Guilty Pleasures #21 - Looney Tunes Back in Action

Studio intervention is often the undoing what could’ve been great films. It’s more common that you might think in movies, both the Spider-man movies that lead to the respective reboots both had issues with studio intervention.

And we’ve got another example of what might’ve been a successful movie buried under studio interference with Looney Tunes: Back in Action. Originally a sequel to Space Jam (which may or may not still be in the works) but after Michael Jordan said he wouldn’t do another and after a failed attempt to get Jackie Chan (god knows what that movie would’ve looked like) the project underwent numerous delays.

So they tried to offer the directing role to Joe Dante, a guy who had had success with movies like Gremlins (which had some background from an episode of Looney Tunes) and his original idea, which was a period piece centred around Chuck Jones, was rejected as they wanted to continue with a Space Jam theme

Years later (presumably having given up on that idea) they gave him Back in Action. He wanted a movie that was a better representative of what the Looney Tunes were actually like, feeling they were poorly represented in Space Jam (and they were) and as a tribute piece to the late Chuck Jones

But after the reading the script, Warner Bros weren’t happy. Joe Dante, whose popularity had become more cult-following than mass market by this point, remarks the production ‘the longest year and a half of his life’ because of the lack of freedom from the studio and the beginning, middle and end are all different from his initial concepts.

And the movie was a colossal disaster, an $80m budget wasn’t made, and there’s sources claiming that production costs including marketing ballooned to a massive $150m. The movie made $68.5m with reviews giving mostly average scores, with both praise and criticism rather more muted than you'd see for most films. This lead to WB desperate trying to re-envision the franchise with things Loonatics Unleashed (a widely hated superhero version of the Looney Tunes – I personally think that it’s better once they decide to Zadavia an actual personality, around the finale of season 1 but its mediocre overall)

But I’m here to judge the movie in my own opinion, so let’s take a look

Guilty Pleasures #20 - Space Jam

OK, I’ll get this out of the way, I love the Looney Tunes, I love their witty dialogue, great comedy and a story filled into a less than 10-minute short.  Looney Tunes is a classic beloved by people over the world and most episodes rely on fairly simple plot-lines. So what happens when you try and stretch that into a 90 minute movie? Can you capture the essence of the Looney Tunes in that sort of time period?

The answer is… sort of… kinda… not entirely. In the 1990s Nike (amongst others) ran a set of commercials featuring Michael Jordan and Bugs Bunny. Jordan’s agent approached Warner Bros with the idea of essentially doing a feature length version of such a commercial, paying homage to lots of classic Looney Tunes and helping to boost the waning popularity of Michael Jordan.

So, 2 months filming and a year’s production later we get Space Jam. It made $230m on it’s $90m budget, making it a financial success however critics were less kind to it, it currently holds a 35% rating on rotten tomatoes.

So… It’s been years since I last saw this movie, how does it hold up? Let’s take a look.