(1) BY PIXEL AND PAPER. The Dublin in 2019 Worldcon bid tells what its publications policy will be for PR’s and the Souvenir Book.
So what should we do about our progress reports?
I note that for some people this is an access issue, and therefore, we will be having hard copies available for anyone who selects them as an access issue. To be clear, Progress Reports are complimentary and we’d like to send them to anyone who needs them for an access issue. Just tick the box please.
We will be sending them out electronically of course if you allow us to.
I noted that some people still liked them, as a historical document or just because they enjoy reading hard copy, and that is very cool, and the Dublin 2019 team will be making sure that anyone who wants a hard copy progress report can get one. There will be a charge of €10 Ten Euro for this.
I hope all of you are OK with this decision and support us in it.
This does not affect our plans for our Souvenir book which we plan to offer in hard copy to all members, full and supporting, and which we are happy to mail to anyone who doesn’t pick it up at con.
(2) HELP PABLO GO THE DISTANCE. Leigh Ann Hildebrand has launched a Generosity.com appeal to send Pablo Vasquez to Helsinki for Worldcon 75. The goal is $1,100. Here’s the pitch:
Bringing NASFiC to San Juan, Puerto Rico was great thing — and one of the prime movers behind that successful bid and con has been Pablo Vazquez. I was really looking forward to congratulating Pablo at the con in Helsinki and to hearing all about that NASFiC.
And then Pablo told me he wouldn’t be joining fans in Helsinki this year.
Money’s tight for Pablo; he’s been prioritizing travel and preparations for this historic and awesome NASFiC. Now he finds himself short of funds for his last travel expenses. He’s got accommodations and a membership covered, but his fixed-cost airfare and incidental expenses are beyond his means this summer.
This is where my fellow fans come in. Help me get Pablo to Helsinki! Here’s what he needs:
$600 for the air fare (it’s a fixed cost, ’cause he knows a guy.)
$500 for food, travel incidentals, walkin’ around money and buying a round. That may seem like a lot, but food in Finland is not cheap, and there’s no con suite this year, so he can’t live on Doritos and free sodas. 🙂
(3) SFF FILM FESTIVAL. Seattle’s Museum of Pop Culture (MoPOP) in partnership with SIFF is now accepting entries for the 2018 Science Fiction + Fantasy Short Film Festival (SFFSFF).
The festival will accept animated or live-action submissions of original science fiction or fantasy stories (examples: futuristic stories, space adventure, technological speculation, social experiments, utopia and dystopia, sword and sorcery, folklore, urban fantasy, magic, and mythic adventure).
A nationally recognized panel of distinguished film, television, literature, and science fiction industry professionals, peers, and film critics will review qualifying submissions to determine the winners of the Grand Prize, Second Place, Third Place, and the Douglas Trumbull Award for Best Visual Effects. Festival films will also be eligible for the Audience Favorite award.
In order to qualify, submitted films must have been completed after December 31, 2012, and must not exceed 15 minutes. Films that exceed 15 minutes may still be considered for festival inclusion but will not be eligible for awards.
See the link for guidelines, deadlines and fees.
(5) WHAT ARE THEY WATCHING? Adam-Troy Castro sighed on Facebook:
Over the past few years I have encountered Harry Potter fans who were abusive bullies, Star Trek fans who were against diversity, and now Doctor Who fans who were close-minded and unkind.
It’s like none of them were paying any attention at all.
I am looking forward to the emergence of Batman fans who are in favor of crime.
Since the targets of Castro’s comment might miss the point, Matthew M. Foster restated the message more explicitly:
The second is that people don’t see theme. SF is about space ships and explosions. Fantasy is about swords. The actual thing trying to be conveyed is missed far more often than not. The light was brought to this in a “funny” way to our little lit community by Brad and the Pups a few years back when Star Trek was pointed out to be first and foremost, about adventure and action–about combat in space. From the same group, there was a great deal of discussion in which they confused the theme with something incidental to the story because the incidental thing was not part of their normal life. So, if a story happened to have someone gay in it, then the story must be about sexual preference. If the story had a Black lead, then the theme must be about race. These are people that are big fans of science fiction, and they couldn’t see the themes.
(6) MAD PENIUS CLUB. And right on time, here’s Dave Freer’s death-kiss for the Thirteenth Doctor.
The trouble with this is it’s a judgement call, and especially inside the various bubbles (New York Publishing, Hollywood, and in the UK the Beeb’s little Guardian-and-Birkenstock club) they’re often so distant and unconnected with audiences outside their bubble that they assume they think like them and will respond like them. Which is why they have flops like the Ghostbusters remake, because they assumed the audience for the movie was just dying for a feminist version, with lots of man-kicking. Dr Who is trying much the same thing with a female Doctor. It could work because that audience is already pretty much restricted to inside their bubble. Still, with a new writer, and female lead after 12 male ones… She’ll have to be a good actress, and he’ll have to be a better writer. I expect we’ll see a long sequence of designated victim minorities cast in the role in future, until the show dies. I doubt we’ll ever see another white hetero male, but maybe that’s just me being cynical.
(7) HEADWRITER CANON. Prospect’s James Cooray Smith declares: “Uncomfortable with a female Doctor Who? It’s time to admit your real motives”.
