{"id":14953,"date":"2014-08-03T15:48:50","date_gmt":"2014-08-03T22:48:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2014\/08\/03\/14953.html"},"modified":"2014-08-03T15:48:50","modified_gmt":"2014-08-03T22:48:50","slug":"lucy-and-the-guardians-at-the","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2014\/08\/03\/lucy-and-the-guardians-at-the\/","title":{"rendered":"Lucy and the Guardians at the box office"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

When I saw the trailer for Lucy<\/cite> a few months back, the movie looked pretty bad to me, but I thought about maybe going to see it anyway, because I suspected that it would be seen as an indication of whether Scarlett Johansson could hold up an action movie. I figured if Lucy<\/cite> did badly (which I wrongly predicted it would), then there would be no chance of the solo Black Widow movie that many of us have been longing for.<\/p>\n

Turns out I needn't have worried about the movie's financial performance. Last weekend, its opening weekend, it was the #1 movie in the US (in terms of ticket sales). This weekend, ticket sales have dropped off by a lot, but it's still at #2. And apparently its opening was “the third-highest female-driven action movie of all time<\/a>, behind Angelina Jolie's Wanted<\/cite> and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider.<\/cite>”<\/p>\n

There've been pessimistic articles suggesting that reviews for the movie are weak and that the audience is likely to drop away quickly. So I don't know how studios will interpret that. Still, although I know very little about how Hollywood works, I'm more optimistic about the chances of a Black Widow movie now than I was a couple weeks ago.<\/p>\n

(A couple interesting articles about the politics of Lucy<\/cite>: “Scarlett Johansson Vs. the Faceless Men of Color<\/a>” (contains many major spoilers)—which suggests that the movie doesn't treat people of color very well; also looks at her career, and at a couple of other recent American movies—and “Scarlett Johansson's Subversive Vanishing Act<\/a>” (contains some spoilers), which notes that the movie “functions simultaneously as a critique of the objectification of Hollywood starlets, as well as a cheap, vulgar embrace of it.”)<\/p>\n

\n

Meanwhile, unrelated to Lucy<\/cite> or Johansson, Guardians of the Galaxy<\/cite> has done amazingly well<\/a> at the box office on opening this weekend; the biggest North American August opening ever. I mention this in the same post as the Lucy<\/cite> stuff because this could be another case where Hollywood might be paying attention to box-office performance related to gender, because Guardians<\/cite> is the first Marvel movie to have a woman credited as a screenplay writer<\/a>. If the movie had done badly, would anyone have said that having a female co-writer was the reason? I have no idea. But I'm glad not to have to find out. The movie has now demonstrated that, at the very least, having a woman co-write an action movie is not a liability.<\/p>\n

While I'm here, I'll mention my own reactions: I had never read any comics featuring the Guardians until their recent appearance in Captain Marvel<\/cite>, and I don't find them particularly interesting. The trailer for the movie didn't appeal to me at all, and I confess that I was in the “why is Marvel following up on its amazing success with this goofy second-string set of heroes?” camp. But I think I'm going to see it, partly because everyone's saying it's fun, but partly because Chris Pratt, who plays Star-Lord, comes across as fun and sweet in a BuzzFeedBrews interview<\/a>. The audio is almost inaudible in that, at least on my machine, so here's an animated GIF sequence that captures the best part: Chris Pratt learns of the existence of X-rated Marvel-movie fanfic<\/a>. The words on the GIF are slightly summarized\/edited; I thought about transcribing the relevant bit, but I'm too lazy, so instead I'll just point you to the one-minute-long segment starting around 13:30 in the abovelinked video.<\/p>\n

(And btw, if you keep watching after that, a minute or two later there's an entertaining moment when he's asked what his favorite pizza topping is, and he blurts out “penis!”)<\/p>\n

I realize that the actor's attitude isn't necessarily at all relevant to the movie. But it nonetheless makes me more interested in seeing it.<\/p>\n

And I really love that we've got major male action-hero actors these days who are so completely casually unhomophobic.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I saw the trailer for Lucy a few months back, the movie looked pretty bad to me, but I…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[80,47,11,44,23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14953","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comics","category-gender","category-improving-society","category-movies","category-queer"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14953","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14953"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14953\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14953"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14953"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14953"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}