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Mr. T and Rampage Jackson pity all the fools

Kim Hollis: The A-Team opened to a disappointing $25.7 million. Why do you believe the film with the lofty $110 million budget failed to strike a chord with consumers?

Josh Spiegel: First of all, for a $110 million budget, that money shot of Bradley Cooper helming a tank that's falling from the sky looked awfully fake. Second, this is disappointing to Fox, but I do not know why anyone is surprised at this result. Granted, I was born during the five-season run of The A-Team, so I wasn't watching, but from the reactions the preview got whenever I saw it, no one did (or those that did didn't care). The movie didn't look terrible, but if I'm going to drop money on a movie, it better be good or have immense hype. The A-Team didn't have the latter, and the reviews were, again, in the camp of "It could've sucked more", which is not a good sign. Fox is going to lose big on this one; the international receipts aren't too impressive, what with them releasing the film against the opening weekend of the World Cup.





Matthew Huntley: Josh makes a good point by bringing up the weekend kick-off of The World Cup (I hadn't thought about this). He also mentioned what I think is the bigger problem: the so-so trailers, which made the movie look like standard action fare (I saw the movie last night, and that's really all it is). Like the ads suggest, there's nothing really distinct about The A-Team movie and if consumers are begging for anything these days, it's something different (or, in the case of The Karate Kid, something done in a different way). Nothing too different about The A-Team. When you take away the TV show, what's special about it? It's just another dumb, loud, testosterone-driven action pic, which, don't get me wrong, definitely has its place in the entertainment landscape, but only when movies of this sort are distinguishable. When they're run-of-the-mill, people find little reason to see them.

Tom Houseman: I already saw this movie, like a month ago, when it was called The Losers. It had Chris Evans in it, and I stand by my theory that everything is better when it has Chris Evans in it. I pity the fool who greenlit this movie with a $110 million budget... in fact, I pity all fools who greenlight any movie without casting Chris Evans in it.

Reagen Sulewski: It's possible that the duplication factor might be at play here, but when you look at what The Losers made, it could simply be that this isn't a type of movie that people are really interested in seeing. Name recognition carried it so far, but it was likely a self-limited factor. The number of people who were more interested in seeing an A-Team movie were balanced out by the people who just couldn't bring themselves to buy a ticket for something with The A-Team on it.

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