Boxoffice Pro has just put out its projection for this coming weekend--and along with the usual projection for three-day Friday-to-Sunday period, also one for the five-day Friday-to Tuesday period created by the long holiday weekend we will get as a result of Independence Day falling on a Tuesday this year.
Of course, the big story here is what Indiana Jones 5 will make. As it happens the range for the weekend now stands at $60-$77 million--which means that the ceiling for the film is now below the floor in Boxoffice Pro's first tracking-based projection four weeks ago ($81-$111 million), which itself had reflected expectations none too high to begin with.*
Their best guess seems to be that the movie will take in something in the middle of that range--$70 million, with all that implies for the Solo-caliber or worse catastrophe scenario I have been discussing here for quite some time.* (And of course, should the prediction of a $70 million gross prove overoptimistic as it just did for The Flash, well, the consequences of that need no enlargement here.)
Is there any hope at all for Indiana Jones 5 avoiding that outcome? I see little--but not nothing. One possible glimmer of hope is that as more critics have seen the film the overall response has become a bit more favorable--the Rotten Tomatoes score risen from 50 to 66 percent. Admittedly that is still not very impressive, with the more favorable later reviews possibly just a matter of people saying "Well, it's not that bad." But it is something a little more positive than what we heard before, especially should it betoken audiences proving a little more generous, and maybe good word-of-mouth bringing more viewers in subsequent weeks--and the film having sufficiently decent legs to make the film's final take merely a disappointment rather than a disaster. Still, I have to admit that, especially given what is known about the content of the movie itself (The Super Mario Bros. Movie defied the critics to become a mega-hit, but this just does not look like that kind of crowd-pleaser), and the way in which the summer has been going, I would not expect too much.
* In real terms even $70 million is half of what Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull pulled in back in 2008 (about $140 million in May 2023 dollars).
Thursday, June 29, 2023
The Little Mermaid: Box Office Gross: The Fifth Weekend--and the Upcoming Sixth
During the run of The Little Mermaid some analysts found it useful to compare the film's domestic run to that of 2019's Aladdin--the next-to-last of Disney's animated-classic-to-live-action adaptations, which likewise came out Memorial Day, and I have tended to use the comparison (in current, not real, dollars) as part of my basis for making calculations about the film's likely gross.
As it happened The Little Mermaid opened a little stronger--with $95.6 million taken in in its first three days, and $118.8 million in its first four, as against $91.5 million and $116.8 million in the case of Aladdin. The result was the hope that, if the movie was already falling short of expectations domestically (to say nothing of internationally) it could overtop, or at least match, Aladdin's $356 million gross--which, even with the dollar worth a fifth less than it had been in 2019, would not look too shabby.
Alas, the gap between the two movies (again, without bothering with inflation) has steadily widened--and not in the new film's favor. Where The Little Mermaid was running almost 4.5 percent ahead of Aladdin at the end of the first three days, my extrapolations from the data have its lead down to 0.8 percent by the second weekend and turning increasingly negative afterward--1.5 percent lower by the third weekend, 4.2 percent by the fourth, and 6.4 percent by the fifth, when it had $270 million grossed, as against Aladdin's nearly $289 million.
In short, the film's opening a little bigger (even if it was just in current dollars) has been more than offset by its faster fade at the box office, which seems likely to continue this weekend. Boxoffice Pro anticipates the movie making a mere $4.4 million over the Friday-to-Sunday period, which would leave it with just under $280 million banked--as against the almost $307 million Aladdin had, widening the gap from 6.4 to 8.7 percent.
Previously considering the film my guess had been that its final gross would be in the range of $300-$350 million. At the current rate I still expect it to break past $300 million, but the faster fade makes its getting anywhere near $350 million a long shot now. Instead I think even $325 million out of reach, the lower half of the $300-$350 million range where it will end up.*
Meanwhile the international markets continue to offer little succor--the $230 million taken there to date amounting to just 46 percent of the global gross. Getting it past the half billion dollar mark (and thus into the $500-$700 million range I earlier anticipated), I would guess that if this does not improve the film's final take will be in the $550-$600 million range. Even by the lowered standard of a month ago it is not the happiest outcome that could have been anticipated for the film.
* Aladdin made 86 percent of its money by the sixth weekend. Should The Little Mermaid be at the same point in its trajectory after taking in $280 million as of Sunday one could expect $325 million when it finishes up--but the faster fade means one should assume it to have pulled in more than Aladdin had at the same point.
As it happened The Little Mermaid opened a little stronger--with $95.6 million taken in in its first three days, and $118.8 million in its first four, as against $91.5 million and $116.8 million in the case of Aladdin. The result was the hope that, if the movie was already falling short of expectations domestically (to say nothing of internationally) it could overtop, or at least match, Aladdin's $356 million gross--which, even with the dollar worth a fifth less than it had been in 2019, would not look too shabby.
Alas, the gap between the two movies (again, without bothering with inflation) has steadily widened--and not in the new film's favor. Where The Little Mermaid was running almost 4.5 percent ahead of Aladdin at the end of the first three days, my extrapolations from the data have its lead down to 0.8 percent by the second weekend and turning increasingly negative afterward--1.5 percent lower by the third weekend, 4.2 percent by the fourth, and 6.4 percent by the fifth, when it had $270 million grossed, as against Aladdin's nearly $289 million.
In short, the film's opening a little bigger (even if it was just in current dollars) has been more than offset by its faster fade at the box office, which seems likely to continue this weekend. Boxoffice Pro anticipates the movie making a mere $4.4 million over the Friday-to-Sunday period, which would leave it with just under $280 million banked--as against the almost $307 million Aladdin had, widening the gap from 6.4 to 8.7 percent.
Previously considering the film my guess had been that its final gross would be in the range of $300-$350 million. At the current rate I still expect it to break past $300 million, but the faster fade makes its getting anywhere near $350 million a long shot now. Instead I think even $325 million out of reach, the lower half of the $300-$350 million range where it will end up.*
Meanwhile the international markets continue to offer little succor--the $230 million taken there to date amounting to just 46 percent of the global gross. Getting it past the half billion dollar mark (and thus into the $500-$700 million range I earlier anticipated), I would guess that if this does not improve the film's final take will be in the $550-$600 million range. Even by the lowered standard of a month ago it is not the happiest outcome that could have been anticipated for the film.
