Did this flop?
It seemed to come and go without much fanfare in australia.
shareits currently at 567m ww so no
shareThat’s good numbers for a movie that nobody seemed to see. Those week one numbers mist have been good.
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MovieChat Forums > Ready Player One (2018) Discussion > Did this flop?
Yes. It made money, but it was supposed to make a LOT of money and it did not. Also, nobody is talking about on social media at all. It's a dead stick. It blipped in and out.
shareit was all over social media ..until Infinity War .. now id be very surprised if RP1 makes it to 600m.
but its done well . never thought itd make 500m
The lack of a star didn't help this movie at all. Why not throw 20 million at someone worthy? If a big star gives it an extra week run in the cinemas it will pay for itself and have more appeal moving onto dvds and streaming.
shareThat also increases the risk/cost for the film without any guarantee of any additional gain, for something like this you are relying on the book's audience, nostalgia, director and the previews to drive it. I think like many YA novels that have been converted to movies the focus is on the material not so much on the names in the movie.
shareThis movie needed not a star, but star cameos. Like a ton of them. Like non stop f'n cameos from every still living stars of the 80s and 90s.
shareindeed - check this thread out for stuff I was expecting going in https://moviechat.org/tt1677720/Ready-Player-One/5ad1bac06f37650014c1f096/what-kind-of-80s-stuff-were-you-expecting
shareNobody walked away poor from making this movie except for the audience.
I see a lot of 'box office flop' comments on numerous movie subforums where it's clear that those movies were anything but flops.
You know which movies do usually flop? Drama films - I've seen some really well written/acted out drama films which did very poorly financially. But - you know how people make transformers seem like the worst film series out there? The scripts are dreadful - but you put out the shittiest transformers film out there and it's still going to make a billion bucks.
Welcome to the age of idiocracy (speaking of which, idiocracy also flopped - it was too intelligent for an average ape we now have instead of humans).
Its simple really. Why do you go to a theater? for an experience you cant get at home. This means that flashy, 3d, CGI-full movies will do better at theaters than regular low-to-none effect dramas. People watch those at home or even wait till TV syndication. they go to theaters to see spectacles. It has nothing to do with idiocracy, which is a separate issue and was better addressed in Gattaca anyway.
shareIt's a big success considering it was a new concept that nobody outside of readers of the book, had heard about. It wasn't a "safe" movie to make. No guarantees.
shareIn the U.S., it did average business for "young adult" novel adaptations, similar to Divergent or Maze Runner. But overseas, it was a huge hit for the genre, surpassing Hunger Games, Twilight and everything else except for Harry Potter. It's a strange result considering how much American culture is in the movie, albeit with nods to Asian properties which may have helped in those markets.
It's hard to say what happens on home video. Is the movie a sleeper that was overlooked by an American public obsessed with brand names like Star Wars, Marvel and DC but will eventually find a big audience? Or does the movie just not have a very big target audience, being written at a "young adult" level but packed with references that only nerdy male 40-somethings who grew up in the '80s still care about?
That “young adult” generation in REALITY is clueless about half the stuff in the movie.
How many teenyboppers recognized the 60s Batmobile crashing in the opening race?
How many recognized Sho’s 1977 Trans Am from “Smokey and the Bandit”?
How many even know what the Colonial Viper was in Aech’s shop?
Or the Buck Rogers Starfighter?
Or even the movie quote from Lex Luthor from the 1978 Donner film?
This film’s actual target audience is a lot older.
I feel like there is still a HUGE untapped audience out there for it among that older crowd. I recommended it heavily to many people I know in their 20s to 40s. No matter what I said, none of them ended up going to see it. They just could not be convinced that it would be a good movie. There was zero urgency among anyone to see it. And some of these are people I grew up with who I know will love the movie just like I did. I just don't know if it's possible to get people excited about an unknown brand anymore in this day and age of sequels and "cinematic universes."
At the same time I know the movie won't have universal appeal. I know I am THE target audience for it just as any Atari 2600 baby would be. I believe the reports afterwards that females gave it much lower ratings than males. Makes perfect sense since females have always been a small minority of gamers or sci-fi fans or comic book readers, etc.