…Steven Moffat, Doctor Who’s Executive Producer from 2010 to 2017, used to make a habit, when asked if there was ever going to be a female Doctor, of throwing the question back to the audience. He’d ask for a show of hands as to who did and didn’t like the idea. Even half a decade ago, those audiences would be roughly balanced into pros and antis—although, as he noted, the proportion of “likes” was exponentially increasing every time he passed the question back.
In the last few years, the idea has gone from almost universally disliked to “Why hasn’t this happened already?”
Laying the canonical foundations
Moffat has played no small part in that himself. The first lines of dialogue given to Matt Smith’s Doctor, the first lines of Moffat’s era, see the newly regenerated Doctor, who cannot see his own face, wondering if he’s now female. A year later in “The Doctor’s Wife,” produced by Moffat and written by Neil Gaiman, the Doctor comments of a dead Time Lord friend The Corsair, “He didn’t feel himself unless he had a tattoo. Or herself, a couple of times”.
Three years after that, Moffat cast Michelle Gomez as ‘Missy’, the Doctor’s oldest friend and arch enemy, a character previously only played by male actors and usually referred to as the Master. A year after that—just to make sure that no one regarded Missy as an exception that proves the rule—Moffat had Ken Bones’ recurring Time Lord character The General regenerate into T’Nia Miller, changing sex and ethnicity simultaneously. Other Time Lords in the series treated this as momentarily distracting but thoroughly routine.
It now seems daft to say that such groundwork needed to be done: after all, the character of the doctor is an alien who merely looks human. But the series itself had never hinted that the idea was possible before 2010. Now, any viewer who has seen an episode with Missy in knows the Doctor’s own people can, and do, change sex. No one can pretend the idea isn’t part of the series, no matter how much they may want to. Moffat’s careful layering over years shows up any objections to the series having a female lead for what they are.
(8) NEVERTHELESS. Alison Scott has a shirt she would love to sell you. I bought one for my daughter. (U.K. orders here; U.S. orders here.)
(9) TODAY IN HISTORY
- July 17, 1955 — Disneyland Park opened in Anaheim, California
- July 17, 1967 — Contact with Surveyor 4 lost 2.5 minutes before Moon touchdown.
- July 17, 1987 — Robocop, released on this day
- July 17, 1988 – Debut of the sci-fi telefilm Out of Time…starring Bill Maher…yes that Bill Maher.
- July 17, 1992 — Honey, I Blew Up The Kid in theaters.
(10) COMIC SECTION. Andrew Porter noticed Zippy the Pinhead mentioned d Emshwiller.
(11) READING PLEASURE. Look for the SF pulps! Photos of old newsstands.
(12) ADAM WEST REMEMBERED. “Family Guy pays tribute to Adam West with nine-minute highlight reel” – from Entertainment Weekly.
As famous as he was for playing Batman — and he was very famous for that — Adam West was also known to another generation of fans for his wacky work on Family Guy. The late actor, who popped up and scored in more than 100 episodes as Mayor Adam West, left a colorful, indelible imprint on the animated Fox comedy — as well as on its producers and fans.
(13) WORLDCON PROGRAM. Worldcon 75 put its draft program schedule online today.
There are three ways to view the programme schedule DRAFT:
- View the programme schedule in KonOpas in your browser.
- Download the free Grenadine Event Guide app (for Android and iPhone) from https://vvy4n.app.goo.gl/5r2l. To access the Worldcon 75 programme in the app, please use the code WCON75.
- View the programme schedule in Grenadine in your browser.
(14) HAUNTED HELSINKI. Adrienne Foster has arranged a “Ghost walking tour of Helsinki” for the convenience of Worldcon 75 members. It will be an English-speaking tour at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, 9 August 2017.
Once again, those interested in reserving a spot on the tour need to be a member of Meetup.com and join Bay Area Ghost Hunters. Joining is free on both counts, but the fee for the ghost walk is to cover the cost of the tour operator. Yes, it was deliberate putting the “prere…gistration” fee in U.S. dollars and the “at-the-door” cost in euros.
As the 75th World Science Fiction Convention (aka Worldcon 75) rolls around again, it gives me another opportunity to arrange a ghost walk of its host city, Helsinki. Yes, that’s in Finland. Ghost walks are one of my favorite things to do when I’m traveling and it’s always a lot more fun to do them with like-minded companions. To make it even more attractive to the many members who don’t speak Finnish, the tour operator has an English-speaking tour available.
Although this has been timed for the convenience of Worldcon 75 members, all BAGH members are welcome to participate. If anyone just happens to have coinciding travel plans to Helsinki, please join us.
In addition to ghost stories, guests on these tours learn a lot about the history of the locale, particularly some of its macabre past. It even starts at a hotel that is a converted prison.
(15) MINGLE LIKE TINGLE. Is this going to be an “I am Spartacus” kind of thing?
With my new t-shirt, I am now prepared for Worldcon. #vital #worldcon75 pic.twitter.com/x5CM8oWdyl
— Jenn Lyons (@jennlyonsauthor) July 17, 2017
(16) AUREALIS AWARDS. The 2017 Aurealis Awards are now open for nominations. Eligible works must be created by an Australian citizen, or permanent resident, and published for the first time this year.
(17) VENUS AND MARS. David D. Levine’s second novel, Arabella and the Battle of Venus, sequel to the Andre Norton Award winning Arabella of Mars, comes out this week.
