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Top Gun 2: Greatest Cinematic Event of the New Millennium


Veltigar
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On 7/1/2022 at 11:37 AM, Rhom said:

But you still have to have a nostalgic tie back to the 1980's...

Is it tho? I mean, I guess it sort of does but not in the same way as something like WW84 and Stranger Things. 

It's also got a lot more going for it than that. I'll say it again, the last 30 minutes of TG:M is fucking intense; in a way that the final battle of most Avengers movies isn't. On top of brilliant visuals and editing, you aren't breaking the tension every 1.5 minutes to inject some meh banter or some sight gag, which seems to be par for the course for a lot of superhero stuff. The characters in this film also don't have the kind of plot armor that goes along with a shared universe franchise.

I view this film a bit like The Color of Money. Technically, it's a sequel to The Hustler, but you didn't have to see the latter to enjoy the former. I never even made the connection between those two until long after I'd seen it. 

What's amazing is that there's less separation in time between those two films (25 years) than there is between TG and TG:M.

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On 7/1/2022 at 1:07 PM, Winterfell is Burning said:

And a massive budget. And one of the biggest movie stars of all time.

I mean, I liked the movie a lot, but let's not act like it's some small film running against juggernauts.


Cruise' MI franchise films an his recent sci fi efforts have had all of those things and, while they've mostly done well, non of them have done this well.

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On 7/1/2022 at 7:37 PM, Rhom said:

But you still have to have a nostalgic tie back to the 1980's...

I mean, the universe must prevent me from somehow filling up my bingo card ;) Anyways, I'll take a throwback to an eighties film that was in itself a throwback to the fifties over superheroes and pandering to China :D 

On 7/1/2022 at 9:07 PM, Winterfell is Burning said:

And a massive budget. And one of the biggest movie stars of all time.

I mean, I liked the movie a lot, but let's not act like it's some small film running against juggernauts.

The way Tom Cruise is now being feted as a sort of underdog in and of itself is fascinating to me. He clearly isn't, but the fact that he's such a standard bearer for movie theatres and practical film making over weightless CGI shit makes me root for the old boy regardless.

I do think the budget for Top Gun 2 isn't overly large though? At least that was what I heard. Definitely not a mid-sized movie, but on the lower end of the blockbuster budget scale.

On 7/3/2022 at 6:12 AM, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:

It's also got a lot more going for it than that. I'll say it again, the last 30 minutes of TG:M is fucking intense; in a way that the final battle of most Avengers movies isn't. On top of brilliant visuals and editing, you aren't breaking the tension every 1.5 minutes to inject some meh banter or some sight gag, which seems to be par for the course for a lot of superhero stuff. The characters in this film also don't have the kind of plot armor that goes along with a shared universe franchise..

I agree completely. This film is damn rewatchable :) 

 

Edited by Veltigar
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Regarding the budget, TG:M is reported to have cost $175M to produce. That places it firmly in a galaxy of $150-$200m blockbuster films. Definitely not an indie picture, but not remarkable enough to be newsworthy either. And there are definitely a few duds in its immediate orbit. 

The Meg cost $178 million?!? Good for them. 

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1 hour ago, polishgenius said:

The Meg did well enough to get a sequel. Which is being directed by Ben Wheatley. Which is hilarious.

I've only seen clips but I did get the impression that it had remarkably high production values while simlutaneously full-on embracing B-movie shlock. Much more interesting to me than the recent Jurassic films.  

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  • 1 month later...

I'm watching it sloooowly claw its way to $700 million domestic. That'll probably be late next week or the week after if it doesn't fall off a cliff. 

Jurassic World did Way better than I thought it would. Asia Pacific definitely loves its dinosaur movies. 

Am I the only one who's puzzled at the lack of commentary regarding Thor 4's under-performance?

Edited by Deadlines? What Deadlines?
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55 minutes ago, Veltigar said:

Were do you all get those numbers from? I'd appreciate a good source for future use :) 

This is a more interesting source. They actually graph the box office cume over time and you can even compare movies. They also get super granular with the data; like ranking all time domestic performance on individual days (e.g. 5th Monday, Tuesday, etc.).

For example, Top Gun: Maverick not only has the best legs of any movie this year, it has some of the best legs of all time. After the first week, there are a lot of individual days where it's top ten, top five, or top 3 all-time. This is only for domestic and unadjusted for inflation.

