Pacific Rim Beaten by Adam Sandler at Box Office

[mitchell271]

Oh... oh god. That's terrible news! I can understand Despicable Me 2 beating it because it's a family movie and the first one was great but Adam Sandler's latest schlock movie beating it is pathetic. Did everyone forget his last movie, Jack and Jill? And how it got nearly all the Razzies last year?

And people wonder why I'm bitter.

 

[CaptainThom]

To be honest i don't care for Pacific Rim but Adam Sandler's movies are awful.

 

[Piorn]

Pacific Rim is not even out here in germany!
We'll even it out!

 

[COMaestro]

I saw Pacific Rim yesterday and it was a fun movie. Not necessarily "good", but definitely fun. I don't think it deserves to be the #1 movie in America (or the world) or anything like that, but for all that is holy, it should be doing better than Grown Ups 2. When I heard there was a sequel being made, I couldn't believe it. I didn't even know the first one made enough money to justify a sequel.

I adored Despicable Me once I saw it, though, so I fully expected the sequel to do well.

 

[Darren716]

I knew this was going to happen but it doesn't make me any less depressed about it happening. It baffles me that people will pay money to watch Adam Sandler make poop/piss/fart jokes for an hour and a half. Last year I was at a friends house for a movie night and they had rented Jack and Jill, I didn't laugh once and expressed my distaste with it afterwards but they just said I don't like any movies. No I enjoy a ton of movies I just don't enjoy horribly made ones. Unfortunately I wasn't able to see Pacific Rim over the weekend but I'm going tonight with some friends and hopefully I'll enjoy it.

One final thing watch the first 2 minutes of the following video (embedding isn't working for me again) in order to see the reason why Grown Ups 2 got first place at the box office. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9QbhTvoDUk

 

[Darth Sea Bass]

I dunno i think it's got a decent chance of making it's money over a longer run the people at the studio had to know it was probably gonna go down this way.

It's not like they did a Dredd with it and release it at a limited number of cinemas in 3D only i mean they must have been huffing glue to think that was a winning strategy.

 

[TAGM]

On the subject of Grown Ups 2:
I actually had the chance to go into an American cinema - in Downtown Disney in Florida, no less! - To see Monsters University (Good as always for a Pixar movie) and Heat (Pretty good, yeah.)
Grown Ups 2 ads came up both times, and there was some pretty heavy laughter both times - the second time more then the first, probably because kids were in the audience of the first film and didn't get the jokes.
Me, I was busy flipping middle fingers at the screen over the stupid "Oh har har look a bunch of gay guys are cleaning a car this is very uncomfortable for the main character!" shit, but I won't deny that people - normal semi-upper-middle-I-dunno-really class people (They can afford to get to Downtown Disney, people, that says SOMETHING about their income) were laughing.
Were there some Pacific Rim adverts there too? Maybe, I can't remember. They sort of got lost in the shuffle, along with World War Z and such.
Maybe that's the issue there - the adverts are getting a bit too over-saturated with gritty fighty si-fi movies, and your average movie goer can't remember which was the one with the robots and which were the ones with the zombies. (Hell, my own mother couldn't tell there even WERE Zombies in World War Z, she thought it was a World War type film!) Oh, but they can remember that one with Chris Rock and Adam Sandler in it! That looked pretty funny, lets go see that.

Then again, I could just be forgetting it because I didn't take it seriously because the name "Pacific Rim" sounds like it belongs in a porno movie more then a mecha-suit one.
Hey, I was on a three week vacation, people! You can't expect me to do that proper thinking crap ALL the time.

Still, I'm not going to panic and proclaim this the death of all good movies ever because the L.C.D. is ruining EVERYTHING and so on. We've had 3 transformer movies, and now we're getting this, which is apparently another transformer movie under a different name - for better and worse. This stuff isn't dying out anytime soon, by the looks of things.

 

[Snazzymathematics]

That's it, I'm fucking done. Get the guns, ladies and gents, 'cause we're going on a witchhunt to kill every mutha fucka who watched Grown Ups 2 instead of Pacific Rim. Show no mercy.

 

[RedEyesBlackGamer]

Yeah, the reviews I've seen are pretty masturbatory. It isn't that good. The main characters' robot does almost all the fighting and it is utterly predictable. I think that it being full of cliches was intentional, but it means that you will never be surprised. It was entertaining, but it was not the second coming of Jesus.