The thrilling adventures of Arabella Ashby continue in Arabella and the Battle of Venus, the second book in Hugo-winning author David D. Levine’s swashbuckling sci-fi, alternate history series!
Arabella’s wedding plans to marry Captain Singh of the Honorable Mars Trading Company are interrupted when her fiancé is captured by the French and sent to a prisoner-of-war camp on swampy Venus. Now, Arabella must find passage to an enemy-controlled planet in the middle of a war, bribe or fight her way past vicious guards, and rescue her Captain.
To do this she must enlist the help of the dashing privateer, Daniel Fox of the Touchstone and build her own clockwork navigational automaton in order to get to Venus before the dread French general, Joseph Fouché, the Executioner of Lyon.
Once on Venus, Arabella, Singh, and Fox soon discover that Napoleon has designed a secret weapon, one that could subjugate the entire solar system if they can’t discover a way to stop Fouché, and the entire French army, from completing their emperor’s mandate.
Levine will be doing a book tour:
- July 18, 2017: Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing, Portland, Oregon.
- July 20, 2017: University Book Store, Seattle, Washington.
- July 22, 2017: Borderlands Books, San Francisco, California.
He is currently drafting the final book in the trilogy, currently titled Arabella and the Winds of Phobos but may end up being called Arabella the Traitor of Mars.
(18) NEWCOMERS TO THE HEARTH. Fireside Fiction is undergoing a change of management, with Brian J. White stepping down. Pablo Defendini is taking over as publisher and Elsa Sjunneson-Henry as managing editor. Julia Rios and Mikki Kendall are also joining the team.
White is leaving to focus on his work as a journalist.
As many of you know, I work at a newspaper. And that work has been consuming more and more of my time lately, with both the volume and the importance of the news rising in a way we’ve never experienced in this country. And it comes alongside a level of furious, violent antipathy toward the press that is somehow both wildly shocking and banally predictable.
Fireside has been the labor of love of my life, and it kills me to step away. But I am a journalist, first and always, and I need to focus my energy on the work we are doing. A lot of people have made fun of the earnestness of the Washington Post’s Democracy Dies in Darkness slogan, but it is true, and I won’t let the light go out.
Mikki Kendall has been signed on as editor to lead the follow-up to last year’s #BlackSpecFic report, which White says will be out soon. [Hat tip to Earl Grey Loose-leaf Links #43.]
(19) THE COOLEST. Arthur C. Clarke would be proud, as the search for extra-terrestrial life turns to ice worlds.
Chris McKay has fallen out of love with Mars. The red, dusty, corroded world no longer holds the allure it once did.
“I was obsessed with life on Mars for many years,” confesses the Nasa planetary scientist, who has spent most of his career searching for signs of life on the red planet.
“It’s seduction at the highest level,” he says. “I’m abandoning my first love and going after this other one that’s shown me what I wanted to see.”
The new object of McKay’s affections is Enceladus, the ice-encrusted moon of Saturn. Investigated by the joint Nasa and European Space Agency (Esa) Cassini space probe, the moon is spewing out plumes of water from its south pole – most likely from a liquid ocean several kilometres beneath the surface. Cassini has found this water contains all the vital ingredients for life as we know it: carbon, nitrogen and a readily available source of energy in the form of hydrogen.
“I think this is it,” says McKay. “From an astrobiology point of view, this is the most interesting story.”
(20) SO BAD IT’S GOOD. Marshall Ryan Maresca extols the antique virtues of the 1980s movie: “ELECTRIC DREAMS: A Bad Movie I’ve Watched Many, Many, MANY Times”.
The Eighties got a lot of mileage out of the idea that computers were magic. I mean, the fundamental principle of Weird Science is that Wyatt has, like, a 386 with a 14.4 modem and a scanner, which he can connect to the Pentagon and make a goddamn genie with it. Most Hollywood movies today still let computers be magical, but not to the same degree. And few movies go as full out crazy with the idea as Electric Dreams.
For those not in the know, Electric Dreams is a relatively small, simple movie, in which an architect named Miles (he might be an engineer—something to do with buildings) lives in the downstairs part of a duplex, below gorgeous cellist Virginia Madsen. And he gets himself a computer so he can design an earthquake brick. So far, all normal.
It turns into a love triangle with Wyatt and a sentient PC as rivals.
(21) THE LATTER DAY LAFFERTY. Adri’s Book Reviews praises “Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty”.
As in any good mystery, it soon becomes clear that there are shady things lurking in the past of each and every crew member, as well as the traditional untrustworthy AI. Six Wakes builds its narrative through an omniscient third person narrator which switches between character viewpoints, as well as flashbacks to the crews’ lives in the lead up to being selected for the ship. Each crew member knows the others have volunteered for the mission because they are convicted criminals who will be pardoned upon arrival, but they have been told their crimes must remain confidential. From the ship’s doctor who was one of the original people cloned when the technology began, to the AI tech who has been on the verge of a breakdown since waking, to the shady machinations of the captain and the security officer, Six Wakes uses a small cast to great effect, with the world of the clones coming across as claustrophobic and restrictive even in background chapters set on Earth, thanks to both the Codicls as well as the inequalities and power struggles that arise from a society of functionally immortal beings. Six Wakes’ characters aren’t likeable in a traditional sense but I found them generally sympathetic, and the backgrounds go a long way towards making that balance work.
