The Madame Web Failure Thread (And the Success of Dune: Part 2 Thread)
POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Tuesday, April 16, 2024 01:07
VIEWED: 6818
PAGE 10 of 12
Looks like YOLO is done. I didn't see any international bump at all this weekend and it still hasn't been bumped from $479 Million this late into the week.
Currently, Dune: Part 2 has $512 Million worldwide and is still pulling in nearly $3 Million per day in the States.
Any bets on the next US released movie that will knock off the Chinese movies that are otherwise still dominating the top 5?
Kung Fu Panda is never going to bump YOLO or Pegasus 2, or even Article 20 for that matter, but it will likely take 5th place from Boonie Bears: Time Twist unless that was a new release and is still going to make a killing in China.
https://www.the-numbers.com/box-office-records/worldwide/all-movies/cu
mulative/released-in-2024
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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
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28.10.2021
The Contested Politics of ‘Dune’
It’s a Trap
Herbert said many times that Dune’s central theme is the ‘Dangers of the Superhero’. In a piece of that name, republished in Tim O’Reilly’s The Maker of Dune, Herbert claims that ‘the original spark’ of the novel was his conviction that ‘superheroes are disastrous for mankind’, and a desire to dramatise how the mythmaking impulse that crowns a Hero inevitably conjures a toxic, totalitarian social system of ‘demagogues, fanatics, con-game artists… [and] innocent and not so innocent bystanders.’
Dune, then, explores what makes the Hero seductive enough that people willingly, even rapturously, ‘turn over their judgement and decision-making faculties’. This framing locates Dune alongside projects like Adorno’s ‘F-Scale’, in the grand tradition of postwar theorising about fascist subjectivity. Rather than theorise the seductiveness of the fascist imagination, Herbert’s novel is intended to function as a trap, a mechanism intended both to perform the siren song of hero-worship and simultaneously estrange them from that experience, exposing their own complicit desires for it.
The result is a text in which the surface narrative of imperial power fantasy is conveyed through multiple viewpoints, each of which undercuts and complicates the others. The novel provides plenty of clues for how readers are intended to approach this hedge of perspectives. An example is Leto’s advice to a young Paul:
‘Knowing where the trap is—that’s the first step in evading it. This is like single combat, Son, only on a larger scale—a feint within a feint within a feint… seemingly without end. The task is to unravel it.’
Leto speaks of the politics in the novel, but his advice applies to the politics of the novel, too. Little should be taken at face value. Each element of the narrative is meant to provoke reactions in the reader, misdirect their attention, and set them up for the next confounding or estranging jolt.
The critical elements of the novel are found in the framing and subtext, in the interplay of perspective, and especially in the sardonic tone that suffuses the text. Here again, the text offers the careful reader clear instruction. In one of the epigraphs framing the narrative, Paul says of his own performance as a ‘hero’:
‘The person experiencing greatness… must have a strong sense of the sardonic. This is what uncouples him from belief in his own pretensions. The sardonic is all that permits him to move within himself.’
Dune’s dour, self-lacerating tone is what allows the novel to ‘move within’ itself and its own heroic pretensions. Stilted dialogue, caustic asides, and other sour notes dampen ostensibly epic and exciting plot elements, recasting Paul’s ‘hero’s journey’ as a descent into cynical self-destruction, as when Paul turns to his companion Stilgar in a moment of triumph to find his friend has ‘become a worshipper,’ a mere ‘creature’ ruined by Paul’s own ambition. By poisoning its feast of fascist aesthetics, the novel strives to put us off the taste for good.
The first and in some ways most important reader to fall into this trap was John W. Campbell, editor of Analog magazine, where the first version of Dune was serially published. A notorious aficionado of psychic übermenschen, Campbell was thrilled by this ‘grand yarn’, and his correspondence with Herbert about the manuscript shows little initial awareness of its critical treatment of his favourite themes.
Campbell’s embrace allowed the ambitious narrative to see the light of day: without the Analog publication, Herbert would have had an even harder time selling the text as a novel. But his reaction also showed the weakness in the book’s approach. While the seductive fascist aesthetic is right up on the surface, inescapable, the critical and estranging elements have proved all too easy to miss, by Campbell and generations of readers that have followed him. Worse, this narrative mechanism is most likely to fail those already targeted for fascist recruiting: young people an
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You're a fucking joke dude.
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Oh... BTW...
It appears that there is actually a lot more dialogue in Dune: Part 2 than just 952 words. Much of the movie is spoken in some foreign (likely made up) language with subtitles provided on screen.
The text that I had pulled from the subtitle file for the movie would have just been the English words being spoken, since making a subtitle file for the subtitles already on screen for the foreign words wouldn't only be redundant, but would likely be superimposed over them in such a way where they were virtually unreadable.
That being said, I have no idea how many words are actually spoken in the movie, but it's a lot more than 1,000.
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Bruce says Madame Web was in 1,058 theaters last weekend. It will probably still be in that many until Thursday night.
Just saw this article claiming that Sony is pulling it.
https://comicbookmovie.com/spider_man/madame-web/madame-web-sony-pulls
-marvel-movie-from-theaters-after-just-5-weekends-and-its-a-bigger-flop-than-morbius-a209942#gs.6lnryj
Doesn't look like it got any international bump this week. It may have already been pulled internationally.
If nothing changes, it didn't even crack $100 Million.
It appears that article wasn't correct. According to Bruce's theater counts, Madame Web will still be playing in 172 theaters in the US, down from 1,058 last week.
It's at $97,616,825 worldwide right now. It only made $17,000 on Thursday night, which I believe still would have been in the 1,058 theaters. At least that's how Bruce lists Thursday movies on his charts, but it's never really been explained how all of those Thursday night preview movies get screens if they don't leach them off of the under-performing movies, so who knows?
