Tomb Raider (Movie) vs Rotten Tomatoes

[The Anti-Targ]

A Wrinkle in Time 40%

Red Sparrow 47%

Pacific Rim 44%

Tomb Raider 50%

I didn't think Tomb Raider deserved a thread of its own. But I thought looking at movies released around the same time, that many people would have hoped would do well with critics, and for which there is some audience cross over, or a connection with having female leads gives an interesting picture.

A month ago, before any of these movies released, who would have predicted that Tomb Raider would be the best reviewed movie in this list? Certainly not me. Not that one should be terribly excited about Tomb Raider earning a 50%. Sure, it's the best reviewed video game movie of all time (Potentially to be unseated by Rampage, but we'll see...yes Rampage is a video game http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0304616/), but it's still failed to break the curse of video game movies, and it's going to struggle to be profitable at the box office.

But still, I find this to be an interesting situation. And for box office purposes, adding in Atomic Blonde for female lead action movies, money-wise these movies still seem to be more miss than hit even when getting very good reviews. And perhaps for this type of movie they need to be adaptations of highly popular books (like Hunger Games) to be a better financial risk.

[dbunting]

I've only seen one of these, Red Sparrow, and can't believe it got a 47%. I wouldn't give that crap a 20%. The previews for Tomb Raider don't look bad but have heard it's just horrible. The Pacific rim thing, yeah no thanks.

[Gorn]

I think 50% is about right. On the plus side, Alicia Vikander was really, really good in the main role, and so were Dominic West and Walton Goggins, although they weren't given much to work with. I thought the action scenes were well shot too.

On the minus side, the pacing is awful. The first part of the movie drags on way too long, and some 15-20 minutes could have easily been chopped from the running time. Even better, they should have been replaced with more island scenes.

Spoiler

I hoped for some Die Hard-style scenes, where Lara fights a one-woman jungle guerilla campaign against the mercenaries, but for some reason the director thought the stupid London bike race was more important and exciting.

 

[Gronzag]

With 40% score, A Wrinkle in Time is still massively overrated. All those positive reviews are due to its 'progressiveness', just go on and read them.

[Mladen]

Watched Tomb Raider and while I appreciate the attempt of revamping the franchise with the talented, new actress, it simply fell like house of cards. It is not Vikander's fault, she did her part, but simply the script didn't live up to what it was supposed to do. 

[Spring Bass]

Tomb Raider was a lot better than the reviews I read of it suggested. The main problems were the overly padded First Act and the "Trinity" stuff, plus a few minor nitpicks about how they set up Lara as a character in said First Act. 

 

[The Anti-Targ]

Looks like the global box office is going to save TR from disaster, and may actually make it thinly profitable. Seems like, from those who've seen it, the foundation for the reboot is good, but the script, directing and editing were off. All those things can be fixed in a sequel while keeping the essence of the reboot the same.

Box office-wise it seems like this is kind of following the live action Resident Evil track. Doing not very well in the USA, but doing well overseas. The Resident Evil movies typically have a $50-$60 million budget, and a very modest marketing campaign, which is why they are profitable and there have been several movies made. This movie had a reasonable budget, but still much higher than RE. But it had a substantial marketing campaign, so that will eat into the profits.

I'm not sure Alicia Vikander will necessarily want to do another one though. Her status as an actor probably won't take a hit from this one turn as Lara Croft, but a second turn with a rotten score (and they normally go down, not up) and poor US box office numbers would harm her chances for getting cast in "serious" movies. Ref Milla Jojovich, Resident Evil is really her only gig. And as much as it seems Vikander suits this current version of Lara Croft quite well, it would probably be a waste of her talent if Tomb Raider became her only gig. Though objectively I think Vikander is a better actor than Jojovich, so maybe 2 goes at Tomb Raider won't harm her too much. The problem is, what if Tomb Raider 2, does well enough globally to warrant a 3rd movie, but it still does badly with critics?