(22) A BOY AND HIS HORSE. The British Museum blog asks “The Dothraki and the Scythians: a game of clones?”
The Dothraki in Game of Thrones are represented as feared and ferocious warriors. Jorah Mormont describes their culture as one that values power and follows strength above all, and there is no greater way to demonstrate power and strength according to the Dothraki than through war. Like their fictional counterparts, the Scythians were pretty terrifying in battle. The Greek historian Herodotus writes that Scythians drank the blood of the men they killed and kept their scalps as trophies and skulls as drinking cups. While we should probably take Herodotus with a pinch of salt, by all accounts they were pretty brutal! The Dothraki also like decapitating their defeated enemies – guards known as the jaqqa rhan, or mercy men, use heavy axes to do this.
The Scythians and the Dothraki fight on horseback and are excellent archers. They both use curved (or composite) bows to maximise the range and the damage of their arrows. As Jorah Mormont says of the Dothraki, ‘they are better riders than any knight, utterly fearless, and their bows outrange ours.’
(23) THE NEXT STAGE. The Verge has learned that “The Twilight Zone is being adapted into a stage play” in London.
The Twilight Zone, Rod Serling’s landmark sci-fi anthology series about technological paranoia, creeping dread in 1960s America, and monsters and weirdos of all sorts, will be adapted as a stage play, The Hollywood Reporter confirmed this morning.
The play will debut in a limited run at London’s Almeida Theatre this December, with a script from Anne Washburn. Washburn’s best-known play is her 2012 Off-Broadway work Mr. Burns, which is about a traveling theater troupe in post-apocalyptic America that performs episodes of The Simpsons from memory. The play will be directed by Olivier-winner Richard Jones, who is best known for the 1990 London run of Sondheim’s Into the Woods, as well as the short-lived 1997 Titanic musical on Broadway, and has also directed several operas and Shakespeare productions.
(24) LIADEN UPDATE. Sharon Lee and Steve Miller’s 81st joint project — Due Diligence (Adventures in the Liaden Universe® Book 24) – was released July 10. The pair was also recently profiled by Maine’s statewide newspaper the Portland Press Herald — “Welcome to the universe of Maine writers Sharon Lee and Steve Miller”.
For Maine writers Sharon Lee and Steve Miller, all it took to launch a brand-new universe was a single sentence.
The opening line for what would become “Agent of Change,” the inaugural volume of their Liaden Universe space opera series, was “The man who was not Terrence O’Grady had come quietly.”
It’s not quite “Call me Ishmael,” but something about typing those 10 words back in 1984 made Lee say to her husband, “I have a novel here.” And there was sufficient inspiration on the page for Miller to say, “I’m sorry, but I think you have a series.”
Both were right. Reached by phone at their Maine coon cat-friendly home in Winslow, surrounded by oil paintings, prints, book cover and other science fiction and fantasy artwork, Miller remembered, “We sat down that night and fleshed out the basic idea for the first seven books.” Four years later, in 1988, their collaborative debut was published in paperback by DelRey.
Since then, Lee, 64, and Miller, 66, have published 20 Liaden Universe novels and nearly five dozen related short stories. Baen Books published their latest hardcover novel, “The Gathering Edge,” in May.
.And they’ll be Guests of Honor at ConFluence from August 4-6.
(25) YOU WOULD BE RIGHT.
I have not until just now ever heard of Enid Blyton, which I'm led to understand is sort of like not having heard of Dr. Seuss.
— John Scalzi (@scalzi) July 17, 2017
(26) PLASTIC IS NOT FANTASTIC. Jewish Business News has the story behind the commercial: “Mayim Bialik and Hodor From ‘Game of Thrones’ In New SodaStream’s Funny Viral Video”.
Following Jewish celebrity Scarlett Johansson’s campaign for the Israeli beverage company SodaStream, the Big Bang Theory star Mayim Bialik is the new face proudly representing the company new campaign in a Viral Video.
Features Mayim Bialik as an anthropologist, recalling her first encounter with the Homo-schlepien played by Kristian Nairn known as Hodor from “Game of Thrones.” The story reflects the devastating effect of single-use plastic bottles on Humanity. A habit that is hazardous to Earth and no longer exist in the future.
In this funny story, the Museum of UnNatural History features encounters between Mayim and the last tribe of plastic dependent species, the Homo-schlepien.
The shooting of the campaign was brought forward while Bialik had to rest her vocal chords for one month due to a medical advice. “This campaign has a powerful message and one that needed to be told before I went on vocal rest,” said Mayim Bialik.
[Thanks to JJ, Bill, Steve Miller, David Levine, Carl Slaughter, Chip Hitchcock, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Xtifr.]
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We had several Enid Blyton books at home, I think they were my mothers. Never read them myself, but my brother did and I had several class mates who did too.
So, I don’t think the flop part is negotiable. On the other hand, the “why has it flopped ?”
Sure it is negotiable. The movie did at least as well as other comedies that have received sequels such as Grown-Ups, and both DVD/Blueray and toy sales have done better than average (and certainly more than was expected).
Sure it was more expensive to make than something like Hot Tub Time Machine, but the relative size of its production budget compared to its box office was similar and yet somehow Hot Tub Time Machine isn’t regarded as a flop and was deserving of a sequel.
