According to The Hollywood Reporter, Warner Bros. might lose up to $150M in regards to their latest bomb "King Arthur: Legend of the Sword." This seems to be only the first of what, many are predicting, will be an endless amount of Box-Office bombs this summer.
A particularly interesting quote coming from the THR article:
"King Arthur is a paint-by-numbers Hollywood disaster — wrong director, wrong cast, wrong script, etc.," says box-office analyst Jeff Bock. "The whole Game of Thrones-on-steroids direction the studio went with from the get-go just didn't get anyone psyched to see this."
The Independent elaborates ...
“Some of the tent poles are just not as strong this year,” 20th Century Fox head of domestic distribution Chris Aronson says. “Pirates of the Caribbean? It's the fifth one. Transformers? It’s the fifth one.”
'Fox has just released their sixth instalment in the Alien franchise — Alien: Covenant — and are releasing the third in the rebooted Planet of the Apes series, War for the Planet of the Apes."
I always go back to this Steven Spielberg quote, which seems to become more prophetic by the year:
"There's eventually going to be an implosion — or a big meltdown. There's going to be an implosion where three or four or maybe even a half-dozen megabudget movies are going to go crashing into the ground, and that's going to change the paradigm. We were around when the Western died and there will be a time when the superhero movie goes the way of the Western. It doesn't mean there won't be another occasion where the Western comes back and the superhero movie someday returns." - Steven Spielberg to THR
My reaction to Guy Ritchie's latest failure?
Shocking. Mystifying. I mean, who could have seen this coming? Guy Ritchie's "King Arthur: The Legend of the Sword" has completely tanked at the North American Box-Office. Of course, I am kidding. Most experts have predicted that this summer will be the worst in a decade for Hollywood. It seems like they've overbooked, overworked if you will, themselves into sequel oblivion. The problem this summer is just this, too many useless sequels, prequels have been booked. The movies with an only original idea are Christopher Nolan's "Dunkirk," and Edgar Wright's "Baby Driver." A fifth Transformers movie is being released ditto a sixth Alien (I'll be talking about that film later today in another post). Why was "King Arthur" greenlit? They didn't know that people would not be interested in that story? People were sure as hell not going to go see the film because Guy Ritchie directed it. The film's budget is $175 million, good luck nabbing even half of that back in worldwide receipts Warner Bros.
