Matt Damon’s ‘Green Zone’ Could Open to Less Than $15 Million (Hollyweird never learns)

Big Hollywood ^ | March 14, 2010 | Big Hollywood

[C19fan]

That would be even less than the modest pre-release expectations for the $100 million film, which reteams star Matt Damon and director Paul Greengrass, who worked on the Universal’s last two “Jason Bourne” franchise installments. The film was put into production during the co-chair term of Marc Shmuger and David Linde.

[C19fan]

Did Damon take a pay cut to be in another anti-US war on terror movie? Because if he did not every dollar the studio receives might be needed to pay him, hee hee. I suppose Universal expects to earn some coin overseas.

[MsLady]

These people are beyond stupid. If they hate America so bad, why don’t they leave? And let the 80%+ of us who love this country a lone. I hope Matt doesn’t make a dime.

[PackerBoy]

Part of the blame has to fall on the sucky trailers. If they accurately reflect how sucky the movie is, they did the people a great service is helping them avoid wasting their money.

Hurt Locker was okay, albeit inaccurate in the way it the way it portrayed bomb disposal specialists (like dare devil cowboys). No way did it deserve an Oscar, though.

[raybbr]

Hurt Locker was okay, albeit inaccurate in the way it the way it portrayed bomb disposal specialists (like dare devil cowboys). No way did it deserve an Oscar, though.

Personally, I think that was poke in the eye at Cameron's Avatar. They gave it to his ex-wife and got a bonus by honoring a movie that makes American soldiers look less than cool.

[wideawake]

I will say that this is the smartest strategy yet by Hollywood to pimp anti-Iraq War propaganda.

Rendition, Lions For Lambs, In The Valley Of Elah, The Hurt Locker, Redacted, Grace Is Gone and Stop Loss all did very poorly at the box office when they were first released because they were promoted as critiques of the Iraq War.

People who are usually dependable box office draws like Reese Witherspoon, Jake Gyllenhaal, Tom Cruise, Robert Redford, John Cusack, Tommy Lee Jones, etc. failed completely.

This new movie is being promoted as a shoot-em-up action thriller along the lines of the popular Bourne series of movies - same star, same director.

None of the publicity put out by the studio refers at all to the bizarre conspiracy theories retailed by the film.

[centurion316]

Lefties don’t go to war movies, even anti-war, anti-America propaganda pieces like this. The rest of us don’t want to pay good money to go and listen to the loonies work themselves up into a frenzy with their crackpot theories.

[Defiant]

Their purpose isn’t just the money. These anti-Americans are writing the history of recent events so that future generations (who don’t read about it when there is a movie) will accept their false version.

[GrannyK]

Yesterday someone posted a cheese commercial with a mouse caught in a trap...it was hilarious....now I can’t find it. Anyone else see this and if so, please point me in the right direction. Thanks!

[MizSterious]

Well, if no one goes to this movie, they’ll just award it an Oscar next year. That seems to be the pattern.

[E. Pluribus Unum]

A couple more movies like this and poor Matt will be the same class of laughingstock as his old buddy Ben Affleck.

[Allegra]

HA! I hope this POS tanks big time.

[Borges]

They gave it to his ex-wife and got a bonus by honoring a movie that makes American soldiers look less than cool.

The Hurt Locker? It made American soldiers look pretty brave and heroic. Did you see it?

[Borges]

I think the key with these latter day war films is that they think that the height of artistry is to mimic the look and feel of Cable news. A rushing hand held camera in the front line and minimal coherence because “that's the way it really is when you're there.” That's a primitive notion of realism. People don't want to sit through an experience they can get for free by watching one of the news networks 24/7. They're burned out on it. If you think about films like Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket, they were studiously ‘unreal’, it's an artist’s impression not photo-realism...and all the better for it.

[wideawake]

I agree with you aesthetic analysis: the cinematography is visually cheap verite shot at great financial expense. This is not the vision of an auteur - it's the vision of Anderson Cooper's production assistants.

However, Paul Greengrass' other two Damon vehicles, Bourne Supremacy and Bourne Ultimatum were blockbusters and used similar mise en scene. The scripts even emulated that same paranoid style.

Greengrass is better at this sort of thing that other directors - his first two pictures were similarly shot war movies about the Falklands and the Gulf War, and his breakthrough picture was an award-winning manual on this kind of moviemaking: Bloody Sunday, another war movie, but concerning the urban warfare of Northern Ireland.

What's fascinating to me is that Bloody Sunday was very politically balanced, United 93 was very well-regarded by conservatives and despised by leftists, and now we have Green Zone which, if the plot is really as described, is the most radically left wing major studio release in some years.

Greengrass seems to be much more focused on pursuing his extremely narrow filmic palette than on narrative substance. And, immediately after Bloody Sunday it seemed that the opposite was the case.

[Borges]

He probably just chose this material for aesthetic reasons and couldn't care less about the politics involved. This film sounds like a left wing counterpart to ‘Rambo First Blood Part 2’ (not to be confused with ‘First Blood’ which is a distinguished action film). Live out the faded dreams about a recent conflict all over again and ‘but this time we win! (or are vindicated)’ sort of thing.