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Jummy posted:Not really, unless I'm reading it wrong almost every movie based on a Stephen King work made a profit. Eight of them have made over $75 million if you adjust for inflation. Carrie, The Shining, Shawshank Redemption, Green Mile, Misery, Stand By Me, it's definitely more than "maybe a couple" and he's a big name people go out to see his work. In total Box Office Mojo has his movies making over $2B with an average of about $56M which seems more than decent. This is kind of uncharted waters though, because King's stuff has never really been the type to necessitate $100mil+ budgets, this is really the first time his material is being used to create a major blockbuster. The standards of success are a lot different, when you make The Mist for 18 million and it makes 60 million, that's a success. When you spend 80-100 million on The Dark Tower that puts it into a different category where just making a few hundred million at the box office isn't going to cut it.
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May 22, 2017 15:46
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Jummy posted:I can see that, but I don't necessarily agree. The Running Man is Arnold just a couple years after Terminator with a pretty significant budget and it did pretty well. BUT then you have something like Dreamcatcher where they spent almost $70m and definitely didn't recoup that money so yeah it could go either way. I'm curious about your last point, though, how if the budget is $100m and they make "a few hundred million" presumably $300m+ how does that not cut it? That seems like a pretty decent profit but I'm sure I'm missing something. A decent profit isn't really the return on the investment that studios are looking for from these huge tentpole blockbusters. It's a zero sum game, so that 100 mil and those years spent in development could have been used for something that theoretically could have done a lot better than "just" 200 or 300 million. It would be regarded as not a flop, yet still somewhat of a missed opportunity. I'm not saying I agree with that but its the way these huge films are evaluated these days.
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May 22, 2017 16:29
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:This movie is going to go down in marketing history by figuring out that the trick to silence the "it was different in the book" crowd was to show some random still of a horn and then have every book hipster go "heh, if you actually had read the book you'd know it was different because _______" The reason why the movie is allowed to be different really is fully explained in the books. The reason people are being tight lipped about that is because it would be impossible to explain without spoiling the ending of a series that people invest a lot of time in reading. It's a long series.
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May 22, 2017 17:21
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beejay posted:You just did the exact thing he's riffing on. So be it then. It's a legitimate point that isn't based on hipsterism or smugness, its me saying that its really not a good idea to fully explain why this movie is allowed to be different from the book. It would spoil a pretty large portion of a really long series, so I don't see what's so "hehe" about that.
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May 25, 2017 14:44
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Mulva posted:To be fair it's contextually obvious what the twist is just from reading elements of the thread critically. If you want to boil it down to two or three words, sure. But its really not about just a twist at the end. It's at the center of almost everything in the entire story in ways that are better left unspoiled.
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May 25, 2017 16:10
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3Romeo posted:
The only connector between The Shining and The Dark Tower is that you could say that The Shine is almost certainly related to the psychically talented young people that The Crimson King is using to break the beams. That's really it though, there's no reason to have some official Shining tie-in or anything like that. Salem's Lot is the only one with a direct connection(of the novels that have been adapted to films), and even then the events of that book all take place before the character in question enters the world of The Dark Tower. Plus, very few people give a poo poo about Salem's Lot.
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Jun 22, 2017 21:22
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Hodgepodge posted:And It, but you don't really need to make that explicit for Dark Tower films to work. That's really not even what I'm talking about as a direct connection though. A (Dark Tower spoiler)major character from Salem's Lot crosses over and becomes a major character in The Dark Tower series, and there are a few other King stories that have very strong connections like that but those haven't been adapted to film. The one exception would be Hearts in Atlantis, but good luck finding anyone who actually saw that. The point is that if they wanted to turn this into a big shared universe thing and include a remake of Salem's Lot, nobody would be crying foul as if it was some big offense. Very few people still care about the Salem's Lot movie.
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Jun 22, 2017 23:29
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Fried Watermelon posted:They go to the world where The Stand takes place. The Man in Black is Randall Flagg True, I'd forgotten about that one. The point is the same though, if they want to remake The Stand and incorporate it into a Dark Tower cinematic universe, nobody will be complaining about the sanctity of the original miniseries.
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Jun 23, 2017 16:50
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Fart City posted:On the topic of a shared Stephen King universe, I'm pretty sure that's what Hulu's Castle Rock show is supposed to be. The teaser explicitly mentions characters like Cujo, Annie Wilkes, and Alan Pangborn. Nobody knows exactly what it's supposed to be about, but Hulu is pitching it as their Stranger Things. They probably have a list of the lesser known/older stories that they can pull from, much like how comic book television shows have very strict rules about what they can and can't use. I doubt we'll be seeing IT or The Overlook on that show, and I'd guess they might not even be able to use Derry, just Castle Rock. Who knows though, I'm just pulling that out of my rear end.
