Well why wouldn't you count the worldwide grosses? You think studios determine these things solely on US box office? I mean Troy might have disapointted here, but it made like 400 million overseas. Same thing with Last Samurai, moderate grosses here, HUGE grosses overseas.

Troy:
US: 133 million
Overseas: 364 million

Last Samurai
US: 111 million
Overseas: 345 million

Overall, Troy even made more money than Gladiator did, and WAY more than Braveheart did (Braveheart didn't even make 100 million in the US). These studios aren't stupid, of course they consider worldwide grosses and DVD. Troy would have never been given a 200 million dollar budget if it weren't for the international market (where Cruise and especially PItt are even more popular than here).

They might've not reached expectations, but they still made a shitload of money off of these. And no, most films do not make that type of money overseas, so I think that ensures this type of movie continually being made. Another bright side is, Warner Brothers isn't footing the bill on Alexander, instead its financed the same way Terminator 3 was.

You're right, both Troy and Last Samurai did well overseas. However, they both had huge stars in Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise respectively, just like T3 had Arnold.
Colin Farrell, on the other hand, does not seem to have the same kind of international following, though I am sure international audiences will be wowed by the spectacle.

On a side not, does anybody have the Vangelis soundtrack to this movie yet? I am thinking of getting it and always like music done by him.

oh I didn't know this.. (runs over to amazon.com)... :)

Here's a good review of the album.

http://www.filmtracks.com/titles/alexander.html

I'm a big fan of Vangelis, so i was extremely excited to see him scoring a new film. His last movie score, 1492, is one of the best damn movie scores I've ever heard. I've listened to that thing so many times. I'm excited to hear what he does with this one.

if your a fan of Vangelis, also check out the artist Kitaro and his magnificent score for Oliver Stone's "Heaven & Earth"

A little bump for those who might catch any advance showings this weekend.

Well, judging from the reviews, I'm not the only one yet to be impressed. I will still catch this movie more or less out of morbid curiousity.

I loved Troy, The Last Samurai, and Gladiator, but I will just wait for the Alexander DVD release.

With an abysmal 17% on RT, here are some entertaining review excerpts for Alexander:

"Farrell often looks constipated, like he needs to get off that horse and hit the commode as opposed to hold onto his troops or his audience."

"Even at the end of three hours, the accents still never stopped being an annoyance. "

"A horrendously bad movie, a genuine 40-car pile-up of literally epic proportions, a three-way head-on collision of bad writing, bad acting, and bad direction."

"So awful that it's almost good."

"I respect Stone as a filmmaker, but this movie is punishment rather than entertainment."

"So misconceived, so shrill, so fetishy is Oliver Stone's epic, so unintentionally hilarious a stew of paganism and Freudianism, that it makes Conan the Barbarian look like Gladiator."

"It is such a majestic disaster, that I have a bizarre sort of affection for it, like for a weirdly deformed child, maybe."

"With its rampant homoeroticism, elaborate costumes and jumbled fight choreography, one would assume this is a Joel Schumacher flick not an Oliver Stone production."

"An enormous cinematic mess. Alexander is not so much mind-numbingly boring as it is intriguingly nonsensical."

"It's a perplexing muddle: Every moment of spectacular battlefield action is offset by unintentionally hilarious scenes from Alexander's private life."

"Oliver Stone doesn't just create trainwrecks. He knocks the train off the rails, sets it on fire, then kills every person onboard. (And takes three hours to do it.)"

"You could literally chop Alexander up into six 30-minute blocks, reassemble it at random, and the movie would make the exact same amount of sense (i.e. none). "

"Puerile writing, confused plotting and shockingly off-note performances make Oliver Stone's epic film a disappointment."

Ebert

review

"When the mighty fall, it is from a greater height. So it was with Alexander the Great, and so it is with Oliver Stone's 'Alexander.' Here is an ambitious and sincere film that fails to find a focus for its elusive subject."