It only made around $33k on Wednesday night regardless, so whether the further drop was from less theaters or the new Ghostbusters movie being released or a combination of both probably doesn't matter at all. I can't even really guess if it will hit $100 Million or not at this point. Bruce sometimes is still changing the final figures for movies that have been out of theaters 7 or 8 months later, and despite its poor performance it did make enough money where a $2.5 swing in its favor on the international numbers isn't out of the question. It won't be getting any more help in the US. Maybe up to $150k to $200k more if it sticks around for a few more weeks, but that's about it.
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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
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My old man actually did go to see Dune 2 with my brother this week. They like to support the local theater but the choices they've had for months now with only 2 screens have been pretty poor so they haven't been there a while.
My brother wanted to see Kung Fu Panda 4. My old man says that they should have seen Kung Fu Panda 4. They weren't very impressed.
I could tell that neither of them cared any more than I do about it. I knew that neither of them saw the first part and I asked them if they were going to watch it first and they didn't bother. Kung Fu Panda 4 would have been the better choice to just see a movie to support the local family theater. 2 hours and 44 minutes is a big time investment for a mid movie you don't care about watching.
I dunno... Me and my old man love sci-fi, and he loved the first Dune book when he read it. But I'm not surprised about his lackluster review on this. It appears to have its fans for sure, being the number 1 movie of 2024 with a likely worldwide total of $750 Million+ before it's out of theaters, but there's something about Dune that I just don't think it can be translated well enough into a movie format where I'm going to care enough to waste my time watching it.
It's probably like H.P. Lovecraft's stuff. Lovecraftian lore is great, but besides Dagon it's never been put to film in a great way. Even Dagon is just good. Most other attempts are pure trash.
John Carpenter seems to be the only one who can do Lovecraftian horror right, with both The Thing and In the Mouth of Madness being excellent movies that found a large cult audience many years after they came out. But neither of them were adaptations of Lovecraft's work while being heavily inspired by it.
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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
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Quote:A review from the National Catholic Register tells you what the movie is truly about. It is no Kung Fu Panda, that is for sure:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
My brother wanted to see Kung Fu Panda 4. My old man says that they should have seen Kung Fu Panda 4. They weren't very impressed.
‘Dune: Part Two’ — False Messiahs and the Shifting Sands of Power
Denis Villeneuve’s masterpiece is a cinematic sci-fi triumph — and a stark cautionary tale.
https://www.ncregister.com/commentaries/lambert-dune-part-two
Stillsuits. Sandworms. Telepathic preborn babies. The weird world of Dune is a wonder to behold.
There is a deeply religious thread that runs through the story of Dune, and it is in this thread that the true crux of the story lies. The world of Dune is a complex universe filled with political factions, warring houses, and a history of mythic proportions. While Frank Herbert did not die a Catholic, he was raised in the faith and was greatly influenced by all the world’s major religions. In viewing the world of Dune through a Catholic lens, it very much fits into the via negativa line of thought — that is, it is an exploration of how religion, and therefore power, can be misused and abused. Herbert wrote Dune as a warning against religious fanaticism and how power seems to necessarily attract corruptible people, and in this sense, Dune: Part Two succeeds in telling the tragedy of Paul Atreides — and indeed, it is a tragedy, for Paul is the epitome of an anti-hero. While the Fremen eventually come to revere him as their savior, they do so only after Paul spends a good portion of the film wrestling with this self-fulfilling prophecy; for as his visions show, his ascendancy to power sparks a holy war that leaves billions of dead across the galaxy.
There are also clear allusions to several key elements of Catholic theology: early in the film, Lady Jessica drinks a mysterious blue liquid called The Water of Life, and through this “baptism by spice,” she is transformed into a Reverend Mother, a religious sage whom the Fremen look to for guidance and wisdom. Water itself is also a precious symbol representing life, and the Fremen treat it as sacred. Then there is the rather obvious parallel between Paul’s journey and the life of Christ, albeit an inversion of it, for Paul’s promise of turning Arrakis into a “green paradise” will come at a great cost to others’ lives and not his own.
It is also a philosophical examination of the nature of power and its forms. Watching through a Christian lens, one can’t help but feel triumphant sorrow for the character of Paul Atreides and his rise as Muad’dib, the Lisan al Gaib, Voice from the Outer World. He is unwittingly cast into a role that he never wanted in the first place, but it becomes unavoidable as the nature of what he must do to gain political power over his opponents comes into clearer focus. Thus, the burden of sin remains heavy and all-encompassing, even thousands of years into the fictional future.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Well if that's the case, I think I'd rather watch The Life of Brian again instead.
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Quote:Why did the Emperor want to destroy House Atreides?
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Well if that's the case, I think I'd rather watch The Life of Brian again instead.
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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
https://www.google.com/search?q=why+did+the+emperor+want+to+destroy+ho
use+atreides
Paul Atreides took his revenge one step too far by overthrowing the Emperor. If he hadn't done the childish thing by forcing the Emperor to bow-down, the war in the next Dune movie would have been avoided. Paul's wife was completely disgusted by Paul humbling the Emperor. She and Paul had discussed this over and over, had come to an agreement, but Paul broke the promise at the last minute. The end of the movie shows Paul's wife, mad as hell at him, marching out into the desert without Paul. Then the credits roll. THE END.
Movie-watching ex-husbands who frequently disappointed their wives probably can't make the connection with the disastrous war that will follow from Paul disappointing his wife at the end of Dune 2. But that is why they are divorced. Frank Herbert, who wrote Dune, learned that from personal experience with Flora Lillian Parkinson (married 1941; divorced 1943).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Herbert
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Meh
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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
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