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Jun 23, 2017 17:05
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Darko posted:Wolves of the Calla was "okay." It suffered a lot from fans for the long gap after 4 and not "advancing" to the Tower much from there. But as Stephen King's Magnificent Seven Samurai Amigos, it was a decent aside, with some weird touches that ended up taking over and being the worst parts of 6/7. Pretty crazy that the fans of the series had gone from enjoying the hell out of something like The Gunslinger, to criticizing Wolves of the Calla/Wizard and Glass for not "moving the story along" or whatever. Yea, that's totally what the series is all about, a constantly advancing plot 
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Jul 13, 2017 18:31
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Fart City posted:Biggest mistake in the endgame of The Dark Tower is not introducing Mordred sooner. He pops up in the last book, kills one of the most important characters in the entire Kingverse, gets food poisoning, and then gets unceremoniously merc'd. If he had been introduced in Song of Susannah and allowed to actually develop as an actual threat, it could have led to a much more interesting finale, and possibly give readers the big, final confrontation that was more or less sidestepped by the Crimson King. Agreed, he's the one part of the overall ending(I guess if we want to consider the entire final book the ending) that I don't think King stuck the landing on. I actually love a lot of the other stuff that most people don't like, but Mordred really was not a satisfying character in any way.
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Jul 14, 2017 13:55
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crime fighting hog posted:Hell, I'm trying to remember if there's a moment where Roland genuinely *misses* without having someone bump into him or something. Pretty sure he never does. He kills with is heart after all, when a gunslinger wants you dead you're dead.
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Jul 15, 2017 15:05
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I think I've posted this before but the fact that Elba appears to not wear a hat for the entire movie bothers me. I always picture Roland wearing a cowboy hat, and most of the book covers showed him with a hat.
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Jul 15, 2017 15:19
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Fried Watermelon posted:possible spoiler for book readers: He's not really supposed to have concrete memories like that to the point where he could make specific plans based on how things went last time. He just as a vague notion that things are cyclical and "ka is a wheel".
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Jul 17, 2017 16:31
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LegoMan posted:He's was fuckin amazed at how many bullets he could buy. Yea bullets were really in short supply in Mid-World, I think as far as Roland knew the ones he was carrying could have been the last in existence. In one of the early books there's a whole thing about him drying out his cartridges after they got wet because they were so precious.
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Jul 17, 2017 21:12
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As far as violence goes, there's no specific list of things that instantly make a movie an R, it's just a cumulative evaluation without any sort of established criteria. There are instances of films being resubmitted with zero changes that were passed with a lower rating just because ever time a film gets rated it's a crapshoot.
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Jul 17, 2017 21:58
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I'm bummed for Elba, this seemed like a solid career move but I guess it didn't turn out that way.
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Aug 3, 2017 15:20
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Diabetic posted:Well it just pisses me off that this movie is boring. That means it will be most likely the last we see of it for a long time. If it was just bad someone would try to do better but with the film being boring they will blame the source material instead of the makers. Yea I was hoping that this would just be passably mediocre. Just barely good enough that someone 10 or 12 years from now might see the seed of something great and try to have another go at it. But this is like Fantastic Four level disaster, the IP is gonna be good and dead for a loooong time. Unless somehow the television series somehow hits, but I can't imagine that happening.
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Aug 3, 2017 18:13
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King also hated Kubrick's The Shining. Kinda understandable, because The Shining was written almost autobiographically and so the changes Kubrick made to the Jack Torrance character were a personal thing for King. Regardless, he's not really shown he's able to see adaptations of his work objectively.
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Aug 4, 2017 16:38
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Fart City posted:Also movie Jack is played by a late 70's/early 80's Jack Nicholson and is ergo already batshit insane from jump street. He's extremely off-putting even in that initial job interview at the Overlook, before he's even moved in. Yea the way Kubrick tells the story Jack is really a completely irredeemable shithead. Almost as if he would have ended up murdering his family at some point even if they'd ever gone to the Overlook.
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Aug 4, 2017 17:37
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It's just very odd that this movie made it past the script phase, because its clear now that they utterly failed to condense the essence of the books into a 2 hour film. You'd think one would be able to read the script and instantly tell that it just wasn't going to work, that a decision needed to be made to make it a multi-film story or just drop it altogether. Instead they just plowed ahead and then acted shocked that the movie tested terribly. By that point reshoots aren't going to save it.
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Aug 4, 2017 20:56
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Jonas Albrecht posted:Of all the ways to use the book's iconic opener, having it whispered over a black screen was probably the best this visual medium could have done. Who's voice was it?
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Aug 5, 2017 15:08
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Jonas Albrecht posted:Some random lady. They probably paid Kate Blanchett like $50,000 to come in for an hour and record it.
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Aug 5, 2017 15:48
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Krispy Kareem posted:I liked Jake. He was the only actor who seemed to be trying. I think he portrayed a kid coming unhinged pretty well. Nah, it's definitely a pretty significant consideration for a character actor like Haysbert to associate himself with a company so strongly that it eventually becomes tougher to see him as anything but a spokesman. I mean, I'd have made the same decision, it's easy consistent money and it's not like Haysbert had money rolling in from acting. But at the same time it means he's entered a different phase of his career where people are going to have to take the Allstate thing into consideration before they cast him.
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Aug 7, 2017 15:49
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I did like what they came up with for the way Roland takes out Walter though, how he deflects a bullet with another bullet. It was a great way to show Walter's powers are limited and that he overestimates his invulnerability. When it comes down to it he's just a magician with some dramatic tricks.
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Mar 28, 2018 15:16
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