A movie can be great without surprise. I wasn't particularly wanting to go see Despicable Me 2, I'm just not a kids movie type of person, but since my friends decided to go see it, I did go with them. I pretty much saw everything that happened in that movie coming a mile away. It was very predictable.

Yet....I still laughed my ass off, enjoyed it immensely, and say it is a great movie and a must see.

Seriously, if I had to be surprised by everything and everything had to be ground-breaking for me to call it great, amazing, and wonderfully entertaining to me, I would be an extremely bored as well as boring person. Really it isn't about how surprising a movie is, it is about how well a movie does old concepts.

I will be going to see Pacific Rim next week, an considering I don't need to be "surprised", I'm most likely going to love it, and probably as much as everybody else that is gushing over it.

Pretty much as Bob said about Pacific Rim, it is refreshing to see new IP in an industry that seems to not know how to make new IP anymore and is just relying on remakes sequels.

Considering how the things like J.J. Abrams trashing up the Star Trek franchise happens these days, I wish more movie makers would just go to the drawing board and make something new, new I.P., even if it uses predictable points from other movies.

Off-T: Seriously though, we need to run J.J. Abrams out of the industry, or at least make it so he can only work on movies that are 100% of his own making and bar him from doing "re-imaginings". Seriously, that guy and his team of writers are worth crap, when it comes to working on existing I.P., they don't know the meaning of the word respect, the only word they know is ruin.

It was fun, but I don't see the gushing. Maybe it is because we finally have a benchmark for giant robot combat. Michael Bay could watch it and take notes. Combat has weight, feeling, spectacle, and you can actually tell what is going on.

 

[ccggenius12]

Pacific Rim had to compete with an MTG pre-release for my free time this past weekend. One of these things can still be done, the other can't. Guess which one got my money?
Spoiler, I'll probably go see Pacific Rim later, because I can.

 

[WolfCross]

I haven't seen either movie, but can we maybe, kinda, sorta stop pretending like Pacific Rim is this landmark in filmmaking? It's just a big monster movie... That's basically it from what I've seen and heard. We've had plenty of those.

The movie apparently is doing quite well even, yet still people are complaining that another more shallow movie is beating it at the box office. Talk about sour grapes.

To you sir i give my entire collection of interweb cookies. The thing that makes me "Not want to live on this planet anymore/weep for humanity" is the degree to which the internet is collectively losing it's mind over this so called travesty.

The action was entertaining granted, but this is about as dumb as film making gets, it had a shoddy narrative and even the parts that tried to be clever failed pretty hard. Not to mention that box office standings are one of the biggest imaginary pissing contests of all time. The only thing that is relevant in terms of a film's success from a financial standpoint are it's earnings compared to it's budget (which i'm more than sure it will clear).

 

[DrOswald]

Yeah, the reviews I've seen are pretty masturbatory. It isn't that good. The main characters' robot does almost all the fighting and it is utterly predictable. I think that it being full of cliches was intentional, but it means that you will never be surprised. It was entertaining, but it was not the second coming of Jesus.

A movie can be great without surprise. I wasn't particularly wanting to go see Despicable Me 2, I'm just not a kids movie type of person, but since my friends decided to go see it, I did go with them. I pretty much saw everything that happened in that movie coming a mile away. It was very predictable.

Yet....I still laughed my ass off, enjoyed it immensely, and say it is a great movie and a must see.

Seriously, if I had to be surprised by everything and everything had to be ground-breaking for me to call it great, amazing, and wonderfully entertaining to me, I would be an extremely bored as well as boring person. Really it isn't about how surprising a movie is, it is about how well a movie does old concepts.

I will be going to see Pacific Rim next week, an considering I don't need to be "surprised", I'm most likely going to love it, and probably as much as everybody else that is gushing over it.

Pretty much as Bob said about Pacific Rim, it is refreshing to see new IP in an industry that seems to not know how to make new IP anymore and is just relying on remakes sequels.

Considering how the things like J.J. Abrams trashing up the Star Trek franchise happens these days, I wish more movie makers would just go to the drawing board and make something new, new I.P., even if it uses predictable points from other movies.

