Monday Morning Quarterback Part I
By BOP Staff
December 8, 2008
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Kim Hollis: Punisher: War Zone opened to a pathetic $4 million against a $35 million production budget. Why did this film fail in spite of Marvel's other 2008 successes?
Brandon Scott: A new lead actor who nobody knows. Poor marketing. Audience fatigue for this type of pic at this time of the year. Poor word-of-mouth. And in all likelihood, a pretty bad movie (though I am speculating here). I read that Thomas Jane, star of the first Punisher, was pissed that he wasn't asked to come back to develop the character more. He definitely wanted to do it and was a little shocked that he didn't get the chance. For them to go to another complete unknown to replace him was kind of silly in my mind. Jane isn't a great actor by any means, but he is serviceable and this role only calls for a serviceable actor, so this is kind of a muddled outcome in total. I think a lesson will be learned here and maybe someone else can shed more light on what that lesson is.
Les Winan: They neglected to ask for the support of Lucius Vorenus, so nobody from the Aventine showed up.
David Mumpower: I disagree with Brandon about the appeal of Jane. I don't believe that replacing the actor negatively impacted the film's appeal. Ray Stevenson fits the bill of an intimidating action hero better anyway, as anyone who watched Rome knows. The problems with Punisher: War Zone are threefold. The first is that a script was accepted that was absurdly violent. I doubt Eli Roth could sit through a title this bloodthirsty.
The second is that the director was reticent to change much in it, and that (correctly) made the studio nervous. Lionsgate got the dailies, realized what a disaster this was shaping up to be, and (rather coldly) took control away from Lexi Alexander, forcing a PG-13 rating on a grisly production. I doubt they had the guts to do this face to face either since she's a certified bad-ass martial artists and she has reason to be bitter since it's happened to her twice now. Lionsgate doesn't have an excuse since they knew what to expect from both the screenplay and her. Once they accepted what a tragic miscalculation had been made, their third mistake was to hold a December release date. Who wants to see something like this over the holidays? It's a mistake the industry watched Black Christmas make. How did Lionsgate not learn from it?
Eventually, the distributor made peace with a comically inept production and slotted it here, the week after Thanksgiving, and accepted that it's a bomb. Situations like this are exactly why Marvel Studios has been trying to exert more control over its properties, but they dropped the ball here as well. Punisher: War Zone is as total a failure as a movie production can be...at least one that doesn't involve Terry Gilliam.
Pete Kilmer: Actually, Thomas Jane walked from the franchise when the studio decided to pass on having Walter Hill direct the film and change the script. Then, from what I remember, this was supposed to become a direct-to-video project. Of course, seeing what other Marvel Properties like Iron Man and the Hulk made at the box office, Lionsgate seemed to think they could at least make budget back and changed their minds on it. Putting it on the screen in December was a total mistake. This should have been a February release.
I really feel bad for Lexi Alexander, I think she's someone who really could have made a good film if Gale Ann Hurd had gotten her a strong script and helped her.
Scott Lumley: Of all the Marvel characters, this one should really be the easiest to adapt. He doesn't have any super powers. He just has guns and toys and he knows how to use them. I don't understand how, given the fairly impressive catalog of Punisher stories that actually read very well, that nobody in Hollywood can adapt this character.
I think Lexi Alexander may have actually been going in the right direction and the studio lost their nerve a little. Possibly when looking at a production this grisly they just didn't know how to market it. The Punisher isn't a character based on humor or jokes or quips or super powers, he's a grim character that makes the bad guys wish they had never been born. Surely as (North) Americans we can all get behind good wholesome vengeance, right?
If we can't market this in the last vestiges of Bush's America, does this mean we're moving in the right direction?
Max Braden: The Punisher has no recognizable characteristics compared to the other characters. Even if you considered Iron Man a lesser known character, you could quickly describe him to a neophyte. The Punisher is a vigilante with guns. So who isn't? You need either a recognizable star or really cool action sequences to sell that character, and this project had neither. Transporter 3, on the other hand, had both, and notably earned more in its second weekend than Punisher opened with. If they were crazy enough to greenlight a third Punisher, they'd better put The Rock in costume and give him a cool batcave.
Sean Collier: Three words: No Kevin Nash.
