F#@k you, Batman! We’re Kings of This World!
It’s Going To Be Okay. The Dark Knight Will Not Sink the Titanic. Be at Peace With That.
Going into the August 16th weekend, I have no doubts that Ben Stiller’s Tropic Thunder will reign as king of the box office come Monday morning. In doing so, it will be the first film in a month to unseat The Dark Knight at the top spot of the weekend domestic box office. We’re all okay with that idea, right? The Dark Knight has enjoyed a pretty good run (to absolutely say the least) and last weekend’s near defeat at the hands of Pineapple Express’ five day opening lay the stage for this weekend’s toppling.
It pains me to say this… but “why so serious?” Across the internet and in comic shops and cineplexes across America, geeks are on a mission. “Sink the Titanic! Sink the Titanic!” The last few episodes of Geekscape have had “sink the Titanic” conversations that have left me sitting camera-left thinking “should I be giving a shit? Am I failing my geek brethren in not taking up arms? Should I give up the cowl and cape and walk off into the night?” I’m being honest with you in saying that this entire Sink the Titanic debate is lost on me.
Is it a bunch of wasted energy? Absolutely. The Dark Knight will pass the original Star Wars this weekend at the domestic box office ultimately roll to a $500 million domestic box office (give or take $10 million). This is $100 million short of Titanic… a movie that rumbled like an unstoppable juggernaut fueled by 16 year old girls and moms WAY back in the winter of 1997… and 1998… and then the spring of 1998. And then the SUMMER of 1998.
Let me paint you a picture of how incredible a feat Titanic’s box office performance was and why it cannot be replicated today. For months, the Titanic was present at the box office. And it built. It didn’t start amazingly well. It grew! The movie opened on the December 19th weekend of 1997 to $28 million. Not a modest bow by any means, even today, but a far cry from (in Dr. Evil voice) $600 MILLION DOLLARS! But that was just the (shit…) tip of the iceberg?
Let’s paint a picture of December 1997. Do you remember where you were? I was wrapping up my first semester at college and was excited to come home. It was freezing in Philadelphia and Austin seemed like a tropical climate by comparison. My friend Kevin McCaffrey and I had spent all night trying to finish Leisure Suit Larry: Love For Sail before racing to the airport. Before I did though, I dropped by this girl’s dorm room. We had a mutual friend and I was totally after her. She was short and from Boston. I think that’s all I remember. Shit, I don’t even remember her name (actually, I don’t remember much about her at all)! All I know is that four months earlier, I had thought college was going to be the equivalent of It’s Raining Men but instead it would be raining panties, coeds and breasts. Cut to Kevin and I playing Leisure Suit Larry in his dorm room at 3am and I think that tells you JUST HOW WRONG I HAD BEEN (and would continue to be wrong for at LEAST another year).
So I go to this girl’s dorm room just in time to see her blow me off and rush right past me to make the train. Okay. That sucked. But I got her number. Then I remember a week later asking my dad if I could call this girl. “She lives in Boston but I’ll be quick. I promise.” And it wasn’t that I was quick. She was. “I can’t talk right now. I’m rushing out the door to see Titanic with my parents.” TITANIC!?! The BOAT movie!?! With THE RETARDED KID from Gilbert Grape!?! People were going to SEE THAT MOVIE!?! WHY!?!?!
But they did. And they continued to. After opening in mid-December, Titanic went on to gross at least SEVEN FIGURES AT THE BOX OFFICE EVERY WEEKEND THROUGH JUNE 19th! June 19th! That’s over 6 months later! Can you imagine in our modern world of revolving door box office champions? Absolutely not. And for 6 MONTHS, every time I heard about “Titanic” I thought about how that chick wanted absolutely NOTHING to do with me.
The Dark Knight DOES. NOT. STAND. A. CHANCE.
Think about the factors that will lead to The Dark Knight’s 2nd place finish and a decade of change. Here’s a list just off of the top of my head that no batarang or batpod can cut through.
