Leave the World Behind

The talks for a Warner-Paramount merger are a sign that the money for streaming is running out even sooner than I expected. Neither Paramount nor Warner, two giants, has the funds for this deal so it would be an all-share deal, if it ever gets done, which is doubtful.

I don't think the actors and writers strike killed the golden goose but I fear the deal will prove a pyrrhic victory for those who will be laid off/ struggle to find work in the coming lean years. Julia Roberts won't be bothered - she reportedly got $25M. for this nonsense. I can't find a reliable figure for its overall budget and its box office numbers are meaningless because it got such a limited release.

They say that no one ever lost money underestimating the intelligence of the general public but many businesses have failed because they misunderstood their customers. Netflix prides itself on understanding its customers through its algorithms but they won't need algorithms to see that their customers watched this baloney and felt cheated.

A quarter of a billion subscribers will cushion Netflix from the coming shake-out. Netflix shares have recovered most of last year's "Great Netflix Correction", mainly because its subscriber base increased through a crack-down on password-sharing and its new ad-based service (not yet in Ireland). Now Netflix needs more shows which attract and retain subscribers, not bait and switch nonsense.

"thumbs down" on Netflix means "not for me" i.e. it helps their algorithm make recommendations. So now I will see fewer movies about global disasters, families on holidays, animal strangeness....

How do I tell Netflix to stop spending millions on glossy movies with nonsensical endings, and no explanation for myriad bizarre plot points?

An absolute load of crap with absolutely no ending.

The camera work was absolutely head wrecking, along with most of the characters.

Masterso is another one that is a load of crap, not impressed at all with Netflix latest offerings.

I don't get the complaints about the ending.

The reveal is there's a war on and I took that everybody was going to be be safe as all the characters where on their way to the house with the bunker where the daughter was who had a happy ending as she found Friends DVDs.

I don't see how that's inconclusive. Doesn't take much brainpower to work that out and it doesn't need to be shown.

If it was shown that they all arrived at the house, hugged each other and went down to the bunker and locked the door and found a tin opener would that have been better?

Seriously, how do you think that Roberts character was racist? Strange people turning up at her door late at night claiming to be the owners is definitely a situation that any person would be wary of and not welcoming so I don't see how that makes her racist. If the the father or daughter were white then her reaction would have been the exact same.

If you can't work out what the ending meant with the girl happily watching Friends and all the characters on the way to a house with a bunker with a huge door and full of food and home comforts then I think you just need everything explained to you.

The problem for me with the attempts at foreboding is that they quickly became ridiculous and unsubtle.

You have to care about the people for a sense of foreboding to work and I really have to think hard to remember a film where I cared less about the characters.

At one point I was urging a stag to have a go just to get it over with 😁

Ridiculous film way too far up it's own sense of importance.

It's interesting that you didn't pick up on something which seemed obvious to me, although not explicit because her character is too bourgeois for that. As pixelburp said, racism here is about making different assumptions based on race. It was plain that the Julia Roberts character was far more sceptical and mistrusting of the owners because they were black. She admitted as much later on. And the owner's daughter had no doubt about that.

I am mystified as to how this covert racism is related to all the bizarre events in the movie. Are we to think that America is being attacked because it is racist? Or that racism will prevent America uniting to defend itself? Is the little girl escaping into the whiter-than-white world of Friends because she feels threatened by black people?

Who knows? The makers of this nonsense care don't care what we think.

Does Netflix claim 47m views?

Grain of salt - the company owns its own algrithms, is a black box, and it's impossible to argue with its numbers because the data is not public. Maybe 43 million people switched to Schitt's Creek after 5 mins, maybe not. We simply don't know.

Personally I liked the film for its sense of chaos - no one really knew what to believe, because the world was suddenly in the throes of an attack that simultaneously cut off all reliable and unreliable news sources. The woman screaming for help in Spanish, to the bewilderment of the Ethan Hawk character, summed it up well. Stuff is happening, we can't see it yet, don't understand it, and don't understand the warnings.

The 'Friends' ending escaped me, until I realised it was about 'endings', suggested above. Can't argue with that interpretation or its creativity.

I'd say it's a very watchable film dealing with hot button issues that don't imply any easy solutions. A complex story, in other words.

If it makes you think, it's worth the price of admission.

Lads, I think what you're all forgetting is that the book was even more ambiguous about what was happening than the film is. You're all clamouring for a neatly resolved little ending that never existed in the source material to begin with.

I wouldnt have a problem with it so long as they were good but its always just horrific quality, Disney/Pixar would be embarrassed.

I suppose AI will sort it all out in a few years.

Your version of the pitch is backwards. The pitch would’ve been “check out this brilliant, hugely successful book with a very contained set of locations that could easily be shot”. All the extraneous stuff will have come from Netflix needing to dumb things down to take a clever small story and provide it to a too-broad audience.

Finally watched it myself last night - this is one of my favourite books of the past few years, so was very wary of the movie, especially as a Netflix product rather than smaller indie production.