Film Jerk

review

"A once deliberate, respectful, and nuanced filmmaker, Oliver Stone has fully abandoned his sense of magic and precision. 'Alexander' is an ambitious stab from the filmmaker at a traditional epic and historical bio-pic, but it cracks under the weight of Stone’s limited imagination and aborted execution."

I knew I would skip the theatrical release, but with these poor reviews, I may skip the DVD too.

USA Today
* 1/2 out of four
http://www.usatoday.com/life/movies/...lexander_x.htm

Wow - not sure whether I'll still see this one over the holiday weekend now.

The local paper gave it one star with the heading "not so great". I'll still probably catch a matinee or something though.

Wow, the critics are really taking a broadsword to this movie. I was hoping for a historical epic that would at least be better than Troy, but it look like I'll have to keep hoping.

Not that I condone his bullshit, but Ms. Knowles liked it:

http://www.aintitcoolnews.com/display.cgi?id=18886

Of course, he was smug about it, and ripped on film critics for not liking it - typical ass behavior.

Now we have to deal with months of Harry up on his cross about this film... :(

Conan the Barbarian is better than Gladiator. Just setting the record straight.

"Oliver Stone doesn't just create trainwrecks. He knocks the train off the rails, sets it on fire, then kills every person onboard. (And takes three hours to do it.)"


Dude, I gotta see this movie now! Like I said, morbid curiousity more than anything else. You would think someone would have tried to release some decent movies over this weekend, but both this and Christmas With the Kranks seem to be true, well, turkeys!!!
What's sad is that while Alexander has slightly better reviews than Kranks ( about 7% to 18%, nothing major to say the least), Kranks can probably still make some money off of families while Alexander will become an infamous flop. Stone will be hard pressed to get funding for future projects.

Maybe with time, this movie will gain a cult following like that of Showgirls and we can get a nice mock SE DVD.

Maybe I'm in minority here, but I liked it. Indeed, it will be a flop, like Oliver Stone himself said in an interview recently- it's long, lots of discussions, far less action than thought (they skip some cool events in his life) and again, it's a historical movie, on a subject (not considering Alex's bisexuality) and in a field most people have no interest on. I saw it in DLP yesterday with about 60 other people and the thoughts on the way out were mostly positive. If I have no interest in a movie, I will not go see it. Funny note, there is one particular scene where Mr STone did his trademark hallucinogenic trip (no joke) and it almost reminded me of some fusion between his acid episodes and a Kubrick period piece (does this make sense?). Give this a chance guys, it's not the greatest movie, but I've seen worse, we all have.

"I've seen worse" is hardly the ringing endorsement that gets me off my rear and to the theater ASAP. :p

How are the Rosario Dawson nude scenes?

She is gorgeous...though the scenes are not nearly as revealing as I've been led on to believe.

seeing this tonight. Not expecting the best but it can't be as boring as Troy.

Famous last words ;)

I know Conan the Barbarian has become sort of a cult favorite, but it really is an awful film. It's not even in the same universe as Gladiator.

I just saw Alexander. Not all that good but certainly not horrible. I just finished reading The Virtues of War, an historical novel about Alexander by Steven Pressfield (author of the superb Gates of Fire about the 300 Spartans at Themopylae). Of course, Stone's movie is not based on The Virtues of War which was just published last month. It was interesting to see the contrasting parts of Alexander's life which Pressfield and Stone chose to emphasize, and also the different ways they told the story. Both are works of fiction but I have no doubt that Pressfield's Alexander is closer to the "real" Alexander than Stone's. Also, the book is simply quite a bit better than the film.

Given the movie's near three hour length I wish Stone had chosen to include more that Pressfield included and less of stuff that's not very compelling and is quite dubious historically. Also, I'm not sure Colin Farrell and some of the other roles were all that well cast. Also, some of Stone's cinematic gimmickry which played quite well in films like Natural Born Killers or JFK seemed very out of place here.

**/ ****.