Surely Only A Matter of Time…

From The Onion:

Man Not Belonging To Movie’s Target Demographic Escorted From Theatre By Hollywood Officials

This Can’t Be Good

When I heard about the Disney/Marvel merger yesterday, I automatically assumed that the likes of Sony/Columbia and 20th Century Fox would be pretty miffed, since they presumably would be losing control of the Spider-Man and X-Men franchises respectively (as well as any others they might own).

Turns out I was wrong. According to Variety and Ain’t It Cool News, Fox control their Marvel properties in perpetuity, for as long as they keep making films, and are currently (already?) hoping to reboot the Fantastic Four franchise.

Start the conveyor belt, boys.

(In the case of Fantastic Four, we’ve been here before).

No Business Like…

This summer has been the most profitable season for the American Box Office ever, according to Variety:

Three tentpoles lead the pack of top domestic performers: Paramount’s “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” ($399.4 million), Warner Bros.’ “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” ($294.3 million) and Disney/Pixar’s “Up” ($289.6 million).

The Hangover and The Proposal also did extremely well, which is good news for modestly-budgeted movies and proof that you don’t neccessarily need vast amounts of CGI to pack ‘em in. A Mike Tyson cameo and a naked Sandra Bullock should do it instead…

What Variety doesn’t ask is how many of the movies they list as doing big business (Star Trek, Wolverine and so on) have actually turned a profit once marketing and distribution costs are taken into account. Unfortunately, thanks to Hollywood Accounting, that’s something we’ll probably never truly know. Only in the movie business does it sometimes make more sense not to make money.

More of the same next year, I wonder, or will we see studios trying to push out District 9/Hangover style mid-budget pieces in the hope of them going supernova? Well that might depend on one word: Avatar.

My Spidey Sense is Tingling

Honestly, if someone had told me DC and Marvel were merging, I would’ve found it more believable than this:

• Disney to buy Marvel for $4 billion (from Variety)

Scarier still, as the article reports:

Disney will acquire ownership of more than 5,000 Marvel characters, including Iron Man, Spider-Man, X-Men, Captain America, Fantastic Four and Thor.

Okay, so this is a pretty smart move from Disney’s point of view. Marvel has basically become a mini-studio in its own right over the last decade or so, and has had some incredibly successful franchises. And it’d be unfair to claim that Disney interference could be to the detriment of what’s currently on Marvel’s slate, since some of Marvel’s recent offerings haven’t been all that good anyway. Still, I worry…

I’ll bet Sony and Fox aren’t too happy either.

Addendum

Things I wanted to mention when I was talking about Inglourious Basterds but didn’t have the space for:

• Tarantino is an absolute master at framing and setting up a shot. The placing of objects within every frame is meticulous and beautiful, especially in that first sequence.
• Using Morricone on a film score should be considered cheating, because it automatically makes whatever’s onscreen seem about a thousand times cooler than it actually is.
• Related to the above two points: I kept thinking of Sergio Leone right the way through; the use of titles to pick out characters reminded me of Duck, You Sucker/A Fistful of Dynamite, when Juan realises Sean is his ticket to breaking into the bank.
• Brad Pitt and Co. trying to bluff the multi-lingual Nazi with their dreadful Italian is priceless.
• I really liked the fact that a good bulk of the film is spoken in French or German, with English subtitles. It gives it a nice feel.

Okay, I think that just about covers it. Though I’ll probably think of something else later.