And this is why we can't have nice things

I'd be kind of disappointed if they made a sequel to Scott Pilgrim. Call me crazy, but it doesn't really need one.

Of course, sillier things have happened.

OK Turbo, it was not about the blue *****, but the damn thing was present enough that it should have been in the credits lol. It would have helped had they not seemed to focus on it.

Reminds me of Uwe Boll and his habit of unnecessary female nudity and focusing on her genilitilia.

uh dude it was two scenes only.

Quoted again cause I think Arcanaville nailed it.

I wouldn't hold your breath. DVD sales are down in the age of Netflix and the like.

Also, fwiw, Pilgrim's total gross today per boxfofficemojo.

Domestic: $29,267,130 75.4% + Foreign: $9,527,630 24.6% = Worldwide: $38,794,760

And that's going up against a 60 million budget. And I think ChrisMoses brought it up before that the movie was having a gradual foreign release, but it's only made another 8 million since that was mentioned here.

A movie made from an incredibly obscure genre bending comic is not blockbuster material. And Edgar Wright's US appeal is almost just as niche. And casting Michael Cera as the lead could be argued as the nail in the coffin.

Nope, you are not alone.

Blu-ray here, special edition if they have it and I am looking into the soundtracks.

You can make the same argument for "Kick-***", which has done much better business than "SPvsW". Nerd lead, niche comic, not-quite-mainstream director.

I can't point at all the factors that separate the two films, but I do think "Kick-***" had a much clearer marketing campaign, whereas "SPvsW" made the film look like an indie romcom. Plus "Kick-***" has much better foreign takings (although yes, it has been out longer).

Just looking at the film posters, "SPvsW" looks like a stoner comedy, where "Kick-***" looks like an action superhero film.

Those updated figures haven't yet been broken down according to country. Since the UK opening weekend was $2.5M (modest but respectable for its market), it looks as though SPvtW may have picked up more business on word of mouth, which is what Universal was hoping for in the US but conspicuously failed to achieve. As I said earlier, SPvtW is getting a rolling release in Europe over the course of this year. Positioning it as a fall movie may very welll turn out to be a better tactical move. (Perplexingly, there's no ready information about its release in Asia.)

Except Edgar ("Shaun of the Dead", "Hot Fuzz") Wright is known for blending genres in his movies, while Matthew ("Layer Cake", "Stardust", "Kick-***") Vaughn's specialty is treating established genres with a bit more intelligence than usual. The latter's films are consequently much easier to promote and find their audiences with less hassle.

As for comparisons of the comics behind Kick-*** and Scott Pilgrim, well, there's none.

Which is kind of a shame since his movies are kind of fantastic.

My wife and I saw it. Thought it was great. I think this might be a movie like Fight Club that lives on long after its theatrical release. I hope so at least. I would hate to be subjected to more pap garbage.

Did Indy 4 really make $300? Sad. Lowers my already low opinion of people.

It got coattails from historical popularity. I didn't see it until I got the DVD from Netflix last year because it just didn't look good to me in the ads but most people don't plan when it comes to watching movies.

I was a little surprised to see Kick A's did so poorly but I hadn't really paid much attention to it until I had its praises sung to me repeatedly by a friend. I thought all the whining about Hitgirl's profanity would get it viewership.

Neither director is really known outside of certain film / geek circles. If anything, Wright has more geek cred for "Shaun of the Dead" than anything Vaughn's done before "Kick-***".

For the comics: both are obscure to the mainstream. Neither had the fan base to really see either film profit just on word of mouth from them. I'm comparing them as new comic IPs that were released within a reasonable time frame but had markedly different financial results (and I really see "SCvsW" as the easier sell to the market). I can't say for sure exactly what the differences were in success factors for each film, but their outcomes have been very different.

What you say is completely, utterly true.

It also happens to be completely, utterly irrelevant.

We're not talking in some abstract philosophical terms. We're talking about what you as a writer need to do to engage your audience. You need to get your audience to connect with your story. They need to know "why?", and in story terms, not in abstract writing terms.

Of course everything in a story happens because the writer wanted it that way. Duh.

You might as well proclaim the sky is blue or that water is wet.

What matters is that if you present some odd thing in a story that is outside the audience's normal worldview, you HAVE to put in SOME in-story explanation of why that odd thing is happening in order for the majority of the audience to connect with the idea.

You know that little scene where Scott has a moment with a visually depicted mental switch, that goes from "clueless" to "gets it"? The audience needs that moment too.

Some stories, the setting itself is the explanation. Fantasy and science fiction settings have built-in reasons why odd stuff happens. Audiences already are primed to expect these kind of things in fantastical settings. "A wizard did it" is cliche but folks generally suspend disbelief as long as it fits the setting.

If you're putting your story in a more 'mundane' setting, you generally need to insert other clues as to what's going on.

The only time you can really get away with not doing so is if the audience is SUPPOSED to be confused and unsure of what's actually going on. Archetypal of this is the aforementioned movie Groundhog Day. Part of the main thrust of that movie is that the audience is supposed to be as baffled and confused as the main character.

Confusion is not the main thrust of Scott Pilgrim. The audience is supposed to "get it" fairly early on but they don't really get a whole lot of explanation to help them to get to that state.

Thus, the commentary on "why?".



