are content that the movie was made. I believe they even gave up their points or whatever (I know nothing about Hollywood) in addition to putting a lot of their own money into it. As a huge fan of the book, I'm grateful it was made and look forward to eventually seeing it. But I don't much care how it affects anyone's career. And when it comes to what kind of movies are made in the future, we're already way too far down the Transformers 23 path for this movie to make much of a difference either way. Anyone want to speculate what this apparent bomb means for Tykwer?
I would like to interrupt this discussion to interject an opinion on the actual movie and not its receipts and the immediate demise of the Wachowski siblings's careers. The Wifey and I both went to see it, and while I was prepared to be snarky about it, I found myself really truly enjoying it. It has a surprisingly uplifting (if ham-fisted) message about unity and in my opinion is one of the ballsiest films I've seen from someone not named Lars Von Trier in a very long time. It was very much worth the ticket price to us.
How dare you enjoy this movie, Richard Burt. It tanked at the box office. (I plan to see it before it leaves theaters.)
I enjoyed it. A lot of things that might have bugged me, I was prepared to give a pass for just due to the sheer ambition of the movie. Epic fiction novels have a grandiosity of scale that is hard to attempt to capture given the limited running time and focus of a movie, I wish more films would make the attempt. Unfortunately, the movie-going public doesn't tend to agree...which is kind of a killer because doing so frequently requires more than an art-house production budget.
Saw this yesterday with my girlfriend. We were both a bit mystified, but I enjoyed it quite a bit. She wasn't entirely thrilled with the level of gore in some of the scenes (particularly the After the Fall stuff), but dug the casting. I'm really going to have to read the novel now to see what exactly was going on. Also, suddenly I feel a need to re-watch All the President's Men, Blade Runner, Equilibrium, Logan's Run, Moon, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Road, and Soylent Green, among other films.
Only $5 million this past weekend. Certainly seems like this will end up in the top 10 all time flops, possibly in the top three. Too bad.
The other thing people aren't considering when arguing that Cloud Atlas isn't a massive flop is the time value of money. It's not enough to just get back your investment a year later, and even when a movie finally "makes back" it's budget 4 years later from bluray sales that's still a collosal failure, assuming the MARR at Warner Bros. is more than 0%.
Except that nobody said that until after the first weekend and all the empty theaters. You've got your cause and effect reversed.
I'm not sure why people spend so much time defending their favorite directors or actors from what they view as "accusations" of floppery. A flop is a fact, you can't argue it, so why bother? Either people see it or they don't. Yes, what magnificent insight, I know, but trying to defend entities from that fact does no good when discussion on the quality - whether high or low - of the end result is what is important. The quality of the film determines whether or not the people who made the flop ever get the chance to create again. People like Peter Weir, Terrence Malick and Terry Gilliam have made careers out of flops and come-backs, all because the post-flop audience is obsessed with the quality of the picture. Sure, they subsist mostly off the patronage of a few very powerful producers or actors who can pull weight and want to work with them, but that's just how the game has worked for the past couple of decades. So, yeah, ben, man, I get it, you're upset that people keep pointing out it flopped, but I don't think anyone here is gleefully doing so, hoping that through the power of Broken Forum they can end the Wachowski's and Tykwer's careers. I think it's in more of a "this is disappointing, but not wholly unexpected, for such an ambitious and rather enjoyable film."
I'm sort of half-gleefully doing it. I still haven't quite forgiven the Wachowskis for apparently sitting around and saying to themselves: "OK, now that we have a chance to make a sequel The Matrix, what should we do? Got it - filthy hippie techno rave scene!"
What joke? If there's any point, it's simply that American moviegoers don't have much patience for complicated cinema, although compared to Tree of Life, Cloud Atlas is about as complex as White Chicks. Which grossed $70 million domestically. Speaking of White Chicks, that's the film I kept thinking of when I saw Hugo Weaving's makeup in the latter 2012 segments of Cloud Atlas.
It's really not worth arguing over the profit and loss numbers on movies. You can't trust them. There's nothing wrong with liking a movie that underperformed. That's perfectly fine. I like plenty of things that failed. Hell - my favorite television series ever didn't make it out of its first season intact. Consumer approval is a terrible metric for judging the creative quality of something. I will say that the commercials for Cloud Atlas have told me precisely fuckall as to what it's about ("everything is connected" is not a story), and I have no clue what the story is supposed to be, and it looks big and sprawling and probably bloated and unfulfilling based on movies that have seemed the same to me in the past (based on their trailers), and that's why I wouldn't go see it in the theater if I went to see anything in the theater. That could be a marketing problem, though.
I wonder if that's true. It's definitely possible, but I wonder if it's more of an issue of the theatre experience (and here I'm talking about your mainstream multiplexes, not some awesome place like the Alamo Drafthouse or whatever) doing everything in it's power to drive people like me away. Because let me tell you, I love complicated cinema. But the idea of going to see something like The Tree Of Life in a multiplex seems fucking crazy to me. It would like be going to a circus to watch a staging of a Samuel Beckett play - the context and environment seems utterly at odds with anything more complex than a Transformers movie. Add to that the technology of 2012, which not only allows me to watch excellent home versions of movies on bluray but to crucially control the experience of watching it, and it's a no-brainer. I'm very much looking forward to watching Cloud Atlas, but there was no way at all I was ever going to see it in a theatre.
I assumed you were making a joke about it "succeeding" where TREE OF LIFE "failed", but now I see the point you are making. I don't agree with it, at all, but I see it.
bengunn - What I find interesting and relevant is a discussion on why Cloud Atlas is such a commercial failure in spite of it being relatively well regarded critically and having Tom Hanks megastar power and the Wachowski Matrix name-drop recognition mojo going for it. As I said way back on page 1, I still think it's the John Carter-level marketing that really let this one down. Now that we can get past the knee-jerk "let's-wait-and-see-maybe-it's-not-really-a-flop-opening-weekend-doesn't-mean-anything!" perhaps there's a chance at looking at reality and trying to make sense of it. I remember seeing the trailer maybe only six weeks ago, thinking "what the hell was that?!", and being surprised the movie was coming out so soon without being even remotely on my radar. No one I spoke to had any idea about it either, just puzzled looks. No one was like, "aw yeah, let's plan on seeing that!" either. It's also interesting that in spite of just how much some people seem to love the movie, the overall critical buzz is enough of a mixed bag that the 63% tomato-meter score isn't exactly helping much. I actually want to see it but can't find anyone that wants to see it with me.
I'm actually going to see it next week with my boyfriend, but tickets might be hard to come by down here. At the theater where I work, Cloud Atlas's two auditoriums are almost always packed. Only downside: cleaning two 300-person theaters back-to-back is a pain in the ass.
Cloud Atlas Floats Atop Chinese box office Beaten SkyFall every day since release While the U.S. box office returns were dismal (at least in relation to the cost to make the movie), worldwide returns before China pushed it up to ~$85M and now in China, it is the top film, despite being butchered by government censors (or maybe in spite of it ;))
