The Invisible Library

Despite making a Gazillion dollars, Superman Returns is apparently considered a flop. This is due mainly to the fact that it cost over 500 Bajillion dollars to make and market.

Warren Ellis sums it up:

SUPERMAN RETURNS conservatively cost $250 million to make. Probably the same again to promote. It took $21M this weekend, eaten alive by PIRATES. The studio gets about half the box office takings. In America, WB’s cumulative slice of SR’s takings amount to around $50M.

As Fraction said to me Sat night, producer Jon Peters is probably sleeping with a gun in his mouth.

Is it conceivable that something that took fifty-odd million in its first weekend could be a flop? I said of KING KONG that for that film’s budget, I could grow my own giant fucking monkey. $250 million puts you in spacelaunch-budget territory. For $250 million WB could’ve given Bryan Singer his own communications satellite and spent the change on a George Clooney movie. Or two Wes Anderson movies. It’s an astonishing volume of cash that, at this stage, they don’t have a prayer of making back worldwide or on DVD.

This is the absurdity of modern Hollywood; that taking more than the GNP of Luxembourg in a single weekend is not actually enough to put a movie in the black.

Maybe Hollywood should try things the Werner Herzog Way:

In Werner Herzog’s films, the main characters tend to be ambitious explorers who find themselves crashing in spectacular failure. Aguirre, the Wrath of God follows a 16th-century conquistador who sets out to find El Dorado, only to end up on a raft, demented and alone, adrift on a stagnant river. In the documentary Grizzly Man, Timothy Treadwell becomes so adept at cohabiting with wild grizzly bears that he comes to believe he’s one of them – until he gets eaten.

Now the maverick German director, who has made 52 films over a 44-year career, is launching The Wild Blue Yonder. The movie, which he describes as “science fiction fantasy,” tells the story of two interstellar voyages. The first is undertaken by an alien race fleeing a dying planet with hopes of colonizing Earth, the other by human astronauts who set out to explore the liquid world the aliens left behind.

Instead of spending millions on Spielberg-style effects, Herzog went low tech and high geek. He spliced together documentary footage from NASA and the National Science Foundation’s US Antarctic Program. He created “characters” from documentary-style scenes with actual physicists and astronauts. But this being a Herzog film, the lyrical images are tempered by characteristic pessimism. “The film ends our illusions about intergalactic travel,” Herzog says bluntly. “We will not do it. We cannot manage it. It’s just too far.”

To the Kind Reader who signed me up to the National Council of Churches Newsletter: I understand that not everyone who goes to church is a twitterpated bigot. I’ve known that for quite some time. And while Liberal Christians aren’t quite as mythical as Unicorns (or Jesus) you certainly aren’t going out of their way to get noticed. Oh but Al Sharpton was on the Daily Show a few years back! Yeah. And Pat Robertson has his own freakin channel.

Look, liberal Christians, the scary truth you aren’t admitting to yourself— wait, scratch that— one of the scary truths you aren’t admitting to yourself, is that the rise to power of the Chowder-headed, drooling Fundy is your own God Damned fault. They’re your people. They go to your church, or the one on the next block. They sit at your Good Friday Pancake Suppers and Fourth of July cookouts and jabber on about how Bill O’Reilly makes some sense and you say nothing. You do nothing. You’ve sat there for the last six years, meekly pointing at Uncle Pat as he wipes his mouth on the tablecloth, insults my wife’s heritage and sugests an after dinner “Turkey Shoot” and quietly mouth, “I’m not with him!” Then you get in his car and let him drive you home.

Both Liberal Christians and the kill ‘em all Christians in the GOP are from the same family. You both believe in myths that aren’t even remotely true. Only they actually believe in them all the time while you only pretend to believe in them for an hour every Sunday and two hours on Christmas Eve. They spout off about the Rapture and End Of Days and them Dern Mexicans and you look at us Secular Humanists and expect us to correct their lunatic behavior and call them on their bad theology and antediluvian social habits. You want me to be the bad guy, so you won’t have to deal with the uncomfortable silences and awkward coffee socials.

Well, tough shit. That Racist Douche Bag with the Christian fish magnet on the back of his SUV is your Crazy Uncle, not mine. If you want Atheists to respect your beliefs, you should have taken care of your family shit at home, before it got messy in public.

Now, to the person who signed me up to the newsletter. You could have started a dialogue in comments. You could have sent me an email. But instead, you took the same passive-agressive route that’s caused this whole mess in the first place, which is cowardly and lame.