* Aladdin made 86 percent of its money by the sixth weekend. Should The Little Mermaid be at the same point in its trajectory after taking in $280 million as of Sunday one could expect $325 million when it finishes up--but the faster fade means one should assume it to have pulled in more than Aladdin had at the same point.
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse vs. Guardians of the Galaxy 3: After the Fourth Weekend, and Into the Fifth
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is proving a rare instance these days of a sequel significantly outdoing its predecessor--performing, as one observer had it, more like a regular, live-action superhero movie with a comparison of Guardians of the Galaxy 3 making the point. Spider-Man opened a little bigger--with a gross of almost $121 million to Guardians of the Galaxy 3's $118 million--and afterward actually widened its lead, such that it has in the subsequent three weekends generally stayed 5 percent ahead of where the Guardians of the Galaxy sequel was at the same point in its trajectory. (Thus as of last weekend Spider-Man had $317 million grossed, against the $300 million that Guardians of the Galaxy had managed as of its own fourth weekend.)
Moreover, going by Boxoffice Pro's projection--the movie's taking in $340 million by Sunday--would mean this continuing, the movie still about 5 percent ahead of Guardians of the Galaxy 3 in its fifth weekend (by which it had grossed just $323 million). The fact that the weekend is another holiday weekend would seem likely to add to its edge, boosting its gross to $346.5 million by its 34th day in release (as against Guardians' $326 million at the same point), working out to a 6 percent margin of difference.
All that being the case, even with Guardians of the Galaxy 3 benefiting from surprisingly strong holds late in its run (which will see it triple its opening weekend gross this weekend, and finish up in the vicinity of $360 million) it still seems easy to picture Spider-Man edging it out at the end. Given that Guardians of the Galaxy 3 seems likely to be the highest-grossing live-action superhero movie of the year (especially given the debacle The Flash proved to be, and the questionable prospects of Captain Marvel 2 and Aquaman) I still expect the animated Spider-Man film to be the highest-grossing superhero movie of 2023 domestically. (The global winner in the stakes is another matter, given that Spider-Man, if doing better than its predecessor internationally, has just not caught on abroad the same way--though I will be revisiting that matter in an upcoming post.)
Moreover, going by Boxoffice Pro's projection--the movie's taking in $340 million by Sunday--would mean this continuing, the movie still about 5 percent ahead of Guardians of the Galaxy 3 in its fifth weekend (by which it had grossed just $323 million). The fact that the weekend is another holiday weekend would seem likely to add to its edge, boosting its gross to $346.5 million by its 34th day in release (as against Guardians' $326 million at the same point), working out to a 6 percent margin of difference.
All that being the case, even with Guardians of the Galaxy 3 benefiting from surprisingly strong holds late in its run (which will see it triple its opening weekend gross this weekend, and finish up in the vicinity of $360 million) it still seems easy to picture Spider-Man edging it out at the end. Given that Guardians of the Galaxy 3 seems likely to be the highest-grossing live-action superhero movie of the year (especially given the debacle The Flash proved to be, and the questionable prospects of Captain Marvel 2 and Aquaman) I still expect the animated Spider-Man film to be the highest-grossing superhero movie of 2023 domestically. (The global winner in the stakes is another matter, given that Spider-Man, if doing better than its predecessor internationally, has just not caught on abroad the same way--though I will be revisiting that matter in an upcoming post.)
Wednesday, June 28, 2023
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny: Opening Weekend Expectations, Domestic and Global
Last week did not see Boxoffice Pro's already low and falling expectations for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny's domestic opening change much. All that happened was a slight shift of the ceiling downward, as the floor remained constant, the projected range now $68-$95 million (while Boxoffice Pro's long-range projections were unchanged from $211-$325 million, which would only make sense on the basis of the optimistic expectation of the movie having legs at least as good as those of Guardians of the Galaxy 3 and better than tripling the opening weekend take). However, we now have a projection for the global opening--of some $140 million. That is to say that the film is expected to make globally on its debut more or less what it made in North America alone--back when the dollar was worth forty percent more than it is now (and the $100 million debut of Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull back in May 2008 was equal to about $140 million today).
This is not a great vote of confidence in the movie's foreign performance--which matters greatly. The last two Indiana Jones movies took in about one-and-a-half times their domestic income internationally, which would, on the basis of Boxoffice Pro's (admittedly optimistic) figures, work out to between $300 and $500 million above its domestic take, and a global total in the $530-$810 million range--the high end of which, if still a disappointment, would not necessarily be disastrous. (Indeed, there would be some hope of the movie not just breaking even but turning a profit by the time the income from home entertainment, etc., is in.) However, should, as seems possible if one sticks with the $140 million opening weekend (in which the movie at best matches its domestic gross, and maybe does less well than that) as a basis for the longer run projection, we would be looking at a lot less money taken in, and certainly the "Solo or worse" scenarios I have been discussing here since April that, especially since the colossal misfire of the Cannes premiere, have moved from being the outlier to the baseline.
Simply consider the math. With an opening weekend take of $140+ million, and the film doing well to triple that (the way Guardians of the Galaxy 3 has been doing), the movie would still end up in the range of $420-$450 million--which is markedly lower than the $475 million that Solo's gross would be when adjusting the figure ($393 million) for today's prices. Meanwhile, should the movie really fall flat (should its opening weekend be followed by collapse domestically, and its overseas gross be no better than its domestic) it could do a lot worse than Solo even in current dollar terms. (Doubling a $68 million take domestically, matching that overseas, works out to a gross of not much more than $270 million--so that there would be plenty of room to do better than this and still fail to match Solo's gross in current, never mind real, terms.)
Still, grim as the prospects looks, a possibility of the movie's at least triumphing over the worst-case scenarios cannot be completed ruled out. And this Friday moviegoers all across America, and around the world, will get their say, and we will once more see speculation give way to historical fact as the theaters and the studios total up the cold hard cash paid by the ticket-buyers--and Lucasfilm weighs it against the outlays that led up to this moment.
