2023-08-04 06:00:51
The only place in the world where Megalodon 2: The Pit has been premiere, with its red carpet and its parade of stars, it has been Beijing. It happened on July 28.: megalodon 2 was screened at the city’s National Indoor Stadium in an event where figures such as Catherine Xujun Jing (leader of the Chinese company CMC Pictures that co-produces the film with the American company Warner Bros.) boasted of the values of the national culture promulgated by the construction site. The exceptionality of this appointment was not without logic: the current Hollywood strike prevents Jason Statham from approaching any kind of premiere.
The SAG-AFTRA (actors union) has allied with the WGA (of screenwriters) to subject the industry to a paralysis that could not come in a worse year for the mecca of American cinema. The contrast of China hosting with great means the premiere of megalodon is more pronounced than it seems: as much as the phenomenon Barbenheimer have the box office very proud today —and the triumphs of Super Mario Bros. o Avatar: The Sense of Water—, are rather flashes that qualify a general tonic. The one of the blockbusters of Hollywood losing its connection with the public.
Flash, Indiana Jones and the dial of fate, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, Fast & Furious X…none of these movies have worked the way the studios hoped they would, in most cases because they had budgets too big to find profitability. Faced with this string of disappointments, curiously the latest installments of Transformers y Fast & Furious yes they have had some good numbers in China. Which, together with the fact that the Asian giant’s box office is led for the most part by native productions, leads us to a simple conclusion: Hollywood needs China, but not the other way around.
Wu Jing contra Jason Statham
at the premiere of megalodon 2 Jason Statham was obviously not present, but other cast members such as Wu Jing and Shuya Sophia Cai were. The second already appeared in the megalodon inaugural, back in 2018, being his mother in fiction Li Bingbing. Wu Jing would come to play the role of Bingbing in the sequel: both are big stars from China, who make up the cast of the Megalodones to satisfy the public of his country in tune with a sophisticated advertising machine, which seeks international triumph.
But between the fames of Jing and Bingbing there is a difference in caliber, which perhaps represents how things have changed since the first megalodon. While Bingbing had seen fit to work in Hollywood before megalodon -in Resident Evil or the aforementioned Transformers— as a sign of the importance that the US retained to carve out a career, Jing has never seen that need. In fact, he could be someone more famous than Statham, and more decisive when it comes to studies making their market forecasts.
We could classify Jin as ‘the Chinese Tom Cruise’ if it weren’t for Mission Impossible: Deadly Judgment – Part 1 it has been another one of many blockbusters of 2023 that do not meet expectations, and instead there is no movie in which Jin appears that does not rank at the top of the Chinese box office. Jin has starred The Wandering Earth y The Battle of Changjin Lakein addition to their respective sequels, being The Battle of Changjin Lake the highest-grossing Chinese film in history: it achieved that triumph in 2021, which was precisely the first year that the Chinese coffers exceeded the volume of the American ones thanks to the pandemic.
Jin is also a director. He has directed (and starred in) Wolf Warrior y Wolf Warrior 2, being this 2017 action film the second highest grossing in the history of his country. Intimidating achievements that dwarf Statham’s fame and everything that Warner can aspire to at the brand level from the West, especially since Jin is also closely linked to CMC Pictures. This private Chinese company, before megalodon 2has been behind the aforementioned The Wandering Earth and from the local film that is having the best performance so far this year in China: Lost in the Starsreleased at the end of last June.
The point is that megalodon 2 is a US/China co-production where the first partner is in a much more vulnerable position than five years ago. While since 2018 the coronavirus crisis and the overconfidence of studies in the streaming Combined with the apparent burnout of the public from franchises and the as-yet-undetermined fallout from the writers’ and actors’ strike, China’s trajectory has maintained steady growth. From which would also come a desire for control, when working on the identity of megalodonwhich would fully accuse the images of the sequel.
