#24 - Cruise Month - War of the Worlds

It’s time for another entry for Cruise Month

You know, there have been some pretty big producers/directors on this show, George Lucas/Christopher Nolan spring to mind, but there a few bigger than the one who directed this movie. Steven Spielberg. Spielberg has directed films from the Indiana Jones and Jurassic Park, and has been involved in Back to the Future, Men in Black, Tiny Toons, Animaniacs, Freakazoid and even Transformers.

This and next week’s Minority Report were both collaborations with Spielberg with Dreamworks and Tom Cruise with Paramount. The results are mixed as we look at War of the Worlds. Based (once again very loosely) on the HG Wells novel of the same name (I haven’t read it, I’m judging the movie as a standalone product) it was commercially successful grossing nearly $600m on a $132m budget. Critically also successful, nominated for 6 different academy awards (all of which it lost to King Kong) but winning awards in other areas.

So why do I dislike this film? Well, let’s dig in.

Guilty Pleasures #4 Stormbreaker

Stormbreaker is one of a series of books written by Anthony Horowitz, one that was adapted for a film of the same name (originally named Alex Ryder: Operation Stormbreaker) the advantage of 6 different production companies and over a dozen distributions did not stop it taking a fall in the box office. Recovering just $23.6 million of its $40 million budget. So where did it all go wrong? It certainly wasn’t lack of promotional material. Hoping for it to be the next billion dollar film series, like Harry Potter was becoming, they had very high profile marketing, in the UK with BBC and ITV appearances.

No, the reviews for this movie are average at best, 5.6 on IDMB, on 33% on rotten tomatoes. But there’s no reason why another book series could rival Harry Potter, let’s dig into Stormbreaker and see why this wasn’t the franchise for it.