I had so much fun drawing Deadpool for Wednesday’s comic, I decided to toss him in to the incentive image I have posted over at Top Web Comics. And even though I know he doesn’t appear with his mask in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, I don’t care. It simply looks too cool NOT to draw.
To see the incentive sketch, vote for Theater Hopper at Top Web Comics. In case you missed the announcement from the other day, I’m including a teaser in the blog post that links to the site. So you can kind of see some of the incentive sketch peeking through.
If your planning on voting at all, today is the day to do it. Since it’s May 1, the Top Web Comic counters have reset and everyone now has an equal shot of landing in the Top 10. Well, for the next few days, at least. Vote now and maybe we can take an early lead!
Now onto more serious matters…
As I am sure you are well aware, X-Men Origins: Wolverine opens in theaters today officially launching the summer blockbuster season. Reviews are starting to filter in and it’s averaging pretty low scores – 37% positive at Rotten Tomatoes as of this morning. I imagine that number will move more toward the middle once everything is said and done. Most of the reviews I’ve read seem to agree that the performances are very good and Hugh Jackman proves why people love him so much in this role.
Interesting side note, Hugh Jackman is the first actor to play a comic book hero in four consecutive films since Christopher Reeve as Superman. Thanks, IMDB!
It appears that the downside to the film appears to be that it’s overdone. Everything from the epic, century-long storyline, overabundance of mutants and lip service cameos. Jeffery Wells from Hollywood Elsewhere shared on April 28 that a ” credible Australian critic… ‘caught a screening… and the bad buzz is spot-on. Clunky script, unfocused plotting, cheesy special effects and terrible production values. Nearly everything looks like a set and what doesn’t look like a set looks like CG’.”
Personally, I think Fox always knew that it had a clunker on it’s hands. How else can you explain the marketing surrounding this thing? Everything from the awkward, snicker-inducing teaser played at San Diego Comic Con last year, to reports of reshoots, to the over-abundant and hyper-localized advertising, to (probably most damaging) the leek of the nearly-completed film to the internet a few weeks before the film opened in theaters. Fox has bungled this from the word “Go.”
Look at the leak in particular. On April 2, Fox head Tom Rothman claimed that the leak was an ‘unfinished version,’ ‘a complete misrepresentation of the film’ and months-old. By April 22, blogs figured out that the leaked version was the exact same running time as the final version and called Fox liars. Then, on April 29, Fox issued a statement saying they weren’t liars. Rothman was giving statements based on incomplete information.
Gee, how’d they ever manage to lose that work print to the internet in the first place? They seem so organized!
I have a tiny conspiracy theorist who lives in my head. I call him George and I occasionally like to feed him theories to ponder. George is starting to wonder out loud if Fox didn’t leak the film on purpose. This is not a new theory. Others have suggested it. But the more you think about it, the more it starts to make sense.
Imagine you are Tom Rothman and you have a $130 million tent-pole movie kicking off the summer blockbuster season. Early buzz is bad and your pouring untold millions into marketing it. How do you turn the tide? Leak the film to the internet. If critical response is bad and people don’t come to see the film during the opening weekend, you can cry foul and claim that the leak ate into your profits.
If critical response is good and people come to the theater in droves in opening weekend, you never have to talk about the leak again. Obviously the quality of the film rose above the controversy. It’s a win-win.
Steve Mason from Big Hollywood is predicting that the movie will pull in $92 million this weekend, the film is still tracking highly and the leak does not appear to have hurt Fox’s bottom line.
I suppose that’s why there have been no arrests or named suspects regarding the leak one full month after the crime was committed. Fox once vowed to prosecute to the full extent of the law an claimed the FBI and the MPAA had launched their own investigations. Maybe it’s not that big of a priority for them.
Of course, like most conspiracy theories, it doesn’t hold up very well against logic. Fox would be taking a HUGE risk by leaking the film themselves and the last thing a movie studio would want to attract is risk (especially in a down economy). Hollywood is all about what is safe and predictable. Find a formula and exploit it. Don’t rock the boat.
Still, considering how badly Fox has handled their response to the leak, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone ended up confirming the conspiracy theories. Stranger things have happened.
It’s just hard to overlook things like alternate endings shipped to different theaters as a way to draw in the audience. It feels like a gimmick. It feels desperate and tacked on. By that logic, handing out live-animals to every tenth customer doesn’t feel far off.
