Box office for GINO/monster movies in general

[Gojiraknight]

I was watching Roland Emmerich's "The Directors" special the other day and in it he said that the expectations for Godzilla's box office were all the media's doing. He said that he and Devlin reviewed all the other monster movies and saw that on the whole scope of things Godzilla was on the high end and that the genre never does well.

Now Roland acting like he never thought it would do all that well sounds like a case of backtracking to me and shifting blame but I digress...After Godzilla's underperformance and more recently King Kong 2005's I just have to ask: Is Roland right?

Was there always a cap on how much a Godzilla movie was going to make? Is it just too Japanese or too corny for mainstream audiences? Or could a Godzilla (or any monster movie) franchise be a player ala Pirates of the Caribbean or Spider-Man?

[pocketmego]

You site 2 very excellent examples. However, I also think these might be the hardest examples to answer the question. The problem with Godzilla's under-performance at the boxoffice was because of the MIND-NUMBING amount of mone that was put into the promotional campaigns for this movie.

Godzilla was damn near promoted like Batman, with material of the giant foot just every where imaginable. No one could NOT be aware that this movie was coming out.

When it under-performed it cost the studio a tremendous amount of money in advertising alone. It was the ultimate example of the reality that no matter how glitzy, big, and cool your movie is. If you don't have a solid story to tell, people are not going to be bothered.

Kong suffered the same problems, but it didn't fail for its storytelling. It failed, in my opinion, because it had nothing new to bring to the table. The original King Kong was all about innovation. Special effects and concepts no one had ever seen before.

The new Kong told the same story with nothing special or fresh to bring to the table. We've all already seen impressive CGI, we've already seen dinosaurs doing all sorts of things, and worst of all we've all already seen King Kong.

Jurassic Park was the modern King Kong.

So, what is my point?

Good story, original concepts, and fresh approach given to the powerful advertising that is put behind these movies and you will have your Spider-Man and Pirates numbers, Giant Monster or not.

I say of they had simply, lets say, Dub the HOST and put the kind of major advertising and promotion that GINO got, or Kong, or even more appropriatly Crouching Tiger, You would have seen a monster moview tear down the roof. You would have seen a monster movie do Spider-Man numbers.

Watch Transformers numbers and mark my words...that movie will do just as badly as Kong and GINO did. Because, the story is weak and that will kill the movie no matter how much marketing that put behind it.

-Ray

[walshbeme]