Civil War. Probably not the best movie to release in current year, but it does look pretty entertaining...

POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Thursday, June 12, 2025 08:12
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Will it be a failure?

Yeah. I'm pretty sure it will be.


It's got a decent amount of countries showing it. But I'm not even going to pretend to know if anybody outside of America wants to watch it. Netherlands is the only country that has reported so far and it grossed $333,025 over the weekend. I'm assuming that's probably just your average US movie opening over there unless it was an event movie.

It only did $26 Million here in addition to the Netherlands money. That's way below the amount you want to see on opening weekend to hit that break even point. We're looking between $100 to $125 Million it needs to make.

Unless the international box office ended up being surprisingly high, good word of mouth is just about all that can save Civil War now.




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Quote:

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Will it be a failure?

Yeah. I'm pretty sure it will be.

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With Alex Garland as the writer, you could have predicted failure as soon as the movie was first announced. For some reason, perhaps for tax losses since he is a reliable loser, Hollywood keeps hiring Garland.

6ix, movies written by Alex Garland tend to not break even. Civil War is typical of this trend. Ex Machina was the exception. Here is a chart of six Garland movies.

Movie Comparison: Civil War (2024) vs. Men (2022) vs. Annihilation (2018) vs. Ex Machina (2015) vs. Dredd (2012) vs. Never Let Me Go (2010)

https://www.the-numbers.com/movies/custom-comparisons-extended/Civil-W
ar-(2024)/Men-(2022-United-Kingdom)/Annihilation/Ex-Machina/Dredd/Never-Let-Me-Go#tab=day_by_day_comparison

The maximum number of movies in a comparison is 6, you need to remove one by clicking Remove in the table below before you can add another.

If there was room for a seventh movie in the graph, Sunshine (2007) would have been included. Sunshine also lost money but what else is new? https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/Sunshine-(2007)#tab=summary

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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Alex Garland's first movie writing credit was 28 Days Later. It was filmed on an $8 Million budget and grossed over $80 Million worldwide.

Dredd was probably never going to do well, even if it was a decent movie. People are generally done with reboots and have been for quite some time.

That leaves Never Let Me Go as the only movie on your list of losers where he wasn't also the director. Maybe the problem is that they need to find a different director when putting his stories to life.



It only occurs to me now that I haven't ever seen any movie that Garland has directed. And I've only seen two from his catalogue of written work. Only now that we're having a conversation about him and I'm looking into what he's done did I know that he directed the reboot of Judge Dredd, which I had pretty much already forgotten was a movie that happened.

I've seen Ex Machina up on a streaming service before and always meant to get around to watching it but never did. Though I am familiar with the Ex Machina movie poster, I only now found out that Garland wrote and directed that movie. It's probably pretty good. I'm actually motivated to watch it now.

Never Let Me Go was the only movie of his other than 28 Days Later that I've seen, and it was a good watch. $15 Million to film it is a stupid number though, especially back in 2010 money. He's already proven that he can make a much more visually impressive movie on less than half that budget.

It appears that he rides a thin line between Indie and Mainstream, choosing to put a bunch of big names in his productions, which I'm sure is what is eating up a lot of these budgets.

I think he would do a lot better if he went back to making films with no-name actors. He put an unknown Cillian Murphy on the map, who probably wouldn't have ended up playing Oppenheimer last year if he hadn't done 28 Days Later all the way back in 2002.

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Quote:

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

I think he would do a lot better if he went back to making films with no-name actors. He put an unknown Cillian Murphy on the map, who probably wouldn't have ended up playing Oppenheimer last year if he hadn't done 28 Days Later all the way back in 2002.

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Alex Garland wrote and directed the 8 episodes of Devs.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8134186/fullcredits/?ref_=tt_cl_sm
I don't know if Devs was profitable, but it certainly was memorable.

The little inside joke for the nerd programmers working on Devs is that "DEVS" is the way the ancient Romans would have carved the word "Deus" on the marble frieze of their temples. The nerds were working on programming a quantum computer to see and hear the past, even what was unknown or forgotten. They were attempting to build the ultimate spying machine for the government. The closer they got to Deus working, the more scared they got, especially when theoretical physics equations allow the computer to also look into the future, not just the past. If the Devs project is successful, it is proof that the nerd programmers working on it are not in control of themselves. The nerds were very worried that they were meat puppets without free will. That idea causes dramatic confrontations between management and programmers as they approach their ultimate goal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devs_(TV_series)
https://www.metacritic.com/tv/devs/

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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Interesting.

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Quote:

---

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Interesting.

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I suspect that Alex Garland wrote “Devs” after he read the very short story “What's expected of us” by Ted Chiang | 06 July 2005
https://www.nature.com/articles/436150a

Garland saw the dramatic possibilities inherent in the story from Nature. The Deus device is probably Garland’s TV version of the Predictor device in Ted Chiang’s “What's expected of us”.

Here is the whole story from the pages of Nature:

This is a warning. Please read carefully.

By now you've probably seen a Predictor; millions of them have been sold by the time you're reading this. For those who haven't seen one, it's a small device, like a remote for opening your car door. Its only features are a button and a big green LED. The light flashes if you press the button. Specifically, the light flashes one second before you press the button.

