Renny Harlin’s Good, Bad, and Ugly!

[Mach6]

Good: Die Hard 2: Die Harder It’s an incredible old school action movie with a great payoff with the final plane explosion, but I would still rate it third in the Die Hard franchise behind the original & Die Hard with a Vengeance. I prefer Vengeance over DH2 cause Willis & Jackson have the action buddy movie chemistry down & Jeremy Irons’ Simon is still one of my favorite villains in history.

Bad: Deep Blue Sea I will never forget the crowd’s reaction in the theater during the famous Samuel Jackson scene. They absolutely lost it & were screaming their lungs out for a minute after it happened. There were some quality shark kills (I admit I love the kitchen stove one) & for once LL Cool J & Michael Rapaport weren’t fingernails on the chalkboard unwatchable. I just don’t buy Thomas Jane as a badass or the main lead.

Ugly: A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master The sequel that completely turned Freddy from a scary, creepy-as-hell boogeyman into a lame one-liner spewing, third-rate comedian. “You wanna suck face!” “Why don’t you reach out and cut someone?” Good Lord!

During the podcast, Steve mentioned that Cutthroat Island was the final nail in the coffin that sent Carolco Pictures into bankruptcy. Steve said Terminator 2 played a big part in it. Didn’t T2 make $500+million box office worldwide on a $102 million budget? I just don’t get with those huge profits how T2 help tanked the studio. Can someone explain this to my uneducated American mind?

[Steve T Power]

During the podcast, Steve mentioned that Cutthroat Island was the final nail in the coffin that sent Carolco Pictures into bankruptcy. Steve said Terminator 2 played a big part in it. Didn’t T2 make $500+million box office worldwide on a $102 million budget? I just don’t get with those huge profits how T2 help tanked the studio. Can someone explain this to my uneducated American mind?

It had to do with residuals and back end deals. Basically the profits were carved up between producers, Cameron, Arnie, and other ancillary bodies to such a degree that in spite of making "mad bank", Caroloco, as a payee were cut a pittance of a paycheck. There's a great article out there somewhere that talks about how it all really started with Total Recall and how they went "spend crazy" to such a degree that yes, while they were making coin, the essentially lived on every film being a massive hit to push on. When T2's back end deals shoved it up their back end, they basically had to make or break, and Cutthroat Island broke them.

Similar stuff went down with other studios in the past as well, most recently MGM I believe.

[Mach6]

Thanks Steve.

I couldn’t find the article you mentioned but I did check out the Wikipedia page for Caroloco. It looks like they had the same back end deals for Cliffhanger as well. Cliffhanger made a ton of money ($255+million worldwide) but since Caroloco had to take a minority ownership they got very little revenue from it.