Seriously, though, there was never any reason to suspect that anyone would care. The version from a few years ago barely made a dime, there was no marketing push behind this film, and we've given a combined $1.2 billion to the efforts of Batman, Iron Man, Hancock, and The Incredible Hulk this year. This one was dead on arrival.
Reagen Sulewski: Most everything here has been covered, but I'd like to add that one problem the character of The Punisher has is that he's just not fun. He's grim and dour and bent on the goriest kind of revenge. He's practically a Batman villain. I just don't see him ever catching on as a popular multiplex character.
David Mumpower: The interesting aside to Reagen's point is that The Punisher is thematically similar to the Rorschach character in Watchmen. This is the perfect example of a question we're about to address. Why does one comic book character excel while another fails?
All Kim knows is that she wants her Dr. Strange movie
Kim Hollis: Is there any way for a casual movie fan to know ahead of time which Marvel films are going to break out? Is there a logical reason for Iron Man to open $100 million higher than The Punisher and Ghost Rider and Daredevil to open higher by a factor of 10. How is the pecking order determined?
Brandon Scott: Honestly, this is a good question, Kim, as truly the studios don't seem to have a clue. Tapping into a casual fan might not be the right idea but certainly allowing for more fanboy input seems to be working out for those studios that do. I know Favreau blogged regularly for fans and actually listened to their concerns and did his best to ease them while he was making Iron Man, and the results were obviously great. Now as for casual awareness, I am not a comic book guy by any stretch, but I believe Iron Man was a pretty known quantity before the movie. In the case of the others, they are more niche characters that you need to be "in the know", to know. In Ghost Rider and Daredevil's cases, they both cast big stars in the lead roles with Cage and Affleck et. al. For Punisher, I dont think anyone was sure what was taking place. Was this a re-boot? We knew there was another film that wasn't too successful by my recollection, so there wasn't any reason to believe that this would be too successful either. But $4 million is pathetically low.
Les Winan: Quality, quality, quality. Ghost Rider and Daredevil both looked (and were) cheesy and poorly made (aka - The Mark Steven Johnson Effect), so they didn't break out. Iron Man looked high quality, was high quality and, on second viewing - still is high quality. Punisher: War Zone looked like a overly violent, crappy action movie and the reviews agreed. The Punisher, at best, is a peripheral character in the mainstream Marvel Universe and a successful film adaptation of the character would need to have more than simply buckets of blood. However, to be clear - a successful adaptation would in no way involve Mark Steven Johnson.
David Mumpower: My answer would be that the feel is the thing, but even that isn't completely honest. I always felt I had a good handle on Daredevil and Ghost Rider as successful projects and Punisher: War Zone and Elektra as disasters. Iron Man is the one that shocked me every step of the way. At no point during the production did I consider that a $100 million opener or potential $300 million finisher. So, I agree with the point Les is making, at least to an extent. Some projects are doomed from the start while most will fall in that safe range of Marvel/DC performances that we've chronicled several times in recent years.
Then, there is that manner in which perfect projects like Iron Man and The Dark Knight (which is a different studio/comic book company, obviously) that will have everything go right, allowing them to reach the box office stratosphere. Okay, from the Ledger family's perspective, everything didn't go right, but you understand my point. A project like Runaways, glorious though that may be, is naturally limited in its box office range. Scott Pilgrim will be the same way. Meanwhile, Ant-Man is doomed, no matter who directs it. Then, there are situations like Wonder Woman, Captain America, Thor and Green Lantern, films that are probably looking at expected results in the area of The Incredible Hulk. If someone came in and got one (or more) of those right, however, that Iron Man possibility is out there. A director who returns a quality product with its fair share of money shots can change the shape of a franchise, just as Christopher Nolan has done with Batman.
Yes, I know I've meshed together DC and Marvel properties, but the same tenet applies to both groups.
Pete Kilmer: Ghost Rider opened to $45 million and Daredevil had a $40 million opening weekend. Ghost Rider finished at $115 million and Daredevil finished at $102 million domestic. So while not super blockbusters, they were successful in that they showed there is life in Marvel (and superhero properties) but they didn't have long life in theaters.
