New duplicates

There's a lot I could say about Michael Shanks' Together, which has jumped up near the top of my 2025 rankings, but some of what I would say is deep into spoiler territory, as well as my own alternate reading of the film, which didn't occur to me until its very last shot.

But, I'm sick.

So I'll just set aside the really interesting stuff today and write my second straight post about movie titles.

July was an interesting month in that I added four titles to my big movie list that were already on it.

How is that possible, you ask? How can you add a movie to a list when it is already on the list?

I didn't say the movie was on the list. I said the title.

It's not so profound as my succession of short paragraphs makes it sound. I mean, it isn't a hugely surprising thing to see a movie that has the same title as another movie you've already seen.

It is, I would argue, somewhat unusual to see so many within a short period of time. 

As you recall from this post, in April I did a mini project of ranking movies by their titles. The project entailed me finding movies with the same title that were not remakes of or sequels to each other, and determining which shared titles represented the best collective quality between all the movies that shared that title, all the way down to the worst. Yes, I have too much spare time on my hands, apparently.

That project produced only 47 titles that qualified during my whole history of watching movies. So yes, it's unusual that I would have added four to that list in only a single month this year.

The first of those is Thirst, a 1979 Australian vampire film directed by Rod Hardy that I quite liked, which I watched on July 3rd. That made it a duplicate of Park Chan-wook's 2009 film Thirst, which I also quite liked, and is also a vampire film, but not a remake of the 1979 film -- believe me, I checked. Thirst is just a good title for a movie about creatures who desire blood.

Moving forward a little more than a week, on July 11th I watched The Avengers, Jeremiah S. Chechik's 1998 film that I watched on the plane when I could not watch any more 2025 films that I had to give my full attention. This was also the film that, when Joss Whedon's The Avengers was released in 2012, made me think "We already had a movie called The Avengers." Little did I know what kind of behemoth would be launched by Whedon's film.

The final two have come within the past week. Last Sunday night I watched Brick, a 2025 German language film directed by Philip Koch, which was sold to me by Netflix as in the same vein as Cube and The Platform. It is, sort of, but it is not as good as those movies. That made this a duplicate of Rian Johnson's 2005 film Brick, which is certainly technically a better film than Johnson's, but which I probably don't like as much because I had a pretty negative reaction to it when I first saw it, and a second viewing only improved my impression somewhat. 

Finally we have Together, the movie about a couple in a rut who start to get physically stuck to one another (and so much more), watched on the final day of the month. This shares a title with Lukas Moodysson's 2000 film Together, which I wrote about lovingly here, about Swedes living on a commune.

So what?

Yeah except I like to write posts like this. Hang with me. It's been an issue in my life a little bit lately, for reasons I'll explain.

I actually don't like watching movies with the same titles. I grumble and think that the second film should have tried harder to think of something distinctive. There are an unlimited number of possible combinations of words out there -- just think of a different one to describe the events that happen in your movie. Yes many repeated titles are the generic rather than the specific ones, and a generic title can be preferable because it can be easier to remember. But you know, then I have to include the year in parentheses after the title when I update a list that includes both movies, just to distinguish them from one another, when you could have done that yourself by just thinking about it for another 15 minutes and coming up with something else.

But you know what? I am actually taking the opposite position in a scenario I'm very tangentially involved in, in my real life.

I won't go into too many particulars to protect her privacy, but my wife is actually producing a film for a director trying to make his first feature film, whose short she produced about eight years ago. The title of this film is a woman's name. Or was. Or actually still is, but now it's a different woman's name.

See, the original title has been dropped because it shares the name of another film. This other film is not even a film I've heard of, though the director is well known. The sales agent argued, quite unfoundedly I think, that they can't use the original name because it would cause too much confusion with this other film -- this other film that I, a person who has seen 7,033 films, has never heard of. I'm not sure that my wife or the director were compelled to take this advice, but they'd have to have a fairly convincing reason not to, so they've taken it.

Now the original name, exotic but familiar enough to remember, has been replaced by a name that's very exotic and very hard to remember, because it's not a name I've ever even heard before.

I tried to convince my wife not to take the advice of the sales agent. That's how I'm tangentially involved. But there was never very much of a chance my opinion would provide them a perspective that they hadn't already considered themselves, and indeed, they are going forward with the new name for the main character and the movie proposed by the sales agent.

My point in telling you this is: I'm inconsistent as hell.

But in terms of movies I'm actually watching, I won't let a movie having the same title as another movie prevent me from seeing it. I even intentionally complicated things for myself by watching two different movies called Swan Song that were both released in 2021, meaning I had to include the director's name in parentheses when I listed them in my year-end rankings that I published for you to read. I guess that was preferable to seeing only one of the two movies, and leaving you, the educated viewer who knows all the movies released in any given year, to wonder which of two movies of approximately equal prominence I was actually ranking. 

