Thor (2011)

The Common Room Film, Television, Music & Books
#21

Here’s another analysis of why Thor failed to ‘strike’ at the Aussie box-office.

From personal experience, it’s probably because of the publicity. Apart from ‘point-of-purchase’ advertising (ie cinema lobbies) and the odd bus stop poster or two, there was little mention of Thor in the media. Oh, there were TV spots aired during primetime, but Fast Five, Rio and Hop (the latter two already in release for a fortnight) also had screentime.

Whereas for Fast Five, they took out huge full-page ads in the cinema listings for Hoyts in comparison to Thor’s quarter-pages. The distributor also sponsored the airing of the ‘Fast and Furious’ Free-To-Air premiere on Channel 7 the week before its opening, and ‘2 Fast 2 Furious’ on opening weekend. Both had a sponsor message at the beginnning and end of the airings (“This program was brought to you by Fast Five, only at the movies…”), and TV spots aired repeatedly during the breaks. Then there was ‘Tokyo Drift’ on Channel One (a free-to-air sports channel) which didn’t have the sponsosr messages to my knowledge, but had the TV spots aried as well.

Marvel didn’t release sponsor any film or TV show on Free-To-Air close to its release, which was a pity. They could’ve screened Iron Man, or Daredevil, or any of the Marvel properties they air from time to time and done that same sponsor message to raise audience awareness, but they missed that opportunity to my knowledge.

The biggest irony is that the reviewers here are giving better reviews for Thor than for Fast Five. And that an original animated bird movie is beating a superhero movie and a sequel, two of the most reliable box-office characteristics, at the international B.O. :mrgreen:

I had half a mind not to watch Thor because of the ridiculous way they’re forcing us to watch it in 3D by placing 2D sessions in matinee (whereas Rio had a few 2D evening sessions in its first week of release). But my brother is interested, so maybe we could use our next grocery shopping trip as an excuse to see it.

#22

Not a lot of advertising on Thor huh? Man, that is probably a big reason why it got beat in the box office. We’ll see how it does here in the states though.

#23

Rio is out pretty much everywhere by now, though. Fast Five is only out in the non-NA Anglic countries and Thor’s only out in Australia. And in those regions both Fast Five and Thor crushed Rio’s opening weekend. To be honest, Rio kinda flopped in the UK; the Latin countries are what’s saving it.

#24

Thor will probably outgross Rio and Rango domestic, and become the highest grossing film of the year, until Pirates 4, The Hangover and KFP2 come out in May, so far critics seem to be delighted by the god of thunder,

#25

I wouldn’t be surprised if (and I expect) Thor to gross as one of the top ten movies of the year.

#26

TSS: Yeah, Marvel really messed up their marketing strategy with the confusing release dates. I’m very eager to see the box-office report for Australia’s last weekend and find out who among the three is tops. I’m suspecting Fast Five will be first, Thor second, and Rio/Hop third.

bryan: Perhaps, we’ll see. I think Pirates 4 and KFP2 will blow the competition away, The Hangover has a limited clientele of stoner hipsters and crass comedy lovers, and it’s not shown in 3D to my knowledge.

tribefan: Like I said, the Latin American market is a huge contributing factor. I’m very interested to see if Fast Five can overcome its 2D-only disadvantage and smash Thor like they did here in Australia, cos’ really, the 3D surcharge is what is making the box-office success, for Marvel, Blue Sky, Pixar, Dreamworks, etc. And a lot of studios are using this technology as an excuse to make more money like the post-conversion they did with Clash of the Titans and Alice (the latter of which I’ve been severely disappointed by).

I’m surprised to hear Rio flop in the UK, but maybe it’s a culture thing with the reserved Brits (but that doesn’t explain how the stiff Russians can come out in droves to watch it!).

I’m supporting both Fast Five and Thor in the coming days as well as Rio one more time in 2D today, but I’m very pleased that an original animated movie from an underdog studio can beat the odds against a superhero movie and live-action sequel, if only temporarily.

#27

Aside from Fast Five, KFP 2, And Pirates 4, i think the biggest competition could be the final Harry Potter movie.

#28

It’ll be a battle between Pirates, Transformers, Harry Potter, Cars, and Kung Fu Panda for number 1 this year. Maybe a superhero film if one of them catches on like Iron Man did.

