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Post by jdv on Oct 11, 2021 11:15:32 GMT -5
DESPITE nearly 2 years of waiting, a giant ad campaign, and it being the 25th (and last for Daniel Craig) James Bond movie, NO TIME TO DIE just crashed at the box office, grossing a mere $53 million in 4400 US theaters.
NO TIME TO DIE has grossed $313 million world-wide, but unfortunately for producers, the film needs to gross about 3 times that amount just to break even. That's 'cause the budget on this flick ballooned to a reported $250-300 million, plus another reported $250 million for ads.
So while final totals are not in, and VOD services like HBO Max will add money to the til, it's pretty clear that this will be the first Bond in a long time - maybe ever - to lose money.
And it's not too hard to wonder why. Like the previously invincible STAR WARS franchise, Bond drifted away from core audience expectations - in the case of Bond, a hard drinking woman banging assassin - to something pushing dubious moral theories almost completely at odds with the original character and previous movies.
Simply put, people don't want Bond attending gay pride parades, but rather banging Russian spy so hard that the spill their secrets only to get murdered by their handlers. They want him slapping ass cheeks, shooting guns, and dishing one liners, not to see him become a near parody of himself. It also probably didn't help when the director called Sean Connery's version of 007 a "rapist."
A more idiotic thing to believe - much less say to a reporter - can hardly be imagined. Hopefully this movie will lose so much money that producers will reconsider the path they've taken when they pick the next actor to play Bond... but I doubt it as Hollywood still seems content to condemn the audiences that made them rich in the first place. This year is positively littered with bloated woke stinkfests which in turn became black holes for money, and NO TIME TO TIME is now one of them.
As for Craig, who was initially so good in the part, it's ended up being quite a disappointment. Each successive movie got sillier and less gritty and by tying them all together so poorly in SPECTRE, the franchise was already on its last legs. For Craig, it will always be what might have been as opposed to what we actually got.
None of which bodes well for the future of Bond movies, especially when so many unforced errors have already been made. Which is too bad. As the oldest franchise still in existence, the character still has legs... but only if producers let them be used.
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Post by Warpig on Oct 11, 2021 12:53:19 GMT -5
I think one of the problems with Bond now is this: We are not on the same side anymore.
In the past, there was an idea, and it may even have been somewhat true at one time, that there were two sides at odds with each other and men like Bond were necessary to help tip the balance in the favor of goodness, freedom, and democracy.
This is an increasingly difficult position to maintain when we see the intellegence services worldwide take their attention away from external threats, which were never actually threats to begin with, to internal threats, namely from the free people of the West. The KGB, always a convenient boogeyman for our government, is so far from the menacing force they've been portrayed as that I doubt they've ever operated outside Russia's borders for quite some time. Being quite assured that the US was never seriously ever going to attack them. Also realizing, quite early, that the lesson the US learned from WWII is that totalitarianism is fun, and who better to learn from than our former 'opponents' and our new 'allies' in the form of Germany and Russia and see how our government policies over time have simply brought us in line with that way of thinking; the people are the enemy and they must be defeated.
So not only is this Bond a pile of unmanly woke trash, but he represents a world that was just as much fantasy as the films themselves. No matter how hard they try; you can't get around the 'uncanny valley'.
People instinctively know bullshit when they see it. The only question to be answered is if they are ok with the lies they are presented.
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Post by jdv on Oct 11, 2021 13:15:51 GMT -5
That's a great point - this franchise has been grasping ever since the Soviet Union went ass over tits. Russia is still a continental power to be sure, but short of them launching whatever nukes they have that are still working in an all-out fuck it move, they are not a threat in a global sense of the word.
But China is.
And what are the odds that Bond ever crosses blades against a communist China spy in 2021 or moving forward? Would it be zero or none?
So right off the bat, the series is rejecting the most logical set of villains. By also rejecting the core character - again, calling Connery's version a rapist is as about as crazy dumb as it gets - it leaves very little left in terms of interesting story telling.
Bond still produces some of the great action snippets going - but when the movie's nearly 3 hours long and underlying story is puke, it doesn't matter much.
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Post by Warpig on Oct 11, 2021 13:19:05 GMT -5
Big brother, I think our government looks at you and me as WAY more of a threat than China; their slave labor provider, and personal bankers.
So yeah, there's no fucking way China will EVER be depicted as an enemy, because to our government, they're not.
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