There's No Place Like "Tomorrowland"

This is NOT a still from the movie. © 2015 Malcolm F.

Okay I didn't planed to write this because I was supposed to be start writing the main thing in two days. I don't even have a drawling for this post. But I decided to talk briefly about Disney's "Tomorrowland", it's failure, and the upcoming originals in general.

Okay "Tomorrowland" is an original intellectual property not just for The Walt Disney Company but also the entertainment movie industry as well. I'm saying this because currently the movie industry is mostly flooded with franchise squeals and remakes but I want to give my attention on this movie. Walt Disney Pictures, as well as Hollywood experts, were hoping for about $40 million or $50 million dollars at the box office. Sure, George Clooney and animation veteran Brad Bird, who also directed another live-action hit Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, was a perfect match for the film's hopeful successes.

But given it's a science-Fiction movie that is generally hard to sell, the movie slightly fell below expectations. Moreover, this film might have divided the critics and, possibly, the audience (I haven't dig around the articles that much so all I read was that the movie gets a "so-so B CinemaPoll score according to The Hollywood Reporter)

According to movie expert Paul Dergarbedian, movie studios who want to make original projects have to watch the budget. The budget for "Tomorrowland" cost $180 million; it opened about $38.1 million in the opening weekend. Dergarbedian said that studios should make the budgets more comfortable (and not highly-budget like $180 million or over-budget which creates even more pressure on box office dollars to break even) in order for the original films to be successful.

"Tomorrowland" is not the first original with that kind of a budget and the mediocre reviews to fail, "Jupiter Ascending" was hoping to break the 'sequel and remake' mold of Hollywood. It was an original film in terms of it wasn't a remake or a sequel, but it wasn't original in terms of story (Mila Kunis getting rescued several times by Channing Tatum was an example). So as a result, it failed in the box office.

Currently, the disaster flick "San Andreas", while seemly not an intellectual property, is seen hopeful to crash the box office. Dwayne Johnson, who stars in this film, says that it features family and heart that wasn't included in other recent disaster movies which include characters that audience don't care about. Both "Jupiter Ascending" (which was made by the Wachowskis, who also made the "The Matrix" franchise) and "San Andreas" were released by Warner Bros. Pictures, a TimeWarner company.

Time will tell if "Tomorrowland" will eventually topple the highly-cost budget. With schools out for the summer, Disney is hopeful that its original science-fiction film will played out in the upcoming weeks and create a line of more originals in the works. But Hollywood seems to change it's thoughts. Because of the movie's aforementioned budget, it's mostly unlikely that "Tomorrowland" will ever become a moneymaker.

Once again, I didn't planed to write this because I'm schedule to write the main thing on June 1st. But after reading some of the articles of "Tomorrowland", I figured that I would write my explanation on it rather than trying to come up with a post that either to do about my life or with something that happened in my life. I will write another post tomorrow before I write the regular thing. Until then, thanks for reading.