#29

I think Thor could take the number one spot, but remember that Iron man was not only a good movie. it was funny and it had a lot of dazzling effects that made the movie even more epic. Thor has gotta bring something that we haven’t seen before.

#30

To me, Captain America seems like the most widely-appealing of the superhero films. It doesn’t look as kitschy as Thor and Green Lantern but still has an air of fun to it judging from the trailer.

#31

Good point. And about captain america, I’m not sure if this is right, but out of the three super heroes mentioned, he is probably the most popular, and one of the more iconic.

#32

San Francisco should share some of its Thor publicity with you guys. Where ever you turn, there’s an advertisment for Thor!

#33

How about Fast Five? How much of advertising is there for Fast Five, compared to Thor?

#34

I didn’t see any advertising for it!

Plus, that day I wasn’t in one part of the city, we literally drove from the ocean side to the Golden Gate side, to the bay side, and in the central of it. We covered lot of area.

#35

as much as I am officially excited for Thor, there is no way it can be the number one film of the year (domestic), competition is hard, judging on what I’ve read in several forums, most people agree that the top 3 spot of the year will belong to Harry Potter 7.2, Transformers 3 or Cars 2, even though I was a little surprised to not see neither KFP2 or Pirates 4 there,

PS: I really enjoy superhero films, but the one I am waiting the most in Green Lantern, however Thor and Captain America have grown on me, X-men FC doesn’t conviced me yet, but it will be a must see in my schedule,summer 2011 is HERE :smiley:

#36

I read somewhere that this year has 26 sequels or something, the highest on record. Frankly, I’m jaded with all the sequels, spin-offs, prequels, and adaptations that Hollywood is churning out. Very rarely does an original movie stand a chance against a powerful franchise, and gone were the pre-millennia days when you had high-concept and creative movies like Speed, Dragonheart, Die Hard, The Matrix, etc. :unamused:

I mean, I like to see more adventures of existing characters as the next fan, but I’m more interested in new concepts like Brave, Source Code, The Croods, etc. instead of more of the same stuff or an adaptation of something I’ve experienced in another medium before.

tribefan: I really love Captain America’s poster (it’s as gritty and ‘dirty’ as Harry Potter’s) and the whole ‘underdog’ narrative hinted at in the trailer. It’s much more interesting to see an ordinary man rise to become a hero (albeit through extraordinary circumstances) as opposed to a demi-god who is innately born with supernatural powers. That’s just my personal opinion.

EJE: Laugh out loud, no love for Rio in San Fran! :slight_smile: But yeah, we got a couple of bus posters and cinema lobby advertising, but that’s about it. Fast Five is really churning out the TV spots, interviews with major news programmes, ‘sponsoring’ of its previous sequels on free-to-air, bus-stop posters, and newspaper cinema listing full-pages that it generated much more awareness than Thor.

Anyway, I may go see this with my bro tomorrow as an excuse to do grocery shopping. Or is it the other way around?

Stop! Hammer Time!

#37

I dunno. Die Hard was an adaptation, as well as technically being the spiritual sequel to a Sinatra film based on a book featuring the same character that inspired John McClane. And on top of that it started life as a script for a Commando sequel.

The Matrix has been accused of plagiarizing films that beat it to the punch with similar premises and elements such as The Thirteenth Floor, eXsistenz, and Dark City.

I’ll give you Dragonheart and Speed. But movies and even stories like those have always been scarce and are in no shorter supply today than they were before. You just want them from people who don’t seem to feel like making them at the moment.

I’m looking forward to Thor. It’s been getting some of the greatest reviews and I want to know if there’s any truth to them.

#38

You’re right aerostar, I forgot that Die Hard was based on Roderick Thorps’ ‘Nothing Lasts Forever’, a book I’ve been meaning to read a few years back.

I’ll disagree with you with regards to original movies being scarce. We had great 80-90s films like Lethal Weapon, Robocop, and Police Story, before they were milked into sequels. That’s just the police procedural genre. Dreamworks Animation during its ‘2D era’, produced original content with no sequels. Same with Disney pre-millenia. Pixar, at least for its first two movies. The animation genre was less susceptible to sequels and TV spin-offs than the live-action genre during its golden age (there are a few exceptions like ‘The Aladdin Animated Series’ and ‘Timon & Pumbaa’). Disney did rely on existing fairy tales for its movies, but there were brave ‘remixes’ like Basil: The Great Mouse Detective, Treasure Planet, Atlantis: The Lost Empire and The Emperor’s New Groove.