This is not a great vote of confidence in the movie's foreign performance--which matters greatly. The last two Indiana Jones movies took in about one-and-a-half times their domestic income internationally, which would, on the basis of Boxoffice Pro's (admittedly optimistic) figures, work out to between $300 and $500 million above its domestic take, and a global total in the $530-$810 million range--the high end of which, if still a disappointment, would not necessarily be disastrous. (Indeed, there would be some hope of the movie not just breaking even but turning a profit by the time the income from home entertainment, etc., is in.) However, should, as seems possible if one sticks with the $140 million opening weekend (in which the movie at best matches its domestic gross, and maybe does less well than that) as a basis for the longer run projection, we would be looking at a lot less money taken in, and certainly the "Solo or worse" scenarios I have been discussing here since April that, especially since the colossal misfire of the Cannes premiere, have moved from being the outlier to the baseline.
Simply consider the math. With an opening weekend take of $140+ million, and the film doing well to triple that (the way Guardians of the Galaxy 3 has been doing), the movie would still end up in the range of $420-$450 million--which is markedly lower than the $475 million that Solo's gross would be when adjusting the figure ($393 million) for today's prices. Meanwhile, should the movie really fall flat (should its opening weekend be followed by collapse domestically, and its overseas gross be no better than its domestic) it could do a lot worse than Solo even in current dollar terms. (Doubling a $68 million take domestically, matching that overseas, works out to a gross of not much more than $270 million--so that there would be plenty of room to do better than this and still fail to match Solo's gross in current, never mind real, terms.)
Still, grim as the prospects looks, a possibility of the movie's at least triumphing over the worst-case scenarios cannot be completed ruled out. And this Friday moviegoers all across America, and around the world, will get their say, and we will once more see speculation give way to historical fact as the theaters and the studios total up the cold hard cash paid by the ticket-buyers--and Lucasfilm weighs it against the outlays that led up to this moment.
Tuesday, June 27, 2023
The James Bond Continuation Novels: In Lieu of a Guide
Listed below are the James Bond continuation novels--specifically the twenty-seven authorized, non-novelization James Bond continuation novels by Kingsley Amis, John Gardner, Raymond Benson, Sebastian Faulks, Jeffrey Deaver, William Boyd and Anthony Horowitz.
At this point reviews of nearly every one of them have been posted on this web site. Those for which such reviews have been posted may be accessed via the hyperlinks in the titles which take you to the relevant page.
Kingsley Amis
Colonel Sun (1968)
John Gardner
Licence Renewed (1981)
For Special Services (1982)
Icebreaker (1983)
Role of Honor (1984)
Nobody Lives Forever (1986)
No Deals, Mr. Bond (1987)
Scorpius (1988)
Win, Lose or Die (1989)
Brokenclaw (1990)
The Man From Barbarossa (1991)
Death is Forever (1992)
Never Send Flowers (1993)
SeaFire (1994)
Cold Fall (Alternatively, COLD) (1996)
Raymond Benson
Zero Minus Ten (1996)
The Facts of Death (1997)
High Time to Kill (1998)
DoubleShot (2000)
Never Dream of Dying (2001)
The Man With the Red Tattoo (2002)
Sebastian Faulks
Devil May Care (2008)
Jeffrey Deaver
Carte Blanche (2011)
William Boyd
Solo (2013)
Anthony Horowitz
Trigger Mortis (2015)
Forever and a Day (2018)
With a Mind to Kill (2022)
At this point reviews of nearly every one of them have been posted on this web site. Those for which such reviews have been posted may be accessed via the hyperlinks in the titles which take you to the relevant page.
Kingsley Amis
Colonel Sun (1968)
John Gardner
Licence Renewed (1981)
For Special Services (1982)
Icebreaker (1983)
Role of Honor (1984)
Nobody Lives Forever (1986)
No Deals, Mr. Bond (1987)
Scorpius (1988)
Win, Lose or Die (1989)
Brokenclaw (1990)
The Man From Barbarossa (1991)
Death is Forever (1992)
Never Send Flowers (1993)
SeaFire (1994)
Cold Fall (Alternatively, COLD) (1996)
Raymond Benson
Zero Minus Ten (1996)
The Facts of Death (1997)
High Time to Kill (1998)
DoubleShot (2000)
Never Dream of Dying (2001)
The Man With the Red Tattoo (2002)
Sebastian Faulks
Devil May Care (2008)
Jeffrey Deaver
Carte Blanche (2011)
William Boyd
Solo (2013)
Anthony Horowitz
Trigger Mortis (2015)
Forever and a Day (2018)
With a Mind to Kill (2022)
Monday, June 26, 2023
Review: Never Send Flowers, by John Gardner
While there was always an important element of continuity between James Bond's adventures in Ian Fleming's novels (the Soviets' desire for revenge for prior battles in From Russia, with Love, the aftermath of those events in Dr. No, etc.), Fleming got more ambitious in his later books. His last five novels--Thunderball, The Spy Who Loved Me, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, You Only Live Twice and The Man with the Golden Gun--can be read as a single saga of a run-down 007 struggling against previously accumulated damage, and a succession of personal disasters, through and after his battle with his most famous enemy, Ernst Stavro Blofeld.
Likewise John Gardner's last books--specifically his final three novels, Never Send Flowers, SeaFire and Cold Fall--form a more thoroughly interconnected story. This time around Bond's real or alleged decay is not an issue, and the novels do not have him fighting a single great villain. Instead it is M's aging that is more prominent, the Old Man on his way out, amid a larger reorganization of the Service for the post-Cold War--changes which see Bond, whose administrative role had previously been vague at best, become entangled with government committees in SeaFire, and Cold Fall closing with Bond on his way to meet Sir Miles Messervy's replacement for the first time.
However, as in Fleming's later novels Bond again copes with love and loss, albeit in a different fashion. One can even see hints of a political theme--just hints, less fully realized or worked out than Fleming's, but worth mentioning all the same. Those last five books, and especially You Only Live Twice and The Man With the Golden Gun, saw a declining, weary Bond sorely tested (not least, by his assignment to assassinate Dr. Shatterhand in Japan), and, after hitting what seems like rock bottom (Bond captured by the Soviets in an amnesiac state, brainwashed into an assassination attempt against M himself), redeeming himself (by taking down Francisco Scaramanga). Through him, Britain and its traditional elite were symbolically tested and redeemed as well (Tiger Tanaka making this quite explicit in Twice).