Here's TG: M Vs Black Panther, which is next up in the all time ranking. I kind of guesstimated based on how the curve is trending to arrive at $700 million in a week or so. That might sound conservative, but if you look at Dr. Strange 2, it hemorrhages screens in the 9th week (shortly after the streaming release) and the box office goes from 2.6 million in week 8 to needing almost 3 weeks to make its next million. TG:M had its digital release last week.

If TG:M can make it to $696-697 million by Monday morning, $700M+ seems pretty certain. 

Regarding Thor, that film had a BvS production budget and it isn't going do BvS's box office; and that was a film that was criticized pretty heavily for underperforming. Thor 4 probably didn't have quite the same hype, but the hype was still pretty considerable.

Thor 4 isn't a bomb by any means, but you don't spend $250 million in the 3rd Thor sequel without expecting it to join the billion dollar club; especially since this is Thor's first appearance post-Endgame. As it stands, when you account for the lack of a Chinese release, it'll do roughly the same business as the Thor: Ragnarok. 

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Box office mojo used to do a lot of that and then Amazon (I think) bought them and paywalled it. Glad thenumbers sprang up and got even more detailed.

 

I like the graph they have showing the legs on a movie by comparing it to the average spread of a movie with its opening weekend. Titanic's graph on that front is just silly.

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Which is why I do not buy Kal's assertion that a disaster story will never be as popular as a feudal succession tale.

Almost everybody knows what happened to the Titanic, yet it is still the third highest grossing movie of all time.

Nobody knows what happened in Valyria. There's a great opportunity there.

/derailbeforeitbegins

 

Edited by Spockydog
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7 hours ago, polishgenius said:

Box office mojo used to do a lot of that and then Amazon (I think) bought them and paywalled it. Glad thenumbers sprang up and got even more detailed.

 

I like the graph they have showing the legs on a movie by comparing it to the average spread of a movie with its opening weekend. Titanic's graph on that front is just silly.

Titanic and, to an extent, Avatar opened soft. Word of mouth was so good that they just kept on going and going and going... titanic also went horribly over budget. The consensus at the studio was that it was going to be a massive failure, even after the first weekend.

7 hours ago, Spockydog said:

Which is why I do not buy Kal's assertion that a disaster story will never be as popular as a feudal succession tale.

Almost everybody knows what happened to the Titanic, yet it is still the third highest grossing movie of all time.

Nobody knows what happened in Valyria. There's a great opportunity there.

/derailbeforeitbegins

 

Having James Cameron at the helm helped a lot I think. It's an incredibly well made film.

Titanic also did the clever trick of treating the disaster movie elements as a sub plot and instead focused on the romance and class conflict parts of the story. I don't think anyone had done that before.

The gem was a clever maguffin that was handled in an interesting way. I may have had something in my eye when Rose dropped it into the sea and you're a bad person and you're monster if you didn't and you make me sad and it's the greatest movie ever made and everyone should totally stan Leo and Kate and try to blame me! 

 

 

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Sure, if they want to make an incredibly, anally obsessive story about a doomed love, feminism and super hot people fucking that is in the backdrop of Valyria and it's doom I think that would work...as a movie.

But it could also work without that at all. Titanic partially works because we know things are doomed and we hope for it to work in some way anyway, but it is still at its core about a romance and not the disaster at all. It is also heavily buoyed by the teenage women who went to see it over and over again. I don't think either of those imply that a game of thrones style tv show would do nearly that well as a political machination-based story.

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I finally watched this yesterday and our home theater can support the big screen & big sound experience, so I don’t think I diminished the experience by steering clear of COVID traps.

It’s a really enjoyable action movie experience and really, really well made.  The tension and enjoyment are all subtly crafted because, if we’re being realistic, it’s a paper-thin plot with trope characters that relies heavily on nostalgic call-backs to the original.  But it’s thankfully greater than the sum of its parts.

Tom Cruise makes very watchable action movies.

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34 minutes ago, KalVsWade said:

Sure, if they want to make an incredibly, anally obsessive story about a doomed love, feminism and super hot people fucking that is in the backdrop of Valyria and it's doom I think that would work...as a movie.

Am I the only one who'd prefer that the doom and Valeria in general not be demystified? I imagine the text will eventually yield more details here and there, and that's cool, but leaving a few blank spots on the canvas would be good too.

But yeah, it could absolutely work as a movie. Or it could be the next Pompeii

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