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Thanks, that's even better.
:D
A Bond movie that is #10 in the US, #5 in the overseas box office, that is well above those that follows, but that is well below the Star Wars movie above :
This is Spectre ? "Box office success, everyone should be happy !"
This is The Spy Who Loved Me ? "Bond had its low point with Moore, what did they have in mind ?".
May SPECTRE's box office make some realize the 80s were definitely not as bad as the "US inflation adjusted figures" make it look in a too simplistic manner (the "adjusment" is just a rule of three computation...).
And well, TSWLM's BO was probably about 10 times its budget :)
Did anyone understand anything in this post?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films
This makes SPECTRE the 45th highest grossing film of all time. passing Inception, the final Twilight, and, er, one of them Transformers movies.
Funny you should say that, coz i was wondering what this post was all about as well, and how did TSWLM get into the conversation?
:))
No and its even more sad, that GG finally left because of him. Evetything GG contributed was of so much more value.
Thanks for the forgiveness :)
Time to write him again! ;)
Not only did this make absolutely no sense, but in no way should it have been directed toward me. I've no clue what you're talking about; are you attempting to lump me into some group of people who complained during Moore's tenure? Because if so, aim (whatever that was) elsewhere; wasn't born until '91, bud.
Part I
https://hmssweblog.wordpress.com/2015/12/13/spectre-box-office-and-its-future-implications-part-i/
Part II
https://hmssweblog.wordpress.com/2015/12/14/spectre-box-office-and-its-future-implications-part-ii/
Thanks for that, an interesting read, and really reflects the things we have been saying on this site about Spectre. One thing the writer missed was the aspect of how important the writing of the film should be.
This definition :
"A Bond movie that is #10 in the US, #5 in the overseas box office, that is well above those the movies that follows it in the box office, but that is well below the Star Wars movie above it."
It will probably fit quite well both SPECTRE and both TSWLM (which, means, for me, that they were both great success).
But I wonder if the many here who describe Moore's Bond tenure as a low (because of some "inflation adjusted figures" that actually doesn't make much sense) will re-assess it now that they experience the same kind of box office success with SPECTRE, that they define as a success.
Who is describing Moore's tenure as a low? His run of seven films is all over the place, he has the 4th highest grossing Bond film of all time, LALD, and two other big hits - MR, TSWLM - FYEO is sort of middling, and he had weak earners - OP, AVTAK, TMWTGG.
FYI Spectre has beaten them all worldwide, and finishes only behind MR in the US.
Thats because you use an "inflation adjustement" measure that makes comparison "easy" but that can be used in so many ways it's also meaningless... There's a good reason why you won't find inflation adjusted worlwide box office lists on Box Office Mojo for instance : it's probably impossible to compute them. Putting the US inflation on the UK box office is plain wrong.
Also, the market itself is not even the same. TSWLM had no China to boost his BO, etc. And the Connery movies to make it brief had nothing East of the Berlin Wall, etc.
And if you compare the BO with the budgets, you can even invert the comparisons I guess.
So as nevertheless people here want to compare SPECTRE with other Bond movies, rankings within the year is not a bad way to compare IMO : all the blockbusters of a given year had the same kind of market, the same TV/video/piracy context, the same marketing possibilities, etc. And then Bond has been consistently high, and the LTK "low" is even more apparent (and many movies would have liked to do as well as LTK).
LTK was #36 in the USA in 1989. I find it far more revealing than all the computations with the inflation you can imagine. LTK did less than a Fletch sequel.
Then with this ranking approach, SPECTRE becomes a MR/TSWLM success. Or, rather, the other way around, for those who have no idea of what Bond meant in the 80s :)
Oh, and with the ranking approach, the alleged "US love for silly Brosnan movies" becomes much less clear...
Nope.
As it has been said before, the budget needs a reassessment so that every penny is being used for the right things come Bond 25. I think a leaner Bond film with a lesser budget will make EON and the director and their team think on their toes and create far more original stunts when they are forced to really make up for a deficit in their funds and think outside the box. We've seen films in this day and age and in the past do a helluva lot with an average or lesser budget, so why not Bond? The team they've got is beyond talented and highly capable of getting the job done with scraps.
The main issue with SP's money issue is this: Money wasn't used in a prioritized manner. Cash was thrown at things it just shouldn't have been. Case in point is the explosion at Blofeld's HQ. What was the point really? It seems to me that Mendes and EON were fishing for an accolade for largest on screen explosion for Guinness Records, so instead of spending less money on a miniature of the set and some computerized effects, they wasted money on a boat load of explosives just so they could say they "did it for real" and reap the glory of it all. While I love that the series tries to do things for real at every opportunity, when you watch the film you don't even think for a second that they actually wasted money to blow up the HQ; it seems beyond impossible to fathom such a mistake. I didn't think it was real when I saw the film for the first time, and neither did many others.
Looking at the less expensive helicopter stunts in the PTS however, was something EON could do for real that gave actual gravitas and tension to the film. Knowing real people were in danger in that stunt heightened everything about it, but the same can't be said for Corbould's approach to the HQ explosion. What does it add to the film? It doesn't feel risky, doesn't heighten tensions, doesn't make you appreciate the team, or anything. For this reason, it shouldn't have been done for real and a cheaper solution needed to be found.
True. They also boasted of spending $36 million for Aston Martin and Jaguar "supercars" to do the car chase. (There were stories that the Rome sequence cost $60 million by itself.) Could they have gotten by with, say, $10 million for cars for the car chase? Was the car chase so important to the plot you actually had to spend $36 million?
Also, according to emails that came out with the Sony leaks, there were disagreements about the number of rail cars for the train. There was a recent story about the subtle use of CGI that indicated they indeed cut back on the number of rail cars while using computer effects to make the train look bigger than it was.