The real point though is that Freer’s claim that there was no audience for a movie like Ghostbusters is simply untenable. No matter how much the movie cost in production and marketing, the movie did find an audience – a $230 million audience. Claiming that the movie was a failure because no one wanted to see a movie like it is simply a stupid claim that doesn’t hold up to any kind of scrutiny.
@Oneiros
C4 is actually a bit odd – it doesn’t get any public funding, although there was a plan to give it some relatively recently that fizzled out. Its charter forces it to commission shows rather than making anything itself, which is what forces it to buy good US imports (and what used to force it to buy dirt cheap US imports!)
@Mark: oh I could’ve sworn it received public funds – guess I was thinking of the failed plan!
Had no idea of the finer points of its charter but at least in the last, oh, five years or so since I started paying attention to what I was watching and where and when, it’s had some quality stuff on the air. It’s a shame their online service is so bloody annoying to navigate or I’d probably watch more of their shows.
There’s a story in Herodotus about how the Scythians abandoned a battle to chase a hare they spied, and left the Persians wondering what just happened. Dany waking to discover the Dothraki have vanished in the night feels like something of an echo of that, in its clash of cultural expectations.
I’m another British person who read a fair few Blytons. I’ve also been watching anime in the World Masterpiece Theatre series lately, which adapted a lot of Western children’s literature. Mixes some things which look like obvious choices to English-speakers with ones that are much less known over here (A Dog of Flanders and Sans Famille/Nobody’s Child Remi, for instance, have several more Japanese adaptations): List of titles here
My current favorite comment re: the 13th Doctor (from Twitter):
goth dad. @syntheticaudi0 Jul 16
When talking about who ruined Doctor Who, “women” is the weirdest way of spelling “Stephen Moffat” I’ve ever seen.
Guillaume on July 18, 2017 at 1:46 am said:
That’s an easy one, the budget was too high for a movie that’s being sold on nostalgia when movies with inflated budgets rely on international markets that may not have that same nostalgia in order to recoup costs. Recognizable franchises that have a lot of action that don’t have a lot of scenes of just dialogue tend to do very well internationally.
Domestically was the #1 movie for the studio, but it didn’t perform as well as other properties internationally. Part of that is it had no China release, which is a pretty big deal for potential blockbuster movies these days. Star Trek Beyond for example made 158 million gross on a budget of 185 million domestically, and did 184 million internationally with 65 million of that coming from China alone. Xmen Apocalypse? 155 million domestically on a budget of 178 million. Just the gross from China? 120 million. TMNT 2? Flopped back domestically with 82 mil out of a 135 million budget. Internationally it did well and of that market China brought in nearly 59 million, 1/3 of the foreign gross for that movie. Ghostbusters did 100 million internationally without China.
It met expectations here it just wasn’t able to make up the rest internationally like other movie were, and part of that is because it wasn’t able to release in China.
As far as flops go it made back it’s filming budget though unlikely it’s marketing budget. After licensing for toys/video games/merchandise and home video along with other things it’s likely it’ll break even if not for the franchise juggernaut that they were hoping for.
@Matt Y
Interesting – I’m guessing that wisecracking humour translates very badly? I knew China was an increasingly important market but those figures show it’s vital for tipping the balance.
The whole fuss over Who makes me wonder when certain Filers will talk about how they expect the new Doctor to show some signs of trauma at the change — cf the discussion over the grimdark Oz TV show last winter. Or are Time Lords so urbane as to be above trauma?
Would that be trauma greater or lesser than the end of the Time War? Offhand, I’d say next to killing off all of your race, gaining a uterus is small potatoes.
I can think of a couple occasions where the regeneration itself ran into problems, but after tasty, The Doctor generally seems fairly comfortable in their body.
I … thought?… there was some issue with the government officials who control foreign admission to the Chinese film market objecting to portrayals of the supernatural or something like that?
Anne of Green Gables is not American.
It was, sadly, a bad film. Though not for the reasons folks like Freer insist; the cast was really good, and I’d be happy to watch *them* again. But the tone of the film was weirdly inconsistent, the third act fell apart completely and it was painfully obvious that huge context-providing chunks of that act were cut, and Paul Fieg is a terrible writer/director whose awkwardness-and-humiliation-are-punchlines schtick has gotten so, so old. Every place that movie is weak has Fieg’s fingerprints all over them.
It’s telling that the movies everyone is comparing Ghostbusters to in the comments here are things like Hot Tub Time Machine, Grown Ups, or Independence Day 2 (i.e. mostly movies that I forgot even existed) and not, like, The Avengers or Star Wars or Harry Potter. The latter was the goal, and whatever you may think about Ghostbusters, whatever numbers you crunch or squint at, it didn’t come anywhere close to being tentpole status. It didn’t even win the box office the week it came out. The concept of “flop” is subjective. One of the frustrating things about Ghostbusters is that no matter what your position, the movie was good/bad enough to justify your arguments. You can make a pretty convincing argument either way, but you can’t claim the cultural relevance that so many other franchises have attained…
Mark on July 18, 2017 at 7:29 am said:
Joe H. on July 18, 2017 at 7:32 am said:
It’s true that there’s a higher bar on censorship for movies involving the occult, spirits and cults there but the reason for denial was apparently since the first two had never released there they didn’t feel there was significant enough interest to allow it.
I never got around to reviewing Ghost Busters but if I had, I would have used as an example of where it didn’t work the interminable slime stuff and where it did work scenes like 44 seconds of Holtzman curbstomping ghosts, scenes that do what they do very efficiently.