At this point, I would have to say my expectations for X-Men Origins: Wolverine are as low as they can possibly be. So maybe I will walk out of the theater pleasantly surprised. But what do you think? Does the conspiracy theater hold water? Has Fox bungled the marketing for this film? How do you feel about the alternate endings? Will you try to see the movie in different theaters in hopes of catching both of them, or will you wait a week for them to show up on the internet?
Leave your comments below!
Yeah, the studio added them to entice people who downloaded the film when it was leaked on the internet a few weeks ago.
They wanted them to come back and see the movie in the theater.
And as an ADDED incentive...
Every tenth customer gets their own wolverine!
Lets face the reality here, comic book movies usually cover about 3-4 months or in a massive character like spiderman about 12-15 issues but it all takes place over a few weeks. Force a two hour movie to explain a mini-series of comics that probably needed double the run time is just bad plotting. I imagine there are whole issues of the comic book that will be ignored where Wolverine meets the more contrived (thus less profitable in this “superheroes need to be realistic!” era…blah) characters.
In the end Wolverine will be profitable, he’ll get a couple of his own films set in a more proper time frame and told with less epic grandeur but I don’t know if i’ll be able to truly muster desire for them. I love wolverine, but I love the comic book wolverine, the obnoxious blue and yellow suit, the craziness in his life, all of the contrived crap. But I am just one stupid fan….what do I know?
I think I’m going to hold off on trying to see it twice to get both endings (I never have any luck with blind boxed toys so why would I with scoring a different ending of a film?) I have to say that after X3, I want my expectations to be as low as possible for this flick because then it can do nothing but entertain me. Besides, what more do I really expect? It’s a wolverine movie for crying out loud, it’s not trying to be high cinema.
I always kind of bristle when people say “It’s a comic book movie! It doesn’t have to be good!”
I’m all for mindless entertainment, but there have been enough attempts in the genre that have shown us that a comic book movie CAN be done well. Considering my affinity and closeness with these characters, it annoys me when a film can’t meet those standards.
However, Michael Gough and Pat Hingle both played Alfred and Commissioner Gordon (respectively) in four consecutive Batman movies. I realize you said ‘hero’, but I thought I’d toss that in anyway.
As for Wolverine, unless they show all the alternate endings together on TV the same way that Clue does, I doubt I’ll bother seeing it in theaters more than once. It’s hard enough to muster the enthusiasm to see it to begin with.
I couldn’t agree with you more Tom, nothing is adding up over this movie. The leak, the publicity overdrive, and like you said, the gimicky two-endings tactic. I mean it’s no Sam Jackson’s as Nick Fury is it?
The long and short of it is that the internet is an insanely powerful medium these days, and Fox are (hopefully) beginning to regret fucking around with the fanbase. I’ve never been a fan of X-Men or Wolverine, not because I don’t like them, they’re just something I’ve never got into so I don’t have that nostalgia element that prompts so many people to follow the productions of these movies to crazy degrees. But I’m still picturing a lot of fanboys/girls walking out of their local theatres this weekend frothing at the mouth and (more likely) hoping Fox scraps these ‘Origin’ stories for good — even though one for Magneto could be awesome if done properly. But on the plus side of things I’m betting todays comic will provide more laughs than Wolverine will 😀 Great punchline.
So do you think we’ll ever see studios releasing movies for free like a lot of bands do these days with albums, just so long as we sit through 20 minutes of commericals? I could totally picture Fox sinking as low as that.
I thought it was worth the ticket price, it was well cast (the actors playing Gambit and the blob were surprisingly good) and the action scenes were competently directed and the script even had a few funny lines. Sure it felt like a poor man’s x2 at times and parts of the movie were downright bad (some effects, corney lines and the plot ran a little close to x2’s at times), but when you go in expecting x-men 3 and find a mostly enjoyable action movie…
Yeah, I didn’t mean to make it sound like super hero movies can’t be good, or that there shouldn’t be some expectations. I’m just trying to get past having too much of an expectation when going into a film like Wolverine because I’ll end up nitpicking it to death and there’s almost no way it can be good at that point. I guess I’m getting sick of slapping down $10 and not enjoying the experience of watching most super hero films because of my expectations not being met. If I can go in with a clean slate I might enjoy it regardless and possibly end up happy that the film is great.