Given my worries, I actually got more out of this than most on here it seems. It largely caught the general mood and helpless uselessness of being in the situation.

Look, its not anywhere near as satisfying as the book (the chapters where Clay is lost, driving around actually made me feel like this guy was just gonna die out there simply for not realising his total reliance on gps), and it definitely gives us too much ‘apocalypse’ (there’s no tanker, no plane crashes, no leaflet drop etc in the book), but it holds enough of its essence in the character dynamics that I still found it worthwhile. And I quite liked the little thread of closure with ‘Friends’ - the book offers none at all, you simply leave the characters, entirely sure they’ll be dead before too long.

I think the pitch would never get past

When was the last blockbuster movie made from a recent novel? In the past, Hollywood dreamed of the Great American Novel but those days are "Gone With the Wind".

Books can still be made into movies, but not novels. Oppenheimer was based on "American Prometheus", but that was a biography. And "Killers of the Flower Moon" was also non-fiction. "Where the Crawdads Sing" made some money last year on a modest budget, despite negative reviews, but that was "counterprogramming".

Harry and Meghan bought the rights to a romance novel as part of their $100Million deal with Netflix. I rest my case 🤑

None of those are blockbuster movies, apart from Dune which was not a recent novel (60 years!).

Hunger Games and 50 Shades were blockbusters but they are not novels in the sense we were discussing i.e. literary works. By that standard, the Harry Potter books were the most successful novels in movie history.

You seem to be plucking some definition of ‘novel’ that I never intended or suggested. A novel by definition is simply any book with more than 40,000 words - which I’d say every book suggested is. (I’m also not at all sure I’d call the movie version an attempt at a ‘blockbuster’)

Leave the world behind was an award winning, bestselling book that was an obvious pickup to adapt.

I'm not shifting goalposts. If 50 Shades and Hunger Games are the only examples of blockbuster movies made from recent novels, then my point is made. The other movies mentioned by JohnnyUltimate are anything but blockbusters.

I take no pleasure in this. I would love it if, for instance, Prophet Song or The Bee Sting are made into major movies, which would be an enormous boost to Irish literature. One of the streamers might pick up the rights but, on the evidence of this stinker and others, they will make a mess of it. I think Neil Jordan was lined up to film Skippy Dies. Did that every happen?

This movie is not a blockbuster. It’s just not. Of all the different ways to describe what sort of film this is, that would be one of the last id go for.

And it feels a massive stretch to me to argue that the first conversations were anything other than; “This really good book exists, it’s very popular, has sold tonnes of copies, is very contained, and would be easy to adapt”. That’s just how these things work, just as it is with all of the thousands of other optioned projects in the works.

And sure whatever any of us think about it, it sounds like it’s going great (not least as evidenced by nigh on everyone on this forum having watched it it seems)

Why is the term blockbuster even coming up? The movie is not a blockbuster type of movie, the book was not a blockbuster type of book, and even the budget is not a modern blockbuster type of budget (Netflix own Gray Man and Red Notice etc cost over double)... it's a predominantly slower paced nervy character study with about 5 total minutes of 'action'. Throwing in the term blockbuster just creates an argument that doesn't really exist.

Your link also backs up exactly what I said in the post which sparked this conversation - that the book hadn't even been adapted yet when the story was bought by Netflix. It's very safe to assume that it's after that point that the planes and tanker and some character changes etc got added for Netflix to spell it out more for their broader audience. That's how their projects work. IMO they made it worse by throwing more money than was necessary at it, and would've benefitted from a slightly more faithful approach to the book - but that would've probably made it a bit less appealing for the mass audience, so I get Netflix decision making, even if I don't like it.

I'm also not sure where you're coming from with the insistence of these terms like 'serious literature'... it's not Ulysses like, it's a really good well written page turner that I read in 3 days... it was the number 1 bestseller when it came out.

..

Like Rebel and Pixelburp, you completely misunderstand my points. Just read my post #96.

I have nothing against arthouse films but that is not what this thread is about. We're discussing a Julia Roberts/Obama/Netflix mega-bucks stinker. Hollywood Studios would never have made this nonsense for a simple reason - it has no ending or resolution. Hollywood makes a lot of trash but it never knowingly set out to cheat its audience.

I made a second point in response to Rebel who thought this movie was pitched on the basis that it was a successful and acclaimed novel. I say that would be a strong argument against making a movie in Hollywood today (unlike in the past) because no recent novel has become a blockbuster movie. The only exceptions are trash like 50 Shades or the Da Vinci Code or YA literature like Harry Potter and Twilight. Tragically, Hollywood has become dependent on comic books (!) but that's another story. Rebel doesn't understand why I mention "blockbuster" movie. Try pitching a movie in Hollywood by saying "It won't be a blockbuster but I want Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke, Kevin Bacon and masses of CGI".

So, why did Netflix defy the logic of experience and will they be punished for wasting all this money? Heads would roll in a Hollywood Studio because word of mouth would kill this movie after the first weekend. Can Netflix defy gravity?