A little late getting to it but this weekend brought so many harbingers of doom on so many levels that it took me a day or two to get it all down.
Where to start.
• COLD MOUNTAIN. October is truly the cruelest month for Paramount.
Not a lot of tears being shed for the three-decade history of the Terminator franchise. Nor for James Cameron, Paramount or David Ellison. It’s not often you get the ever-supportive Deadline spelling it out like, “ And sorry, Paramount and Skydance, but this is your second back-to-back bomb.”
Awwww. ..But what about the brilliant Robot or whatever Con activation? The hashtag campaign? The 7-11 bobbleheads?
Well, Deadline isn’t going to walk away from handing out participation trophies just yet:
Paramount did a great job at mounting excitement for this film out of Comic-Con and Cinemacon..
The operation, as ever, was a brilliant success. And thankfully, the patient was the only one who died.
• A TERMINATOR TOO FAR. Another Terminator? What could go wrong? Well clearly on the set, a lot did. But you don’t have to go much farther than this passage the opening sentence of THR’s write-up, telling that the new movie, “which hoped to revive the franchise after three failed attempts.”
When we try to kick-start something again, you would think that effort would start with a good look at why the previous attempts to do the same had changed. And be open to the answer that, “Audiences just might not be interested in another version of this story.” As Sony learned with Men in Black: International. (Did that really happen?) Particularly when your lead stopped being a movie star 20 years ago.
In these days of the IP drought, we’re squeezing some rocks pretty hard looking for oil. Terminator was a wonderful story in its day – the Skynet metaphor is a gift to Op-Ed writers forevermore – but was it a boundless story, with decades of never-ending, fascinating off-shoots and countless variations that audiences will never, ever tire of? Do we wake up at night missing John Connor?
As with Star Wars, it often seems we’re taking what was a thin, or at least not-infinite plot and asking it to support a thousand possible off-shoots on its thin spine.
But what else are you gonna do if you’ve got a studio to run? Try to find a script that some…writer came up with a try and build a multi-billion dollar franchise on that? And try and get David Ellison to pay for it, more to the point.
• THIS WHEEL’S ON FIRE. There are times when you can’t win for losing. Apparently knowing that the film was circling the drain, Paramount had planned a marketing Hail Mary: when Arnold appeared on the Jimmy Kimmel show that week, I’m told a secret plan had been in the works to take the entire audience after the show to the Dark Fate premiere.
But when the gods are against you, there can be no mercy. The Getty Fire caused the cancellation of the premiere, and with it, the desperate Hail Mary stunt was not to be.
• WHAM BAM THANK YOU CAM. They bring on a very successful director, only to discover, after he’s been hired, in James Cameron’s words that “Tim wanted to make it his movie.”
Now there’s a rich history of directors coming aboard a known piece of IP and making it their own, and there’s also a rich history of otherwise successful directors coming on board a franchise and knowing very clearly the parameters they’ve got to play in (see: Marvel). But usually, that stuff is hashed out before the film starts. When the cameras are rolling and you’ve got the director and producer spilling “blood on the floor” over whose movie this is, that’s rarely the sort of process that brings about a good result.
So is it safe to turn our back on the Terminator franchise now? This time, is it really dead? But the bigger question from the smoldering wreckage is what does that fight say about where Cameron’s creative instincts are these days? And should it be making a certain mouse-oriented company a little nervous about the biggest bet in the history of cinema they have unfolding in Cameron’s tool shed now? I think I would be.
• ELLISON IN THE ROOM. But the most important aspect of Dark Fate gate is of course, what it says about the intramural competition to be the Top Ellison in Hollywood.
The Meganfreude has run high this year, as David has been recast as the grounded, sensible CoL (Child of Larry), sticking to meat and potatoes tentpoles while flighty, irresponsible Megan ran her company into the ground with vanity projects.
Certainly no one is saying that Annapurna has been anyone’s model of fiscal sobriety, but on the other hand, you could probably bankroll 20 Adam McKay indulgences with the amount of money Skydance has lost this month alone. People once chortled at Megan selling her brother the Terminator rights she had won at auction, that she was walking away from a sure-fire money machine to go off and make little art films. Doesn’t seem quite so dumb this week to have decided one more Terminator project wasn’t what the world needed.
Not to mention, where was the sober-minded, tough as nails overseer while the director and producer were spilling blood and shutting down the production?
David looks like what Hollywood still thinks a big-time producer should look like; and more important spends money on the sort of projects Hollywood believes a “serious producer” should spend money on. Works fine until it doesn’t
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