We’re so amazed by the stellar reviews of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (if not for Manohla Dargis, Rex Reed and Wesley Morris the top critic score on Rotten Tomatoes would be 100%), that we wondered if it’s the best-received sixth installment of a series ever. And from what we can tell, until some late-come party crashers show up to ruin things, it appears to be nearly true.

Of course, it’s not like there was much competition from past franchises. By the sixth movie most film series are cheap, tired and nearly void of remaining followers. However, there have been a few worthwhile Part 6s, enough to show us that it’s sometimes acceptable for Hollywood to keep going with a film property (even without the excuse and benefit of a popular long-running book series).
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The original film of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three was quite representative of New York City in the mid-1970s. Tony Scott’s remake, which opens this weekend, doesn’t have that same sense of space, but even worse than its lack of local relevance is its out-of-date plot, which has John Travolta causing panic on Wall Street in order to make hundreds of millions in a stock scheme. Never mind that the economy is currently in such a state that the terrorist’s plan may be fruitless. Even before the recession this should have seemed antiquated. As David Edelstein writes in New York magazine, “Why would he need to do something so…so…1974 as hijacking a subway train to do what a lot of hedge-fund managers do before breakfast?”

The plot is also tremendously unoriginal, enough to assume Travolta’s character is a huge James Bond fan. But someone familiar with 007 villains, or any other would-be economic terrorists, would have to realize his own scheme would fail. To illustrate why it’s useless to attempt this kind of thing, we present you with ten classic films involving stock market scams, most of which are unsuccessful.
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Though the third Fast and the Furious installment, Tokyo Drift, wasn’t a huge box office disappointment with its $63 million domestic gross, it was significantly less successful than its predecessors, The Fast and the Furious ($145 million) and 2 Fast 2 Furious ($127 million). A fourth film would normally see an even bigger drop in box office receipts, but next week’s Fast & Furious has a good chance of actually being the highest-grossing film in the series yet, due to the return of original cast members Paul Walker, Michelle Rodriguez, Jordanna Brewster and, most importantly, Vin Diesel.

With the expectation that Fast & Furious will be enough of a hit to save the franchise, we take a look at ten other films that similarly kept their respective series going, either because of an increase in profits or a surprising increase in quality, following one or many disappointing installments.
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Next week, Vin Diesel returns (along with Paul Walker, Michelle Rodriguez and Jordanna Brewster) to the Fast and the Furious franchise, which he’d abandoned after the first movie (he did have a cameo in part 3). When news first hit that he’d be reprising the role of Dominic Toretto for the fourth installment, simply titled Fast & Furious, most of us saw the actor as returning under a veil of shame. Because he initially departed the series with an inflated ego — and with it unrealistic salary demands — it does seem obvious that Diesel is now only desperately crawling back because his career failed to take off the way he’d hoped it would.

This is quite sad considering not even Steve Guttenberg ever crawled back to the Police Academy movies, nor did Burt Reynolds ever get dragged back for a fourth Smokey and the Bandit. But there have been other shameful returns by stars to franchises they’d previously sat out of (whether the hiatus was of their own choosing or not). Only one of these may have been as desperate as Diesel now appears, but it’s worth looking at four additional actors and actresses who should be very embarrassed of their delayed reprisals.
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Both are broadly classifiable as science fiction, but Alien is basically a horror flick and Aliens has all the conventions of a war film. That’s a pretty slick transition from one type of movie to another, especially since the switch was so immediate within the series. Most movie franchises don’t play with genre in such a way until they’ve gone through a number of sequels, and even then the series usually just simply takes its characters into outer space, a la Moonraker, Jason X and Leprechaun 4.

Genre jumping isn’t that easy, though, unless a franchise inhabits a whole universe in which to expand through. Like Star Wars, for example. Originally a film series, the Star Wars franchise spread out into novels, which has allowed for dips into the romance genre and now horror. That’s right, an upcoming novel by horror author Joe Schreiber, titled Deathtroopers, takes the Star Wars universe into frightening territory described by Schreiber as “in the vein of The Shining and Alien, with a little dose of William Gibson mixed in.”