In terms of the month of July, both the best movie I saw that month (Together) and the worst (The Avengers) were new duplicates. 

I promise I won't hunt out more new duplicates in August just so I can write another post like this a month from now.

My days of bad children's movies are numbered

I don't think I will have to sit through 100% Wolf for very much longer.

Thankfully, I don't have to sit through 100% Wolf itself for any longer, as it mercifully ended 96 minutes after it started on Saturday night, and I never intend to watch it again. But I won't have to sit through movies like 100% Wolf for very much longer either.

It was my eight-year-old's choice for a family movie, but he'll be growing out of making choices like this pretty soon.

It already wasn't his first choice. He wanted to watch The Last Airbender, the 2010 M. Night Shyamalan movie that I didn't hate as much as most people did. Apparently I had more hope for 100% Wolf than to reassess my not-completely-negative take on a Shyamalan dud.

Bad choice.

100% Wolf was not actually my first choice among our remaining choices. My son had watched a trailer for Over the Moon, which reminded me a bit of the surprise delight Wish Dragon that I ranked last year. My son kept the moon theme -- 100% Wolf is about werewolves -- but picked the wrong movie.

Bad choice.

Look, 100% Wolf wasn't awful, and it was an Australian production, so I give it some additional home team points. As you can see from the poster, it's got a decent voice cast, though I'm starting to wonder how much that really means these days -- who would turn down the opportunity to phone in some line readings from their house and collect 20 or 30 grand for a couple days' work?

So it could have been worse. But I'll be happy to be past such movies, probably within the next year.

I'm a film critic, so I theoretically see everything. But there are certain movies that just don't have any hope of seeming relevant to my audience, and therefore, I'm not going to watch them if I don't have a specific reason, like having an eight-year-old son who is just sentimental enough about his own dwindling childhood to continue gathering my wife and me on the couch for movies like this one.

Where was his older brother, you ask?

Well, here's the preview of things to come, the feeling that 100% Wolf hasn't got long left. My 11-year-old had two other 11-year-olds over for a sleepover, and they were set up in our garage with the projector, watching the first Avengers movie. I guess we're getting closer to that day when I finally agree it's okay to show him Infinity War, which features _______ getting choked to death by ______. 

But it's not the MCU that is the preview of things to come. The 11-year-old has probably seen half those movies by now, and his younger brother has seen at least five. No, it's what his friends wanted to watch instead that really opened my eyes.

If I was taken aback but pleasantly surprised that another friend wanted to watch Monty Python and the Holy Grail on a sleepover -- as discussed here -- I was taken aback and less pleasantly surprised when one of these kids wanted to watch Police Academy.

Now, it's been pretty long since I've seen Police Academy, but I'm pretty sure it has f-bombs and I know it has nudity -- since the kid confirmed it when I humorously confronted him with that fact. 

How does he know it has nudity? Well, he'd already watched it. With his parents' consent.

My wife, usually far more vigilent about these things than I am, said she would have been okay with Police Academy, when I reminded her that it was rated R -- at which point she did a complete about face.

The compromise between Police Academy and a Marvel movie -- in terms of appropriateness if not in terms of subject matter -- was going to be Dumb and Dumber, which is largely lacking in profanity and entirely lacking in nudity. My son was keen to see it. But the other two had already seen Dumb and Dumber more than once each, so they opted against it. And because it was already closing in on 8:30 and they needed to get that damn movie started, we just went with The Avengers, telling my son that my wife and I would watch Dumb and Dumber with him later on -- probably not as fun as with his friends.

So under some set of circumstances, the contrast between what was showing in our living room and what was showing in our garage could have been as extreme as a movie featuring a boy who transforms into a pink-haired poodle rather than the rest of the werewolves in his family, and a movie featuring bouncing boobs among profane police officers. Such a stark discrepancy can't last long, and never again is it going to lean in favor of the first movie rather than the second.

Don't get me wrong, I actually think it's time. In fact, I view it as a positive development that my older son was more interested in the idea of a comedy than another Marvel movie. Even at age 11 he is able to see how much they resemble each other and start to feel like a bit of a slog. He doesn't have a completist mentality, and he doesn't have my luxury of having spaced these movies out over nearly 15 years now, rather than watching a dozen of them within essentially two years. I can understand the exhaustion, and I like it that my son wants to laugh, maybe even that he'd be on the fringes of naughty humor. Maybe if John Cleese and Graham Chapman weren't a hit with him, Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels will be. (He'll have to wait a bit longer to see what he thinks of Steve Gutenberg and Michael Winslow.)

