The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

New ‘Terminator’ Flops at Box Office

Posted on | November 5, 2019 | 4 Comments

 

Hasta la vista, “wokeness”:

According to a new report, Skydance Media, Paramount Pictures and 20th Century Fox stand to lose around $120 million in total, given the long-term prospects of Terminator: Dark Fate bombing at the box office. The movie, directed by Tim Miller (Deadpool) and produced by franchise creator James Cameron, made just $29 million in its domestic debut, which was far below industry estimates, which had it taking in around $40 million. Even that number wasn’t great, but it gave Sarah Connor and the gang a fighting chance.
The biggest issue here is that the movie is said to have cost $185 million to produce, with each of the aforementioned companies putting up 30 percent of the budget. It’s also worth mentioning that figure doesn’t account for marketing, which estimates peg at $100 million.

Ace of Spades writes:

This might be the final wake-up alarm that alerts Hollywood to the notion of Get Woke, Go Broke. They’ve had ten alarms already, but they kept hitting snooze. This one will finally get their attention, I think.
It might also be the end of “dark marketing,” which is a term some give to the practice of trying to gin up controversy — and get #Woke movie reviewers and “journalists” to write clickbait articles in your favor — by choosing sides in the Civil War 2.0.

The plot of Terminator: Dark Fate seems to have been concocted by a committee of Gender Studies majors and DNC consultants. Director Tim Miller went out of his way to emphasize the “progressive” ideas symbolized by the character played by Mackenzie Davis:

Miller, who broke out in Hollywood after directing “Deadpool,” recently spoke with Variety ahead of bringing “Terminator: Dark Fate” to Comic-Con later this month. The filmmaker said Mackenzie’s cyborg character Grace will be enough to get misogynistic internet trolls shaking in their boots.
“If you’re at all enlightened, she’ll play like gangbusters. If you’re a closet misogynist, she’ll scare the f–k out of you, because she’s tough and strong but very feminine,” Miller said. “We did not trade certain gender traits for others; she’s just very strong, and that frightens some dudes. You can see online the responses to some of the early s–t that’s out there, trolls on the internet. I don’t give a f–k.”

So, this auteur tells us, the world is divided into “enlightened” people, on the one hand, and “misogynistic Internet trolls” on the other. Anyone who doesn’t want to pay $12.50 to be insulted by a two-hour cinematic Gender Studies lecture is therefore a misogynist. As I explained in July (“SJWs Ruin New ‘Terminator’ Sequel”), the reason hit movies become hits is because they usually follow classic formulas, expressing themes with a timeless appeal. The original 1984 Terminator was formulaic in that it was a damsel-in-distress story — the female lead threatened by sinister forces from which the hero must rescue her. Kyle Reese (played by Michael Biehn) the soldier sent back from the future to rescue Sarah from the Terminator, heroically sacrifices himself in the rescue attempt, leaving Sarah to finally escape on her own. And yet the whole point of this drama is that Sarah’s live is worth saving because she is destined to give birth to John Connor, the future hero who will lead the resistance against Skynet. So, in one sense, Sarah is analogous to the Virgin Mary, and the Terminator represents the persecution of Herod.

The idea of a woman who is most valuable as a potential mother is, of course, anathema to the kind of androgynous feminist ideology that Tim Miller sought to celebrate in Dark Fate, and the fact that this box-office bomb might lose more than $100 million for the studio ought to cause the money men in Hollywood to rethink their “woke” investments.


 

Category: Movies

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4 Responses to “New ‘Terminator’ Flops at Box Office”

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