What happens here in the way of this is hinted at in the preceding book, Death is Forever. There the CIA that in the Bond novels conventionally provided the cash and technology and sheer muscle while the Brits provided the skills, was looking a good deal less flush than it used to do, while Bond comes to the rescue not of those less helpful Americans but the EU, such that it could seem as if Bond's future, and Britain's, lay in partnership not with the Cousins, but the Continentals. And certainly that is how it comes to look in Never Send Flowers. Fittingly Bond is, more than ever before (even in Scorpius), more local cop than international man of mystery in a story more than usually attentive to bureaucratic gamesmanship. Bond's story proper actually begins with a visit to the Secret Service by a pair of senior functionaries from the "Security Service" responsible for domestic intelligence (MI 5)--specifically the Terrorist Intelligence section chief who informs M and Bond that the chief's deputy, one Laura March, has turned up dead in Switzerland. And so they want Bond to go talk to the Swiss police, find out what they have learned in their investigation, and bring the body home. Bond does just that, and learns that Laura had skeletons in her closet, not least an unknown elder brother who just so happened to be a serial killer. It seemed he was dead--but of course "seemed" and "was" are two different things, and in fact big brother March was still very much alive, and still very much going about his gruesome business.
Of course, serial killers had in the past been henchmen within the Bond novels (Red Grant, certainly, was such), but hardly the stuff of the series' primary villains, and it would seem that just as Win, Lose or Die was about capitalizing on the fashion for Top Gun and Tom Clancyesque military techno-thrillers, Never Send Flowers was about doing the same with the popularity of serial killers as villains after the commercial and critical success of The Silence of the Lambs, as so many others did in those years.
To his credit Gardner displays some originality (and some care to not simply give us a cookie-cutter cop-hunts-serial killer-story) as he tries riding the wave. Thus he blends together the figures of the serial killer and the political assassin in his image of an assassination-obsessed thrill-killer (who just so happens to be a celebrated actor much admired for having both a "thousand faces" and a "glass head" that lets the audience see right into the mind behind each and every one of those faces) who gets his high not from preying on society's most vulnerable, but pursuing the most difficult of targets in some of the highest profile figures in the world--a celebrated treader of the boards giving his greatest performance on the world stage. In doing so Gardner blends the antiseptic world of the criminal profiler and the modern mental institution with Gothic horror, with its monstrous children and evil twins and madmen in the attic and incest and religious fanatacisms and even a Rhineland castle standing as a monument to its murderous owner's insanity.
Still, clever as this all sounds the actual effect is disappointingly flat. Dragonpol is a far cry from even Gardner's more memorable Bond villains (an Anton Murik, a Brokenclaw), never mind the villains he created outside this franchise (like his hugely entertaining take on that other James of thriller fiction, James Moriarty). All this is the more problematic given the scenario's ruling out the usual Bondian mechanics (the large organizations and their grandiose agendas, the legions of heavily armed cannon fodder they put into the field, the big finale in the enemy fortress out of the question when the enemy is not a SPECTRE-type organization, but just a single thrill-killer).
It seems to me the execution (no pun intended) was to blame, with a sign of this the triteness toward which Gardner too often tended here. Considering this I find myself coming back to an early passage where he describes an Italian Air Force General who is one of Dragonpol's first targets. Gardner refers to the man as, following his aerial heroics in the Gulf War, having become a household name by writing an international nonfiction bestseller about "the dust-dry stuff of strategy" as "a subtle cross between Tom Clancy and John le Carrè." As one who has read, with very close attention, a very great deal of strategy, and of both Clancy and le Carrè, I find the description confusing rather than illuminating as I have literally no idea what such a piece of writing would look like; how all these prose forms would mix, subtly or in any other way. (Simply concerning ourselves with Clancy and le Carrè, the former is inclined to plain, straightforward, information-heavy writing oriented to the big picture, le Carrè toward a far more Literary, oblique, "Show-don't-tell" approach centered on the characters--and for all its merits from the standpoint of storytelling, utterly unsuited toward a "strategic treatise.") I suspect Gardner had no idea how all this could mix either, that in this instance he was simply stringing together words to produce something that would sound impressive to a reader who had heard of these things without actually knowing about them, or at least did not make a habit of actually thinking about what they actually read on the page.
Alas, it seemed such failings were not solely on the surface here, Gardner generally showing less concern for consistency than usual in his handling of his material. If Bond's Gardner suddenly became an expert on the theater mainly for the reason that Gardner was, and was interested in bringing the element into the books, here he becomes a veritable encyclopedia on the subject--indeed, a "drama geek," in the middle of a briefing at headquarters suddenly expounding tangentially on the satirical intent of a Cole Porter lyric and being reprimanded by M for it; and relying on minute recollection of a prior Dragonpol stage performance to advance the investigation. Similarly out of character is Bond's relationship with the Swiss operative with whom he works, Fredericka "Flicka" Von Grusse, a far cry from Bond's prior taste in women, physically and other ways. (Gardner tells us that her face is "long . . . nose slightly crooked . . . jaw a shade square. Not beautiful by any standard," but "full of character," while career-wise and in other ways, down to her Anglo-Swiss heritage, she seems to have been conceived as a female 007--hardly the sort of thing that usually endeared women to Bond's sense of romantic fantasy, even after Gardner's long eliding of Bond's once well-known attitudes in these matters.)
One might add that their time together was, unlike the sort of dramatic experience that made Bond decide to marry in On Her Majesty's Secret Service (or even his thoughts of a deeper involvement with Tiffany Case in Diamonds Are Forever), far from life-changing. Yet Bond falls for her so hard that he becomes a one-woman man. Meanwhile M is happy to have a foreign operative no longer in good standing with her own agency come to work for him, while even nudging Bond toward marrying her. (I cannot but contrast it with M back in Diamonds Are Forever telling Bond that making it official with Tiffany Case would mean the kind of "mixed marriage" that the old Victorian was sure could never work--scarcely removed from Anthony Trollope's Roger Carbury, likewise probably imagining "all American women as . . . loud, masculine and atheistical" in The Way We Live Now. To Gardner's credit Bond himself is surprised, while less to Gardner's credit M suggests that he is "really just a sentimental old matchmaker.") Meanwhile Bond-the-man-who-couldn't-stand-the-office became a player in the Service's post-Cold War reorganization. (I might add that tonally the Security Service's spying on Bond in Britain, and the final confrontation in EuroDisnyeland--a choice of setting for the climax that recalled the decision to make Markus Bismaquer an ice cream tycoon--also felt out of place, even by Gardner's standards.)