Off-T: Seriously though, we need to run J.J. Abrams out of the industry, or at least make it so he can only work on movies that are 100% of his own making and bar him from doing "re-imaginings". Seriously, that guy and his team of writers are worth crap, when it comes to working on existing I.P., they don't know the meaning of the word respect, the only word they know is ruin.

It was fun, but I don't see the gushing. Maybe it is because we finally have a benchmark for giant robot combat. Michael Bay could watch it and take notes. Combat has weight, feeling, spectacle, and you can actually tell what is going on.

I think one of the big things is individual taste. I personally loved Pacific Rim and I am one of the people who cannot say enough good about it. Easily the best movie I have seen in theaters this year. But this is a movie pretty much tailored to make me love it and I can easily see why others might not.

Spoiler

In particular I really liked the plot and script for every reason people seemed to have disliked it. I like that it sticks to the basics and that they didn't try to reinvent the genre. I am glad that they did not try to surprise us with plot twists and that they were willing to embrace old tropes without trying to play it off as irony. I even loved a lot of the dialog and cliched characters people thought were a big problem.

This is because all these elements were done well. The script could get cheesy but it always remained fun. The characters were cliched but they were also likable and successfully drove the story forward. The plot was straight forward but it also never gets bogged down.

The movie is not high art but it never tried to be. By setting its sights lower it was able to achieve a high degree of excellence on the things that matter in a pure action vehicle.

 

[In Search of Username]

I don't even get the hype over this film, but then, 'it doesn't have Adam Sandler in it' is quite a selling point I guess.

 

[SonOfVoorhees]

Am not surprised at all. Dumb people watch Sandler movies. They are the common denominator.

 

[Lunar Templar]

That makes very, very sad. You there! It's your fault! Go see Pacific Rim to try and rectify the issue. It's fun.

Why are you blaming me?! I saw it first showing on Friday!! The Hell man...

 

[commodore96]

What if this is the penalty of living in a demographic computer literate enough to download the movie in a week rather than going to pay for a ticket? What if this is something that isnt about other people being stupid but is our own fault?

 

[Izanagi009_v1legacy]

That makes very, very sad. You there! It's your fault! Go see Pacific Rim to try and rectify the issue. It's fun.

Alternatively, anyone else think we should send a Jaeger after Adam Sandler and see who's laughing then?

I would say a Kaiju just to see him poisoned by Kaiju Blue and maybe have his legs eroded off by that acid

This sucks balls. I get Despicable Me 2, it's a light hearted animation that continues from a well received movie with the funny characters and the minions returning(say what you will about the original, the minions made me laugh like crazy) . Grown Ups 2, WHY ON EARTH WOULD YOU WANT TO SEE ADAM SANDLER DO HIS HORRIBLE GIG AGAIN?

 

[Flatfrog]

In other words, Pacific Rim made the fights so good it was like you were there. It was creative, well played out and didn't drag out. Not to mention that there were other designs and great structure towards both the robots and monsters to get you more engaged as they fought. Most people didn't go seeing this movie for deep story telling and depth really... we wanted awesome fights and they surpassed our expectations.

...

OT: I'm really, really sad to see how a sequel that looked sort of bad topped the best movie in 2013 in my opinion.

But that's the thing, really. I mean - yes, I'm not going to give anything to Grown Ups 2 (not that I know or care anything about it, but I certainly wouldn't expect much of it! Although Sandler was outstanding in Funny People) but no matter how much Pacific Rim might appeal to the limited demographic of the Escapist, I think it isn't surprising that that appeal hasn't translated into a major breakout success (not that it's by any means a failure!). It's very, very hard to get genre movies to appeal to audiences without any recognition factor. This is a movie with no major stars, no existing IP to relate to (apart from the 'it's basically Godzilla meets Power Rangers' hook), and whose only real selling point is 'It has great fight scenes'. I don't think that's enough.

Consider the real breakout hits in genre movie history. Kung Fu movies are a great example (I just happened to be watching 'Snake In The Eagle's Shadow' for the first time today - simultaneously awful and glorious). So for years there were many cheesy kung fu movies coming out of Hong Kong, the equivalent of the Japanese monster movies. To the untrained eye they all look silly, although to afficionados there are some gems in there which are easy to miss because while they look just as bad on the surface, actually they have some great characters or ideas or fight scenes. But you have to love the genre as a whole to devote the time to finding those gems.