So, if Star Wars can venture into the horror genre, what other movie franchises should attempt a genre jump? To toy with the idea, we’ve selected five film series in need of a change and suggested a possible redirection of genre for each.
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Now that Quantum of Solace has had some time to sink in, we get to the pressing questions is raises. Sure, it was a quality action movie, but was it spy movie? Where were the gadgets? The new Bond Girl kicked plenty of ass, but where was the deception? We dig into all this and more when we ask: what happened to Bond?

Meghan O’Hara, producer of The IFC Media Project, joins us to talk about the truth behind the news. The show, which is more cinéma vérité than TV news magazine, airs on the IFC channel Tuesdays at 8:00 PM.

Karina checks in before heading off to the Denver Film Festival. We talk about her panel regarding DIY filmmaking, and three titles worth catching at the fest: Intimidad, The Prince of Broadway, and Last Chance Harvey.

(Subscribe to FilmCouch–Spout’s weekly movie podcast–in the iTunes store or to our RSS feed and an episode will download each Friday)

0:00 - Intro

2:38 - Quantum of Solace, what’s a spy movie?

20:14 - Meghan O’Hara of The IFC Media Project

32:59 - Karina on indie film, Denver fest

filmcouch-97

When I heard Quantum of Solace director Marc Forster say in the promo trailer that he tried to make the Bond film he always wanted to see, I thought “Uh-oh.” But my “Uh-oh” turned to “Oh, shit,” once I got to the screening and saw Paul Haggis listed in the credits as one of the writers, my distaste for Finding Neverland Forster trumped only by my loathing of faux-deep Haggis. And yet none of this mattered in the least because I was going to see Quantum of Solace for one reason and one reason only: to watch Daniel Craig get naked. (Heck, I’d have happily sat through Crash a dozen times if Haggis had tossed in a naked Daniel Craig every once in awhile!)

You see, ever since Craig’s debut in the remake of Casino Royale, the dusty old, 007 series was offered a prime opportunity to expand its audience for the first time in decades. Not only would hardcore Fleming franchise fans and massive car explosion enthusiasts be lining up for tickets; there was now a third audience of those like me, indifferent to the Bond legacy and shaky cam chases alike, but hot and bothered by Mr. Craig. And Forster and Haggis, not surprisingly considering their very un-sexy track record, blew it.

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• Despite critical disappointment with the latest Bond installment, Quantum of Solace had the franchise’s best opening ever, by a lot. The previous installment, Casino Royale, debuted with only $40.8 million, and Bond’s former best opener, Die Another Day, debuted with $47 million. Quantum’s take was $70.4 million, which was unfortunately $400,000 too high for a really good headline. As for the other significant UK/USA co-production, Slumdog Millionaire earned a smashing weekend per-screen average of $35,000 and has grossed $418,000 since Wednesday.

• Meanwhile Quantum is on track to become Bond’s highest-grossing film internationally, as it’s so far made more than $251 million overseas.
• Can Todd Haynes please make a sci-fi film now? By selling half their stake to a venture capital fund, Killer Films is looking to produce films with bigger budgets, though I’m guessing Killer staple Haynes will probably remain a part of its “smaller indie movies” output.
• How on Earth does Guillermo Del Toro have time for another screenwriting gig? His latest project is a dark, stop-motion Pinocchio for the Jim Henson Co. Hopefully it won’t look anywhere near as creepy as Steve Barron’s 1996 version.
• Aaron Eckhart is finally going to be an action hero in Battle: Los Angeles, in which he’ll play a Marine platoon leader fighting off an alien invasion.

Ian Fleming would have been 100 years old in May of this year, but he sadly passed away in 1964 at the age of 56. He published 11 different James Bond novels after creating the character in 1953’s Casino Royale, and also published two collections of James Bond short stories. However, his most famous character has lived on despite the death of the creator, and after 22 movies he shows no signs of slowing down. Here’s a look at the ways in which Bond has continued to exist in the book world through different several different writers, reboots, and reimaginings.

