'Napoleon' liked, disliked ...or ...has Ridley Scott Lost the Ability to Make Great Movies? by JAYNEZTOWN

I'm not a huge fan of any of these "Historical Biopics" myself.

They're all "Based on a True Story", like Fire in the Sky or Fargo was.

Is it any wonder why Jada Pinkett Smith couldn't figure out why everybody raged against black Cleopatra? All of these things have a couple of truths sprinkled into the vast seas of artistic liberty.

Other than that, I'm not commenting on the quality of the film at all. I'm just saying that these budgets for movies like Napoleon and Killers of the Flower Moon are insanity.

In any other case, the fact that Napoleon took 2nd place and beat Disney's 100th Anniversary cartoon on their opening weekend would have been cause to celebrate. But it's going to end up not even making its Production Budget back worldwide, let alone the $500k it needs to break even.

Supposedly Amazon or Apple or whoever was really behind this doesn't care when they put this big money down because it will make money on their streaming platforms. I don't know how to verify these claims or strike them down. We know Disney+ loses money every quarter for Disney, but Amazon's Prime service covers a lot more than just streaming, and I never hear anything about Apple's business.

If they got a plan, then great.

But Disney always lies about having a plan and they're finally going down.

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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Sunday, December 3, 2023 2:14 PM

“c'est fini ” ??

it looks like

Godzilla, Beyonce and Hunger Games beat Napoleon

The Shift, Trolls, Silent Night and Wish are eating into Napoleon profits?

Some reports say Napoleon is in big trouble, its box office is in free fall and might fall down behind a superhero flop called 'The Marvels', Killers of the Flower Moon, Five Nights at Freddy’s and fall behind a Hindi-Bollywood India movie called Animal (2023)

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Sunday, December 3, 2023 2:22 PM

JoBlo liked 'the Last Duel' and says Napoleon is 'great'

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Sunday, December 3, 2023 2:53 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Movie Review: What Ridley Scott's 'Napoleon' Gets Wrong About War

By Franz-Stefan Gady | December 2, 2023

https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/12/02/napoleon-ridley-scott-review-movi
e-battle-military-historical-accuracy-myth/

I’m just a defense analyst, so I’ll leave a proper critique of Ridley Scott’s new blockbuster biopic Napoleon to the many reviewers who have already disparaged it. I, for one, found it to be a lukewarm mélange of battle scenes and romantic vignettes, leaving me with neither a sense of the man Napoleon Bonaparte — the bicorne-hatted soldier-turned-emperor of the French — nor a feel for the age of upheaval he so much defined. For a grand piece of historical fiction from the director of such masterpieces as Blade Runner, Thelma & Louise, and Black Hawk Down, the film curiously fails to entertain.

My perspective on Napoleon is a different one. Scott’s film stands in a long line of movies, novels, and even history books that have given the world an entirely wrong view of how wars are fought — and even more importantly, how they are won. And that matters, because the mythical idea of war embedded in Napoleon and so many other works has become so widespread in our culture and discourse that it ends up informing actual decisions about actual wars.

Let’s call it the decisive battle myth. Napoleon, with its focus on famous battles such as those of Austerlitz and Waterloo, perpetuates the dangerous idea that wars are decided by great and bloody clashes. This obsession is as old as there have been written accounts of history, but in popular culture in the English-speaking world, the myth can be traced back to the 1851 publication of The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World: From Marathon to Waterloo, which helped kickstart an entire genre of works focusing on battles supposed to have singlehandedly changed the course of history. In film, think of The Longest Day, Midway, and Stalingrad; in books, the list of battle histories and battle fiction is too long to contemplate. The genre even plays in counterfactuals: The 1993 movie Gettysburg, based on Michael Shaara’s novel The Killer Angels, suggests that the South could have won the U.S. Civil War had the Battle of Gettysburg gone the other way.

No matter what these works have taught us to think, the decisive battle is a myth. Wars between major powers are not decided by great battles but by attrition of soldiers and materiel, which in turn is determined by such things as force size, logistics, production, and technology. Battles, large and small, are important only to the extent to which they accelerate attrition and wear down the other side. Yet the myth of the decisive battle — the idea that an adversary can be defeated in one big and bloody but short engagement — remains powerful. It’s also dangerous, because it affects not only ordinary moviegoers but military and political leaders as well. In other words, the very people deciding whether to start and how to fight a war.