@ Andrew: I saw a while back that a movie of The House with a Clock in its Walls is being considered. Unfortunately, the only names connected to the project so far are Eli Roth and Jack Black, who would not be my first choices. Still, if it gets more attention for Bellairs…
Mark on July 18, 2017 at 7:46 am said:
Might need a citation of that as the goal of the studio, when even analysts before hand had it tracking in the 30 million dollar range for opening weekend and the studio was excited over a 46 million dollar opening weekend, while you’re saying they expected a 150 million dollar opening (Avengers, Harry Potter, Star Wars).
While I’m sure they would’ve loved that, there’s no way that was ever the goal or expectation.
Well, she already survived an attack on it.
My mistaken impression of Freer as a Baen tentpole may be driven by a larger misapprehension, which is that it is my impression Baen’s new books tend to be from a smaller pool of writers than 20 years ago. Since I have not sat down and counted, there’s no guarantee my impression is correct.
@August: Yeah, it was mostly a waste of a really talented cast, with a not very good script.
8) I’m sorely tempted to order one, though if people don’t even get my Dalek t-shirt with the words “Oh, look it’s R2-D2. I loved him in Star Trek”, they’ll certainly won’t get that one. Coincidentally the only person who ever got the Dalek shirt was a kid who informed me that that wasn’t R2-D2.
24) I nominated the Liaden Universe books for best series, too, but apparently there weren’t enough of us.
I’d say next to killing off all of your race, gaining a uterus is small potatoes
Are Timelords placental?
Well, she’s sure not European. What continent is Canada part of?
After tasty?
I knew of Enid Blyton, but never read any of her books until about five years ago when I found one in the library shop for about 50 cents. I think the copy had worked its way here from India.
As children we got Nesbit instead of Blyton which has the benefit of magic. (Five Children and It vs. The Famous Five.)
I can recommend The Comic Strip Present’s Five Go Mad in Dorset, but maybe not Five Go To Rehab.
Are Timelords placental?
I’m tempted to argue they’re Annelida, what with the multiple hearts.
“North America” and “America” are not synonyms. Canadians react to being called “American” the way the Irish react to being called “English.” It’s not just an innocent error, it’s usually considered actively offensive. Canadian literature is often seen as especially vulnerable, because for generations our publishing industry was controlled by American and English companies to the point where many Canadian authors, including some of our most important early writers, were contractually forced to re-write their books so that they would be set in “anonymous” American-seeming locations or explicitly American or English locations so that American or English publishers would be willing to publish them, contracts or no (Canadian-owned publishing virtually didn’t exist until the mid-20th C). It’s the same in film; it’s virtually impossible to see a Canadian film at a Canadian theatre because most of our theatres and distributors are owned by foreign companies that push American films; some cinemas are financially punished by the parents companies if they choose to show a Canadian film when the screen time could have gone to an American film. It’s a big, touchy issue here, and Anne is probably the only cultural export of any significance we had for like 50 years. It is explicitly, even importantly Canadian.
1) Re ZIPPY, Bill Griffiths was a neighbor of the Emshwillers on Long Island and even posed as the kid in some of Emsh’s pieces.
2) Re Enid Blyton, John Scalzi must have faced the same crossword puzzle I did … first time I ever heard of her.
It’s no coincidence there was a vast flowering of Canadian rock and pop music right after CanCon was introduced.
@Matt Y
Movie companies have basically two strategies for predicting first weekend box office, if they think the movie is strong they go with their best estimate if not they undercut and hope they can say it performed above expectations. Here is a link with an independent expectation of $40 million. http://variety.com/2016/film/news/ghostbusters-female-reboot-marketing-challenges-1201810847/
As for the tentpole part here you go.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/emma-stone-ghostbusters-i-turned-803358
And this one from the director himself.
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2016/may/01/who-ya-gonna-call-why-ghostbusters-is-leading-the-charge-for-female-buddy-movies
It’s telling that the movies everyone is comparing Ghostbusters to in the comments here are things like Hot Tub Time Machine, Grown Ups, or Independence Day 2 (i.e. mostly movies that I forgot even existed) and not, like, The Avengers or Star Wars or Harry Potter.
People are comparing them to those movies, because they are apt comparisons. Ghostbusters was a silly action comedy, and judging it by the standards of other silly action comedies, it was at least as successful as several other movies of that type that have been considered to be reasonably successful, and have gone on to have sequels – and those movies never had the toy tie-in potential that Ghostbusters had. Comparing it to movies that are part of established blockbuster franchises is almost ridiculous. Yes, one could say that “Ghostbusters” is a franchise, but there hadn’t been a Ghostbusters movie for nearly three decades before the 2016 edition, and the 1989 movie wasn’t even one of the most profitable movies in the year it was released.
The latter was the goal, and whatever you may think about Ghostbusters, whatever numbers you crunch or squint at, it didn’t come anywhere close to being tentpole status. It didn’t even win the box office the week it came out.
Every article I have looked at says it was the number one movie the weekend it came out, and also that Sony was thrilled with its $46 million opening weekend, so you’re going to have to provide some citations for this assertion.