I have to concede that the high cinema remark was probably not fair, though you have to admit that there is a difference between good films and high cinema. The original Star Wars is a great film, but it’s riddled with some clunky dialogue and some pretty campy moments. Like Wolverine, Star Wars isn’t trying to be high cinema, so it’s an expectation that can be written off…
Wait, so they planned to make you buy two sets of tickets, to get two different endings, to combat piracy? Won’t this INCREASE piracy, as people try to download a screen-rip just to see 5 minutes worth of ending instead of paying $15 again to *maybe* get to see the other ending?
Orpheus: I loved that they did that with Clue. “And now here’s what REALLY happened…”
“Nearly everything looks like a set”
Could it be purposeful? Wolverine #48-50
http://www.comicvine.com/wolverine-shiva-scenario-part-1-of-3-dreams-of-gore-phase-one/37-64311/
I enjoyed it. Wish they would have done better with Deadpool but at least Sabretooth and Gambit were good. Plus we got the cooler of the two endings. But yes it does look like FOX may have leaked the print to protect a movie that might not have the legs to be a tentpole film. But really how could they expect a huge box office when Star Trek opens the following week?
Perfect Cast, acceptable story and I was okay with most of the changes (and my quibbles there are really fanboyish and irrelevant), but the squandered it on making it a movie about introducing characters, explosions and wolverine yelling at the sky.
If you would have taken the exact same cast and the bare bones of the story and handed it to Marvel Studios it very well could have been amazing even filled with good action and special effects. Instead you get this feeling that they wasted the opportunity to use this cast to tell this story in order to just cram a bunch of cgi laden over-the-top fight scenes together.
Yeah, your theory actually makes an insidious, twisted kind of sense… One I find myself agreeing with.
and yay iron man photos, I look forward to it almost as much as the promise of a third “Batman Begins” movie simply because the first was true to form and well cast.
Saw the midnight show last night, and I don’t know what people are complaining about. It was very well done, very good pace, not hard to follow at all and they did a nice job incorporating all the mutants. Deadpool made me sad, honestly – I liked Wade 🙁 Otherwise it was an EXCELLENT movie. I’ll probably see it again, in fact.
I went on a school trip today and someone brought a bootleg version of the movie to watch. i refused to one personal grounds because I am a big supporter of the industry, I don’t like steeling (yes, I’m a prude) but I’ve have heard a lot of bad reviews. THe Houston Chronicle just panned it. I”m still interested but now a little less. Let’s wait for Iron Man 2. lol
I’m leaning toward spending my mindless summer blockbuster cash for May on the new Terminator movie. I’ll see Wolverine eventually, and I’m sure I’ll enjoy it about as much as X3, but it’s not a priority.
Also apparently there is an ending out there that fixes the alleged Deadpool frak up and rumors about Ryan Reynolds in talks for a Deadpool movie. I hope all that is true. He would have to come to the realization somewhere in the film that he’s a character in a movie, that is the only thing that makes sense.
I work in a movie theatre, and we thought it would be guest-friendly to make a big announcement about the ending after the credits. We informed them they are about to watch the “A” ending and if they want to watch the “B” ending they can come back and ask us where that one is. (our theatre received both endings).
I have to make sure the building is clear, so i hung out in the theatre during the credits. Tension was building as people got restless and yelled for the credits to “hurry up!.”
then it comes, the 30 seconds they have been waiting for
and now I know what 400 people groaning at the same time sounds like.
I saw it last night before I came into work. It was–for what it was–really good, though not without it’s flaws. Obviously, Deadpool is a complaint. I think that could’ve been done better. And Gambit felt tacked on. Still, I think the one thing that could’ve made it spectacular would’ve been at the least, thirty more minutes of exposition. The whole thing felt rushed–not that a story as vast as Wolverine’s could be told in such confined space as a two hour movie, let alone two and a half. Regardless, I don’t feel the need to defend it. I think it does a fairly decent job of that without me.
So having seen the movie now, I’ve gotta say that it was definitely the best Highlander movie I’ve ever seen.
Orpheus – That’s funny. Yeah I think Wolverine threatens to cut off like people’s heads like every five minutes.