Scott’s focus on battles is hardly surprising. Napoleon fought numerous campaigns culminating in big set-piece battles, after which the defeated side sought peace; at the Battle of Austerlitz, Napoleon defeated the allied armies of Austria and Russia, forcing the former to sue for peace and the latter to retreat home. But the French emperor’s most celebrated victory was only an episode in a long war that did not end until 10 years later, after attrition and mutual exhaustion. The Battle of Waterloo concluded a war that had raged for 23 years, ended French attempts to dominate Europe, and destroyed Napoleon's imperial power forever.

The focus on decisive battles orchestrated by a brilliant military leader such as Napoleon has been poisoning Western military thinking for centuries by suggesting that great power wars can be short affairs. The idea that an adversary can be decisively beaten in just one or a few engagements has incentivized political and military gambling: Think of the German Schlieffen Plan that bet on a single, decisive encirclement of French forces and their quick annihilation or capitulation in 1914, with the disastrous result of condemning much of Europe to four years of attrition with millions of soldiers killed. The idea of a quick, decisive battle inspired then-Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein to invade Iran in 1980, which led to a horrifically bloody eight years of attrition.

More recently, Russian President Vladimir Putin thought one decisive push toward Kyiv in early 2022 would quickly and painlessly conquer Ukraine. Hundreds of thousands of deaths later, the grinding war goes on. For all the emphasis on Napoleon’s quick campaigns and decisive battles, his wars tell a similar story of long and painful attrition: More than 5 million European soldiers were killed or otherwise died during the Napoleonic wars, a level of carnage, relative to total population, on par with World War I. France alone lost around 860,000 soldiers, including 38 percent of all men born between 1790 and 1795.

That Napoleon is only a movie doesn’t make it better. There are documented cases of films influencing a policymaker’s decisions to go to war. In 1970, for example, then-U.S. President Richard Nixon repeatedly watched the film Patton during the decision-making process to expand the Vietnam War into Cambodia, taking inspiration from the movie general’s willpower and single-minded belief in U.S. military power. One academic study found that popular culture, including fictional films, can frame the way we think about a multitude of issues, and there is no reason to believe that military officers and policymakers are exempt from these effects. Movies can help prevent wars, too. Former U.S. President Ronald Reagan was inspired by the television film The Day After and Tom Clancy’s novel Red Storm Rising to push for nuclear arms control. But if decision-makers and military leaders are prone to fighting the wars of their imagination, then a popular culture that reinforces the idea that wars can be short and decisive may incentivize willingness to look for a quick military solution to a political problem.

There is no reason to believe that the myth of the decisive battle will lose its power any time soon. As the historian Cathal J. Nolan writes in The Allure of Battle: “The idea of decisive battle will always be more alluring than winning by attrition — morally and aesthetically; to generals and theorists, and to publics hungry for war news.”

Let us hope that U.S. and NATO military strategists and force planners do not draw too deep an inspiration from Scott’s depiction of Napoleonic battle. It’s bad enough that the allure of the decisive battle is already shaping U.S. deliberations over how to fight a possible future war with China over Taiwan. Disregarding the likely attritional character and extended length of such a fight — and the requirements in manpower, weapons, ammunition, production capacity, and political constancy that would entail — could spell disaster for the United States and its allies. Focusing on long attrition instead of dramatic clashes would certainly make for a boring film experience, especially since one only has to look at Ukraine to see the long slog of attrition playing out in real life. Nonetheless, stripping Napoleon of the romanticism associated with epic battles decided by the archetypal hero on horseback would be a small first step in gaining a better understanding not only of past wars, but also of how future wars will be fought.

Franz-Stefan Gady is a consulting senior fellow for cyber power and future conflict at the International Institute for Strategic Studies and an adjunct senior fellow for defense at the Center for a New American Security. Twitter: @hoanssolo

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Sunday, December 3, 2023 2:57 PM

WHOZIT

Quote:
Originally posted by JAYNEZTOWN:
“c'est fini ” ??

it looks like

Godzilla, Beyonce and Hunger Games beat Napoleon

The Shift, Trolls, Silent Night and Wish are eating into Napoleon profits?

Some reports say Napoleon is in big trouble, its box office is in free fall and might fall down behind a superhero flop called 'The Marvels', Killers of the Flower Moon, Five Nights at Freddy’s and fall behind a Hindi-Bollywood India movie called Animal (2023)

'Godzilla' is suppose to be pretty good.