But, as I said before, the salient point has nothing to do with whether it was profitable or not. Freer asserted that the movie was the result of out of touch studio executives forcing something no one wanted into the market and that was why it “flopped”. The problem with this analysis is that there was clearly a substantial audience for a female-led Ghostbusters, as evidenced by its $230 million box office, higher than expected DVD/Blueray sales, and overperformance in toy sales.
One thing that it odd is this idea of rating the demand for something by how well the producer manages their finances. When Def Leppard recorded Hysteria, it was one of the most expensive albums ever recorded. To break even, it had to sell more than five million copies. It ended up selling more than twenty million, but would we be talking about how terrible the album was if it had only sold four million and been a financial failure? Four million copies has often been enough to get an album to the number one position on the charts, and yet by the metrics used here, one would be saying that there “was no audience” for such a product if it didn’t make back its production costs.
As for the tentpole part here you go.
That’s a quote from Emma Stone, not the studio. You’re going to have to do better than that.
And this one from the director himself.
At no point in that article does Fieg describe the movie as a tentpole or anything similar.
I have a sad because today I learned Bon Cop, Bad Cop was never released to theatres outside of Canada. I remembered it did well (better than that other icon of Canadian culture, Porkie’s, unless one remembers inflation, in which case it didn’t) but apparently only within Canada and mainly in Quebec.
Imagine The Tunnel (which it predates) or perhaps Bron/Broen (which it also predates) as a dark comedy buddy cop film.
6) And yet, they keep saying how racism and misogyny never had a place in the Puppy campaigns…
My take on Doctor Who is that casting a woman allows them to explore new dynamics in a series that has been growing tired. We’ve pretty much run through all the classic tropes between the Doctor and the companions, and we’ve seen the different approaches taken between the different personalities of the Doctor. Having a female Doctor, even one that rejects the ideas of gender conformity, does provide a new prism through which they can approach similar stories and themes. One of the reasons that DW has lasted so long, in my opinion, is that they’ve been remarkably willing to reinvent the series at various points to keep it from going stale. This is just a different permutation of their established history.
Not that I expect Freer to be bothered to consider that, when he can trash women under the guise of political correctness.
25) I hadn’t heard of Enid Blyton until Australian friends of mine pointed her out to me about fifteen years ago. I suspect that that might be due to Canadian and American kids lit in the 80s (when I was reading it) already had built up an impressive pool of the ‘friends go on adventures and solve mysteries’ which were easier to access. Most of the British or International children’s authors that were focused on at the time for my patch of Ontario were usually in genre works like fantasy or horror, where there wasn’t a lot of Canadian representation.
25) I’m familiar with the name, but that’s about it. It’s possible that I might have read one or more of her short stories — I had an anthology of British kidfic when I was growing up — but I don’t remember which ones might have been hers at this point.
@ Aaron: ISTM that “declaring that the Ghostbusters reboot was a flop” is an example of the Big Lie tactic — repeat it often and loudly enough and people will accept it as true, even in the teeth of evidence to the contrary. Also, “wasn’t a stellar blockbuster” is not synonymous with “being a flop” no matter how much Certain People would like for it to be.
@ SamJ: To paraphrase a famous quote about movies: “It doesn’t remove that role model at all. All of the old DVDs are still right there on the shelf.”
@ various: Dr. Seuss. Please add it to your spellcheck. “Suess” makes my teeth itch.
if no one has already noted it, Iain Banks explicitly notes in The Culture novels, that ender is so fluid there that humans shift their gender as it pleases them to do so. Indeed one character has grandchildren several times over in which he’s the grandfather to some and the grandmother to others.
@James Davis Nicoll
Good Cop/Bon Cop did quite well for a Canadian only release. But the movie was pretty much unsalable outside of Canadian theatres. It got good buzz at TIFF, but pretty much every distributor pointed to the lack of a bankable star and the Canadian-centric nature of the plot as a non-starter.
Porky’s, for years as the forerunner of ‘Canadian’ movies literally had nothing Canadian involved it in other than funding. And even it has been crushed by the success of ‘My Big Fat Greek Wedding’, which was a huge hit in the US and overseas, as well as Canada.
@Lee
Thanks to all the nonsense around it, anything that wasn’t a wildly successful hit was going to be a flop.
That being said, break even is certainly not what the studio was investing in, which is why the idea of sequels have been pretty much squelched. Which is a shame, because in spite of the awful pacing and poor direction, that cast almost managed turn that material into something good. The comedic chemistry was excellent and easily on par with the original. Despite the wishes of the internet Woman Haters Club, the female Ghostbusters crushed it. It’s just you can only do so much when the other parts are weak.
@ Aaron
Yes, Feig says, “managing and meeting and exceeding expectations” is a challenge. “But I would hope we weren’t being made the test case for whether women can star in tentpoles or not. That kind of litmus test just wouldn’t be fair to women.
It was conceived as a tentpole, it was funded as a tentpole, it was marketed as a tentpole and it failed as a tentpole. We do not live in a world where it was a small budgeted comedy ,hopefully with a better script, where those numbers would be good.
COLM FIORE IS TOO A BANKABLE STAR! And pretty much everyone agrees Bettman’s strategy of adding hockey teams in places with no snow in the winter is an affront to decency, goodness and kittens.
(I have a hard time accepting teams not in the “original*” six as legit NHL teams, to be honest)
* Only original in the sense of those were the six when I was a kid and I think that situation only dated back to the War. IIRC there were only four teams to begins with (the Montreal Canadiens, Montreal Wanderers, Ottawa Senators and Quebec Bulldogs) and two of them shared an arena**. The important thing is none of them were owned by Eddie Livingstone. “And we’ll never have to deal with f*ing Livingstone again!” was more or less the NHL’s founding motto.