[Martini Sigil]

I didn;t get to see TR in the movies although I wanted to... The thing is, that I don;t sit down in a theater with my tub of popcorn and giant soda with the same expectations for every movie... when I go see a flick like this, I just want to be entertained.. if there is a good plot/writing/cinematography/etc, then thats gravy.... when i went to see Three Billboards, I had a totally different mindset... so the Rotten Tomatoes score wouldnl;t phase me.

[The Anti-Targ]

3 hours ago, Martini Sigil said:

I didn;t get to see TR in the movies although I wanted to... The thing is, that I don;t sit down in a theater with my tub of popcorn and giant soda with the same expectations for every movie... when I go see a flick like this, I just want to be entertained.. if there is a good plot/writing/cinematography/etc, then thats gravy.... when i went to see Three Billboards, I had a totally different mindset... so the Rotten Tomatoes score wouldnl;t phase me.

My approach to Rotten Tomatoes is that I judge the RT score based on the type of movie. If it's a serious drama then if the RT is <60% it suggest the movie is pretty bad. If it's something like Tomb Raider then a RT >45% means the movie is watchable as long as you are not expecting high brow content. But also, if a movie seems like it has all the ingredients to be a great movie (good cast, good premise, good director), and it gets a 60-65% I'm probably going to give it a miss even though technically it's a "good" movie according to the RT score.

And then there are musicals. I won't go see a musical, or even voluntarily watch it on Blu-ray / streaming even if it gets 100% on RT. The only exception being the Disney animated semi-musicals (like Lion King, Aladin etc) that I will watch if they get good reviews, which they almost always do.

[felice]

On 24/03/2018 at 6:54 PM, Fall Bass said:

Tomb Raider was a lot better than the reviews I read of it suggested. The main problems were the overly padded First Act and the "Trinity" stuff, plus a few minor nitpicks about how they set up Lara as a character in said First Act.

Yeah, I found it very entertaining. Not great art by any means, but an enjoyable way to kill a couple of hours. I knew very little about Lara going in (haven't played any of the games or seen the previous film), so I suspect I appreciated the first act more than fans of the franchise.

[Spring Bass]

On 3/25/2018 at 4:30 PM, The Anti-Targ said:

Box office-wise it seems like this is kind of following the live action Resident Evil track.

That's exactly the comparison I'd make. If these things going forward can make $200-300 million each while keeping the budget down to the $60-70 million range, then they can just keep on making them going forward like the Resident Evil film. 

Vikander's a real question mark on coming back. It looks like she might prefer to do more low-key films, and possibly side-line into directing. It's not like it's super-easy money, either - she had to do a ton of physical training for this.  

[The Anti-Targ]

On 3/28/2018 at 6:31 PM, Fall Bass said:

That's exactly the comparison I'd make. If these things going forward can make $200-300 million each while keeping the budget down to the $60-70 million range, then they can just keep on making them going forward like the Resident Evil film. 

Vikander's a real question mark on coming back. It looks like she might prefer to do more low-key films, and possibly side-line into directing. It's not like it's super-easy money, either - she had to do a ton of physical training for this.  

I think Vikander dipping out on Tomb Raider would be more down to the fact that Vikander does not want to have a career of such great early promise and achievement assassinated by being associated with multiple critical failures, even if they are financially profitable movies. But I also think that WB would have been mad not to lock her down for at least 2 TR movies. So long as WB green-lights a sequel I think she will probably be obligated to do another. There's an outside chance that a sequel could be moderately critically praised. If that happens, Vikander will get a lot of credit for being part of the movie that breaks the video game curse, and that could do her career some good. If a sequel with her does worse both critically and financially it'll be a big hit for her career.

She has delivered the best reviewed video game adaptation ever (at least until Rampage), so it wasn't a bad effort this time around.

[Fez]

My girlfriend and I saw Tomb Raider last night and we both thought it was a lot of fun. I think 50% is about right for it though; the first act was way too padded out and the third act was way too rushed. There were also a few story beats that I thought didn't work. But overall I thought it showed a lot of promise as the start of a franchise and I think a sequel with the same crew and Alicia Vikander starring could be really good, now that they got their origin story jitters out of them.