Altogether the result means that the deviation from the usual Bondian expectations is uncompensated by what Gardner does differently. Still, the book has a particular relevance nonetheless as an apparent foundation for the series' post-Cold War shape, with the changes in Bond's personal life, and his professional life, very much at the heart of the next book, SeaFire.
For a full listing of the James Bond continuation novels (and the reviews of them available on this blog) click here.
Likewise John Gardner's last books--specifically his final three novels, Never Send Flowers, SeaFire and Cold Fall--form a more thoroughly interconnected story. This time around Bond's real or alleged decay is not an issue, and the novels do not have him fighting a single great villain. Instead it is M's aging that is more prominent, the Old Man on his way out, amid a larger reorganization of the Service for the post-Cold War--changes which see Bond, whose administrative role had previously been vague at best, become entangled with government committees in SeaFire, and Cold Fall closing with Bond on his way to meet Sir Miles Messervy's replacement for the first time.
However, as in Fleming's later novels Bond again copes with love and loss, albeit in a different fashion. One can even see hints of a political theme--just hints, less fully realized or worked out than Fleming's, but worth mentioning all the same. Those last five books, and especially You Only Live Twice and The Man With the Golden Gun, saw a declining, weary Bond sorely tested (not least, by his assignment to assassinate Dr. Shatterhand in Japan), and, after hitting what seems like rock bottom (Bond captured by the Soviets in an amnesiac state, brainwashed into an assassination attempt against M himself), redeeming himself (by taking down Francisco Scaramanga). Through him, Britain and its traditional elite were symbolically tested and redeemed as well (Tiger Tanaka making this quite explicit in Twice).
What happens here in the way of this is hinted at in the preceding book, Death is Forever. There the CIA that in the Bond novels conventionally provided the cash and technology and sheer muscle while the Brits provided the skills, was looking a good deal less flush than it used to do, while Bond comes to the rescue not of those less helpful Americans but the EU, such that it could seem as if Bond's future, and Britain's, lay in partnership not with the Cousins, but the Continentals. And certainly that is how it comes to look in Never Send Flowers. Fittingly Bond is, more than ever before (even in Scorpius), more local cop than international man of mystery in a story more than usually attentive to bureaucratic gamesmanship. Bond's story proper actually begins with a visit to the Secret Service by a pair of senior functionaries from the "Security Service" responsible for domestic intelligence (MI 5)--specifically the Terrorist Intelligence section chief who informs M and Bond that the chief's deputy, one Laura March, has turned up dead in Switzerland. And so they want Bond to go talk to the Swiss police, find out what they have learned in their investigation, and bring the body home. Bond does just that, and learns that Laura had skeletons in her closet, not least an unknown elder brother who just so happened to be a serial killer. It seemed he was dead--but of course "seemed" and "was" are two different things, and in fact big brother March was still very much alive, and still very much going about his gruesome business.
Of course, serial killers had in the past been henchmen within the Bond novels (Red Grant, certainly, was such), but hardly the stuff of the series' primary villains, and it would seem that just as Win, Lose or Die was about capitalizing on the fashion for Top Gun and Tom Clancyesque military techno-thrillers, Never Send Flowers was about doing the same with the popularity of serial killers as villains after the commercial and critical success of The Silence of the Lambs, as so many others did in those years.
To his credit Gardner displays some originality (and some care to not simply give us a cookie-cutter cop-hunts-serial killer-story) as he tries riding the wave. Thus he blends together the figures of the serial killer and the political assassin in his image of an assassination-obsessed thrill-killer (who just so happens to be a celebrated actor much admired for having both a "thousand faces" and a "glass head" that lets the audience see right into the mind behind each and every one of those faces) who gets his high not from preying on society's most vulnerable, but pursuing the most difficult of targets in some of the highest profile figures in the world--a celebrated treader of the boards giving his greatest performance on the world stage. In doing so Gardner blends the antiseptic world of the criminal profiler and the modern mental institution with Gothic horror, with its monstrous children and evil twins and madmen in the attic and incest and religious fanatacisms and even a Rhineland castle standing as a monument to its murderous owner's insanity.
Still, clever as this all sounds the actual effect is disappointingly flat. Dragonpol is a far cry from even Gardner's more memorable Bond villains (an Anton Murik, a Brokenclaw), never mind the villains he created outside this franchise (like his hugely entertaining take on that other James of thriller fiction, James Moriarty). All this is the more problematic given the scenario's ruling out the usual Bondian mechanics (the large organizations and their grandiose agendas, the legions of heavily armed cannon fodder they put into the field, the big finale in the enemy fortress out of the question when the enemy is not a SPECTRE-type organization, but just a single thrill-killer).
It seems to me the execution (no pun intended) was to blame, with a sign of this the triteness toward which Gardner too often tended here. Considering this I find myself coming back to an early passage where he describes an Italian Air Force General who is one of Dragonpol's first targets. Gardner refers to the man as, following his aerial heroics in the Gulf War, having become a household name by writing an international nonfiction bestseller about "the dust-dry stuff of strategy" as "a subtle cross between Tom Clancy and John le Carrè." As one who has read, with very close attention, a very great deal of strategy, and of both Clancy and le Carrè, I find the description confusing rather than illuminating as I have literally no idea what such a piece of writing would look like; how all these prose forms would mix, subtly or in any other way. (Simply concerning ourselves with Clancy and le Carrè, the former is inclined to plain, straightforward, information-heavy writing oriented to the big picture, le Carrè toward a far more Literary, oblique, "Show-don't-tell" approach centered on the characters--and for all its merits from the standpoint of storytelling, utterly unsuited toward a "strategic treatise.") I suspect Gardner had no idea how all this could mix either, that in this instance he was simply stringing together words to produce something that would sound impressive to a reader who had heard of these things without actually knowing about them, or at least did not make a habit of actually thinking about what they actually read on the page.