No they didn't. But what they did have were much longer theatrical windows. The Connery movies played for months, and were re-released again and again in double bills and revivals - Thunderball was being seen in theaters as late as 1971. A cinema was the only place to see them, and Bond was the ONLY big blockbuster series like it, it was something audiences had never seen before and there was no competition on the same level. No waiting for video, cable, pay per view, or torrents, which all cut into modern cinema revenues. Those are a major advantage that no modern Bond movie has.
Indeed. It's also worth noting that he came up against very strong competition in his time and performed quite well - relative to the competition, he might actually have performed the best out of the Bond actors.
James Bond tallied up another $6.4M in 92 total markets, taking the offshore cume to $642.2M. In notable performances, Japan added $1.1M from 448 screens in its 3rd frame for a cume of $15.3M. The UK continues to lead with $142.9M, followed by China at $84.7M and Germany with $65.9M.
Well, one could answer back by saying that the movies were not released as massively as they were now. And by a huge margin. A movie is now out in thousands of theaters when it's released. At that time, it was more on selected screens. To reach the number of viewings a blockbuster has today in 4 weeks, yes you would have needed many months or possibly even years at that time.
When you find out the number of viewers is not that much different between blokcbusters here and then, you realize the positive factors and the negative factors cancel one another more than many think.
By listing all these factors though, it proves how meaningless any attempt at a comparison through so different period of times is. When why insisting on doing computations that are very wrong (using US inflation for Europe box office for instance), just to "rank" them ? Box Office Mojo never ventured into such adjusted worldwide lists for good reasons.
And about the lack of competition at that time : did you know Golfdinger was never considered a #1 weekly box office in the USA when it was released ? And yet no one would ever consider it to have been a disappointment, or that Bondmania never really existed. Note : at that time, believe it or not, the weekly box office was not computed by summing ticket sales !
I was really hoping that SP would retain the idea of elevating the quality of the Bond films while re-discovering the fun that was lost. The closest we've had to the old glory was the initial conversation with Silva. SP did not deliver, though the opening sequence was beautiful.
BTW... noticed everyone brings up the invisible car all the time with DAD. Yeah, a bit much, but it is based on existing technology. As was the underwater city in TSWLM (I think the existing one is in Japan) ... and the invisible car is no more outrageous than the rocket that can land and re-launch into space (from a volcano!) in YOLT. That was decades before the shuttle. ;)
Now you can release the hounds.
So he was written, and not a real person? Who wrote him?
In the USA, for instance,
Die Another Day did significantly less than Austin Power's Goldmember (released the same year).
Casino Royale did significantly more than Mission Impossible : III (released the same year).
The obsession over the inflation adjusted lists hide such telling facts from the view.
Let's do the ultimate ranking : the ranking of the rankings in the USA :)
1) SF : #4
2) GE : #6
3) CR, QOS : #9
5) SP, TND : #10
7) DAD : #12
8) TWINE : #14
It's pretty hard to conclude Brosnan was the more popular of the two IMO.
There you have a list in which you don't have to judge whether or not it's relevant to adjust the dollars you spent on entertainment with respect to some indicator that includes oil prices and school fees.
And with earlier ones... I think we can safely say Dalton was not very popular in the USA. But for the rest...
1) SF : #4
2) OP, GE : #6
4) LALD : #7
5) FYEO : #8
6) TSWLM, CR, QOS : #9
9) MR, TND, SP : #10
12) DAD : #12
13) AVTAK : #13
14) NSNA, TWINE : #14
16) TLD : #19
17) TMWTGG : #22
18) LTK : #36
I didn't include the ones before because contrary to many other movies, the Connery movies were movie that were re-released, so the ranking data becomes less and less reliable.
GF and TB were #3 of their years in the rankings, but they definitely didn't make all their money during the year. While other movies of the list probably did a lot in their first year, there was no franchise to have them re-released on and on... But they were so ahead they may have been nevertheless #3 indeed...
From what i've read the official box office figures quoted, are based on the films initial run, and don't include all the minor re-releases and double bills, that the film may have had. Some of the Connery films still had double bills in the UK, even upto the mid-70's, i very much doubt that these small earnings would be included in the films original box office run. The studio would know, but the money was not added on to the figure for the publics record.
The record books and BO sources, would otherwise of had to of kept changing ther figures for these films regularly.
Also remember, BO sources do actually, highlight against a films gross, if a films figures include re-releases, BUT i have never ever seen this for a Bond film.
"You must excuse me, gentlemen, not being English, I sometimes find your sense of humor rather difficult to follow!"
Do you miss a "to"? Well, here you have "two"... (What about that, eh?)
Great article about SPECTRE box office by Gert Waterink. Yes, @Gustav_Graves himself!!
Part one: https://hmssweblog.wordpress.com/2015/12/13/spectre-box-office-and-its-future-implications-part-i/
Part two: https://hmssweblog.wordpress.com/2015/12/14/spectre-box-office-and-its-future-implications-part-ii/
Well, the BO obsession is very recent. I'm not sure you can find Box offices lists about past years in the 60s/70s...
And don't forget the weekly box office in the US for instance were not based on ticket sales ! BO was far less important for the media, until the studios started to make Public Relation from it.
For France, I know for a fact that the viewers figures are based on the sum of the releases. Hence the famous old saying "En première exploitation" (which means you had to go a few cinemas in Paris to see it first, before they sent the copies in other cities, hence the habit to give box offices for Paris and suburbs only, while it's quite irrelevant now).
For instance, DN had more viewers in France in the year of GF than in the year of its release, and did quite well in the year of FRWL... It did about 1.5M when it was released, but now you will find almost 5M in the books.