Posted on 07/22/2012 1:01:19 PM PDT by BenLurkin
“The Dark Knight Rises” is on track to earn $160 million after a shooting that left 12 dead and 58 wounded at a midnight screening of the Batman sequel in Colorado.
Hollywood studios joined “Dark Knight Rises” distributor Warner Bros. in publicly withholding their box-office numbers for the weekend. Box-office tracking service Rentrak also did not report figures this weekend.
An opening of $160 million would give the 2-D “Dark Knight Rises” the third-highest opening ever after the 3-D films “The Avengers” with $207.4 million and “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2” with $169.2 million
(Excerpt) Read more at losangeles.cbslocal.com ...
The trend to trumpet the weekend’s box office earnings is pernicious and has had a horrible effect on how films are marketed and probably on what sort of films are made. They didn’t do this till about the early to mid 1980s.
Violence creates violence in some people. Hollywood and TV sells violence!
In the late 70’s, our PTA was trying to do something about this...apparently to no avail. At that time, it was established...by psychiatrists and psychologists, that even cartoons, watched by youngers, was full of violence.
If kids watched a cartoon character getting run over....flattened...or apparently killed....and then getting up, to the children, it meant that humans will do the same. In other words, they could not differentiate between cartoon characters and humans.
An interesting study...
Cartoons in the 1940s were much more violent than they are now.
“Cartoons in the 1940s were much more violent than they are now.”
Cartoons on black and white TV have been replaced by horrific violence on TV, video games, and in Hollywood movies!
My post was not about cartoons...it was about violence.
You’re backwards. They didn’t start caring about the opening weekend until the opening weekend became truly national. Up until the mid 80s opening weekend was just for big cities, then over the course of the next month or so it would move down the city sizes. Then the system changed to hit everywhere at once, many more prints, Chicago and Alamogordo getting first showings on the same day, and suddenly opening weekend really meant something.
Of course since then the number of movies they make jumped dramatically, so now all but the most profitable movies won’t even be in the first run theaters in a month, so opening weekend becomes even more important.
Read some original unedited Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Hollywood wouldn’t dare accurately make those into movies, they make Saw movies look tame. And unlike Saw movies they were intended for kids. Violence has been a part of entertainment for as long as there’s been entertainment.
The two trends reinforced each other.
Of course people really only pay attention to the opening weekend of tent pole movies. Nobody has really paid any attention to the grosses of Moonrise Kingdom, it’s just been trucking along hiding in single screens next to huge releases for the last couple of months.
“Read some original unedited Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Hollywood wouldn’t dare accurately make those into movies, they make Saw movies look tame. And unlike Saw movies they were intended for kids. Violence has been a part of entertainment for as long as there’s been entertainment.”
Oh please...
Look at the age of the kids taken to this violent movie by parents...look at the number of kids playing violent video games today...look at the number of kids watching violence on TV...
My guess is that you can’t compare to the fraction of kids who were reading Grimm’s Fairy Tales. I grew up in the 40’s and 50’s...I don’t remember reading much of Grimm’s fairy tales.
If I did...
We all had a mom and dad....and relatives close by who were loving. We went to church and were taught to fear God, or we would burn in hell....scary stuff, but it worked..lol...
We had prayer in school every single day...and a pledge of allegiance to the United Stated flag everyday... and we said, “one nation, under God...”
We were taught to respect people...even if we didn’t like them.
Obviously you are not from my generation! But good luck! Sad times.
Grimms’ Fairy Tales are German and from the early 19th century, most Americans knew very little about them until Disney started butchering them into cutesy movies. There were a handful that made the jump to America pre-Disney but not many. But for German kids they were part of growing up. And they are simply brutal, hearts torn out, thumbs cut off. Hansel and Gretel made the jump to America, featuring a character cooked to death. You just don’t think about it because it was part of your childhood.
And that kind of thing has existed in every culture for millenia. We just don’t bother to notice. Look at the legend of Prometheus, liver torn out EVERY DAY. Hard core violence is nothing at all new in fiction. The only thing that’s new is people whining about it and thinking it perverts kids.
As for all your other stuff, well that’s other stuff, besides the point. Meanwhile back here in reality the violent crime rate has plummeted.
“Violence has been a part of entertainment for as long as there’s been entertainment.”
Then you didn’t grow up when I did...
When my generation went to the movies, no ones throat was slashed...no blood was shown...no gorey scenes.
At the movies, we watched Abbott and Costello flee from a mummy...and we sat in theater seats scared as hell. That was it.
I do have to admit that there were cowboys and Indians, and cowboys and cowboys fighting each other, but it was always clear who was good and who was bad. The good people always won...
It made us aware that good and honest people win.
Not so in movies today.
No you just didn’t pay attention. Like I said it’s been there FOREVER.
What I didn't like was the new digital format. Digital is fine, BUT THE PROJECTIONIST HAD THE ASPECT-RATIO WRONG.
The height of the picture was about 10% less than it should have been, making everybody look fat.
There ought to be some sort of quality-control calibration feature on the digital projectors to give the correct aspect ratio.
If this is how it is always going to be, I will never watch a movie at a theater again. I will wait until it comes out on DVD so I can watch it and not be annoyed.
I was going to talk to the theater manager, but it was a teenage girl wouldn't know aspect ratio from her brassiere size.
“No you just didn’t pay attention. Like I said it’s been there FOREVER.”
Throat slashings? Blood and gore? Rapes in movies? Porn? Homosexuality?
Are you really saying that it’s been in movies, video games, TV.... FOREVER?
When did your “FOREVER” start? What year? Just curious.
There is information that comes with it. But you can’t make the guy use it. It’s a bad theater, it happens. My favorite theater in town they keep the dumb guys behind the counter not the projection booth, it’s easy to circumnavigate them. My least favorite the dumb guys are in the booth.
Up until the mid 60s the American film industry was under a strict production code so even much Shakespeare could not be filmed uncut. A word like ‘navel’ would have been regarded as too suggestive.
Keep in mind that the Grimms just collected and collated stories that had been around for centuries. Hans Chrisrian Andersen wrote his own stuff.
$30 million less than the studio had projected. Too bad.
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