Monday, July 11, 2005
The Fantasticks!!!
Well, aside from confusing it with the long-running off-Broadway show, maybe that should have been the title of the latest Marvel-inspired movie. It would have been a perfect circular irony. Heck, more than a few people will think anyway that the live-action superhero movie that opened Friday was ripped off from the animated hit of last summer.
(Last year's irony was that The Incredibles, a seeming "rip-off" of the Fantastic Four, a comic created in 1961, could still turn out to be such a wonderful original work. It was a "rip-off" both in the way the powers of the Incredible family mirrored that of the Richards-Grimm-Storm clan, but also in its adoption of the comic's literary conceit of a superhero team having to deal with the complications of also being an actual "family" -- as opposed to the "adoptee" sense inherent in X-Men).
It's pretty cool to see FF do what the combination of Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg couldn't -- end the box-office doldrums of the last three months. Indeed, it looks like my prediction -- that War of the Worlds would, relatively-speaking, turn out to be something of a flop. Yes, $165 million in the first couple weeks isn't anything to dismiss, but, hey, this was supposed to be the big summer smash and the 52 percent drop from its opening weekend doesn't suggest a long shelf-life.
The number of bad comic-related puns in the first paragragh of this Box Office Mojo article on the FF's great opening weekend are almost enough to make me stop that awful habit.
Yeah, right.
My take? Sorry, but a few other distractions kept me from seeing the movie, though co-worker Ali says that she liked it as much as X-Men 2 ("good, but not as good as the first one"). Hey, she's married into a comic-book industry family, so, that should account for something, right?
Lord Jim's nice Rand-y perspective on the FF's origin, his daughter's reaction to the movie and a nice round-up of various reviews can be found here.
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(Last year's irony was that The Incredibles, a seeming "rip-off" of the Fantastic Four, a comic created in 1961, could still turn out to be such a wonderful original work. It was a "rip-off" both in the way the powers of the Incredible family mirrored that of the Richards-Grimm-Storm clan, but also in its adoption of the comic's literary conceit of a superhero team having to deal with the complications of also being an actual "family" -- as opposed to the "adoptee" sense inherent in X-Men).
It's pretty cool to see FF do what the combination of Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg couldn't -- end the box-office doldrums of the last three months. Indeed, it looks like my prediction -- that War of the Worlds would, relatively-speaking, turn out to be something of a flop. Yes, $165 million in the first couple weeks isn't anything to dismiss, but, hey, this was supposed to be the big summer smash and the 52 percent drop from its opening weekend doesn't suggest a long shelf-life.
The number of bad comic-related puns in the first paragragh of this Box Office Mojo article on the FF's great opening weekend are almost enough to make me stop that awful habit.
Yeah, right.
My take? Sorry, but a few other distractions kept me from seeing the movie, though co-worker Ali says that she liked it as much as X-Men 2 ("good, but not as good as the first one"). Hey, she's married into a comic-book industry family, so, that should account for something, right?
Lord Jim's nice Rand-y perspective on the FF's origin, his daughter's reaction to the movie and a nice round-up of various reviews can be found here.