Even these 11-year-olds are weirdly betwixt and between though. For as much as the most mature of them -- in terms of interests if not behavior -- is appearing to show the signs of attraction to the opposite sex, and has to really censor himself not to swear constantly, the guys also weirdly played hide and seek a number of times during the weekend. Granted, they were videoing it with the intention of posting it somewhere, but it was still hide and seek. 

Maybe they're not so different from my eight-year-old, but it's much more likely that he will aspire to be like them going forward than they'll aspire to be like him. Especially in their choice of cinema. 

Will I miss D-grade animated movies like 100% Wolf and last year's Dog Gone Trouble, which was also known as Trouble in some parts?

I won't. But I do know this can never be an absolute stance, and here's why: The aforementioned Wish Dragon, which ended up at #35 on my year-end list, is not a movie I ever would have watched if my son hadn't suggested it. The animation was more than competent -- far better than 100% Wolf, anyway -- but its lack of a theatrical release would have been code for "It ain't worth your time."

Well, Wish Dragon was worth my time. Maybe before he fully grows out of animated movies and wants to watch bouncing boobs instead, my eight-year-old will pick one or two more Wish Dragons along the way. 

The fine line between Captain America and The Avengers

The following post contains very minor spoilers about Captain America: Civil War, not much more than what the trailers already show you.

Captain America: Civil War is, for all intents and purposes, an Avengers movie.

Except it's good.

Like, really good.

Which makes no sense.

Marvel Studios and Disney so tightly control the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and therefore the look and feel of their films, that when a director wants to bring his own vision to one of these movies, they just push him out. Bye bye, Edgar Wright. We want Ant-Man to be less interesting than you want it to be.

But for some reason, the Captain America movies have stayed above the fray. Civil War is no exception.

Which makes no sense.

These movies should be of a piece, yet the Captain America movies -- be they directed by Joe Johnston (the first movie) or the Russo brothers (the last two) -- are consistently superior products.

I'm sure someone could figure out why, but it's not going to be me.

As Joss Whedon has gone from Marvel golden boy to Marvel whipping boy, it's easy to just suggest that Johnston or the Russos are better directors than he is. But that's a pretty weird conclusion. None of those guys has the track record Whedon has, and just because his last Avengers movie was a stinker, it doesn't taint his previous output -- both for Marvel with the original Avengers, or in general as a writer/director/creator. Can we really say that these other guys "get" Marvel more than Whedon does?

And yet this is basically an Avengers movie. The Avengers are called out by name constantly in Civil War. Like Superman before them (about a month before them), they are culpable for wanton destruction and accused of being indifferent to the resulting loss of life. Just because the Hulk, Thor, Nick Fury and, um, Cobie Smulders are missing from this, it doesn't mean it's not really an Avengers movie. They've just replaced those guys with Spider-Man, Ant-Man, Black Panther and Bucky Barnes. (And who knew, by the way, that Captain America's movies would be so much about Bucky, well beyond The Winter Soldier and probably on into the next three or four installments?)

What I thought I would object to in this movie is the fact that everybody needs to be in it. As the paragraph above indicates, it's about the same amount of everyone as in the overstuffed Age of Ultron, but what seemed like it would make it worse is that they kept on adding new people. The introductions of Ant-Man and Spider-Man particularly had me worried. There wouldn't seem to be enough for everyone to do.

Yet Civil War somehow figures that out, too. Ant-Man and Spider-Man are both basically comic relief, and boy are they fun. They are used just the right amount, sprinkled in for flavor, rather than relied on heavily to bear out complete narrative arcs. (And there's one awesome Ant-Man thing that I don't think any of the trailers have spoiled yet.)

I'm wondering if we just find the Captain America brand name a surefire indicator of quality -- if, in fact, that's why this story contains the Captain America banner rather than the Avengers one. I mean, it's never too late for a series to curdle, but something about Captain America just continues to hum along at a creative peak. What's strangest about this is that the original, The First Avenger, was something I wasn't looking forward to in the slightest. I was worried this character would be terminally square, jingoistic in a completely unironic and probably painful way. The First Avenger figured to make me embarrassed about my country of citizenship. Instead, the three Captain America movies may well be my favorite three movies from the MCU.

I don't know that I should question it. Maybe I just need to accept it and move on.

Some other thoughts on Civil War ...

America first

If you're wondering how I've already seen this movie, well, I'm kind of wondering that too.

As I came out of the theater yesterday, I asked myself, "Wait, wasn't it the first weekend in May that Captain America and Batman v. Superman were fighting about back in 2014 or something? As far as I can tell, it's not May yet -- even here in Australia."

And indeed, when I got home, I checked IMDB, and the movie doesn't open for another eight days in the U.S.

No such delay here. A week and a day before its U.S. release -- which is really one more additional day because of the time difference -- Captain America has hit Australian theaters. Except they don't call them theaters here, or even theatres. They call them cinemas.