Most people say that when they first try it, it feels like they're playing a strange game, one where the goal is to press the button after seeing the flash, and it's easy to play. But when you try to break the rules, you find that you can't. If you try to press the button without having seen a flash, the flash immediately appears, and no matter how fast you move, you never push the button until a second has elapsed. If you wait for the flash, intending to keep from pressing the button afterwards, the flash never appears. No matter what you do, the light always precedes the button press. There's no way to fool a Predictor.

The heart of each Predictor is a circuit with a negative time delay — it sends a signal back in time. The full implications of the technology will become apparent later, when negative delays of greater than a second are achieved, but that's not what this warning is about. The immediate problem is that Predictors demonstrate that there's no such thing as free will.

There have always been arguments showing that free will is an illusion, some based on hard physics, others based on pure logic. Most people agree these arguments are irrefutable, but no one ever really accepts the conclusion. The experience of having free will is too powerful for an argument to overrule. What it takes is a demonstration, and that's what a Predictor provides.

Typically, a person plays with a Predictor compulsively for several days, showing it to friends, trying various schemes to outwit the device. The person may appear to lose interest in it, but no one can forget what it means — over the following weeks, the implications of an immutable future sink in. Some people, realizing that their choices don't matter, refuse to make any choices at all. Like a legion of Bartleby the Scriveners, they no longer engage in spontaneous action. Eventually, a third of those who play with a Predictor must be hospitalized because they won't feed themselves. The end state is akinetic mutism, a kind of waking coma. They'll track motion with their eyes, and change position occasionally, but nothing more. The ability to move remains, but the motivation is gone.

Before people started playing with Predictors, akinetic mutism was very rare, a result of damage to the anterior cingulate region of the brain. Now it spreads like a cognitive plague. People used to speculate about a thought that destroys the thinker, some unspeakable lovecraftian horror, or a Gödel sentence that crashes the human logical system. It turns out that the disabling thought is one that we've all encountered: the idea that free will doesn't exist. It just wasn't harmful until you believed it.

Doctors try arguing with the patients while they still respond to conversation. We had all been living happy, active lives before, they reason, and we hadn't had free will then either. Why should anything change? “No action you took last month was any more freely chosen than one you take today,” a doctor might say. “You can still behave that way now.” The patients invariably respond, “But now I kn

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Quote:

---

Originally posted by second:

Quote:

---

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Interesting.

---

I suspect that Alex Garland wrote “Devs” after he read the very short story “What's expected of us” by Ted Chiang | 06 July 2005
https://www.nature.com/articles/436150a

Garland saw the dramatic possibilities inherent in the story from Nature. The Deus device is probably Garland’s TV version of the Predictor device in Ted Chiang’s “What's expected of us”.

Here is the whole story from the pages of Nature:

This is a warning. Please read carefully.

By now you've probably seen a Predictor; millions of them have been sold by the time you're reading this. For those who haven't seen one, it's a small device, like a remote for opening your car door. Its only features are a button and a big green LED. The light flashes if you press the button. Specifically, the light flashes one second before you press the button.

Most people say that when they first try it, it feels like they're playing a strange game, one where the goal is to press the button after seeing the flash, and it's easy to play. But when you try to break the rules, you find that you can't. If you try to press the button without having seen a flash, the flash immediately appears, and no matter how fast you move, you never push the button until a second has elapsed. If you wait for the flash, intending to keep from pressing the button afterwards, the flash never appears. No matter what you do, the light always precedes the button press. There's no way to fool a Predictor.

The heart of each Predictor is a circuit with a negative time delay — it sends a signal back in time. The full implications of the technology will become apparent later, when negative delays of greater than a second are achieved, but that's not what this warning is about. The immediate problem is that Predictors demonstrate that there's no such thing as free will.

There have always been arguments showing that free will is an illusion, some based on hard physics, others based on pure logic. Most people agree these arguments are irrefutable, but no one ever really accepts the conclusion. The experience of having free will is too powerful for an argument to overrule. What it takes is a demonstration, and that's what a Predictor provides.

Typically, a person plays with a Predictor compulsively for several days, showing it to friends, trying various schemes to outwit the device. The person may appear to lose interest in it, but no one can forget what it means — over the following weeks, the implications of an immutable future sink in. Some people, realizing that their choices don't matter, refuse to make any choices at all. Like a legion of Bartleby the Scriveners, they no longer engage in spontaneous action. Eventually, a third of those who play with a Predictor must be hospitalized because they won't feed themselves. The end state is akinetic mutism, a kind of waking coma. They'll track motion with their eyes, and change position occasionally, but nothing more. The ability to move remains, but the motivation is gone.

Before people started playing with Predictors, akinetic mutism was very rare, a result of damage to the anterior cingulate region of the brain. Now it spreads like a cognitive plague. People used to speculate about a thought that destroys the thinker, some unspeakable lovecraftian horror, or a Gödel sentence that crashes the human logical system. It turns out that the disabling thought is one that we've all encountered: the idea that free will doesn't exist. It just wasn't harmful until you believed it.

Doctors try arguing with the patients while they still respond to conversation. We had all been living happy, active lives before, they reason, and we hadn't had free will then either. Why should anything change? “No action you took last month was any more freely chosen than one you take today,” a doctor might say. “You can still behave that way now.” The pa

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