Alas, it seemed such failings were not solely on the surface here, Gardner generally showing less concern for consistency than usual in his handling of his material. If Bond's Gardner suddenly became an expert on the theater mainly for the reason that Gardner was, and was interested in bringing the element into the books, here he becomes a veritable encyclopedia on the subject--indeed, a "drama geek," in the middle of a briefing at headquarters suddenly expounding tangentially on the satirical intent of a Cole Porter lyric and being reprimanded by M for it; and relying on minute recollection of a prior Dragonpol stage performance to advance the investigation. Similarly out of character is Bond's relationship with the Swiss operative with whom he works, Fredericka "Flicka" Von Grusse, a far cry from Bond's prior taste in women, physically and other ways. (Gardner tells us that her face is "long . . . nose slightly crooked . . . jaw a shade square. Not beautiful by any standard," but "full of character," while career-wise and in other ways, down to her Anglo-Swiss heritage, she seems to have been conceived as a female 007--hardly the sort of thing that usually endeared women to Bond's sense of romantic fantasy, even after Gardner's long eliding of Bond's once well-known attitudes in these matters.)
One might add that their time together was, unlike the sort of dramatic experience that made Bond decide to marry in On Her Majesty's Secret Service (or even his thoughts of a deeper involvement with Tiffany Case in Diamonds Are Forever), far from life-changing. Yet Bond falls for her so hard that he becomes a one-woman man. Meanwhile M is happy to have a foreign operative no longer in good standing with her own agency come to work for him, while even nudging Bond toward marrying her. (I cannot but contrast it with M back in Diamonds Are Forever telling Bond that making it official with Tiffany Case would mean the kind of "mixed marriage" that the old Victorian was sure could never work--scarcely removed from Anthony Trollope's Roger Carbury, likewise probably imagining "all American women as . . . loud, masculine and atheistical" in The Way We Live Now. To Gardner's credit Bond himself is surprised, while less to Gardner's credit M suggests that he is "really just a sentimental old matchmaker.") Meanwhile Bond-the-man-who-couldn't-stand-the-office became a player in the Service's post-Cold War reorganization. (I might add that tonally the Security Service's spying on Bond in Britain, and the final confrontation in EuroDisnyeland--a choice of setting for the climax that recalled the decision to make Markus Bismaquer an ice cream tycoon--also felt out of place, even by Gardner's standards.)
Altogether the result means that the deviation from the usual Bondian expectations is uncompensated by what Gardner does differently. Still, the book has a particular relevance nonetheless as an apparent foundation for the series' post-Cold War shape, with the changes in Bond's personal life, and his professional life, very much at the heart of the next book, SeaFire.
For a full listing of the James Bond continuation novels (and the reviews of them available on this blog) click here.
Sunday, June 25, 2023
Why No Wildstorm Cinematic Universe?
We have reports of a movie about the Authority possibly in the making, apparently as part of the bigger DC reboot being overseen by James Gunn.
The Authority, of course, was not originally a DC creation in the manner of the Justice League, but part of the Wildstorm Press comics "universe" that DC later bought up--which included, besides the Authority, such titles as WildCATs, Stormwatch and DV8.
In this age in which Hollywood seems obsessed with superheroes, and shared universes, Wildstorm's universe could seem a natural--with it perhaps appearing a surprise that with all the "Marvel envy" out there no one seized on the Wildstorm universe to make a screen universe out of it before. However, a moment's thought past that makes it seem all too predictable given how much "brand name" means these days when only the easiest high concept "sells" will do, the more in as the budgets regarded as required (even a $100 million is too puny for a tentpole these days) make the investments so large. Wildstorm's heyday was a long time ago, and even then its properties far less well-known to the general audience than the first-stringers, or even third-stringers, of DC and Marvel. Indeed, even younger comics fans probably have never heard of many of the associated series'. (Name recognition-wise, John Lynch is a long way from Nick Fury or Charles Xavier.)
I might add that the work I remember from the brand's '90s heyday may not have much to commend it to the audience. Much of it was derivative, if often in a knowing way (with the aforementioned John Lynch we see a man become father figure to a team of super-powered young mutants who all live together while having adventures--wait, I've seen this somewhere before); and where it was not derivative, as with a lot of Warren Ellis' or Alan Moore's work, it was more oriented to grown-up, hardcore readers (as with Ellis' deeply metafictional Planetary saga, or Moore's America's Best Comics work); while in innumerable ways, even the lighter stuff, from the ironies of the stories to the style of the art work, were very, very much of the '90s.
Speaking for myself I have enjoyed a great deal of Wildstorm's stuff over the years. But I know that this stuff is a tough sell to the general audience next to the kinds of things put out by Marvel Studios--while much simply would not survive contemporary handling given the current cultural moment. The result is that even if an Authority movie does come to pass the odds of a bigger on-screen Wildstormverse seem to me slight indeed.
The Authority, of course, was not originally a DC creation in the manner of the Justice League, but part of the Wildstorm Press comics "universe" that DC later bought up--which included, besides the Authority, such titles as WildCATs, Stormwatch and DV8.
In this age in which Hollywood seems obsessed with superheroes, and shared universes, Wildstorm's universe could seem a natural--with it perhaps appearing a surprise that with all the "Marvel envy" out there no one seized on the Wildstorm universe to make a screen universe out of it before. However, a moment's thought past that makes it seem all too predictable given how much "brand name" means these days when only the easiest high concept "sells" will do, the more in as the budgets regarded as required (even a $100 million is too puny for a tentpole these days) make the investments so large. Wildstorm's heyday was a long time ago, and even then its properties far less well-known to the general audience than the first-stringers, or even third-stringers, of DC and Marvel. Indeed, even younger comics fans probably have never heard of many of the associated series'. (Name recognition-wise, John Lynch is a long way from Nick Fury or Charles Xavier.)
I might add that the work I remember from the brand's '90s heyday may not have much to commend it to the audience. Much of it was derivative, if often in a knowing way (with the aforementioned John Lynch we see a man become father figure to a team of super-powered young mutants who all live together while having adventures--wait, I've seen this somewhere before); and where it was not derivative, as with a lot of Warren Ellis' or Alan Moore's work, it was more oriented to grown-up, hardcore readers (as with Ellis' deeply metafictional Planetary saga, or Moore's America's Best Comics work); while in innumerable ways, even the lighter stuff, from the ironies of the stories to the style of the art work, were very, very much of the '90s.
Speaking for myself I have enjoyed a great deal of Wildstorm's stuff over the years. But I know that this stuff is a tough sell to the general audience next to the kinds of things put out by Marvel Studios--while much simply would not survive contemporary handling given the current cultural moment. The result is that even if an Authority movie does come to pass the odds of a bigger on-screen Wildstormverse seem to me slight indeed.