** Until the arena burned down. The Wanderers folded and Canadiens moved to an arena that burned down the following year or the year after.
@ August
An even better semantic parallel might be “in the same way that lesbians react to being called ‘gay’.” There is a technical sense in which it can be considered factually correct, but in the ordinary default understandings of the scope of the words, it’s a false statement. (Not that the semantics of sexuality categories are anything I pay obsessive attention to or anything…)
@Heather Rose Jones: That may indeed work better.
I admit BC/BC’s flagrant bilingualism could be a pretty big marketing challenge in any empire unaccustomed to multilingualism.
According to the trade papers (Hollywood Reporter, Variety), ‘Ghostbusters’ lost at least 70 million dollars.
In my opinion, the original was very much of its time, and reliant upon the chemistry of the original cast. Even if the the 2016 version had an all-male cast, it was still going to flop. The whole project was just ill-conceived.
@Arifel (re Blyton):
I’d expect \some/ British kids to have a sense of their own less-than-100-years-back social history, just as US kids today might find unmodified Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew more comprehensible. How much harder? “Run out and find me a four-year-old child, I can’t make head or tail of it.” As I now recall, I found Blyton in the modest library of a private elementary school; I don’t remember seeing her work in the public library system, but I’m not sure I looked — IIRC, most of my borrowing there was SF, of which they had some and the school none.
In discussions here last summer, and elsewhere at various times, I’ve read that a film needs to gross 3x its production budget in order to break even — so the new Ghostbusters looks to have overspent before it started to advertise. (I do not stand behind that 3x; I don’t know anyone close enough to the industry to verify it. I also note that mundane news about court cases has pointd to enough creative bookkeeping in major studios to make any fixed ratio arguable.) Whether it would have done as much business as it did if it had cost less to make can be argued endlessly but pointlessly — at least until somebody comes up with a paratime transporter. Interestingly, the new version and the old grossed almost exactly the same in contemporary (non-adjusted) dollars (again per Wikipedia), although I don’t know how many other films were competing for summer-audience dollars in 1984 vs 2016.
As I recall Enid Blyton was a pretty widely read children’s author in the small Canadian city where I grew up in the 1960s. I read the “x of Adventure” series myself and a few scattered other things. I think my younger brother had some Noddy books.
@Magewolf
‘But I would hope we weren’t being made the test case for whether women can star in tentpoles or not.’ =/= Ghostbusters was a tentpole movie meant to compete and be the next Harry Potter, Avengers or Star Wars.
My response was to Mark who was saying questioning why it wasn’t being compared to those and it a flop compared to those movies, and that the studio expected another Avengers, Harry Potter or Star Wars. That analysts guessed low, and that independent estimate was 40 million and they did 46 million opening. That’s a hell of a big difference than a Potter/Marvel/Star Wars expectation.
Transformers The Last Knight for example had previous movies that had 100 million opening weekends and it did 44 million, that’s failing to meet expectations (even though it went on to make 500 million, over half of that from China alone, they love Transformers movies much more than we do apparently!).
Out of curiosity I looked up and here are other recent 80s movie remakes opening weekends:
Robocop 21 million. (this straight up bombed domestically)
The Karate Kid 55 million
Conan The Barbarian 11 million (and bombed everywhere good lord)
Clash of the Titans 61 million
Miami Vice 21 million
Red Dawn 14 million
TMNT 65 million (sequel did half of that on opening)
National Lampoon’s Vacation reboot 14 million
Magnificent 7 34 million
Baywatch 18 million
80s remake nostalgia doesn’t seem to be as big of a money maker, comedies did poorly internationally, and China is where most make back their money.
So yeah the reason people aren’t comparing it to Marvel/Star Wars/Potter is because that’s a bar few can cross. Remove China from Xmen Apocalypse, Star Trek, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Legend of Tarzan, The Angry Bird Movie, etc and it performed as well. Power Rangers faced the same problem, though it hurt from it a lot more.
It didn’t do great, it wasn’t a disaster, and we oddly don’t hear about how those movies flopped so bad.
clack on July 18, 2017 at 9:59 am said:
Yeah, that’s one of the reasons I was glad for an all female cast because trying to recapture the original was never going to be a good proposition, so why not try something new.
The Ghostbusters video game script was written by Akroyd and Ramis was pretty good though.
I have vague memories of the Famous Five books being a thing – but I can’t remember if I ever read any myself. I admit I have always thought they were written by a an ghostwriter syndicate like The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew.
A whole bunch of Meredith Moments from Orbit:
http://www.orbitbooks.net/ebooksale/
The full Orbit sale list:
Ancillary Justice
Blood of Elves
Feed
The Fifth Season
The Girl with All the Gifts
Leviathan Wakes
Red Country
Soulless
The Way of Shadows
2312
Mad Penius Club! I woke up to this and I am crying laughing over here.
Nice roundup Mike. TBH, I never started watching Dr. Who, I was too intimidated by the time commitment. In light of the new Dr. I may try to tackle the series. Do I need to start with the ’60’s?
@James Davis Nicoll
This is how Canadians identify other Canadians when outside of the country.