But I always felt that the marketing campaign was off. The movie I ended up seeing was so much better than the trailers made it look. I wasn't excited about seeing it based on the trailers. I just had faith in Steven Spielberg, faith that paid off in a huge way. Is "welcome to the rebellion" the line that the movie should hang its hat on? This movie is really not a movie that's "about what it's about." It's not about the main conflict between the heroes and the "imperial overlords." It's about the chase, the race, solving puzzles, the experience of playing a game and the specific kinds of social interactions you have in that environment. The trailers stupidly focused on the plot and put an inappropriate, dark, dystopian tone on everything, failing to capture the infectious fun of watching the movie. It would be like watching an Indiana Jones trailer that made it seem like the movie was about an American archaeologist struggling against an evil Nazi Empire. It is about that but it isn't. You don't walk out of Indiana Jones movies thinking you just saw a serious story about Americans fighting the Nazis.
One big mistake they made was marketing it so heavily as "the new Spielberg film." American audiences just don't care about a film's director that much. And Spielberg's brand itself doesn't mean anything specific any more, especially since he himself said in interviews this is the first adventure movie he's done in a very long time.
My teenage daughter is an 80s buff and encouraged her friends who are “Stranger Things” fans to see it.
Hopefully the DVD sales will prove this film was a massive sleeper hit like the first POTC film was when idiot critics blasted it for being based on a Disney ride.
Big difference between timeless pirates and a has-been like Eddie Murphy in “Haunted House”.
The sequel to Ready Player One should be a bigger hit at the box office.
I hope they include more ROCK and less New Wave crap music next time.
I’ll PUKE 🤮 if they sneak in A Flock o’ Seagulls or Culture Club.
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I just don't know if there will be a sequel unless this thing really explodes on the home market. It's looking a lot like Terminator: Genisys, a weak domestic performance bolstered by a giant Chinese performance. But the Chinese market is so mercurial that it's not something anyone would place a bet on. It's a nice bonus if it performs but you can never plan for it. It just takes one Chinese censor to decide your movie won't even play there. Pirates made a lot more at the BO.
If they come up with a home video trailer that doesn't mention Spielberg, doesn't focus on the "dystopian future" any more than the movie does, which mentions it at the beginning but then forgets about it, and doesn't overtly call attention to any of its references (just like the movie itself rarely does), then they might be able to sell the movie on the basis of what it actually is.
The movie is pure Spielberg in the best sense of that word, with the actual feel that his Amblin-produced films always had in the '80s, a feel that other modern movies trying to claim that legacy, like Super 7, did not achieve. But most moviegoers don't even necessarily know what film was an Amblin or Spielberg-produced film, so you can't sell it based on that. Spielberg actually tried hard to keep his own fingerprint off the movie itself by not referencing his own films much. Then why was his name and face all over the marketing campaign?
IMO, the movie completely worked even if you didn't recognize one reference. While some small moments would go over your head, like the Buckaroo Banzai reference, nothing that impacts the story does. So to sell this as a "spot the reference" movie is a mistake. Back to the Future was sold on the basis of its story, not on the basis of getting to see a bunch of 1950s nostalgia. If only the people interested in 1950s nostalgia were told to go see BTTF, it would've not been the top movie of 1985.
BTW I LOVED all the music in the movie. I never even knew about the song Blue Monday played at the club, but I love it now!
BTW I LOVED all the music in the movie. I never even knew about the song Blue Monday played at the club, but I love it now!
I STILL hate that song.
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I think you meant “Super 8”.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXKNeP25cIU
here ya go!
i recognized none of the things you listed but it did not made my watching experience worse because of it. Im from eastern europe, so most american references, especially those from before the fall of soviet union when we werent even importing the culture to begin with, are nonexistant here. Yet even without those one can watch a movie for what it was and accept that things that are supposed to be cool are cool without recognizing the franchise the cool thing is supposed to be from.
Also who the fuck hasnt seen the 78 superman by now? Thats like the first classic you watch when you go into superhero movies.