The phenomenon megalodon part of some novels that Steve Alten began to publish in 1997. They narrate the successive confrontations between the titular megalodons (a gigantic and prehistoric species of shark) and an adventurer named Jonas Taylor, with the verbena tone that other sea monsters had been practicing from a wide and beloved low-budget film tradition. One that would have been born from the success of the Shark by Steven Spielberg, and that predisposed the spirits so that a film titled megalodon It was the absolute party.
It was not. Beyond the wisdom of casting Statham as Taylor, the adaptation was never as raunchy or in the uncomplicated spirit that Alten’s readers—or supporters of things like Sharknado— would like It was easy to assign blame: on the one hand, the PG-13 rating could do little to show gore submarine, and on the other that a director like Eli Roth (Hostel) previously left the production due to creative differences was used to blame the dullness of the ensemble on who had ultimately taken over, Jon Turteltaub.
But the central motive transcended these questions, insofar as the character of megalodon like corporate and geopolitical Frankenstein. A corseted scaffolding of international agreements, box office forecasts and diplomatic gestures where the pleasure of seeing a monster eating someone is the last priority. Also in megalodon 2.
The Ben Wheatley Shipwreck
It was foreseeable that it would happen. That the need to please China was even more immobile at a time when the US is barely fighting for leadership of the world box office, and megalodon 2 it will settle for being a mechanical prolongation of the postulates of the first film. Even if it did well at the global box office, megalodon The public and critics liked it so little that Warner, in view of the sequel, ruled in Spain on the criticism embargo until the day of the premiere, wanting to control a conversation that is not expected to be very laudatory.
megalodon 2 it is a rickety and painful fiction in a degree similar to that of the first megalodon. One would think that, after seeing the self-imposed limits of Turteltaub’s film, there would be no room for disappointment again with the sequel, but Warner and CMC made sure that it was possible when they hired Ben Wheatley in 2020. Wheatley is a very good English director. loved by fans of fantastic cinema thanks to Kill List o High Risethe adaptation of JG Ballard that starred Tom Hiddleston.
Wheatley usually has a world of its own, a forceful staging and concerns between surreal and festive that could well serve a giant shark movie. However – and shortly after High Rise put him in the front line -, Wheatley’s resume began to hit a lurch, directing for Netflix an adaptation of Rebeca very minor and suddenly seeming eager to head some blockbuster. The one that was Before megalodon 2 had been linked to a sequel to Tomb Raider with Alicia Vikander.
Tomb Raider 2 did not go ahead so that megalodon 2 It is Wheatley’s first blockbuster and it happens that little horror film, In the Earth, that rolled into a pandemic. Wheatley has therefore gone on to join that group of independent filmmakers who are absorbed by large companies through gargantuan sagas, where authorship only trades when it comes to boasting a brand and seducing cinephiles. Little has been able to do the director of Free Fire inside the monumental embolado of megalodon 2which fails to perform neither as a family adventure film nor much less as a horror film.
Even so, Wheatley’s hand is slightly noticeable in a more careful composition of planes than Turteltaub’s, as well as in a suggestive use of colors when it comes to descending into the abyssal depths. megalodon 2 takes Statham’s character (and his adoptive daughter after the first part, played by Cai) to a pit where the number of megalodons has increased in step with other creatures like giant octopuses or dangerous reptiles. The plot, however, soon reveals that he possesses the exact same skeleton as the first. megalodonincluding a vaguely buffoonish third act set in the waters of overcrowded Chinese beaches.
The humor tries to be louder by increasing the stupidity of the characters that accompany Statham (so boring in this role that he loses a good part of his usual charisma), while the increased fauna seeks to give variety to the action scenes. Nothing comes together because everything sounds like it has already been seen or, worse, something consciously contained: it is a film drowned out by all the accounts it has to settle, so conjunctural and forcefully forgettable, that it hoards for itself all the sorrow that it can inspire us today. Hollywood. That mecca of popular cinema that now seems to settle for paying the bills, without hiding its anxiety that everything could get worse from one moment to the next.
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