As I mentioned, this year is the highest on-record for the number of sequels in release - theblogismine.com/2011/02/17 … e-sequels/

This is the smoking gun for the death of original properties, in Hollywood at least. Not sure about Europe, or Asia. Miyazaki has not produced a sequel to my knowledge, though Studio Ghibli enthusiasts are free to verify and correct me on this. Same with Aardman, unless we count Wallace and Gromit as a feature-film adaptation of an existing property. And of course, the ‘small-timers’ who brought you Happy Feet, Secret of the Kells, The Illusionist, Mary and Max, etc.

So we come back to Thor. It is an adaptation of an existing Marvel property. This is in the lead-up to Captain America, and the eventual Avengers movie next year. And Green Lantern (which some newbies confuse with Green Hornet). And X-Men: First Class, another X-Men prequel.

The most original movies nowadays seem to be romantic comedies, stoner comedies, and horror movies. The summer season is almost exclusively dominated by non-original content.

But as I have written in the ‘Defense of Modern Cinema’ thread, nothing is original anymore. Not Marvel, not Pixar, not Dreamworks, not Blue Sky… Is this a bad thing? Maybe. But if the execution is right, and we are moved, touched, and entertained, then the storytellers have done their job.

#39

Not sure about Europe but in the largest producers of content in Asia they’re even more sequel crazy than the West.

Bollywood and Hong Kong thrive on knock-off franchises, adaptations, remakes, remixes, sequels, spinoffs and everything in between. Not that they don’t have tons of originality as well. Their industries out-pace ours IIRC, so that’s something that’s bound to happen. Especially since one of those has to do everything under some of the strictest of government restrictions.

Japan will come back to stories they’ve done not even a year before with the same characters and even the same actors and writers and do them again but differently.

This is before we can get into the whole convoluted thing where we hire those same people to make those things yet another time for Western audiences. This is a global thing to be honest though.

The Great Mouse Detective is actually based on another property that was itself an homage to another property that was itself based on a real person. I had a few of the Basil Of Baker Street books and loved them dearly. It’s a remix of Holmes to be sure. But not as much as Treasure Planet.

I actually find it interesting that Stargate and Atlantis have the same storyline for the most part and are fairly close to even sharing the same protagonist. This is fairly coincidental though. As I’m sure both productions were unaware of each other when being made.

By original stories being scarce I meant there are/were few films in Hollywood you couldn’t trace back to previous productions, source material, or abandoned sequels to franchises or even different films entirely. That’s still true today.

But what I mean is that things that seem fresh and new regardless and don’t automatically reek of the sort of thing you were talking about haven’t decreased. They just don’t come from Hollywood. There are hundreds of films that are released in America alone that are just original properties. They may not make it overseas or even to every part of the country, but they do exist and plenty of them are worth watching. And in a digital age you can find this content if only someone points you in the right direction.

Would I like Hollywood to go back to doing less of what you mentioned? Yes I really would. But there’s a lot of things I want them to start doing first. One of those is get rid of this ludicrous notion that being Harry Potter is more important than being the head of state for any country or a teacher. There’s nothing that anyone does in Hollywood worth over 7 figures. I’m sorry but it’s true and it’s killing the consumer and the industry alike.

Actually if you solve this problem right here, you get a lot more original content. Everything seems like less of a gamble when you don’t need to clear $200M domestic to break even.

But back to Thor. I really think you should go see it. It may be an adaptation of a Marvel property which is itself based on Norse mythology which is itself rumored to have roots in Egyptian mythology, but this is something altogether new at the same time. A comic book universe actually forming and crystallizing on screen. A soap actor’s first try as a lead is on display here. And a guy known mainly for films that are so far from this kind of thing that you wondered why they even hired him to make it. There’s so much going on here that writing it off as just another comic adaptation is doing it a great disservice. It’s even being called the best Marvel movie so far by some.

I can’t wait to see it next week. Even if a part of me is most excited for how they pull off Bifrost without copping out or making people laugh.

#40

I am seeing THOR this weekend, maybe tomorrow or Sunday, later I will write my personal thoughts about the film,