1) A crowded summer marketplace. Titanic opened up against Tomorrow Never Dies. A James Bond film that was flawed but still almost beat Titanic on opening weekend… before word of mouth started separating the two over Christmas and New Years. Good Will Hunting’s platform release hadn’t picked up steam yet going into the Oscars and the rest of the competition consisted of As Good As It Gets, Mousehunt and Scream 2. Titanic and Tomorrow Never Dies landed in an opening going into the holidays, before the Oscar race had started up and after the glut of smaller October and November films. The films that Titanic and Bond were competing against were specifically targeted horror films (like Alien Resurrection and Scream 2), family films (like Mousehunt) and older slanting films (Good Will Hunting and As Good As It Gets).
The Dark Knight opened as the FOURTH superhero film in the middle of July of a summer that had already seen several large event films and family movies going back to late April. Not exactly the open arena that Titanic and Tomorrow Never Dies opened to back in 1997. And going into the rest of the summer, things were only going to get harder. As Titanic floated on at the box office, it was washing into Oscar territory. Its competition got SMALLER! Titanic gobbled them up like a big fish in a very small pond. In fact, it’s largest weekend was its SIXTH which was $36 million dollars.
2) Dark Knight opened huge! Did you read the last two paragraphs? It’s the tortoise and the hare. Slow and steady always wins the race. What Titanic did was incredible. Never in its run did it ever make more than $40 million dollars in a weekend. Dark Knight shot out of the bat cave with FOUR times that in JUST ONE WEEKEND! Holy Hollywood Pocketbooks, Batman! What an opening! And then… what a bunch of finishes. A month out and the Dark Knight looks like it will be in single digit earnings for the weekend before September is through (not exactly the 6 month stretch of Titanic’s seven figure earnings).
3) DVD and VOD. A movie comes out and a week later it’s on DVD. Have you noticed that trend? Well, The Dark Knight won’t be swinging onto DVD until at least the holidays, but that won’t stop Iron Man, Hulk, Hancock and any other caped crusader from dropping in on the fun and picking up all those people who waited to get their summer fix from their couch. I didn’t even OWN a DVD player in the 90s! And I seriously doubt that you did in 1997. But now many of us do… and maybe not you or me… but a lot of people are still waiting out The Dark Knight.
4) Piracy. Hahaha! Hohoho! I must be joking, right!?! I mean, how can you do a show called Geekscape and talk to all you torrenting fiends on a weekly basis without believing that piracy can’t have THAT big an effect on the pocketbooks of the below the line Hollywood employee and distributors?!? I pwn noobs who think that I’m not the most kick @ass poon pwning pirate! LOL! ROTFL! Um, yeah. You want The Dark Knight to beat Titanic? STOP PIRATING YOUR F$%KING MOVIES! Last weekend I was grilling on my patio when across the way I saw my neighbors crowding into their living room to watch “el Batman”. No, not Tim Burton’s or Joel Schumacher’s. Not even El Batman Impiesa (El Batman Begins to the anglos). THEY WERE WATCHING EL DARK KNIGHT PERFECTLY PIRATED ONTO A DVD! I stood there with my jaw dropped open watching the opening bank heist scene as my meat burst into flames on the grill. Trust me. If my neighbors, who up until this point only watched Chespirito on TeleMundo (with the doors and windows open on full blast, mind you) can figure out how to get a pirated and perfect looking version of The Dark Knight… millions can. And they aren’t going to pay $50 plus to take the family to see it either. So “Sink the Titanic?” Uh… “stop pirating first, jerkoff?”
Okay, those are just off the top of my head. What do you think? Are you convinced yet? No? Well, watch it happen. And you know what? Whatever.
I can already hear you crying through your braces: “But Titanic’s not even a good movie!” I hate to tell you… but after repeat viewings, The Dark Knight’s not a whole lot better. Both movies are without a doubt too long and have moments where you look at your watch and think “I could be at home reading comics… and by comics I mean watching porn”. Both movies have really strong visual sequences and incredible performances. Say what you will about Leo, but he did put on a solid performance and was so put off by his Oscar snub that he skipped the awards show all together and didn’t show his face again until Danny Boyle’s The Beach.