Married . . . With Children . . . In Animated Form?
I was recently surprised to hear of plans for a revival of Married . . . With Children in animated form.
Even by today's remake-mad Hollywood's standards the idea is questionable. The show was very much of its time, and practically impossible to present today because of how the sensitivities of the public (or at least its opinion-leaders) have changed. The air of crudity, the toilet humor in this answer to the upper middle class gentility of the sitcoms of the era of The Cosby Show and Growing Pains that caused a moral panic back in the '80s seem tame in the era of Shameless--while other aspects are today regarded as completely unforgivable. (In the era of the alt-right Al's leading an avowedly anti-feminist organization is apt to be taken very differently indeed.) Indeed, not one of the four members of the Bundy family would be allowed on screen today as they were then--and the degree of adaptation likely required to make them acceptable sure to leave the Bundy family unrecognizable, with the neighbors not much more likely to survive handling.
My expectation is that the altered version will produce an Internet tempest in a teacup, be promptly canceled, and then, as is usually the case with such tempests and their causes, be quickly (and deservedly) forgotten--a risible little footnote in the history of Married . . . With Children and its pop cultural legacy.
Even by today's remake-mad Hollywood's standards the idea is questionable. The show was very much of its time, and practically impossible to present today because of how the sensitivities of the public (or at least its opinion-leaders) have changed. The air of crudity, the toilet humor in this answer to the upper middle class gentility of the sitcoms of the era of The Cosby Show and Growing Pains that caused a moral panic back in the '80s seem tame in the era of Shameless--while other aspects are today regarded as completely unforgivable. (In the era of the alt-right Al's leading an avowedly anti-feminist organization is apt to be taken very differently indeed.) Indeed, not one of the four members of the Bundy family would be allowed on screen today as they were then--and the degree of adaptation likely required to make them acceptable sure to leave the Bundy family unrecognizable, with the neighbors not much more likely to survive handling.
My expectation is that the altered version will produce an Internet tempest in a teacup, be promptly canceled, and then, as is usually the case with such tempests and their causes, be quickly (and deservedly) forgotten--a risible little footnote in the history of Married . . . With Children and its pop cultural legacy.
Clive Cussler's 1993 in Dragon
From quite early on Clive Cussler got in the habit of setting his Dirk Pitt novels a few years ahead into the future, so as to offer some latitude for the political and technological changes without which his scenarios would not be as plausible, especially in the case of novels like Night Probe! (1981)--or Dragon (1990). Part I of the latter novel incorporates in Cussler's version of 1993 undersea mining stations 16,000 feet down with all their apparatus and vehicles, and satellites with sensors which can render the oceans effectively transparent to investigators, with these things not merely interesting gimmicks but indispensable to the unfolding of the plot--while the technology gets only more exotic from there, not least where the robotics are concerned.
Of course, not only did we not have that stuff in 1993, we do not have it in 2023, and at this much later date are unsure that we ever will. (This applies even to another technology critical to the unfolding of the plot of Dragon, autonomous cars.)
Considering the fact it seems to me reflective of the line between "techno-thriller" and "science fiction" having been thinner for '70s-era techno-thriller writers like himself, or his contemporary Martin Caidin (who like Cussler, was fond of writing in not just imaginary technology but cryptohistory and cryptoarchaeology, as seen in The Messiah Stone, or the third of his Steve Austin novels, High Crystal).
The differentiation of the two genres also seems to have gone with the techno-thriller writers becoming more intent on persuading the reader that their fiction was in fact well-grounded. A Tom Clancy, for example, who did read Clive Cussler, and in some cases seemed to follow his footsteps (I suspect Cussler's influence when I look at Debt of Honor), never expected his readers to take seriously anything like Dragon's undersea mining station, or presented his spy satellites as able to peer through the sea that way--and while some of what he envisioned has since come to seem science fiction-al (as with his conception of anti-missile defenses in The Cardinal of the Kremlin), these were lapses, in this case a product of the wildly overblown '80s-era hype about them by which Clancy was taken in, even as he generally strove to "get the details right" to a much greater degree than Cussler did. (Clancy generally purported to write about real technologies, while Cussler, especially in his earlier books, did not hesitate to make things up even when he did not have to do so. Thus in Deep Six an "F/A-21" fighter plane launched "laser-guided" anti-ship missiles at a key part of the narrative. The U.S. did not have, even on the drawing board, F/A-21 fighter planes or laser-guided anti-ship missiles that would have been launched from such, and such would never have appeared in a Clancy novel.)
However, it seems to me there may be more than the care to "keep things grounded" and "get the details right" differentiating them--especially from the standpoint of a reader looking back. They might scoff at Cussler's seaQuest-like undersea mining station, or the advanced robotics of the tale, but such stations were supposed to be a near-term possibility when Cussler began writing his books, while there was a lot of hype about robotics, and the artificial intelligence controlling them, back in the '80s, and especially what Japan was supposed to be accomplishing in that field. (Remember, fifth-generation computing was going to change the world!) Expectations in both these areas (like the expectations in regard to anti-missile defense) have become more modest as we became habituated to the generally lowered expectations of an era of technological stagnation in which the "techno" became less thrilling than it seemed just a short time earlier.
Of course, not only did we not have that stuff in 1993, we do not have it in 2023, and at this much later date are unsure that we ever will. (This applies even to another technology critical to the unfolding of the plot of Dragon, autonomous cars.)
The differentiation of the two genres also seems to have gone with the techno-thriller writers becoming more intent on persuading the reader that their fiction was in fact well-grounded. A Tom Clancy, for example, who did read Clive Cussler, and in some cases seemed to follow his footsteps (I suspect Cussler's influence when I look at Debt of Honor), never expected his readers to take seriously anything like Dragon's undersea mining station, or presented his spy satellites as able to peer through the sea that way--and while some of what he envisioned has since come to seem science fiction-al (as with his conception of anti-missile defenses in The Cardinal of the Kremlin), these were lapses, in this case a product of the wildly overblown '80s-era hype about them by which Clancy was taken in, even as he generally strove to "get the details right" to a much greater degree than Cussler did. (Clancy generally purported to write about real technologies, while Cussler, especially in his earlier books, did not hesitate to make things up even when he did not have to do so. Thus in Deep Six an "F/A-21" fighter plane launched "laser-guided" anti-ship missiles at a key part of the narrative. The U.S. did not have, even on the drawing board, F/A-21 fighter planes or laser-guided anti-ship missiles that would have been launched from such, and such would never have appeared in a Clancy novel.)