Then came Enter The Dragon. It was different for a number of reasons. Obviously, it had a higher budget and was marketed better. But it also was genuinely good. It had a story that was well told, great directing and cinematography, snappy dialogue and a joyful storytelling that could appeal to the audiences who *didn't* care about the fight scenes. It could bring those audiences in, and that's why it managed to break out of the genre ghetto.

Much later you also find Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which took the next step and managed to appeal even to the more 'arty' types. It wasn't just entertainment, it was in some way a 'proper' film.

I think you can say the same about the other genres too. In SF you can think of Star Wars and of 2001; in comic book movies there was Superman and Batman, and more recently Avengers and The Dark Knight; in fantasy there's Harry Potter. These are the ones that make the real money, the ones that manage to go beyond the genre and deliver great stories and character *as well* as giant robots hitting each other.

And yes, I know Transformers made a shitload of money. That's because they had a lot more name power behind them, but also, I hate to say it, because they broke up the giant robot fights with a story about some kid getting a girlfriend. And while that annoyed the Transformers geeks, it appealed to the vast majority of other people.

So - tl;dr: whatever its merits as a giant robot smackdown, I don't think it's a big surprise that Pacific Rim is only going to be a moderate success and not a major breakout hit.

 

[Izanagi009_v1legacy]

I don't think I've ever disliked a movie as much as Pacific Rim. Sorry, people - and MovieBob, I know you love giant monster movies but Jesus, you should not have let this movie get away with being as dumb and cliched as it was.

I genuinely don't understand the big love this movie is getting here.

Everyone has different tastes man. Not getting on you, but if you dislike a movie I can understand and nod in respect but asking why there's a lot of love for the movie.... well...

First off, it has been a long time since we've gotten a monster movie about monsters fighting. Second, there are giant robots that fight monsters. That's pretty new in terms of what we've been getting in the making (mainly superhero movies, cop movies, ect.) thus it's going to spark interest. Now, what makes it amazing isn't because of the fighting alone. Transformers had fighting with giant robots too but here's the difference:

• - Transformers fighting is choppy, filled with unnecessary explosions in the background, and you couldn't tell what was happening.
  
  - Pacific Rim did everything right in the fighting. You could exactly tell what was happening because the robots and monsters fought slowly, yet in such a way it looked epic because of their enormous sizes. It made sense for them to fight slower due to their mass along the fact it was visually impressive in graphics.

In other words, Pacific Rim made the fights so good it was like you were there. It was creative, well played out and didn't drag out. Not to mention that there were other designs and great structure towards both the robots and monsters to get you more engaged as they fought. Most people didn't go seeing this movie for deep story telling and depth really... we wanted awesome fights and they surpassed our expectations.

Don't get me wrong, the faults are there too with the characters being cliche' and silly, but overall the fights topped those faults by a long shot. People who enjoyed Godzilla movies, or wanted something to be brought that the Transformers couldn't... it was given.

OT: I'm really, really sad to see how a sequel that looked sort of bad topped the best movie in 2013 in my opinion. Then again, it's the advertising and the public knowledge that harmed Pacific Rim. If it was done differently or have gotten more word, maybe we might of seen a difference. But alas, we all knew Despicable Me 2 was going to take #1 and i'm fine with that.

Personally, I liked the characters and while the drama could have been better, it was serviceable enough for me to emphasize with the pilots of the Gypsy Danger and the Marshal.

Here is the odd thing; this movie, as discussed by me and my friends, was pretty much banking on an extremely small portion of the American audience but a Large portion of the Asian market. Kaiju and Mecha fans are hard to find in America as they are usually only found in conventions and clubs because of limited appeal (though why giant nuclear laser lizards and mechs that can destroy armies has limited appeal I can't fully understand).

But Asia, especially Japan, has a heritage of Kaiju and Mecha. Giant robots as we know it was started by Mazinger Z with Gundam helping to develop them to more realistic standards (only slightly but still noticeable); Gundam to this day has a massive following in Japan as one of the biggest metaseries in the coutnry. Kaiju, as stated in Critical Intel, has been a staple of Japan's media as expressive of national issues and with the tsunami/earthquake/Fukishima, Kaiju are perfect as symbols of those forces and will make a big impact in Japan.

Even the international sale number says so, Almost 3 times the amount in the US and i bet a good portion is in the Japanese, Korean and Chinese market.