When it comes to movies and their release dates, Australia often taketh away. But sometimes, Australia giveth.

Imperfect teeth

There's a moment in Civil War when Robert Downey Jr.'s Iron Man tells Chris Evans' Captain America that sometimes he wishes he could punch him in his perfect teeth.

This was only a few minutes after I realized he couldn't say the same thing to Black Widow.

No, not just because heroes don't usually threaten to punch women in the mouth. Rather, because Scarlett Johansson's teeth are not perfect.

When she's on the phone with Steve Rogers following [a particular incident that I won't spoil here], the camera goes close on Johansson's mouth, and that bottom row of pearly whites is anything but straight. In fact, the teeth in ScarJo's front middle are actually trying to crowd each other out, one in particular protruding crookedly in front of the others.

Before you think I'm teeth-shaming Scarlett Johansson, I'll let you know why I'm bringing this up. It reminds us again why Johansson is awesome -- she's not perfect, but the combination of her appearance and her charisma often convinces us that she is.

In fact, in reality, she's just the girl next door with crooked teeth.

Okay, so that's being a bit disingenuous. She's a person of otherworldly beauty. But her beauty is not inaccessible, as you might think it were. There's a natural component to it, a regular component to it, nearly undetectable imperfections that ground her in our world. This despite the fact that someone actually made a "realistic" robot version of her. One with perfect teeth, I might add.

And sure, it could just be because she could never afford to take enough time off from acting to get braces. But I like to think that she just doesn't care. And that's cool.

A well-trained audience

People have figured out this Marvel thing by now.

Most of the time when you go to the movies, and the credits start to roll, you lose three-quarters of your audience right there. A hardy few will stay to look at the names of all the key grips and dolly grips, but most of them are gone -- to the bathroom, to the car, what have you.

Well, not in Marvel movies, at least not anymore. For a time, these people were leaving early and missing the now two extra sequences that appear -- one about a minute into the credits, and one after all the credits have rolled. But now everyone is hip to this. In my audience, we lost no more than ten percent, and even those who did leave, didn't do so until after the first installment of additional footage. The rest of us waited to the bitter end. It was really a rather unusual experience, a bunch of people looking at their phones with the lights up, still plastered to their seats.

And I'm proud to say I was able to figure out essentially what the final bit of footage would be. I won't tell you what it is, but I will say that I correctly guessed both characters that would appear in it and what the essential nature of their interaction would be.

Marvel may not contain all that many surprises these days, but Captain America continues to be the exception to that rule. He was the first avenger, and I'm increasingly convinced he's also the best.

I prefer Ant-Man in his own universe

I was really digging Ant-Man. In fact, I was toying early on with giving it a four-star rating. As just one example, I loved that scene where Michael Pena recounts how he learned about the potentially unguarded safe, and all the characters in his story mouth the words of his story as he's saying them. That was probably Peyton Reed's best Edgar Wright impersonation of the film. Not because that's something Wright would actually do, but because it's in the spirit of something Wright would actually do.

But then, the Marvel Cinematic Universe had to come along and screw it all up.

"I think the first thing we should do is contact the Avengers," says Scott Lang (Paul Rudd), with a completely straight face, at what I would guess was the film's 40-minute mark.

The first thing I thought was, Wow, that line was delivered really awkwardly.

The second thing I thought was, Wait, Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) is not laughing.

The third thing I thought was, Wait, how does this civilian know about the Avengers?

The fourth thing I thought was, Oh yeah, because all the events of all the previous Marvel movies are things that actually happened in this world, and were covered by all the major media outlets. This guy knows about the Avengers because the Avengers are the most famous people in the world.

Yeah, that universe.

This was exactly the moment when Ant-Man lost a full star rating and never recovered it. A few moments later, Pym makes reference to something that happened at the end of the second Avengers movie, which I haven't seen but which I know about anyway. It's such a bad joke that you can almost hear the rim shot that accompanies it. He also makes mention of Tony Stark.

Here we go, I thought.

And here we went. A few scenes later, Lang is unwittingly trying to break into some kind of Avenger headquarters, and must face off against Falcon (Anthony Mackie). So too much attention is not drawn from our central figure, I guess, this is the only Avenger Lang actually meets, and he's one of the second-tier Avengers. (It's not the only Avenger who appears in the movie, however -- you are of course obliged to wait all the way until the end of the credits to see who else shows his face.)

