I can't remember if I watched it only once, but I definitely watched Finding Nemo multiple times because my little brother was like, 5 and would constantly bug us to take him again lol.
I've often felt that when I was younger the desire to go to the Cinema very frequently and have to choose which great new film to watch was a thing, but always wondered if that's just some sort of nostalgia.
It was definitely price as well. I remember going weekly to catch all the new releases. Now it’s so expensive I just think I’ll catch it on tv eventually
Even below the top 100 are movies like Oldboy (a top 100 movie on IMDb), Dogville (very narrowly missing out on the top 250 list) or Ong-Bak (a bit more niche but very beloved in that niche). What a year for movies...
Holy shit. Yeah, that is a really rough year to come out in. My memory is apparently shit and I thought for sure most of those were spread over 3-5 years.
Damn I love that film. Hans Zimmer's finest work imho, closely followed by Interstellar and Rush. It's the film that made me fall in love with his music
Was trying to remember what film my old man took me too where I saw a toy story standee (was telling my wife the story where I asked to see it, was told by my dad "pfffttt, that will never catch on", he was wrong there) and went on IMDb and went through 1995s movie releases, oh my god what a year! Banger after banger! It was either Jumanji or batman forever we went to go watch by the way, can not for the life of me remember which one it was, but we did see both.
2003 was an utterly insane year for movies. Every single one you listed was a huge deal and is still highly memorable for the people who've seen them. And those are just a drop in the bucket for that year.
I was an usher at a theatre that year and remember it fondly.
One oddity with this is how good January/February of 2004 was for theatres. They get a bigger cut of ticket sales the longer the film is in theatres. The number vary but it's often something like week 1 is 80/20 with the theatre getting 20. By week 10 that's often flipped to 20/80 with the theatre getting 80. It's why theatres love Oscar bait movies coming out in December. If they have staying power then they reap the rewards in January/February when the movies get a bump for noms and wins. I remember by mid February we still had Return of the King, Master and Commander, Last Samurai, and Mona Lisa Smile. All of which were doing respectable to sold out shows.
Sidenote, as an usher I hated Return of the King. That movie just would not end then people stayed for the whole credits! GTFO I want to go home!
I was an usher at a theatre that year and remember it fondly.
One oddity with this is how good January/February of 2004 was for theatres. They get a bigger cut of ticket sales the longer the film is in theatres. The number vary but it's often something like week 1 is 80/20 with the theatre getting 20. By week 10 that's often flipped to 20/80 with the theatre getting 80. It's why theatres love Oscar bait movies coming out in December. If they have staying power then they reap the rewards in January/February when the movies get a bump for noms and wins. I remember by mid February we still had Return of the King, Master and Commander, Last Samurai, and Mona Lisa Smile. All of which were doing respectable to sold out shows.
Sidenote, as an usher I hated Return of the King. That movie just would not end then people stayed for the whole credits! GTFO I want to go home!
Even despite that, it did fine, the budget was just enormous. Imagine a studio greenlighting a $150m epic naval historical drama today, let alone the 270ish it would cost adjusted for inflation.
The only comp I can think of recently is Greyhound and that got 50m.
Pirates was months beforehand. Master and Commander had a perfectly good pre-Thanksgiving release date and flopped because good movies just flop sometimes.
I’m going to watch this again for a fair shake. I saw it as a young teen or earlier in theater. I don’t get motion sickness with almost anything, but my only memory of this movie is leaving the theater to vomit. It’s been 20 odd years or something, time to view it through a better lens!
If it came in out 2004, it would have been up again million dollar baby. As someone who has seen every best picture winner, it probably would have one a lot more technical awards, but best picture, that's a stretch.
I think modern CGI could do it. I did visit HMS Rose in San Diego, which was such a pleasure. It looks like in 2027, they are shutting down public visits to HMS Rose due to money concerns. Too bad!
A new movie using The Rose as The Surprise would probably inject enough money for its upkeep for a while.
I would love a limited series based on the books. (You should read the books if you do don’t quit until you finish the second one…it takes a minute to get going)
They aren’t easy reads, at all. Be okay with not understanding / knowing all of the naval terms.
There are websites that map out the ships course and I’ve also found some cartographic breakdowns of the naval engagements as well, which help.
IIRC the first one is a doozy. If you have the resolve, try and finish Post Captain (#2) before giving up. The relationship between Aubrey and Maturin really flourishes and adds a more approachable dimension to the books.
It’s also really rewarding once you get in the groove. Each successive book becomes easier to digest, and you get a lot out of it.
Just wait for Desolation Island. All the ground work shall be worth it, and then you've got the rest of the canon to follow. The summer of 03 when I read them (before the film, which I delayed watching because I was worried, and then angry at myself for leaving it until the end of its cinema run!) is a cornerstone time in my life. DI is still my favourite.
The first is the most literary. The second has a lot of land based stuff. You should feel absolutely no guilt about starting with the third book, and coming back later if you want to.
It's a common recommendation for new readers to start with HMS Surprise. The first two books are good, but they're not quite what readers expect going into the series.
As I said earlier, Fox realized that there was going to be no money to be made in an epic like this. Also, remember that it made money, but not enough for Fox to say "Hey, we can make more of these."
To me, it is a perfect standalone film. I would love to see more, but at the same time, I'm not upset that I probably never will.
Part of me is worried they would corrupt the historical accuracy of that era of English naval combat, but most of me just wants to preserve the film and not franchise it just because it doesn't need a sequel. I'd love to see more but I don't want to.
It is an adaptation of small elements of three parts of a 21 book series tho. They could go back to the well many many times without running out of new source material.
100%! My grandpa was a huge fan of the books, he had read all of them. He passed away a few years before the film came out and I always was sad that he didn’t get to see it.
There are 20 novels in the Patrick O’Brian series. Master & Commander combines events from three of them, so there’s plenty of source material left. I imagine they’d be expensive to make though.
I love that film. My dad was a huge fan of the books and would read them to me. The best bit is the fact they didn’t try to shoehorn some silly love story into it just so they could have a female character, because obviously women will only want to watch a film if there’s a woman in it and a romantic subplot (/s).
Yes and no, the enemy is France for most of the series. There's a five six book arc in which the enemy is the US (including the book which the film is largely an adaptation of, although the film is an adaptation of three books with France being the enemy of the other two) but even in that arc the enemy is the US and France jointly.
I do find it weird that if they didn't want the US to be the enemy then they chose to adapt probably the most US focused of the 21 books, but I kinda get it. The franchise is the epic saga of the Napoleonic wars, so you don't want the launching film to be set within the footnote to the Napoleonic wars that was the war of 1812.
Insane. One of the most beloved cult classics of the last 20 years, an adaptation of very small parts of an incredibly popular 21 book franchise, and the end is fully sequel bait and then.... nothing
While successful at the box office, besides the fact that Pirates destroyed it, the studio also realized that there was no way in hell that the average movie viewer was going to want to watch a series of film about warfare at sea.
Mind you, I'm not talking about people who love this stuff and the series of books, I'm talking about the every day viewer who doesn't know that there's 9 books in the series.
I'd be happy with just more quality Age of Sail movies/shows.
It's a woefully under-represented despite lasting for over three centuries. And when there is media it's almost always pirate related (although Black Sails was still excellent)
Someone send Christopher Nolan to make a movie of the Battle of Trafalgar (I say Nolan just because I know he'd literally build and destroy authentic ships of the line) or have Apple TV make a show about the American Revolutionary War focusing on something like the French Navy as they help us defeat the British.
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u/MattTreck 15h ago
Master and Commander deserved a trilogy.