July 25, 2015

Sequels and spinoffs

Never let it be said that Hollywood doesn't know how to beat a good idea into the ground. I gather that The Lego Movie was a surprise hit a few years ago, and everyone wants to play.

We're going to get a Minecraft movie. And someone is making a movie based on Smileys AKA "Emoji". Sony paid $10 million for the film rights to that one!

I haven't seen a movie in a theater since The Matrix and I don't remember the last Hollywood movie I saw in any format, but it's been years. It's apparent I haven't missed anything.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 05:46 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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1 You've missed a few things, arguably, but hardly worth the time to sift through it. In compliance with blog rules I won't name anything as that could be read as suggestions; instead, I'll simply observe that for the most part most of the things I'd name would be one-offs, where the stars aligned and somebody with some taste all but pulled one over on the powers that be. There's very few veins of consistent quality in the past fifteen years. Not... quite... zero... but close enough.

Pixar is arguably the most consistent of those examples. Whether they can survive acquisition by Disney is apparently still an open question... which is actually a bit to their credit as I rather expected the answer to be "obviously not" by now. On movie-making timeframes the acquisition is still young, of course.

Posted by: Jeremy Bowers at July 25, 2015 06:46 PM (qPsU5)

2 The last Pixar movie I watched was The Incredibles, which I bought on DVD.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at July 25, 2015 08:19 PM (+rSRq)

3 And yes, please do not offer titles I "might want to consider."

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at July 25, 2015 08:20 PM (+rSRq)

4 A recently-produced episode of the Bojack Horseman series mentioned two characters who paid some pre-schoolers $10,000 for the movie rights to "Tag".  The tag(heh)-line is something like "He was it.  Now you're it."

That movie would fit right in.

Posted by: Ben at July 25, 2015 09:01 PM (S4UJw)

5 I wish I understood what it was about The Lego Movie that made it such a hit.  So many people seemed to love it, and it just left me feeling "eh." 

The last movie I saw in the theaters was Moneyball, perhaps the least-likely bit of source material ever used for a Hollywood movie.  Who'd go to see a film about a MLB general manager and his assistant "inventing" a new way to value player talent? 

Enough that it more than doubled its $50M budget.  Us baseball fans, we've got wallets.

Posted by: Wonderduck at July 25, 2015 11:18 PM (jGQR+)

6 "I wish I understood what it was about The Lego Movie that made it such a hit."
Plenty of parents with kids at the playing with Legos age, looking for 'safe' movies to take their kids to, that have enough humor adults will appreciate. The Lego movie just hit that sweet spot. 
Suspect I'll get dragged off to the Minecraft movie, too. Hope it's not utter dreck.

Posted by: Brett Bellmore at July 26, 2015 03:56 AM (L5yWw)

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