Iron Man and Dark Knight showed that if you hire quality people to direct, produce and write the movie and you put "actors" in the main roles, there is a damned good chance to catch something special. It's like Les said, it truly is all about quality.
Now with Marvel Studios at the forefront of their characters (except Spidey, X-men, and the Fantastic Four properties) they can have, at the writing stage, people from Marvel Comics look over stuff and make suggestions that the filmmakers can either use or discard. Favreau used the Marvel writers and look what happened.
Time/Warner was smart in the hiring of Christopher Nolan as the guy to run the Dark Knight project. He and his brother along with David Goyer (who's got some serious comic book movie cred as a writer,director and producer) wrote two fantastic projects with Dark Knight and Batman Begins and made smart, smart casting choices and look what happened. But looking at the Superman Returns project, there was no one from DC Comics to raise their hand and say, "Uhhh...excuse me, there is no need to redo the first Superman movie and make him a Super-stalker." That was poor planning.
Scott Lumley: We've really touched on something that I've given a lot of thought to. Because in my mind, two of the top five superhero films of all time were released this summer (Dark Knight and Iron Man for those keeping track). In my mind the others are Spider-Man 2, Blade and Hellboy.
For the longest time, I've always thought that if you were making a superhero film, you needed to display something that was just amazing on that screen and not treat it like a joke. (You are allowed to make if funny per se, but you can't be actively mocking it.) I used to tell my friends that one day we would get Hulk vs Thing on the big screen and then the rest of the world would "get it". Clearly at that point I wasn't "getting it". Because it's not about the big musclebound guy beating on the other big musclebound guy, it's about being able to invest yourself in that character, for whatever reason, and then cheering as they take down the bad guy. And hopefully the bad guy is as interesting or even moreso than the good guy. Rise of the Silver Surfer had the amazing chase scene between the Human Torch and Silver Surfer but they didn't have an awesome villain (they actually did, but they blew it) and they didn't treat the characters respectfully. Ghost Rider had the most spot-on special effects I've ever seen for any Marvel character but the script was ridiculous and the bad guys had little appeal. And the less we talk about Electra the better.
It seems that the formula for a good superhero movie is as follows. (Solid concept + respectful, well-written script)*Talent + Action. If you have reasonable amounts of all of those things, you're likely to have a good superhero movie.
And yes, I noticed that you could probably apply the formula to any decent action film. Thank you for noticing. Someone please forward that to Jerry Bruckheimer.
Max Braden: Are we limiting this to just Marvel? Because even after all this discussion I still don't know which universe Superman, Batman, or Spider-Man belongs to, and I don't really care. As a moviegoer I just know I want two things from a comic book movie: good writing, and the wow factor. I think the mature renaissance in comic book movies began with Blade and then X-Men, with some help from Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings. These projects had the look of serious studio backing, and also took themselves seriously. It just takes a glance at the trailer to see that Punisher: War Zone isn't in the same league. Ghost Rider came across as a lame attempt to cash in on the genre, but its box office success was at least attributable to the wow factor.
Sean Collier: Let's not overlook inspired casting choices. Everyone not named Katie Holmes in either Batman film was a stroke of genius, as was Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man. Ben Affleck as a superhero? No. Nicolas Cage? Also no. Even Tobey McGuire as Spider-Man was breaking the mold enough to turn heads. Contrary to popular belief, action films of all stripes benefit tremendously from having great actors on board - this is why Jurassic Park is awesome and Road House is not. (And no Ben Gazzara debates, please.)
Scott Lumley: I know not a lot of people were impressed by Daredevil, but I actually feel like the studio and the director tried to be very respectful of the material in that one. Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner were pretty good casting choices as Matt Murdock and Elektra Natachos. I'm not sure I can get behind Michael Clarke Duncan as the Kingpin or Colin Farrell as Bullseye, however. I didn't have any problems with the special effects in Daredevil, either, as I thought the "radar Sense" was quite well done and rather creative. The movie only really goes off the rails when Farrell comes into the scene as I thought he might have been the single worst comic book villain I'd seen yet.
Whatever the result, I don't think we can put the quasi failure of Daredevil at the feet of Affleck and I'm not even sure we can call it a failure. It did make $179 million worldwide against a $78 million production budget. $101 million seems more like a success than a failure to me.