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[kswiston]

If those estimates are close to being true, I'm surprised Warcraft made it to almost $500 million. Then again, it did recently open in some new markets.

Warcraft had terrible legs everywhere. It will finish under $450M.

 

[SonicMegaDrive]

I had interest in the BFG when all I knew of it was that it was a Spielberg film for kids. That's something we haven't gotten in a long time. But when I watched the trailer and saw all of that unnatural looking CG, I lost interest. I'll probably still catch it on tv at some point or something.

 

[Dash_Riprock]

Can't believe Spielberg directing carries so little weight now...

 

[Freeza Under The Shower]

Can't believe Spielberg directing carries so little weight now...

I don't think that's the issue. More one of Roald Dahl being a fairly dark writer (which is why it works so well) and presumably having lost a lot of appeal as parents have started to increasingly shield their children from that.
And this movie, having only read opinions about here and never seen the trailer, sounds like it's not the type of design they would likely take their children to see. It's not "safe enough", if you will, whereas Finding Dory is so braindead and harmless there's nothing to learn from it, so parents obviously take their kids to see that shit (I have not seen Dory, but this is a safe assumption knowing Disney).
And I don't think the appeal to adults is big enough in times where there are already soooo many movies that they could go and see. Consider that the Alice sequel bombed (or is bombing) as well, despite being THE children's novel.

edit: removed an n

 

[3N16MA]

I don't think that's the issue. More one of Ronald Dahl being a fairly dark writer (which is why it works so well) and presumably having lost a lot of appeal as parents have started to increasingly shield their children from that.
And this movie, having only read opinions about here and never seen the trailer, sounds like it's not the type of design they would likely take their children to see. It's not "safe enough", if you will, whereas Finding Dory is so braindead and harmless there's nothing to learn from it, so parents obviously take their kids to see that shit (I have not seen Dory, but this is a safe assumption knowing Disney).
And I don't think the appeal to adults is big enough in times where there are already soooo many movies that they could go and see. Consider that the Alice sequel bombed (or is bombing) as well, despite being THE children's novel.

Pixar films usually have some underlying lesson/message that kids can get. Dory is no different.

 

[Freeza Under The Shower]

Pixar films usually have some underlying lesson/message that kids can get. Dory is no different.

Yes, pre-digested and shoved down their throats so they never have to think or consider more complex meanings and emotions. I should explain.

This is not me blaming Pixar for it. Nor blaming Disney in particular. This is just the general cultural trend we have been in for two to three decades now. Just look at depictions of war movies and you're going to find that Saving Private Ryan, now nearly two decades old, is probably the last time, aside from a very small intermission in the form of Rambo 4, when you saw war violence actually being depicted in a non-sanitized-yet-still-very-sanitized cinematic form. As much as TV has gotten smarter and more complex, movies have been going in the other direction, making them easier to digest, less complex, and safer.
You would not get 8MM made today, despite the average horror movie actually having far more 'gore' in it. The result is that movies increasingly cease to understand, visually and emotionally, what violence is (leading to a very frustrated Ed Harris as director of A History of Violence and Quinton Tarantino as a director). Or complex emotions in general.

Maybe I'm reading all of that wrong and using selection bias to make up for the difference, but you can't deny the rampant loss of R-ratings and movies now being made 'R' for just having the word 'motherfucker' in it. I mean, the entire movie catalogue of Eddy Murphy would now be RRR-rated. It's off the fucking scale-R. Even Half! of that is still waaay off the current scale. And Blazing Saddles wouldn't even be fucking made.

Now this could be a necessary adjustment for earlier negligence, or our generation (70s-80s cohort) abhorring the kind of violence we grew up with. Which I very much doubt, since the only 'violence' we 'suffered' was the blood-less Halloween, the arguably far creepier Nightmare on Elm Street, the cartoon violence of two Rambo sequels and many actual cartoons we watched (80s cartoon syndrome: PEW!-PEW!-PEW! and nobody gets hit or dies). And the 70s have some of the best movies (if not all of them) ever made, including the actually scary and violent Alien. Now that one I could understand wanting to get away from. But even so, much like Carpenter's earlier movies, that movie has class in ways no movie today seems willing to do. Even The Terminator, made on a shoe-string budget, has both lack of blood / excessive gore, classy portrayal, and screaming terror on the side of it (which I love about it, AM's burning pillar of 'HATE' in the back of the terminator's mind, so awesome. Hell, Reese even has to explain that because people couldn't grasp it otherwise: "it can't be argued with, it can't be reasoned with, and it will never stop.. until she is dead." ).

The reason I'm bringing these all up is because they have much greater complexity than movies today do, AND more importantly, Roald Dahl's style is very reminiscent of those horror movies. The monstrous Lovecraftian egg aliens swarming in the void of space, in Charlie and the Lift, for instance (and those are just one of many such things btw). Or the mental -and physical- abuse in Mathilda. And for some more horrific things in his earlier non-children work. Uncle... something. It goes to very dark places.
Dahl stands in a line of the brothers Grimm as a style of being both scary, complex, and yet suitable for children. Not because it forces a meaning or message on them, but because things work towards a 'good guys finish first' type deal.

Similarly, I grew up watching Jim Henson's Storyteller and I, Claudius, which both have violence, complexity (good lord does it have that) and lack of a grand meaning other than that things have a way of surprisingly working out, despite having horrible people in it. Hell, I'm convinced that the character of Livia became GRRM's starting point for Cersei, where the line "power is power" could be said by either one without being out of character. I was six when I watched that. Can you imagine a parent thinking that that is safe for kids today? (despite being perfectly harmless. Sure, there's a severed head in it, but Jacobi's horrified response to it is absolutely correct, and even a child would get that)

Now, movies (and TV) are starting to get around to reversing that into more excessive depictions of violence (which is just mean and I don't agree with it) and classier, yet very violent, depictions of it (Hannibal, The Americans, Bone Tomahawk) to get back to being more complex and therefore worth watching, but that's mostly at the intellectual fringes now, not the mainstream cultural core production.

So, what I'm going for with this overly long argument on presentation, is that Roald Dahl's style is just not what we seem to be comfortable with these days. Why or what that means I don't pretend to know, but I kind of hate it because it's a lack of trust in children's ability to form ideas of their own. They're tiny people, not dolls to cram stuff into. But they don't get to choose what we feed them, and that's the point. Spielberg or not, we've altered the cultural diet to a place of discomfort with things that aren't black & white, that is: easy to digest.

Thanks for reading all that. Not really the thread for it, I know, but I felt like saying it.

edit: removed an n...

 

[ascii42]

Pixar films usually have some underlying lesson/message that kids can get. Dory is no different.

In Dory's case it's about the struggles involved with living with disability, for the person with the disability as well as their friends and family. But yeah, I suppose it never gets particularly dark.

Yes, pre-digested and shoved down their throats so they never have to think or consider more complex meanings and emotions. I should explain.

Maybe I'm reading all of that wrong and using selection bias to make up for the difference, but you can't deny the rampant loss of R-ratings and movies now being made 'R' for just having the word 'motherfucker' in it. I mean, the entire movie catalogue of Eddy Murphy would now be RRR-rated. It's off the fucking scale-R. Even Half! of that is still waaay off the current scale. And Blazing Saddles wouldn't even be fucking made.

Were PG-13 movies with the word 'motherfucker' ever common?

 

[numble]

RoNald Dahl?