A more interesting question and one that may lend weight to Andy Serkis’ call for the UK to setup a studio dedicated to it is can it level the field?

Hollywood rules the film roost for blockbusters because it has the money, but as the price of effects falls, the UK could be in a position to make films that look, but don’t cost, £100+ million. If you can compete with the big boys and rack in £100s of millions then it would definitely be worth the investment, before you consider the cultural benefits.

The reason his box office is failing is because he’s made some decision to star in crap movies. Where Inception got great review, Knight & Day got bad ones. Nobody gives a crap what he does outside the cinema once we’re inside, but if you make a bad movie it doesn’t matter how popular you are, people won’t go to see it. The same would be true of DiCaprio. Let’s not forget that The Aviator was hardly a roaring box office success, nor were Revolutionary Road or Gangs of New York. Cruise may no longer be bankable, but then no actor ever has been since the 80s, probably because budgets have spiralled while takings haven’t.

The story is fairly simple, several unrelated and slightly odd strangers who happen to be at the same truck stop in the middle of nowhere meet Archangel Michael, who has come to tell them that God has had enough of humanity and has sent forth his angels to kill them all, but he, once a general in the Lord’s army, has come to defend a woman whose unborn child can save humanity and change God’s mind.  So the battle commences.

It’s drawn similarities to Demon Knight, which features a guardian trying to stop the last key, containing some of Christ’s blood, falling into the hands of demons.  It reminded me a bit of Maximum Overdrive, where a group of people end up at a truck stop being stalked by possessed trucks.  That and practically every zombie movie ever made.

Paul Bettany, who plays Michael, seems to have taken the idea that speaking slowly makes him sound important and austere.  It doesn’t, it just makes him sound slow.  The rest are a rag tag of characters with traits designed to make them less 2D stereotypes, not that it really works.

The biggest disappointment though is there’s not much angel on angel fighting.  Surely that’s the unique selling point of this whole movie, we want to see how an angel lays the smackdown.  We wait an age while waves of possessed humans saunter up and get chopped down by gunfire, hardly new, then Gabriel arrives and there’s a little bit of fisticuffs, way too late in the day and then it’s over.

Overall it just felt like a waste, a solid action B-movie, yes, a straight to DVD or TV release, fine, but it wasn’t engaging or entertaining enough.  It’s beautifully shot and the effects are good, which you’d expect considering the director was primarily known for his effects work on the likes of Superman Returns, Sin City, Die Hard 4 and Iron Man.  Unfortunately, he appears to have found his limit with storytelling and needs to stay on the effects in future (although he’s already got another directing gig, in charge of a movie starring Paul Bettany as a religious action crusader… hang on).

All in all then, not one to rush out for. 

Long ago I had the idea of a raising money for a feature film by allowing anyone to invest in it and getting small rewards (a credit, a free DVD, etc). Now the internet is bypassing production and distribution channels altogether to allow anyone to make money from their movies.

I grew up in the 80s and 90s and I’m guessing the current crop of producers and studio execs did as well, which is why we’re seeing so many remakes of films and TV from that era.

With a new version of The Karate Kid due in cinemas at the end of the month and the original out on Blu-ray for the first time on Monday I got offered a review copy.

It’s been a while since I’ve watched it, I would have been too young to see it on its initial release, but it is still a legend to my generation.  This is the movie that brought phrases like ‘wax on, wax off’ and ‘Daniel-san’ into everyone’s lexicon.

It was so popular it spawned two sequels with the original cast and they even tried to resurrect it with Hilary Swank as The Next Karate Kid.  It’s probably worth some history here, the 80s were big on martial arts and karate was king.  Today the top dog is probably kung fu, as evidenced by the fact that the new movie has the lead learning it as he ‘only knows’ karate.

The 80s was an era filled with the likes of Chuck Norris, Jean Claude Van Damme, Mark Dacascos, Jackie Chan (yes, he is that old) and Steven Seagal.  You had films like Best of the Best, Bloodsport, and Kickboxer.  These were too old for the prime teen audience, who had to make do with the likes of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Sidekicks and The Karate Kid.  Even the likes of James Bond got in on the martial arts action.  It was also a big decade for underdogs, with Sly Stallone winning hearts in Rocky and Schwartzenegger single-handedly taking on an alien in Predators and showing real emotion when terrorists kidnap his daughter in Commando.

The Karate Kid is also the movie inspiration for James Corden’s recent use of the song ‘You’re the Best Around’ by Joe Esposito.

So with that in mind, and my hazy memory, I sat down to watch.

There’s a whole start to the film I completely forgot about, I remembered the girlfriend and Daniel (the main character) getting beat up by a group of Cobra Kai students, but he doesn’t start training until well into the second half and most of the action, the karate tournament, is in the last ten minutes.  Those are the bits I remember most.  It shows you how much movies have changed in the intervening decades.  I’m betting the new one doesn’t wait that long before throwing you into the action.

In a similar vein, seeing high school kids who aren’t stick thin and dressed like models is something of a novelty.  Girls who aren’t sporting short skirts and tight tops and guys not showing abs and flexing their pecks are something of a rarity these days.  They were both played by people much older than their characters though, so some things don’t change.