I had been just fine with Ant-Man in his own cinematic universe and not a part of somebody else's. I didn't know until the closing credits (every last one of which I was compelled to sit through, even though I was in danger of missing the last tram home) that John Slattery was playing Howard Stark, Tony's father, in the opening scene. (If he played him in other movies, I either haven't seen those movies or have just plain forgotten.) But once we were reminded that Ant-Man is just a tiny cog in what is, by now, an impossibly unwieldy infrastructure of superheroes and supervillains, the movie lost its authority for me. Now everything that was going on would be subsumed into this larger narrative, a narrative so big that even its biggest players are inevitably now reduced to someone else's second fiddle.

This is why superhero movies worked for so long under this basic premise: the superhero in this movie is not only the only superhero in the world, he's also the first time the characters are even acquainted with the idea of a superhero. Most old-fashioned superhero movies -- and by "old-fashioned" I mean "more than ten years old" -- were not only origin stories for a particular superhero, but they were stories of the origin of the concept of the superhero. That's why the characters who witnessed this superhero at work were so amazed/astounded/ what have you.

But when a suit that can shrink a man to the size of an ant is only the 10th or 11th most impressive superhero trick out there, something is lost. This is a world where a man turns into a giant green monster when he gets angry. This is a world where a super-powered soldier from World War II was revived 70 years later. Shit, this is a world where an alien god can travel back and forth between Earth and his planet through some kind of interstellar bridge and has an all-powerful hammer. A man the size of a bug is small potatoes compared to all that, pun absolutely intended.

Can't I just be happy with a world where Ant-Man is the world's only superhero, and the things he does astonish us as though we'd never before seen something supernatural? Can't I live in a world where this power is not only described as the world's most powerful weapon, in order to hype up the stakes of this particular film, but actually is the most powerful weapon, because everything else that exists in this world exists within a framework of realism?

I can't, because that world is dead. I'm not sure if another superhero will ever step on to your IMAX screen without the baggage of all the other superheroes who may be slightly cooler than he (or she) is. D.C. will soon be part of Marvel's game -- already is, really, since both Suicide Squad and Superman vs. Batman feel as though they've already been released -- and anyone else who has any kind of superhero will never be able to compete with the two giants.

I for one would like to marvel -- pun again intended -- over the wonders of an unfamiliar superhero as though I'm just discovering what a superhero is myself. For about 40 minutes, I did just that.

But then, the Marvel Cinematic Universe had to come along and screw it all up.

Where have all the Avengers go-o-ooone?

Yes, you are supposed to be thinking of that Paula Cole song right now.

The following may be about the most obvious and unoriginal criticism that has been levied against Iron Man 3, but I came to it independently (some months ago), so I figured I might as well wheel it out here on the day the third Iron Man movie opens. It'll definitely be a lot more stale by the time Thor: The Dark World and Captain America: Winter Soldier come out, I can tell you that, so today's the day.

One of the biggest problems about splintering the Avengers back off into their own movies, after they came together in last summer's phenomenally successful The Avengers, is that it creates an immediate need to explain where all the rest of them are.

If Tony Stark is going to be facing a crisis that could result in the end of the world -- and he damn well better be, or the stakes for this movie won't be as high as this type of movie demands -- then why aren't all his Avengers buddies helping him out on that?

I've heard the argument from comic book fans, whose hair-trigger defensiveness knows no bounds, that they are all "off doing their own things." That sounds like comic book rationale if I've ever heard it.

So what, we're supposed to believe we live in a world where not only is there one impending threat to our way of living, but as many as five or six -- at one time?

Even if Captain America or the Hulk or even frigging Black Widow have other things they're dealing with at the same time that Tony Stark is fighting off the Mandarin, what are the chances that those other things are reaching a crisis point at the exact same time Tony's issue is reaching a crisis point? Even if Captain A. is fighting off the so-called Winter Soldier -- and I have no idea if that character is actually that movie's villain -- then couldn't he put one of his interns on the issue for maybe 12 hours while he goes off and tries to prevent Tony's Malibu house from falling into the ocean?

It's one of those areas where we are supposed to suspend disbelief, and that's fine. I'm sure that whatever criticisms people ultimately have about Iron Man 3, the absence of Hawkeye and Thor won't be one of them. I've cast the comic book nerds as the ones who err on the side of forgiveness in matters like this, anyway. You'd be right to ask me who the comic book nerd is now if I do the blog equivalent of pushing my glasses up higher on the bridge of my nose and asking William Shatner about the physics of Star Trek's beaming technology.

But I do think there should be some cake/eat it too backlash on Marvel for its relentless ambition about squeezing as many movies as possible out of these characters. We are bound to be scratching our heads over it eventually. Because it's not just Tony Stark who will be left to fend for himself in Iron Man 3. As I've mentioned earlier, in movies that will both hit theaters by next summer, Thor and Captain America are also going to be left by their lonesome to face equally apocalyptic challenges.