However, it seems to me there may be more than the care to "keep things grounded" and "get the details right" differentiating them--especially from the standpoint of a reader looking back. They might scoff at Cussler's seaQuest-like undersea mining station, or the advanced robotics of the tale, but such stations were supposed to be a near-term possibility when Cussler began writing his books, while there was a lot of hype about robotics, and the artificial intelligence controlling them, back in the '80s, and especially what Japan was supposed to be accomplishing in that field. (Remember, fifth-generation computing was going to change the world!) Expectations in both these areas (like the expectations in regard to anti-missile defense) have become more modest as we became habituated to the generally lowered expectations of an era of technological stagnation in which the "techno" became less thrilling than it seemed just a short time earlier.
Characterizations and Prose in the Popular Thriller: Clive Cussler's Dragon
Recently reviewing Clive Cussler's Dragon I considered the book as a Clive Cussler Dirk Pitt novel from the period I associate with his best. Thus I had much to say of the book's structure and incidents, pacing and action, focus and flow (which had me concluding that even if other entries in the series were stronger in various ways, the book as a whole works, in cases quite impressively).
I did not raise the matter of literary qualities such as characterization and prose--which were pretty much as expected for Cussler novels, and for popular thrillers generally.
That is to say--they were, are, pretty bad in certain specific ways that were outside my concerns as a reviewer at that time, but of which something may be worth saying.
One may as well start with the most conventional of expectations, as laid out by that most conventional of critics, James Wood. Far from the author's "maintain[ing] an unsentimental composure and know[ing] how to withdraw, like a good valet, from superfluous commentary" as Wood says, such that the "author's fingerprints on all this are, paradoxically, traceable but not visible," in the Dirk Pitt novels Cussler's voice erupts into the narrative so often and blatantly and melodramatically (for instance, to hint at some doom the characters did not yet expect) one could be forgiven for thinking that they were reading a Victorian-era book for a not particularly sophisticated audience. Thus it is not enough that almost everyone is a superhuman Gary Stu, but we are beaten over the head with the fact by the chunky character sketch he presents at each introduction of one of his principal dramatis personae. The artlessness of the presentation annoys me less than the triteness and falsity of what was being presented, affirming innumerable, quite stupid social prejudices. Still, the artlessness reflects a broader and very frequent tendency to overdescribe that constantly undercuts what Cussler is actually achieving by pouring out more words past the point at which he ought to have stopped. (Pursuing villains Pitt believes have kidnapped his longtime girlfriend Cussler tells us that "if they harmed her, they would die, [Pitt] vowed ruthlessly." Was there an un-ruthless way to vow that?) Quite naturally, this is the kind of novel where characters "shake their heads" every time they utter a negative (perhaps not so much as in Larry Bond's books, but not much less either, this quirk popping up scores of times in Dragon). The narration is also replete with comparisons that use up a good many words in distracting and confusing rather than enlightening. (We are told that the villain's dining hall recalled those of "the most palatial castles of Europe" and then almost immediately told that almost everything in the chamber was "distinctly Japanese," from the paper lantern lighting, to the bamboo carpet, to the paintings by Japanese masters on the walls. So, basically, it bore no resemblance whatsoever to its counterparts in European castles.)
I find myself more sensitive to such failings all the time, which do not improve the reading experience. Nevertheless, grating as they could be the story did more than survive them--much more. It is a reminder that those aspects of literary craftsmanship that middlebrow critics tend to emphasize are only part of writing, not the whole of it, and that like all writers and works which excel according to one measure or another they do so not because they get everything right, but because what they got right mattered more than what they got wrong.
I did not raise the matter of literary qualities such as characterization and prose--which were pretty much as expected for Cussler novels, and for popular thrillers generally.
That is to say--they were, are, pretty bad in certain specific ways that were outside my concerns as a reviewer at that time, but of which something may be worth saying.
One may as well start with the most conventional of expectations, as laid out by that most conventional of critics, James Wood. Far from the author's "maintain[ing] an unsentimental composure and know[ing] how to withdraw, like a good valet, from superfluous commentary" as Wood says, such that the "author's fingerprints on all this are, paradoxically, traceable but not visible," in the Dirk Pitt novels Cussler's voice erupts into the narrative so often and blatantly and melodramatically (for instance, to hint at some doom the characters did not yet expect) one could be forgiven for thinking that they were reading a Victorian-era book for a not particularly sophisticated audience. Thus it is not enough that almost everyone is a superhuman Gary Stu, but we are beaten over the head with the fact by the chunky character sketch he presents at each introduction of one of his principal dramatis personae. The artlessness of the presentation annoys me less than the triteness and falsity of what was being presented, affirming innumerable, quite stupid social prejudices. Still, the artlessness reflects a broader and very frequent tendency to overdescribe that constantly undercuts what Cussler is actually achieving by pouring out more words past the point at which he ought to have stopped. (Pursuing villains Pitt believes have kidnapped his longtime girlfriend Cussler tells us that "if they harmed her, they would die, [Pitt] vowed ruthlessly." Was there an un-ruthless way to vow that?) Quite naturally, this is the kind of novel where characters "shake their heads" every time they utter a negative (perhaps not so much as in Larry Bond's books, but not much less either, this quirk popping up scores of times in Dragon). The narration is also replete with comparisons that use up a good many words in distracting and confusing rather than enlightening. (We are told that the villain's dining hall recalled those of "the most palatial castles of Europe" and then almost immediately told that almost everything in the chamber was "distinctly Japanese," from the paper lantern lighting, to the bamboo carpet, to the paintings by Japanese masters on the walls. So, basically, it bore no resemblance whatsoever to its counterparts in European castles.)
I find myself more sensitive to such failings all the time, which do not improve the reading experience. Nevertheless, grating as they could be the story did more than survive them--much more. It is a reminder that those aspects of literary craftsmanship that middlebrow critics tend to emphasize are only part of writing, not the whole of it, and that like all writers and works which excel according to one measure or another they do so not because they get everything right, but because what they got right mattered more than what they got wrong.
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