The Kidd here...
If you were holding your breath for a sequel to last years' THE GREEN HORNET, you might want to let it go fairly soon or you'll end up dead. It doesn't look like it's going to happen for you.
Producer Neal Moritz recently spoke with The Hollywood Reporter when he explained why THE GREEN HORNET 2 was pretty much dead, and it has nothing to do with the quality of the first film, which wasn't much more than okay. In fact, THE GREEN HORNET actually pulled in nearly $228 million across the globe during its theatrical run, a decent profit from its reported $120 million budget. The problem though is that it didn't make enough, and that's what ultimately is squashing any chances of a follow-up happening.
The movie did almost $250 million and was actually very well liked, but we made the movie for too much money. One, we made it in L.A. for certain reasons, and two, we decided to go to 3D -- that added another $10 million. If I had done it in a tax-rebate state and not done 3D, it would have been considered a huge financial success for the studio. So we're not making a sequel right now.
So now only films with potential for HUGE financial success are likely to get the green light? Interesting.
I'm hardly a fan of THE GREEN HORNET, and I don't know that a sequel would have done anything for me, but that first film still made money. It didn't make assloads of cash, but it still ended up in the black for Columbia Pictures.
That's a very worrisome area to be entering into though where only movies with the potential to score big bucks at the box office could be the ones getting to go-ahead. It's either go big or don't go at all seemingly, with moderate success deemed not worth the time, money or effort. Who wants to only make $50 million when those resources could be poured into something that could make five times that amount? That's quite the sad mindset to ignore smaller films in favor of only big budget blockbusters... but hopefully that's the exception and not the rule going around Hollywood right now, although you'd never know it with every comic book, fairy tale, board game, reboot, retelling, reimagining and remake somewhat exhausted to try capitalizing on the familiar to get people into the theatres and not necessarily the creative.
Moritz was specifically asked about doing remakes over original content, since he's involved with both 21 JUMP STREET and TOTAL RECALL this year. His responding words pretty much confirm the assumptions us movie geeks have been making for quite some time.
I do whatever is interesting to me. A movie we're going to make later this year called Invertigo is a huge disaster movie based on a completely original concept. I think we go for established brands because they can cut through the clutter. 21 JUMP STREET was a brand that was known to people over the age of 25, but we felt we needed a combination of two guys that was a great pairing. Jonah [Hill] first became involved, and it was obvious to us that we needed a complete opposite to him -- and Channing [Tatum] was the guy we wanted.
Established brands... established concepts... anything less is clutter.
Come on, Hollywood... you can do better than that, and, as paying customers, we should demand better than that... or at least we should try to demand better than that until our idiot neighbor ruins any progress we're trying to make by buying a ticket to JACK & JILL. Idiot.
-Billy Donnelly
"The Infamous Billy The Kidd"
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