Are the movie studios and, in particular, Sony worried the upcoming movie season chock full of sequels — Shrek, Bourne, Die Hard, Pirates, Harry Potter and Evan Almighty, just to name a few? That’s the talk in last weekend’s Wall Street Journal (yes folks, a free link).
That said, I was a bit surprised at the fretting by Merissa Marr over the prospects for Spider-Man 3, with the countless trailers out on the Internets, S3’s debut in Japan (BOOO!), 7-Eleven drink cups and the Spider-Man 2.1 DVD set with extra “sneak peaks” of S3 and extra footage, all designed to steal your money away from buying… good comics.
Over-exposure may be the point here, along with this very sharp observation from Marr about S3 while taking into account the recent and future prospects of a super-powered rival: “It’s a harder sell when a superhero explores his inner self, as last summer’s Superman Returns proved. Sony Pictures isn’t leaving anything to chance: It has launched a megabucks marketing campaign that seems more like the sales pitch for a first-time movie than a sequel.”
April 16th, 2007 at 7:07 pm
The Spider-Man movies have pretty much always been about Peter exploring his “inner self”, so I doubt anyone is really concerned about that. With three villians and what looks like at least 4-5 huge action set pieces it seems like more action than ever.
Although the most unbelievable item in that article is the claim that the Transformers budget is $145 million. Please. I don’t care if they paid all the actors scale, there is no way that film “only” cost that much.
April 16th, 2007 at 10:39 pm
I’m sure Sony’s lowering expectations so that when they do score, it’ll look huge. Politicians do the same thing all the time when it comes to poll numbers during campaigns or releasing fund raising totals.