And then there's going to be the challenge of bringing them all back together again in The Avengers 2. "Okay, so all your previous end-of-the-world crises weren't really that bad ... but this end-of-the-world crisis? Let's get the band back together again."

Marvel also finds itself limited by the all-or-nothing approach. Like, let's say that only the Hulk were available. After all, what could the Hulk be doing? Every movie about the Hulk has been about his origins, not about his "ongoing projects." The very nature of the Hulk means he is not advising any national security councils or trying to ferret out terrorists from holes in the ground. He's a volcano trapped in a human shell. Can't the Hulk just come and help Tony? Maybe he could stop and get Nick Fury on the way.

So it's one of those situations where "movie reality" doesn't align with "reality reality." And really, that's probably okay.

I actually had an opportunity to see Iron Man 3 last night -- I mean, of course I had an opportunity, since it midnight-screened everywhere from here to East Bumchunk, Iowa. So I should say I had an easy opportunity to see Iron Man 3, one that didn't require me to stay up until 2:30 a.m.

See, the midnight screening time is really only a restriction on the east coast. Out here in California, they can start showing that movie as early as 9 p.m., since 9 p.m. is midnight in New York. And so it was that I came out of a 7:35 showing of Pain & Gain (liked it) and had the chance to choose IM3 as the second movie in my double feature rather than Oblivion (wish I had). In fact, IM3 was playing in the theater directly across from Pain & Gain -- the theater where Oblivion had been showing all day. Since I had to leave P & G as soon as the credits started just to be sure I'd make it to the start of Oblivion, I had no time for dilly-dallying, and when Oblivion wasn't there, I could have just seated myself for Iron Man. There were only a half-dozen other people in the theater.

Instead, I ventured into the theater's other wing and found the spot where Oblivion had been moved to accommodate the "midnight" screening.

And it probably was some amount of anti-Iron Man bias that caused me to pass up this easy opportunity. I liked but didn't love the first movie, and I guess I'm pretty much alone there. I didn't really like the second movie, though in that case I have more company.

And now three with these missing Avengers?

I'm not saying I might wait until DVD, but ... I might wait until DVD.

Cannibalizing future profits - so to speak

The last envelope I returned to Netflix came emblazoned with the following image:

Edward Cullen. As if we don't see enough of his handsome mug.

Now, I certainly understand the instinct to partner yourself with a wildly successful franchise, and the positive byproducts of that might be immeasurable.

But don't you think it's a little strange that a company that relies on people not seeing movies in the theater is telling them to go see a movie in the theater?

Unlike Blockbuster, which recently tried to dupe its unsuspecting email audience by intimating that the new release End of Watch was available for rental in its stores (see discussion here), Netflix clearly states that Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 2 is "only in theaters" (as that small text above the release date reads).

But the more people who catch it in theaters, the fewer people there will be to rent it from Netflix later on. This advertisement has a direct, though probably small, impact on the company's bottom line.

Perhaps this is just an acknowledgement by Netflix that the movie's zeitgeist moment is now, not three months from now when it comes out on DVD. The Twilight movies probably get a higher percentage of their viewings in the theater than any other successful franchise out there. Whereas most other successful movies have a significant number of people who rent them "just to see what all the fuss is about," you can't really say the same for the Twilight movies. Most people already know what the fuss is about. Either they're into the fuss, which means they see the movies in the theater (perhaps multiple times), or they can't get far enough away from the fuss, and they never see them at all.

Let's anticipate the first year of existence for Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 2 and for another wildly successful movie, The Avengers (which I was in the minority by not seeing in the theater). Let's say that in this first year, The Avengers gets 75% of its viewings in the theater and 25% on video. I have no idea if that's correct, but it sounds plausible. That 75% would represent its peak, because from now until the end of time, the only way for most people to see The Avengers will be on video. So the percentage will start at 75% and keep dropping a little bit every day. Eventually, if the movie endures in popularity through the decades, more people will have seen it on video than in the cinema.

While the percentage will also drop for Breaking Dawn Part 2, it doesn't seem likely to drop as much. Its first year will probably be more like 90%/10%, and it will fall only very, very slowly. It may take a generation to get down to 80%/20%. There are always going to be young girls who are going to come of age and seek out the Twilight books, but fewer and fewer random other people will watch these movies as their zeitgeist moment gets further and further in the rear view mirror.

I'm probably belaboring a fairly obvious point, but the point I'm trying to make is that Netflix is probably just fine with advertising Twilight on their return envelopes, because there was never going to be a particularly sizable rental market for this movie anyway. Sure, three months from now will be a good time for some of these folks to see it again -- but they're not going to rent it. If they loved it, they'll just buy it.

The real risk with this marketing strategy is that it will do more harm than good from a "coolness of brand" standpoint. After all, the effect of being associated with Twilight is not a universally positive one. Some people (like me) will see this ad campaign and think "Lame." And Netflix will have suffered, however infinitesimally, in my estimation. 