And if you think “Titanic’s not even a good movie!” why don’t you tell that to the thousands and thousands of American’s who DON’T make up your World of Warcraft guild that DO think Titanic’s a good movie? It’s not about whether or not the movie’s good by our standards! Shit, the prequels are in the top 10 somewhere (thanks for THAT, assholes!)! And Titanic is WAY better than ANY of the prequels (I just heard you yell “noooooooooooo!”). In fact, I don’t think it’s a bad movie at all; just not one I’m interested in seeing again.
Last night I attended a tribute to Stan Winston at the Nokia Theater downtown. Before the tribute, there was a reception, and the whole night was hosted by Sony Imageworks, so the reception had a lot of effects guys and digital FX wizards in the room. I met a guy named John who does digital mapping of objects for films. His Second Life set up is probably The Matrix. The room was full of guys like John and effects people like John Dykstra and my friend Scott, who you have all seen on Geekscape and was nice enough to bring me along.
Then I saw James Cameron, standing there, talking to a few of his friends and coworkers. I slid past him to get in line for the buffet and immediately, the proximity to him made me think about this retarded “Sink Titanic” debate. And then, maybe the way he was standing, definitely the way he was dressed, whatever, Jim Cameron made me think of my dad. James Cameron reminded me of my dad and how he talks to his friends and hangs out with his friends. And it made me like the guy. And then it made me hate the “Sink Titanic” debate. Because in some weird way, it wasn’t just fucking with James Cameron. It was fucking with my dad. And that made me mad.
In early December of 1997, the Hollywood version of my dad’s film career could have been in ruins. Titanic was billed as the biggest budget in Hollywood History (and it was at the time). Two years previous, the previous most expensive movie, Water World, had come out and tanked. Judging by the box office of Kevin Costner’s Swing Vote last weekend… he has yet to recover from it. Water World wrecked Kevin Costner’s career. And my Hollywood dad could have very easily followed. Everyone was talking about what a risk the film was and how much it cost. The only picture that I had seen was one from a magazine that summer, of Cameron, waste deep in water, strapped to a steadicam and shooting a scene, with a giant headline alluding to Titanic being the second coming of Water World.
And last night, during the tribute, listening to James Cameron talk about his friend Stan Winston, I only started hating my fellow Dark Knight loving geeks more. Cameron talked about his friend with so much love and celebration that I couldn’t help loving him. I couldn’t help feeling sad about how he missed his Winston as he talked about how much Stan loved scaring people and pioneering and taking risks. He talked with excitement about turning Terminator 2 around in TWELVE AND A HALF MONTHS from first draft to film delivery (stop and think about what an achievement that is) with Stan’s help (and Dennis Murren at ILM). He talked about Stan directing second unit on Aliens and how he created a lot of the great shots in that film.
It was a lot of mixed emotions. I met Stan Winston for all of eight minutes last year and I MISSED HIM on a personal level last night. And after collaborating with him for over 20 years, James Cameron definitely missed him. I wondered if James Cameron, the day he was up to his waste in water holding a steadicam back in 1995 or 1996, went home and called his friend Stan Winston and vented. I wonder if he asked him for help. I wonder if he asked him what he could do to help save his movie and his reputation. The way James Cameron spoke made me think of moments when I catch my dad on our back patio at home sitting by himself looking at my older brother’s bench. I walk up and say “hi” and he doesn’t say anything but just takes my hand and motions for me to sit next to him and I can tell he was wondering what my brother would be doing if he was alive today. So we don’t say anything and just sit there until something in me gets too anxious and I have to get him up and in the house to go do something else.
That’s the stuff that was going through my head last night listening to James Cameron talk. And those thoughts stayed with me throughout the screening of Terminator 2 that followed. And afterwards, when Scott said “man, that movie just reigns you in, doesn’t it?” and all through my drive home. Jim Cameron’s been making our favorite movies since I was born. And a bunch of people want to fuck with his title because “it wasn’t even that good a movie.”
Well, I didn’t think I’d ever hear myself saying this… but “fuck you, Batman.” And fuck everyone that wants my Hollywood Dad’s movie sunk. The Dark Knight had a phenomenal at bat, but as you will all see, the Titanic is going to sail on.
