You know what they say about the Georiga Bulldogs? "When they win you can't stand them, when they loose you can't find them."
I think that Disney, broadly defined as the parks, animation, films, may be my fifth love. My fourth, behind my wife, my dog, and my truck is college football. Technology and the internet would be in the top 10, too, as would playing with numbers, statistiscs and probability.
I started school at Auburn in 1990. I remember that e-mail seemed like such a new thing then; some people had "fidonet" or compuserve addresses that had to go through a "gateway" to be delivered. Most people just didn't have it. In the fall of 1991 the wwww was a test of mosaic or lynx, more people used gopher to get info, and it was easier to ftp a text file of REM lyrics than it was to find any up to date news, because the news sources weren't on line. Usenet was the most up to date source of info (but it was usenet of course). Our world has gotten so much smaller in the last 10 years. Back then I got into a Sunday afternoon routine of posting the Auburn score from the day before, and if I was motivated enough some of the stats from the Montgomery advertiser. Auburn people who were away on military bases or nasa assignments or grad school up north would send me enough e-mail thanks for me to get a kick out of it. I added a link to an AU logo icon for windows 3.1, and a "War Eagle" .au (the unix sound files back then) and voila, I had one of the first college football web sites, and I started getting into it and wanting to make it better. During the fall of 1992 and 1993 I started a pick'um, with all the SEC games, any "big" national games, and the Auburn score for a "tie breaker" - it was never really needed, iirc. After 1993 I let it slide, I didn't have time, and Bob Lowry and the AU media relations was starting an "official" site then. Some of the guys in computer engineering started a list serve that still runs on the university's server, where now about 10 years worth us still e-mail our score predictions each week in the Fall. Somebody usually steps in and keeps track of it, or if they don't nobody really cares anyway. Actually, this past March I got first place in my baseketball brackets. Anyway.
A couple of months ago I noticed something new to me to play with on the internet, the boxofficemojo movie derby - I lurked there for a while and have submitted a prediction list a few times now. I ain't to good at it, but hey, it's summer, and I've never felt the same about baseball since the strike, if you know what I mean. Anyway, what I've noticed is that the movie geeks are a lot like the pigskin prognasticators. What I mean is that people can talk trash and weauxf before hand and then thump their chest and brag up and down when they get one right and still have respect if they can be man enough to show up and eat that crow when they are wrong. I tell you what, I've had some served up by the finest, including those dogs I mentioned up there, and scoops volunteers or cajunLarry's feaux Tigers for that matter. You dig your own hole and there you are. You either dust yourself off and climb out of it or you start back tracking and wining and trying to change your argument or point and making it up as you go along. "well, yeah, but, just like I thought, the defense stuffed their running game and they was just lucky, and just you wait because our quarterback is really better than he showed because our coach wasn't playing the full game plan trying to hide it until later and that would have worked anyway if it wasn't for the damn officials and we'd of won just like I said." I reckon that usually just makes that hole deeper. And when people don't come back to eat that crow pie, folks start to just write them off the next time they come roostering around.
Honestly, I think some folks aren't going to ever accept that anything Disney does can ever be successful again. Remember when Melissa was right here telling you all that Orlando Bloom was going to pull the girls in, but the hollywood talk said that Orlando Bloom didn't have the chick appeal to draw in the girls for repeat viewing - well don't tell those girls who saw it 8 times that. Posters on this thread have already made a case of why would anyone ever make any movie based on AV's math. I could add in the video/dvd rental and sales (heck, didn't disney make 120 million or something like that on Cinderella 2?), pay per view, etc. but I won't. You all know as well as I do that they are gong to make money off POTC. There is no other source anywhere that I am aware of that paints as bleak a picture with the numbers as AV does.
AV I've really can't stop myself but calling you on the "only the people who want to like it will like it" thing and then the "all the people who bothered going to see it wanted to like it" logic - come on, you know so much better than that. By that logic every Justin and Kelly would have had positive word of mouth, because I'm really sure that nobody went to see it other than people who really wanted to. Right? Man, that is the weakest wiggle I've seen in a while. Instead maybe it sould have been "the people who really don't want to like it won't like it." Ya think?
HB2K. No one thought BA would beat M:R? Buddy, YOU didn't think it - Melissa was right here telling you back then. You just wanted to laugh. Now, I don't see POTC total passing M:R, but I would point out that right now it is already passed the totals of hulk, t3, CA2, 2F2F. The first three of those have budgets about like POTC. I can see it being one of the top 5 of the summer, along with nemo, M:R, BA. I think this year probably belongs to return of the king. Pirates is of course going to drop off, but right now I'd be real surprised if it didn't pass 200. Next weekend Lara Croft will take some of the adventure crowd, and tron kids 3-d will take the family crowd. It is a rough, full summer in the theaters. I haven't seen the annoucement for t4, ca3, or hulk2, did I miss em? What I did miss pretty bad was that I thought LXG would bomb completely it's opening weekend, what I didn't realize was that people would go see it when they got to the theater and found POTC sold out. I'm learning.
Mikeymars said a couple of times that POTC was "strip mining disney's legacy." AV you've said that people look at the disney brand as silly kids stuff (I'm paraphrasing that of course, but I think that's the impression you gave of what you were saying). I'm going to say that POTC the movie is helping the general impression of disney. Go look at the reviews on rotten tomatoes - there are several of them that say basically "I thought this was going to be bad, because it is based on a disney park ride," or "this movie was better than it should have been since it was based on a disney ride." You know what, most people don't have that fondness and nostalgia for POTC the attraction that we disney folks have. I'm sad to say this folks, but to a lot of folks it seems kind of lame. More people will see this film this year than will see the attractions, and you know what, the film is actually going to promote the attraction, rather than the other way. The film is going to end up boosting the attraction, rather than the other way. They didn't strip mine their legacy, they built on it and added to it.
That's all I wanted to say, really. Well, one last thing;
Aug. 30 AU 24 - U$C 10. Weauxf.
DR