The other explanation is that this is just a brand new marketing venture for Netflix, and Edward Cullen just happens to be the first of many faces we're going to see gracing our return envelopes.

As is often the case with my theories, time alone will tell.

Of course, much of this discussion is made moot by the following important little detail: Netflix is a subscription service, not a pay-by-rental service. They don't care if users are renting Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 2 or One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest or Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo, as long as the monthly subscription fee is being automatically debited from their bank accounts.

So maybe they're just trying to limit the number of Breaking Dawn DVDs they'll have to stock to meet the demand.

And now we're getting to the truly measurable impact on their bottom line.

Romantic comedies for old people

Not many movies wanted to open against The Avengers last weekend.

In fact, only one of any note did: John Madden's The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. Albeit on only 27 screens nationwide.

It was the ultimate in counter-programming. A superhero movie for young people vs. a romantic comedy for old people.

It shouldn't be much of a surprise who won.

Granted, the $902,000 domestic gross to date for Marigold Hotel is not bad, considering its small number of screens. But the small number of screens -- especially with a cast of this pedigree -- should tell you something about how often studio execs think old people go to the movies.

Which is odd, because at one of our favorite nearby theaters, we always complain about the fact that the place seems overrun with old people. And I don't live near some retirement community in Florida. I live in the bustling metropolis of Los Angeles, which doesn't only bustle, but is home to the movie industry. And plenty of blue-haired old ladies, thank you very much.

(To be clear, we don't complain about them because we have a problem with their blue hair or musty smells. It's because they don't seem to be able to prevent themselves from talking during the movie. Their ability to filter the little voice inside their head seems to have vanished once they turned 70.)

For awhile this spring, when I was seeing a trailer for Marigold Hotel before every other movie I attended, I linked it in my mind to Lasse Hallstrom's Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, which came out about six weeks earlier, whose trailer I was also seeing on a repeating loop at this theater. The cast is younger, but the audience seems to be the same: older people who have outgrown edgy humor, who may be thinking about the exotic locations they haven't yet visited and may never visit, and are not automatically thrown off by five-world titles.

In a run of about six weeks, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen made just under $8 million in the U.S. That was on a much larger eventual total of 483 screens.

So, maybe old people don't go to the movies that much after all.

Still, I'm heartened by these attempts to remember that other demographics exist beyond the audiences who either have gone to Comic-Con, or would go if they had the money. It's an increasingly rare risk for studios to take.

It seems hard to believe that there was a time when a movie like Grumpy Old Men not only didn't make people blink, but actually scored $70 million at the box office -- and that was in 1993 dollars. (Harder to believe is that its budget was a full $35 million, so the box office hit only doubled the budget domestically.) In fact, it was hit enough that Grumpier Old Men came out in 1995 -- making $1 million more domestically on a budget that was $10 million less. ($25 million seems like more the right amount to spend on a movie like this. It must have cost a lot to lure Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau out of semi-retirement for the first one.)

These days, with every movie needing to have the potential for franchising and merchandising, the market has shifted away from the older audiences who could once help make movies a hit. And I think we're the worse for it. It's why more movies seem the same as each other rather than different from one another.

Of course, I'm not doing my part. I'm only 38, but I'm fast approaching old. And I didn't see Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, and have no realistic plans to see The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. I'm sure I'll catch both on DVD.

But I also am steadfastly refusing to add to the coffers of The Avengers.

There's that, at least.

Superhero circle jerk

And so officially begins the summer movie season.

And it seems like everybody is excited about the ceremonial first movie of summer but me.

It feels like two years now that all I've heard about is Avengers this, and Avengers that. And from the first moment I heard anything about it, I thought it sounded like a bad idea.

Here's my problem with it, in an admittedly broad nutshell. It gets together two groups of people who tend to be insufferable in their own ways:

1) People who go on and on about comic books.

2) People who go on and on about Joss Whedon.

Some of you reading this undoubtedly fall into one of those two categories, and no, I probably don't actually find you insufferable, per se. It's the prototypical "you" that I find insufferable.

I have lately felt the urge to post about there being a difference between being a movie fan and being a fan of superhero movies. There are certain forums in which I discuss film where people call themselves film enthusiasts, but their "love of movies" seems to begin and end with movies adapted from comic books. They'll throw in movies that might as well have been adapted from comic books for good measure. But they don't seem to be interested in talking about anything beyond that. Fortunately, Hollywood has given them plenty to talk about within that sphere in the past decade.

