Tomorrowland

[EricJ]

Yes, definitely for another thread. Like, "Not this one".
I'm sure you liked the movie enough to play favorite-movie-martyr and say "It was too GOOD for the dumb ol' audience!", when OTOH, I'm still going with the theory that the movie wasn't good enough for the "Brad Bird goes to 60's Disneyland" movie that the audience was conjuring up in their imaginations from the massive, massive hype.
(I mean, seriously, they didn't revive Walt, either figuratively or literally??)

I'm as bummed about a well-intentioned failure as anyone else, but I'm not putting it on Bird's doorstep. Lindelof's, maybe (I sort of expected the Lost writer to overdo the abstract conspiracies), but not Bird's.

[Ben]

Both of those are right.

And it's Bird's responsibility as well, one way or the other. He co-wrote and directed it...he's the filter that everything went through.

Luckily, as I mentioned a long time ago, he's at least savvy enough to have already announced The Incredibles 2, so that his returning to that franchise now doesn't look like he's "having" to do it, unlike Stanton and the Dory feature (of course, Incredibles was always more sequel friendly to begin with, which also doesn't help Stanton's case). Bird will still have a tougher struggle to make another live-action film - I can't really see his earthquake picture happening now - since Incredibles 2's success will peg him as a director who the audience will support when doing animation but not live-action, but maybe he'll get another chance if a couple of animated films hit really, really big.

[ShyViolet]

A write-down, apparently:

http://animationguildblog.blogspot.com/ ... n.html?m=1

[Ben]

I also read that quote...TAG didn't include the rest of it where it continued to say that Disney can easily weather this disappointment due to their strong rest of year (Cinderella, Avengers, two from Pixar and a little movie set in a galaxy far, far away), so they're not really going to feel the pinch with this.

Tomorrowland had a lot of potential, but a mixed tone and message, not to mention whether Clooney really was the right choice for this, good as he was, has proven to be the pessimistic pill the film was attempting to skate around.

Still buying the soundtrack though!

[Dacey]

Pretty excellent interview:

http://www.comingsoon.net/movies/featur ... w#/slide/1

[EricJ]

Tomorrowland had a lot of potential, but a mixed tone and message, not to mention whether Clooney really was the right choice for this, good as he was, has proven to be the pessimistic pill the film was attempting to skate around.

Or, as I chose to think while finally renting it on digital, "THE biggest wet-blanket downer in an escapist sci-fi movie since Jeff Goldblum kept nagging everyone about how dangerous dinos were in the first two Jurassic Park movies."

I had to take a look, since I also fell for the wonderful, upbeat marketing, read the ambiguous tone of the bad reviews and thought, "How bad could it be?" Most of the bad reviews seemed to be along left/right political lines about the preachiness of the "Change the world" message ("Preachy"?--We're talking Lions For Lambs, only without a Bush to blame, as filtered through the "Let's stop the bad people, whoever they are, by doing...something" naivety of Occupy Wall Street), in which every single person on the planet who isn't our heroes believes that the world is a mess...
Ah, but then the twist: You see, that was actually

an unfortunate side effect of the villain's plan, and people are not only wrong for being pessimists, they're actually victims of the vile plot! Except that the bad guy, Evil Prince George, turns out to be on the same side as our heroes, he just blames everyone and shrugs them off for being stupid enough to fall for it.

So, you see, he's not really bad, he's just a major jerk. It's one thing to play the old "Keep Moving Forward" mantra and show us the future we could have in Meet the Robinsons, it's another to show them and then thump them on the side of the head and say "It's YOUR fault why we can't have nice things, dumb-@$$!"

But no, I went in--after, as I said months ago, following the wonderful Walt-nostalgic marketing of Disney's Optimist game--thinking that they were going to follow through after that 60's World's Fair opening, complete with the Small World shout-out...Ending with Clooney saying "And then it all went to hell." Truer cinematic words were never spoken. Thanks, George, you DID warn us.
When we get the main plot with Spunky Hacker Girl Like The One On SHIELD touching the pin, we get what Disney should have been doing with their future vision for the park (if that was indeed the idea of making the earlier Dwayne Johnson draft of the story). And then, in THE biggest "Disneyland Burned Down" (literally) bait-and-switch since the Yellow Brick Road was torn up in "Return to Oz" we find out

the big glittering future she saw in the pin, and we saw in the trailer, was all a lie. And we spend the next hour and a half getting chased by evil robots. In a ruin.

I didn't see it in the theater, because I was warned away by the ambiguous bad word-of-mouth that couldn't really put their finger on which bad words to use.
But if I had, I would agree: It's not so much that I would want my money back....I'd want my MOVIE back. The one I thought I was going to see going in.

(And tragically, due to it coming and going so quickly in theaters, we don't even get the courtesy yet of one decent, well-deserved Honest Trailer for it:
"Be inspired by Brad Bird's message of hope and change--Namely, that if the world blows up tomorrow, it's your own fault for being a Walking Dead fan.")