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• Clint Eastwood will direct a Peter Morgan-scripted supernatural thriller titled Hereafter, which has been likened to The Sixth Sense. But with Steven Spielberg producing, wouldn’t it be better to make comparisons to Poltergeist, Always or even Casper (in which Eastwood appears)? Or is the plot more concerned with a lame twist than it is with ghosts?
• Meanwhile Spielberg’s directorial replacement on The Trial of the Chicago 7 might be Ben Stiller?
• The children’s book adaptation Measle and the Wrathmonk sounds like Honey I Shrunk the Kids meets parts of Beetlejuice, which could be good except that it’s going to be yet another creepy motion-capture animation from producer Robert Zemeckis.
• Anticipating huge numbers for Twilight, Summit has gone ahead and assigned adaptations of the second and third books (New Moon and Eclipse) to Melissa Rosenberg, who also wrote the first installment.
• Now that Hope is upon us, does DreamWorks really need to make a fearful terrorist-attacks-the-president movie like Motorcade?
• And now that he’s made a disappointing 007 film, will Marc Forster also ruin the popular zombie novel World War Z?
• Speaking of that new 007 installment, Quantum of Solace is expected to have the biggest opening for a Bond film ever.

• Celebrity death cult where were you? Soul Men, featuring the final performance from Bernie Mac, underperformed over the weekend, placing only sixth with $5.6 million. I guess you preferred his other final film, Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa, which achieved the best debut of 2008 for an animated film with $63.5 million. The other big opener was Role Models, which did better than expected with a second-placing $19.3 million. All thanks to Jane Lynch’s bagel dog trick, I’m hoping.
• Meanwhile, Quantum of Solace, which doesn’t open in the States until Friday, has already passed the $100 million mark overseas.
• Despite YouTube video being possibly the worst format in which to watch movies online, MGM is licensing some of its titles (no 007 movies, unfortunately) to the site for full-length streaming.
• Joe Johnston, who has a Best Visual Effects Oscar for work on Raiders of the Lost Ark, has been hired by Marvel to direct First Avenger: Captain America. And I’m probably the only one who’s now hoping the comic book adaptation is reminiscent of the Johnston-directed The Rocketeer.
• Terrible news: the Brokeback Mountain opera is no longer happening.

A man was arrested in London last week for imitating James Bond. He wasn’t going around and ordering vodka martinis though, he had numerous fake IDs, replica guns, and even a personalized wallet styled after From Russia With Love. That’s dedication right there. We’ve had James Bond imitators in the movies for more than 40 years, but sadly none of them have ever been arrested. Although thankfully, a few of them have been entertaining. Check out the James Bond knockoffs in the list below, as we ramp up towards Quantum of Solace.

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• Peter Jackson, Frank Walsh and Philippa Boyens will collaborate with director Guillermo Del Toro on the screenplays for the latter’s two Hobbit movies. The original plan was to hire outside hands to produce a script, but in order to make the first film’s 2011 release date, Del Toro and Jackson apparently concurred that they needed a team of “people intimate with Tolkien’s world of Middle Earth.”
• Eon, the company that produces movies based on James Bond novels, has declined to buy the rights to the latest 007 book, Devil May Care. The book is set in 1967, and Eon is determined to keep this new wave of Bond films as contemporary as possible.
• Juliet Snowden and Stiles White, the team responsible for the script for Michael Bay’s remake of The Birds, have now been hired to write a do-over of Poltergeist.
• Kirk Kerkorian, who has already owned MGM three times and was responsible for extending the film studio brand into Las Vegas, is rumored to have made an offer to buy the company for a fourth time for a low-ball bid of $3 billion.

If Sony’s looking to woo the people who loved Casino Royale, shouldn’t they have put all the action shots up front? Or am I the only guy who thought the last Bond film was a little underwhelming after that awesome opening chase sequence? Considering its ranking as the second best (as far as critics are concerned) action movie of this decade, I’m probably in the minority, but I was honestly bored throughout most of the movie.

Fortunately, Quantum of Solace looks like it might have a little more action. It’s the usual 007 movie stuff — lots of running, speedboats, hand to hand combat — but better familiar spectacle than extensive poker sequences. And so, just as I’m super-excited about The Dark Knight despite being a little bored with Batman Begins, I’m looking forward to Bond 22 despite my feelings about the previous installment.

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