-np

I'll just repost a couple of select quotes to save us time.

But yes, I supposed the appropriate response to agreeing with something and finding it irrelevant is to turn it into a full blown argument amirite.

Much depends on the perspective: From the distance of the mainstream's outlook, the directors and source material may seem pretty much the same, but from a closer viewpoint, where geeks have a head start, they're very different. The marketing departments must start from the latter perspective to appeal to the former. With Kick-***, all they have to do in the trailer is show the geeky protagonist don his homebrew superhero costume and kick ***/get his *** kicked (Big Daddy and Hit Girl, however colorful, are supporting characters in the narrative). With SPvtW, the indie boy-meets-girl formula is complicated by not only Scott's slacker lifestyle (with its much bigger supporting cast) colliding with his fights vs. the seven evil exes, but also Edgar Wright's approach to Scott's unrealiable status as a protagonist and what he calls "video game magic realism" (viz). SPvtW turns out to be a much tougher sell in this respect. There are still moviegoers who did not "get" this approach after seeing it, to say nothing of those indifferent to its idiosyncratic charms in the first place.

In any case, I've been unable to drum up sufficient interest from either my geek or indie friends, something that has happened consistently since Memorial Day. In general, this has been a poor summer for moviegoing, with ticket prices up and overall attendance down. We'll see how the fall goes, with its scheduled offerings from the decidely mainstream CG supervillain movie Mega Mind from Dreamworks to the film version of Warren Ellis's indie comic Red.

Kick-***, while based on an obscure comic, is fairly straight forward in it's premise. It's a hyper-violent foul-mouthed superhero parody. And while Aaron Johnson was -playing- a loser, he doesn't have anywhere near the (over)exposure that Michael Cera does playing vapid geeks.

Pilgrim's premise is a romantic comedy with hyper-stylized action that targets geeks. Not an easy sell outside the geek market. Then there's Pilgrim's ad campaign that was all over the place. Ymmv on whether or not the ads backfired.

Because in Scott Pilgrim, those details are critical to relating to the characters. Its never really explained how anything works in, say, Ghostbusters, but its not necessary because the audience is willing to accept the setup because the characters all make sense to the audience. We know who Venkmen is from the very first scene we see him. Egon is not a big mystery. When they hire Winston, without knowing anything about him the audience immediately connects with him as the everyman tossed into the bizarre mix.

Most people just aren't going to get Scott Pilgrim. They aren't going to get Ramona. The exes are archetypes of things most of the audience doesn't even know: they are inside jokes told to outsiders without enough explanation in most cases. In most stories, you can have impenetrable characters that are revealed through a relatable story. Or you can have relatable characters that are set in a wild story. Unrelatable characters in wild story gives the audience no touchstones to connect to. And that's why the unexplained elements of SP are so harshly criticized by some. Its too much unexplained on opposite sides of the ledger.

Compare to Inception. Inception has an equally high potential for disorientation. The plot isn't linear, the world rules are unconventional, and the characters aren't given a lot of backstory initially. But the movie does a good job of taking the audience by the hand and walking them through the movie, so even people who don't fully get the movie at least get from beginning to end feeling like the movie didn't pass completely over their heads. Inception eases us into the character of Cobb, first with the scene with his father in law, and then with the scenes with Ariadne, which give you insight into why this character is doing what he's doing. We can relate to Cobb because at the heart of all the wild crazy stuff is someone guilty over the death of his wife, and seeking a way to return to his children. People can connect to that.

Similarly, Cobb introduces the audience to the dream world by introducing Ariadne to it, and Ariadne becomes the proxy for the audience to explore the rules. We find out very quickly how much control a dreamer has over his dream, what happens to people within those dreams, and even why certain rules exist, such as the need to avoid antagonizing projections. This creates a mental short-hand for the audience so that when the actual inception begins no one has to explain anything. We know why they are being shot at. We know why projection-Mal is trying to disrupt everything (at least to some degree, so the deeper explanation makes sense further in). We know why there are multiple levels of the dream, and we even know what the critical risk is in the "Mr. Charles" gambit and what the whole payoff is supposed to be at the end. And we know well before we get there what Limbo is and why its so critical to Cobb's story.

Nolan could have gotten millions of people to watch any blockbuster movie he wanted to make at this point. But he took great pains to make sure that there was a learning curve for the audience to connect with both the characters and the story, and given how unconventional the movie actually is, it shows in how many people it ultimately connected with. A lot is still left unexplained. But enough is to make it possible for the audience to get to the end of the movie with some sense of what was going on.

Its not a question of having higher standards. Its more a question of meeting a threshold. Everyone's threshold is different, even situationally different at times. But its apparent that SP was not going to meet very many people's critical comprehension threshold, and if you're going to spend that much money on a movie you probably should try to.

That is the thing, though. Not only does tolerance for the unexplained vary from person to person but from movie to movie. And you've got camps of people that view films as purely for entertainment purposes and thus roll with everything they're presented, ones that believe films and whatever they deem to be lesser forms of media explain themselves too much and the audience should be left to figure it out for themselves, and ones that think that films have to explain and account for everything or it takes away from the quality.

I just think with everything that comes along with a story, we can find better things to criticize than how much background information we're given or how gently we're eased into the world.