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Friday, December 8, 2023 6:38 AM

The US Domestic numbers are terrible, international $91 Mil

https://forums.boxofficetheory.com/topic/31813-napoleon-909m-overseas-
1366m-ww/

I might watch

'A History Teacher Discusses Ridley Scott's "Napoleon" (2023)'

instead

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Friday, December 8, 2023 8:27 AM

"NO CGI" is really just INVISIBLE CGI

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Friday, December 8, 2023 8:36 AM

I'm pretty sure that my prediction Napoleon would flop at the box office predated any of the media stating that it would, just like my prediction that Killers of the Flower Moon would flop predated any of the media saying it would.

Again, I never made the claim that either of these movies were bad. There's a lot of talent attached to each of them.

It's the budgets. Gotta do something about those budgets.

We're living in Bidenflation land now. Half the folk in the country can't even pay the bills for what they need to live anymore. $50 date night or $150 family outings to the movie theaters aren't going to be happening that much anymore.

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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Monday, December 11, 2023 3:27 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

We're living in Bidenflation land now. Half the folk in the country can't even pay the bills for what they need to live anymore. $50 date night or $150 family outings to the movie theaters aren't going to be happening that much anymore.

Angry poor white trash have never gone to movies very much. Nowadays, rich people don't go because the movies are available for free a month after the premiere at theaters. And Napoleon (the movie) is unlike the historic Napoleon who was a fascinating villain, but Ridley Scott and Hollywood won’t let you see him:

https://theconversation.com/the-napoleon-that-ridley-scott-and-hollywo
od-wont-let-you-see-218878

Bonaparte had assumed power as first consul of France – and had made it his mission to “annihilate the government of the Blacks” in Saint-Domingue so he could bring back slavery.

In January 1802, Bonaparte sent his brother-in-law Charles Victor Emmanuel Leclerc to Saint-Domingue with tens of thousands of French troops.

Bonaparte’s instructions?

Arrest Louverture and reinstate slavery.

The fall of Louverture

One of the film’s writers, David Scarpa, said Napoléon represents for him “the classic example of the benevolent dictator.”

If that Napoléon ever did exist, Louverture never met him.

In June 1802, Napoléon’s army arrested Louverture and deported him to France. As Louverture wasted away in a French prison, Bonaparte refused to put Louverture on trial. Throughout his incarceration, the guards at the jail denied Louverture food, water, heat and medical care. Louverture subsequently starved and froze to death.

With Louverture gone, Napoléon’s army operated with more bloodlust than ever before. In addition to conventional weapons, his troops fought the freedom fighters with floating gas chambers, mass drownings and dog attacks – all in the name of restoring slavery.

The Black freedom fighters, now calling themselves the armée indigène, led by Haiti’s founder General Jean-Jacques Dessalines, definitively defeated French forces in the historic Battle of Vertières on Nov. 18, 1803. On Jan. 1, 1804, they officially declared independence from France and changed the name of the island to Haiti.

‘A fatal move’

If the filmmakers had included Napoléon’s failed mission to restore slavery in Saint-Domingue, it could have served as a propitious moment to tie the movie back to one of its only coherent arcs: Napoléon’s undying love for Joséphine de Beauharnais, his first wife.

In one memorable scene in the film, Joséphine tells Bonaparte that he is nothing without her, and he agrees.

Joséphine de Beauharnais advised Napoléon to let Saint-Domingue operate as a semi-autonomous colony.

However, Joséphine’s posthumously published memoir suggests that Bonaparte disregarded his wife’s most prescient counsel. Joséphine wrote that she urged her husband not to send an expedition to Saint-Domingue, prophesying this as a “fatal move” that “would forever take this beautiful colony away from France.” She advised Bonaparte, alternatively, to “keep Toussaint Louverture there. That is the man required to govern the Blacks.”

She subsequently asked him, “What complaints could you have against this leader of the Blacks? He has always maintained correspondence with you; he has done even more, he has given you, in some sense, his children for hostages.”

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, December 11, 2023 3:30 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

We're living in Bidenflation land now. Half the folk in the country can't even pay the bills for what they need to live anymore. $50 date night or $150 family outings to the movie theaters aren't going to be happening that much anymore.
Angry poor white trash have never gone to movies very much. Nowadays, rich people don't go because the movies are available for free a month after the premiere at theaters.

