Hacker Cinema
Wonder Woman 1984
2020 · Film · 151 min
Part of Wonder Woman Collection
Directed by Patty Jenkins
A botched store robbery places Wonder Woman in a global battle against a powerful and mysterious ancient force that puts her powers in jeopardy.
4 negative4 neutralfrom 8 commenters
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8 comments on Hacker News
> When revisiting a beloved Eighties or Nineties film, Millennial and Gen X viewers are often startled to encounter long-forgotten sexual content content: John Connor’s conception in Terminator, Jamie Lee Curtis’s toplessness in Trading Places, the spectral blowjob in Ghostbusters. These scenes didn’t shock us when we first saw them. Of course there’s sex in a movie. Isn’t there always?
> The answer, of course, is not anymore—at least not when it comes to modern blockbusters
> We’re told that Tony Stark and Pepper Potts are an item, but no actual romantic or sexual chemistry between them is shown in the films. Wonder Woman and Steve Trevor utterly lack the sexual chemistry to convince us that either of them would be thirsty enough to commandeer a coma victim’s body (as they do in Wonder Woman 1984) so they can enjoy a posthumous hookup. In defiance of Norse mythology, Chris Hemsworth’s Thor smiles at Natalie Portman like a dumb golden retriever puppy without ever venturing to rend her asunder with his mighty hammer, so to speak
Maybe because you are comparing r-rated action movies with super hero film made by disney.
There are certainly lots of overlap in audience. Kids watch terminator and adults love super heroes. But the principle target audiences are different.
"nerd culture" is not about what but how.
There were popular D&D shows already in the 80s.
Most comic book movies are simply bad, and "real" nerds hate them.
No nerd loved the last Star Wars trilogy or Rings of power or Wonder Woman 1984 or the nth spider-verse repetition, mostly because studios take something popular among nerds and change it to please modern audience which is exactly what's wrong with the so called "nerd culture" today: it's not a culture.
>Do you mean female lead characters, or female leadership on the movie project itself?
Female leadership on movie projects isn't an issue. Female lead characters aren't an issue. I think girl-boss is a type of narrative in a film where they write unlikeable women that don't register as real people for the purpose of creating "powerful" female characters that aren't interesting or successful.
Examples - Rey/Admiral Holdo/ from Disney Star Wars, Wonder Woman 1984, Captain Marvel, the female terminator reboot, the female ghostbusters reboot, the ocean's 8 female reboot, etc etc etc
I fully expect the newest Thor movie with new female thor to be another girl-boss film, and from the trailer same thing with the upcoming Miss Marvel movie. The new Indiana Jones movie is at risk since it seems to be about Indy passing the torch to a young woman and Kathleen Kennedy is involved - we've seen her record on star wars. We'll see if any of that happens.
>Apart from that, I'm not sure Disney really cares about social policies themselves one way or another. I think it's much more mercenary than that
I disagree. The leadership and many of the creatives in Disney are the people who want to push particular political opinions on to other people.
https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1508912865293619202
>Unfortunately for Disney, a different part of their audience doesn't want to see them take a stand on issues. Or if they do, that it should be a different stand. Disney is finding out right now that it simply can't satisfy everybody.
Disney thought there was nothing anyone could do about it - since they're a private company and they can do what they want. They forgot the government they were picking a fight with also had the ability to take back privileges disney had that allowed them to be their own government in their district.
They don't need to satisfy everyone, but they want to be political activists with a direct line to your kids eyes and ears in your home. Disney is a platform for their politics.
You are of course completely wrong. I have friends at Company 3 (one of the best colourist companies in the world) and they use Resolve for DIT and dailies all the time, including for such small films as Not Time to Die, Wonder Woman 1984 and the next Jurassic Park.
But of course this is the typical HN attitude of “I know better”.
I literally said I work in the industry, and your first claim is “there is no way that’s true”.
edit it’s also revealing that you think there are post pipelines set up around Final Cut. In my experience, there is no Final Cut at the high end (with extremely rare exceptions).