Then there are those people who are still trying to tell you how awesome Buffy the Vampire Slayer is, even though it has been off the air for nearly a decade. I'm sure it was awesome, but I didn't find it so. I watched one episode, and thought I was hooked; I watched the next episode, and immediately lost interest. What's worse, they will also proclaim their undying love for Firefly, which I did not watch at all. But I did see the awful film version of the show called Serenity, which was, simply, awful. There's a certain cutesiness that suffuses Whedon's work, that I can't quite get over.

But I certainly like, even love, some comic book movies (Batman Begins and Watchmen are two examples) and I certainly like, even love, some stuff by Joss Whedon (The Cabin in the Woods and Dr. Horrible's Sing-a-Long Blog are two examples).

So maybe the better way to encapsulate my disinterest in The Avengers is this:

Do I really want to watch a movie about a bunch of superheroes, sitting around jerking each other off?

Of course I'm not being literal, though one of these superheroes is Scarlett Johansson, so that would be pretty titillating. But I can imagine them all sitting around in a room, looking kind of funny because superheroes shouldn't sit around in a room, having fake arguments that are really just designed to demonstrate how awesome they all are in their own different ways with their own different powers. It's ego stroking disguised as the kind of bickering men and women do in romantic comedies before they realize they're in love.

See? Cutesy.

But really -- and I expect to keep defining this and modifying it as I write the piece -- the main reason I'm not so sure about The Avengers is that I think over-stuffing a movie with superheroes is very "Joel Schumacher Batman." I think superhero movies tend to work better if they focus on only a single hero or a finite number of heroes, not the 12 or 13 in this movie. Movies like the X-Men movies are the exception, because that was always part of the concept of that series -- a multiplicity of heroes. I'd rather see for a second time the movie subtitled The First Avenger -- which would be last year's surprisingly awesome Captain America -- than see Captain America the character have to elbow out of the way a bunch of other dudes (or dudettes) trying to hog the spotlight.

But maybe the REAL reason I'm not looking forward to The Avengers (you sick of this yet?) is that it seems to rely all too heavily on the mythology -- and I do mean "mythology" quite literally -- that originated in last year's disappointing Thor. The main villain in The Avengers is Tom Hiddleston's Loki, who is the fallen brother of Chris Hemsworth's Thor. The problem with both of these guys is that they are gods who live on another planet. I don't like that idea at all, but I definitely don't like it mixing with a bunch of other heroes whose back stories are grounded in reality (even if one of them, the aforementioned Captain America, effectively time traveled to be in present day). Throwing all these different realities together into one melting pot just seems fraught with peril. You are effectively telling me that Iron Man could get on that "space bridge" (even though I think it was destroyed at the end of Thor) and travel to Asgard -- another planet, in outer space, inhabited by gods.

But I hear The Avengers is good. Right? That's what "they say."

Then again, I wonder if I should really trust "they," if "they" is increasingly comprised of people who love Firefly and Thor.

The self-created hype over Epix

I don't know about where you are, but here in Los Angeles, we're being inundated with billboards that look something like this. (Imagine it elongated into the rectangular shape of a billboard.)

This was pretty much my first awareness of a premium television channel called Epix. So if awareness is what they wanted to create, I guess they accomplished their mission.

If a sense of exclusivity is what they wanted to create, well, mission failed.

The supposedly momentous "Marvel Heroes Weekend," which begins in JUST TWO DAYS!! (but has been advertised for well over a month), includes the three movies you see here:  Thor, Captain America and Iron Man 2.

So, I'm supposed to congratulate some genius in the Epix advertising department who figured out that they might have the rights to three of Marvel's recent movies?

Otherwise I don't get why this is supposed to excite me so much.

I sort of get why they think it's cool that they can show Thor and Captain America. Both movies came out in 2011. But Thor has been available on DVD since September, and Captain America since October.

As for Iron Man 2? Yeah, that movie hit theaters in 2010. In fact, when my wife and I finally saw it last year, it was streaming on Netflix. Making it kind of the opposite of exclusive.

It would be one thing if Epix were a free basic cable station, which was proudly trumpeting its coup of winning the rights to these three successful movies. But you have to pay for Epix. It's offered on the Dish Network, among others, but it ain't part of your basic subscription. You have to pay extra.

We live in an age where its possible to get so many movies in so many ways, so quickly after they hit theaters (and even while they're in theaters if you want to buy an illegal bootleg), that it seems very antiquated to be hyping up what amounts to a clever pairing of long available properties, nakedly designed to whet your appetite for next week's opening of Joss Whedon's The Avengers. But which geeks are they really trying to appeal to here? Which geeks counting the hours until The Avengers opens have not already seen these three movies? Probably multiple times?

Thanks but no thanks, Epix. We're even considering a move to the Dish Network, but I don't think we'll be adding you any time soon. Even if you can show us The Avengers, The Amazing Spider-Man and The Dark Knight Rises in August of 2013.