Post another pirate link on Haken's site. Douchebag.

Meanwhile, in reality...

Universal still makes content that people pay to see despite the high prices and has made $1.5 Billion profit in 2023.

Disney has lost $1.8 Billion in 2023 because they don't make movies that people are willing to pay for anymore.

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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Monday, December 11, 2023 7:54 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Post another pirate link on Haken's site. Douchebag.

Meanwhile, in reality...

Universal still makes content that people pay to see despite the high prices and has made $1.5 Billion profit in 2023.

Disney has lost $1.8 Billion in 2023 because they don't make movies that people are willing to pay for anymore.

The US would be better off if Universal/Comcast and Disney/Marvel/Pixar/20th Century/Lucas Films went out of business because their products are entertainment for the lowest common denominator who should stop looking at screens.

Average time spent per day with digital media in the United States from 2011 to 2024 (in minutes)
https://www.statista.com/statistics/262340/daily-time-spent-with-digit
al-media-according-to-us-consumsers/

Americans spent on average 503 minutes per day looking at screens in 2023 which is 8 hours and 23 minutes.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, December 11, 2023 8:44 PM

And you can't stop downloading their shit illegally and watching it.

You don't even know what you argue for because you don't have any values or purpose.

You're so great dude. Wow. So impressive.

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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Tuesday, December 12, 2023 10:11 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
And you can't stop downloading their shit illegally and watching it.

You don't even know what you argue for because you don't have any values or purpose.

You're so great dude. Wow. So impressive.

6ix, I am surrounded by people exactly like you, other than they don't post on fireflyfans.net, and long ago I stopped speculating why their lives were so difficult when life is easy and graceful in America compared to most countries. The mental stumble that gets so many Americans into troubled lives is that they think they are wise/knowledgeable people but aren't, which is why they struggle. 6ix, you are a prime example. Your life is so peculiar, and you customized it for your tastes, but you can't understand the connection between what you made for yourself and what happens to you. Change your tastes, 6ix, and your life will change for the better.

According to IFPI’s Engaging with Music 2023 report released this week, online piracy remains a problem worldwide, stream-ripping and illegal music apps in particular.
https://www.ifpi.org/ifpis-global-study-finds-were-listening-to-more-m
usic-in-more-ways-than-ever/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Tuesday, December 12, 2023 2:09 PM

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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Monday, December 18, 2023 12:21 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack (November 23rd):
Damn...

Sorry Joaquin. Your Napoleon movie cost $200 Million to make and is going in the Highbrow Heap of failures right on top of Killers of the Flower Moon. These budgets are stupid, and I'm quite certain that the failure of this movie is not going to be any fault of your own.

$28-$32 Million Domestic for a 5-day weekend is already a death sentence for Napoleon unless everybody else in the world goes out to see it like crazy.

Killers of the Flower Moon which also cost $200M to make only made $23.25 Million on Opening Weekend and after 5 weeks has still failed to make back even 75% of the Production Budget Worldwide.

Napoleon may do better, given the kick start of the 5-Day Holiday Weekend, but probably not by much if it does. The audience and critics ratings are both in the middling 60's here, which doesn't bode well.

It did do better, but not much...

$188,425,000 worldwide as of 12/17.

Killers appears to be stuck at $156.1 Million worldwide, so that's probably a done deal. It may or may not end up hitting $160 Million if Bruce finds some international money and/or fluctuations happen, but I doubt that very much.

I don't care what anybody at these studios say about how these movies were made for the awards. They both lost a TON of money and didn't even make their production budgets back, let alone the marketing costs and half of the money they did make going to the theater chains.

Even though Napoleon probably hits $200 Million and makes its production budget back before it's out of theaters, it's still a massive loser.

The $200+ Million production budgets need to stop. Today.

Songbirds & Snakes even managed to make a healthy profit in the end against all odds, but if it had cost $200 Million to make instead of only $100 Million, it would have ended up just another in a long list of 2023 Lionsgate failures.

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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Tuesday, March 5, 2024 2:34 PM

What Napoleon Leaves Out From the Real History of His Egypt Disaster

https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/ridley-scott-napoleon-leaves-out-real
-history-disaster-egypt/

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Tuesday, March 5, 2024 2:46 PM