Stranger Things and other modern movies like Wonder Woman: 1984 present an inconsistent idea of what the 1980s was like.
Case in point, there's a scene in a supermarket with a bunch of breakfast cereals from various pop franchises. That never happened in reality. In reality, the same cereal would be repackaged for whatever was the hot movie/brand at the time.
This is somewhat sent up in this video from UK's The Adam and Joe Show. https://vimeo.com/347912488
Ok, for a more apples to apples comparison, let's look at the Wonder Women movies.
The first one opens to $103m[1] which equates to 11.5m viewers. The new one was released simultaneously both in theaters and streaming. It had an opening of $17m or 1.8m viewers plus 38m hours streaming and roughly 14.9m viewings. Let's subtract the sequel's theatrical run from both totals and we have 9.7m theatrical vs 14.9m streaming which equates to a theatrical performance being 65% of the streaming performance (assuming they should both have similar openings which is another arbitrary assumption done to simplify everything and because there are multiple factors pushing in opposite directions).
Let's dock the previous Red Notice numbers of that 35% inflation and that gives us 50m streams. That would knock it out of the number 2 spot, but it would likely still be top 10. Once again, this is an original movie and no non-franchise movie is in the top 50 biggest openings. I still don't buy these numbers.
[1] - https://www.boxofficemojo.com/release/rl578455041/
[2] - https://www.boxofficemojo.com/title/tt7126948/
[3] - https://variety.com/2021/digital/news/wonder-woman-1984-hbo-max-nielsen-top-10-1234895616/
> It at least broke even
Sure? [1] says budget $200M, all-time worldwide $166M - given marketing of $100M (cheap, normally considered 2x the budget), those HBO Max signups would have to be $134M; which seems like a lot considering they only have about 13M subscribers[2].
[1] https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/Wonder-Woman-1984-(2020)#tab=summary [2] https://www.businessinsider.com/wonder-woman-1984-helping-hbo-max-slow-box-office-data-2021-1?r=US&IR=T
> Then there's "it's all remakes now"—but 1) it's not,
It really is, if by "remake" you mean all ways of leveraging existing IP. Here are the top ten box office films of 2020:
* Bad Boys for Life (sequel) * Sonic the Hedgehog (videogame) * Birds of Prey (comic book) * Dolittle (book) * The Invisible Man (book) * The Call of the Wild (book) * Onward (original) * The Croods: A New Age (sequel) * Tenet (original) * Wonder Woman 1984 (sequal, comic book)
Two originals. Now go back 20 years:
* Mission: Impossible 2 (sequel) * Gladiator (book) * Cast Away (original) * What Women Want (original) * Dinosaur (original) * How the Grinch Stole Christmas (book) * Meet the Parents (remake) * The Perfect Storm (book) * X-Men (comic book) * What Lies Beneath (original)
Four originals. Go back another 10 years:
* Ghost (original) * Home Alone (original) * Pretty Woman (original) * Dances with Wolves (book) * Total Recall (short story) * Back to the Future Part III (sequel) * Die Hard 2 (sequel) * Presumed Innocent (book) * Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (comic book) * Kindergarten Cop (original)
Five originals. Another ten years to 1980:
* The Empire Strikes Back (sequel) * 9 to 5 (original) * Stir Crazy (original) * Airplane! (original) * Any Which Way You Can (sequel) * Private Benjamin (original) * Coal Miner's Daughter (original) * Smokey and the Bandit II (sequel) * The Blue Lagoon (book) * The Blues Brothers (SNL sketch)
Five originals again. I'm going by top box-office gross here because I think that's a good proxy for what is successful. You can look at other years, but there is a very clear (but not overwhelming) trend towards movies based on familiar content. It's not clear whether studios are leading audiences or vice versa. Probably some iterative process of both.
There's also a clear trend away from dramas. I think that's because drama (and non-slapstick comedies) tend to rely heavily on specific cultural norms for their effect which makes them translate poorly. There is a very clear trend especially in the last decade or so of Hollywood focusing on movies that will also do well in China in particular.