OldBoy

^ any preordering up yet?

RocShemp

If it's like any of Fox' other 3D conversions, this'll look like a huge sack of crap. The only way I'd even bother with it is if it indeed had a properly remastered 2D transfer of the movie.

hanshotfirst1138

I take it the Ultimate Hunter Edition had a lackluster transfer?

RocShemp

It was DNR'ed to hell.

Solid Snake

Ugh. This version again. *shudder* I'm glad I got the original BD. Yeah, it ain't perfect but its a lot better than that newer version.

I just don't get how the guys that work on this shit fuck it up so bad. It boggles my goddamn mind.

fitprod

It was the response to the early bitching from consumers (newbie as well as some bonehead long-time collectors) that assumed HD meant grain free and pristine.

fitprod

hanshotfirst1138

Figures. One would hope that a newly transferred version would've come out to coincide with the Rodriguez movie, but I guess that was it, and it was apparently none too pleasing. I wonder why a sequel to the Antal movie never came out, I assumed it did well. Maybe another sequel would finally get us a proper transfer ala the Total Recall mind-bending edition.

It's like when Hong Kong DVDs come with out-of-sync mono sound which we can fix ourselves. How professional companies can be aloud to get away with this, I'll never know. And the answer, of course, is probably that John Q. Public doesn't care.

And this is what they get, I suppose. There has to be some sort of happy medium.

Josh Z

Predators underperformed at the box office domestically. Its $52 million gross was not enough to cover its $40 million budget plus advertising and distribution costs. Although the movie did better overseas and turned a profit, it still wasn't the big hit that Fox wanted.

Robert Rodriguez (who produced the movie) talked a little about doing a sequel, but I think everyone just lost interest, probably because Predators wasn't much liked by the audiences that did pay to see it.

E Unit

People paid to see it? I used one of the free passes and I felt ripped off.

EddieMoney

I guess I'm one of the few who enjoyed Predators.

E Unit

Ah, one of the few. I just felt it was a missed opportunity to resurrect a classic franchise. With Predators, I doubt we'll see any more now.

hanshotfirst1138

I didn't know that, given that it's budget was fairly small for a sci-fi action movie, that's probably pretty damning for FOX. I wonder how it did on video, I'm kind of surprised that isn't where it found its biggest audience.

Between those rancid AVP films and the Rodriguez one, I guess the franchise is dead in the water now.

I enjoyed it quite a bit. It isn't anyone's idea of high art, but it's a franchise for which Rodriguez brawn-over-brains styling was well-suited, and I thought it was a fun 80s-style testosterone-fueled action flick. Nothing groundbreaking, but for a B-movie, I thought it did its job perfectly adequately.

Spottedfeather

The first AVP was alright. Nothing spectacular, but it was fun. The second one, not so much.

John Pannozzi

Ditto.

Solid Snake

AVP films can go rot in hell.

I like Predators. It's a cheaply imagined film but I like some big chunks of it. I like bringing it back to the jungle, I dig the premise, liked the cast (except LF), and I liked the bleakish ending.

My problems with is that it's kind of remaking the original and it's also got some heavy issues in its script. It's small budget also kind of made it crutch on CGI when practical could have been.

Still pissed that Trejo didn't get a more prominent moment leading up to his finale.

Josh Z

The problem with Predators is that it's a blatant beat-for-beat retread of the first movie, even down to using the same musical score. I'm sure that Rodriguez and whatever fans the movie has will argue that this was an "homage," but it just felt stale.

For all of its flaws (and it has many), Predator 2 made a very clever decision to change the setting of the action to a completely different environment than the original. Even the AvP movies did that in their own ways. Then Predators came along and basically just remade the first Predator in an inferior fashion, and what's the point of that? I was bored stiff watching it.

And that's to say nothing of the casting of Adrien Brody as an action hero, which just wasn't convincing no matter how much he worked out to put on some muscle mass for the role.

Why So Blu?

It made 52 million domestically and 127 million worldwide. In fact, RR came in like 2-4 million under budget. That's a pretty modest hit.

Josh Z

Yes, modest. It did almost exactly the same as AvP: Requiem. Fox expected better and hoped that it would be a new relaunch for the franchise. It wasn't.

No one in Hollywood invests money in a production hoping for a modest hit, especially not with sci-fi. It's either a blockbuster or a it's waste of effort.

Solid Snake

At least Predators will age better for the eyes. I can't watch Predator 2. 1995 looks horrid lol. I still love the med kit moment. I don't know why but I find it interesting to see these things patch themselves up.

E Unit

Funny cause I like watching Predator 2 for that exact same reason. I can't even bring myself to buy Predators, and I know I never will. Zero replay value for me. Predator 2 was just fun to watch, and as Josh Z mentioned, at least it did something different and tried it in a different environment.

My Other Self

I had revisionist thinking on Predators. When I saw it in theaters I thought it was pretty good, then as time wore on, parts of it started bothering me and now I don't think I'd ever find reason to watch it again.

Predator 2 is borderline guilty pleasure for me. I would easily watch that over it.

RocShemp

Add me to the love for Predator 2. Sure it's dated in parts but, as has been said ad nauseam, it made the wise choice of changing up the setting (and even made the protagonist a cop instead of a hardened soldier) instead of being a poor retread of the first. The only good thing that I can say about Predators is that it was barely better than AVP: Requiem and that's only because I couldn't see anything in AVP: Requiem.

hanshotfirst1138

I feel the same way about AVP that I do about the Clash of the Titans remake, which is that it looks a lot better compared to it's rancid sequel. I don't hate Paul W.S. Anderson as much as some do, he's made some decent guilty pleasures. Most of his films are just plain bland rather than unpleasantly offensive.

It does play a Rodriguez "checklist of cool things:" Yakuza vs. Predator? Sweet! Predator vs. Predator? Why not! It's more like a showreel than a full fledged film, but Antal has a nice visual eye for composition and a his action sequences flow well and don't use shaky cam.

The CG did look pretty weak, the budget problems were obvious.

Everyone in the movie were basically slasher movie victims with almost no real character development, they were just there to get killed off.

I thought of it more like a back-to-basics approach. It went the sequel route, which was basically "More Predators and more military people with big guns, because more must be better." It was hardly groundbreaking, but then again, the first film is actually pretty thinly sketched too, if you stop and think about it.

I've actually always thought that Predator 2 was a great idea that bungled a really cool premise. I haven't seen the movie in like ten years, when I first saw it, I was only 14 or so and mostly remember being shocked at the near nonstop stream of brutal violence and some surprising full-frontal nudity.

This isn't wrong, but different doesn't necessarily equal better. The AVP movies, to be fair, also clearly suffered from budgetary shackles, since they obviously had to be be very confined in their setting too.

To play devil's advocate, one could argue that it went back to the one movie in the franchise that actually worked .

I was surprised how well I liked Brody, actually, he convinced me more than I though he would.

The key work is "franchise," I'm sure they were hoping it would reignite that rather than just make some money on its own.

This was fairly modestly budgeted for a sci-fi film, to be fair.

Yeah, any kind of period detail will inevitable date things a bit.

It'll eventually wind up as late night-cable fodder, I'm sure, it's note exactly memorable, but it does its job adequately, IMO.

It was significantly better than AVP Rectum, but so was a stick in the eye. That film was awful, and gooey gore was usually sickening rather than entertaining (Children and pregnant women? Did no one in the meeting room stop to think this crossed a line?) I went to go see it on Christmas day, so not only am I going to hell, but it's terrible .

Solid Snake

I'm not sure at what point I hated AVP:R but it was pretty damn early into it.

EddieMoney

It's quite the raging shitfest.