For a comparison to today, look at The Karate Kid and then compare it to Never Back Down, which has a similar storyline and both have a 15 rating in the UK.

Kids today may find it amazing that none of the characters has a mobile, they can’t text each other, or use Facebook, no computers at all at home, even the arcades largely consist of mechanical games.  Even videos were fairly rare.

Something else that was nice was that they couldn’t rely on fancy effects and wire work to make the fights seem spectacular, or have long, violent bouts.  They’re all fairly low key and over quite quickly.  Having said that, it does mean HD doesn’t add much.  Though the picture quality is clear and bright, surprisingly so (most of my memories of 80s movies are slightly hazy, due to watching them on VHS I suspect).

The movie has a lot more soul searching and depth and moves at a much slower pace than anything made in the last decade, which generally only pay lip service to the martial arts ethos, though some of the Chinese films do spend more time discussing the spiritual side.

So what did I think?  Well, it’s cheesy.  Pat Morita is rightly lauded for his portrayal of Mr Miyagi, being funny, thoughtful and masterful; a perfect wise mentor.  You could say it moves a little slow, but actually it’s engaging, giving you rounded characters and making you will for their success all the more.  It’s still a great movie and with the 80s making something of a comeback I’m sure it’ll win fans new and old.

A hint of the true extent of Hollywood’s current financial travails has emerged after it was claimed that a film which racked up almost $1bn at the worldwide box office in 2007 still lost money for the studio that made it.

No movie appears to make money, that’s the way Hollywood works, otherwise they have to start paying all sorts of people a percentage of the profits. They’ve long been known to operate creative accounting. Net points (those paid when a movie starts to ‘make’ money) are usually referred to as monkey points, because they rarely get paid (5% of movies post a profit, apparently).

The real money is in gross points, those against every dollar the film takes, although even they have caveats for excluding certain things.

Gawker has an interesting article covering this, and Slate has some examples which show you just how complex film financing is.

Add to all this very few films really do make money at the cinema, most make their money from DVD and various rights sales (hence the alarm DVD sales are falling).

So did HPOotP actually lose money? No way, not something that big, they just make it look like it did.

Let’s not forget, however, that the bulk of those profits go back to the US. The Brits tend to shoot in lower cost centres like Hungary, even the BBC does. Most British films (as I class them, I still need to go through the Film Council list and put together a proper one) are low budget (< $5 million) and are lucky to get a theatrical release. If we could make something that would rake in blockbuster money we could start building a global business. It's risky though, even Hollywood studios must be bailed out more often than most people realise (look at MGM's current woes).

On the plus side, tax breaks keep work coming in and people employed who can then choose to work on low budget Brit flicks for rock-bottom wages, knowing they’ll earn top dollar on the big budget ones. It also stops those skills and people having to find other employment.

It may be a PR exercise and as be as much fact as most Hollywood ‘historical’ films, but it doesn’t mean they’re wrong.

As part of the “Full Stream Ahead” campaign, which is backed by the UK Film Council and BFI, and launches tomorrow, anyone accessing the Blinkbox website from fullstreamahead.co.uk will be offered £20 credit to spend on films from studios including Paramount, Sony Pictures, Universal, 20th Century Fox and Warner Bros. Titles include Avatar, Sherlock Holmes and Up in the Air.

The streaming will run for a week from a site called Blinkbox. Another interesting note from the article:

Research by Global Web Index last year showed that web users were turning to unlawful filesharing sites because the content they wanted was not easily available elsewhere. The survey showed that 45% of filesharers said they would consume films legally if the technology allowed them.

First off, let’s say that as far as Hollywood is concerned the cinema is, largely, a loss leader. It’s like a big advert, maybe an indication of quality control, but they don’t make much money from it, most revenue comes downstream from DVD, rental, TV and other channels.

Part of the reason for that is the cost to distribute the film. Each cinema needs a physical copy of the film (more than one if they’re showing multiple screens). Maybe they’re slowly moving past this, I’m not sure.

What cinemas (and indeed Hollywood) needs to do is embrace digital projection and distribution. It’s been talked about for ages, but the costs to implement are going to be high. The benefits are huge though. Aside from reducing the time and cost to distribute a film, imagine the flexibility it brings.

Cinemas could lay on extra screenings in certain films are filling up while others are empty, they could show films for single screenings or short runs, maybe even offer more, smaller screens where you can pay a bit more to watch whatever film you want at whatever time you want. And that’s just some of the things off the top of my head.

Something the article does miss is that while cinema is (largely) aimed at teens, they want to go out to watch the film, partly because it’s cool and partly to get away from their parents and watch whatever they want to watch, which they can’t at home. It’s escapism in a physical as well as mental sense.

Will cinemas die? No, though they may struggle unless they start to move with the times.

I get the impression these guys don’t so much copy the film as try and release films with the same/a similar title and similar stories at the same time as Hollywood blockbusters. You could argue they are trying to capitalise by making people think their film is the Hollywood version, or you could say they appeal to people interested in similar stories.

You have to give a company credit for managing to make a sequel to Titanic. Having watched a couple of the trailers I’m quite impressed with their production values considering their typical budget is $500,000 – $1 million.