"In Time" and "The Thing": What Happened?

John Scalzi is an award-winning science fiction writer.This week, two questions about recent (and sadly underperforming) science fiction films, for which I provide two separate answers. Double your pleasure! Double your fun!

First question:

You mentioned the connection between V for Vendetta and the Occupy movement in last week's column. Do you have any thoughts about the connection between In Time and the same movement?

Yes, it's not been lost on me that some people have called In Time, with its stark future in which time is a currency the poor drop dead from lack of while the rich live forever, Occupy Wall Street: The Movie.

This is an issue of coincidental timing more than anything else; the movie was being developed long before the Occupy movement got started -- indeed, possibly even before the "Tea Party" movement, to which the Occupy movement is seen as a political counterbalance, got underway. Movies take a long time to make, folks.

Even so, it would seem like the movie is in the right place at the right time with the right message. But maybe not: With a current domestic box office take of about $30 million against a $40 million budget, the movie seems unlikely to recoup its production costs here at home (it's made $83 million worldwide so far, which is OK). This seems underwhelming, considering the ripped-from-the-headlines connection people want to make between current events and the movie. One way to explain it would be to joke that the movie's natural audience -- the Occupy protestors -- were too busy in the streets to occupy a movie theater.

A more realistic explanation would be to note that the movie was respectfully if tepidly reviewed, and while it featured a cast of hot young things, including Justin Timberlake, none of them have a particularly good track record of putting butts into seats (except Amanda Seyfried, but her specialty is romance, not science fiction). Director Andrew Nicoll has been down this road before; his best-known film is Gattaca, a respectfully reviewed science fiction film with a cast of (then) hot young things, including Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman, and Jude Law. It did mediocre business but then got a second life in video. I suspect that In Time is going to go that route as well, and that the "Occupy" association will be more meaningful then than it is now.

Next question:

What happened to The Thing? I thought it would be a hit, considering the popularity of the original.

By "the original," I'm assuming my correspondent means John Carpenter's 1982 version of The Thing, which is in fact a remake of the 1951 film The Thing From Another World. The latest version is meant to be a prequel to the 1982 movie. And as for the popularity of that version, it's worth remembering that when the film came out, it wasn't hugely successful at all -- it was generally poorly reviewed and made about $20 million in box office off a $15 million budget. It was in fact the number three science fiction movie at the box office its opening week. What was number two? Blade Runner. Number one? E.T. the Extraterrestrial. Yes, it was a tough week.

The 2011 version of The Thing brought in $8.5 million its first weekend at the box office -- which is almost exactly what the 1982 film made its first weekend, when you adjust for inflation. Unfortunately for the new movie, it came out in an era when horror movies (even science fiction horror movies) take up to half their box office in the first weekend. That was certainly the case here, since the new movie is currently scraping toward $17 million. What it will need to hope for is some additional international revenue and then home video and TV sales to close the gap. This is where the 1982 version of The Thing became a hit; its long afterlife in home video is what fuels its current status as a classic.

I suspect there may be a lesson here for filmmakers, which is that a movie becoming a hit on home video does not necessarily mean the remake/prequel/whatever is going to be a huge hit on the big screen. Likewise, it's a rare horror remake that comes close to the success of its original. Another John Carpenter movie stands testament to this: Halloween, which in 1978 raked in about $47 million, or about $160 million in today's dollars. The 2007 remake, by Rob Zombie, brought in $58 million, which is just over a third of the adjusted gross of the original. As it happens, the $17 million gross of the 2011 Thing comes out to just under a third of the 1982 movie's box office, when adjusted into current dollars.

Interesting. And, again, perhaps a relevant thing for today's filmmakers to be aware of, when they're ransacking past films for ideas.

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It Happened Here - DVD Review

This is a classic film about life in occupied Britain after a successful German invasion in World War II. The film is not so much about the invasion itself, as about what happens afterwards.

The most chilling aspect of the film is the gradual slide towards collaborationism and active involvement in facist activities by both most of the British population as a whole, and by the main character in the film. There is a clear implication that almost everybody is vulnerable to falling under the evil spell of fascism.

The story of how the film was made is also quite interesting. The movie was released in 1966, but work was actually begun 8 years earlier - one of the longest, or perhaps even the longest, production schedule for any film. The film was directed by Kevin Brownlow, who was just 18 when he began work on the movie, and later was to become a prominent film historian. Brownlow was assisted by Andrew Mollo, who was even younger - just 16 - when he started work on the film, and who assisted with the historical details (Mollo later became a military historian). The cast of the film also involved only two professional actors, but hundreds of volunteers. The movie even received some assistance from Stanley Kubrik who donated some film stock. For further information about how the film was made, be sure to read Brownlow's book, "How It Happened Here".

Although the movie has an anti-fascism and anti-Nazi message, the original version of the film included a controversial seven minute section showing British extreme right-winger Colin Jordan, speaking. This footage was removed in the original release of the film, but restored 30 years later by Brownlow after he regained rights to the movie.

Inevitably, given the nature of the production, some compromises were made during making the film. The film was shot on 16mm and has a somewhat grainy character, additionally the sound quality, especially in the early part of the movie, is not the best. The other criticism that I would make is that the ending, to me, seemed somewhat contrived and unrealistic - but I guess that they needed someway to wrap the film up. These criticisms are however relatively minor - the film is a classic, and one that you will want to see. Like many alternate histories of World War II, it shows you what might have been, and how lucky we are that Nazism was defeated.

By S. Tanna. First published at http://www.operationsealion.com/p1_dvd_it_happened_here.php - Visit this link to get the DVD!

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