Summer 2007: The summer of depreciating returns!

Well from the title of this article you can probably see where I’m going with this. I would like to start by saying that before this summer started I had looked ahead and saw, to my glee that this was to be THE summer for Hollywood blockbusters, more so than most. The number of big films heading are way seemed to almost spoil us for choice. The fact that the majority of these films were sequels didn’t enter my mind, actually continued storylines, epic character arcs are the norm now. It wasn’t long ago that we were all jumping for joy for the delights of Middle Earth. A fact obviously not missed by Hollywood execs.
I started the summer with Sam Raimi’s Spiderman 3. A solid first two films had led me to become a long standing supporter of Spidey and his movies. Well, I don’t know what went wrong but I think having too much money IS a bad thing. Raimi obviously didn’t know when to say no and continually kept shoe horning in storylines until one of his lead characters had to get amnesia to occupy his time.
With heart firmly broken over the creative demise of the Spiderman franchise I turned my gaze onto Pirates of the Caribbean 3: At Worlds End. Once again massive budgets and over-cooked Cgi has led to another disappointing third film outing. Peter Jackson has a lot to answer for. His Rings trilogy has sped film running times completely out of control. If you were to add all of this summers blockbuster movie running times together you would discover, to your horror, that nearly an entire day had been entirely wasted on sub par action and terrible action, dialogue, cg….the list goes on. And yet these films still manage to pull in the crowds. Hollywood knows how to attract us, get us embedded in the story line and we’ll just have to go and see how it ends! Soap operas have been pulling the same trick for years. With the summer nearly properly upon us and a glut of summer sequels to face, Die Hard, Shrek, Harry Potter, this is one cinema goer who isn’t going to be sucked in any longer. If it has a number after the title I’d give it a miss.