Garfield movie turns a profit after all
According to Deadline, it looks like, while box office intake was slow of late, the Garfield Movie has proven financially successful as a result of its global gross so far:
As for Furiosa, if anyone's interested in knowing what a professional comics writer thinks of moviegoing experience, I found Canadian Jim Zub talking all about his and his wife's experience with commercials impeding upon the ability to enjoy the film (though at this point, it's apparent not many did regardless):
It's great the Garfield Movie's actually succeeded in its own way. But to be sure, depending on how you view the issue, even more adult movies have to be able to avoid being PC if the filmmakers really want to draw in audiences. And today's filmmakers clearly don't have what it takes to accomplish all that.
Meanwhile, Sony’s The Garfield Movie reigns with a second weekend of $14M (-52%), global weekend of $41M, domestic cume of $51.5M, and global of $152.2M. Given those low family ticket prices, admissions for Garfield this weekend outstripped Furiosa again, with 1.3 million admissions to 700K admissions. Garfield’s average ticket price was $10.75 vs Furiosa’s $15.Yes, a most pleasant surprise. Garfield's latest screen production - this time more animated than the mid-2000s films were - has turned out successful in its own way, though obviously a shame moviegoers are discouraged at this point from attending a lot of Hollywood movies because of how pretentiously PC they've become. Which, thankfully isn't the case here, as the following review by Jim Schembri points out:
As we all should know by now, cartoon feline Garfield, created in 1976 by comic strip artist Jim Davis (an executive producer on the film), is characterized by his love of eating and sleeping, his hatred of exercise and healthy living, and his “whatever” attitude to life in general.That could explain why a lot of critics for major newspapers and TV/radio regrettably hate it, because the animators refused to follow their PC beliefs. Ironically, even if it did, they'd likely still hate it deliberately, and act like they have no idea what could go wrong. If movies are failing, it's because the PC crowd actually wants them to, even as they make themselves look unintelligible by refusing to guess, let alone analyse, what's wrong with the script.
All very politically incorrect – especially for a kids’ film, given that anything designed for that demographic is supposed to be a delivery vehicle for positive, progressive messages as well as entertainment. (Disney has proved that forcing this concept can lead to very costly failure.)
So, what an unalloyed joy it is to see that the creatives behind this wonderful movie (directed by Mark Dindal) have opted, quite decisively, to preserve all those qualities that have made Garfield an icon of the politically incorrect. Chalk it up as a blow in the Culture Wars.
As for Furiosa, if anyone's interested in knowing what a professional comics writer thinks of moviegoing experience, I found Canadian Jim Zub talking all about his and his wife's experience with commercials impeding upon the ability to enjoy the film (though at this point, it's apparent not many did regardless):
Stacy and I saw Furiosa tonight. Before I even get to the movie itself, we had to laugh at the insanity of moviegoing in 2024.
— Jim Zub 🎲 (@JimZub) June 3, 2024
$16 per ticket (regular screen, no AVX, no IMAX)
Once the screening time started there were 15 commercials!!
Not even movie trailers, just ads!
After the 3rd ad we started counting and Stacy made a list on her phone because it was just so ridiculous.
— Jim Zub 🎲 (@JimZub) June 3, 2024
I paid a monthly streaming subscription fee-worth per person so you can firehose ads at me?
Nah. You pushed it too far and broke the theater habit for me.
Wow, so this left-wing writer really found it that bad with the commercials piling on, huh? Reminds me of an old MAD satire from the 1980s, at the time commercial TV was going out of their way to interrupt movies ad nauseum towards the end with infinite advertising. But, as unfortunately could be expected, Zub won't ask whether the film's impact was dampened by the PC notion of a "sexless girlboss". John Nolte comments like this:The only way to make prequels work is to change the foundation we thought we knew. Give the audience a surprise or vastly broaden the scope + enrich the characters.
— Jim Zub 🎲 (@JimZub) June 3, 2024
You can't just connect already connected dots with characters we know are in zero danger. It's narratively inert.
First, this $200 million act of stupidity that dropped a sexless girl into a Mad Max movie flopped on Memorial Day Weekend. Then Furiosa was responsible for driving the Memorial Day Weekend box office to a 26-year low. Then, without any new competition, Furiosa came in third place in week two behind two children’s movies — Garfield and If. Mad Max with a Sexless Girlboss is dying at the domestic box office (still hasn’t topped $50 million after two weekends), dying at the worldwide box office (only $114 million after two weekends), and now we’re told this bomb is killing off an entire movie theatre.Not me. At this point, what they're doing is humiliating women. Also lost in all this junkyard mountain is the question whether the filmmakers have any creative freedom allowed by the studios. One day, we may discover they no longer did by the time such a film was made. Alas, liberals like Zub show no interest in commenting on such challenging issues regarding artistic freedom even in comicdom. And then we wonder how the comics medium's collapsing along with moviemaking.
“Stephen Goddard, the manager of Emerald Cinema Complex in [Emerald, Queensland], sold just 222 tickets to” Furiosa during its opening week, the Daily Mail reported. He says that these “disastrous numbers could spell the end of his 20-year business.”
He explained that a movie people actually want to see “would usually sell 1050 tickets in a week,” so he “will probably shut down.”
“Back in 2006 to 2009,” he said, “the top movies sold 4500 – 5000 seats, We did 66,000 seats all through that period. We will do possibly 30,000 seats this year if we are lucky.”
“We will probably shut down, quite truthfully,” he added, “and I know that Mount Isa [cinema] is in the same boat. I have spoken to them and they are looking at it.”
You produce a Mad Max movie without Mad Max, and then, instead of making the character of Furiosa a hot babe with some sex appeal, the filmmakers took a lovely actress with sex appeal, shaved her head, and gave her the body of a 14-year-old boy.
Who wants to watch that?
It's great the Garfield Movie's actually succeeded in its own way. But to be sure, depending on how you view the issue, even more adult movies have to be able to avoid being PC if the filmmakers really want to draw in audiences. And today's filmmakers clearly don't have what it takes to accomplish all that.
Labels: animation, comic strips, misogyny and racism, politics, sales
