MOVIE NEWS – Roland Emmerich’s new disaster film Moonfall seems to be aiming for the success of Apollo 13 rather than Apollo 11.

It seems a little ironic that Roland Emmerich’s disaster epic Moonfall looks set to be an epic disaster, as it has so far failed to gain any gravitational pull with audiences. The film opened in some 2,300 locations in the US on Thursday, but only managed to bring in $700,000, well behind its attention-grabbing rival Jackass Forever, which opened with more than double the take at $1.65 million. With critics not being too kind to Independence Day director Emmerich’s latest film, the box office figures are sure to drop further over the weekend.

A few days ago, Emmerich said that the Marvel and Star Wars franchises are ruining the industry and making it difficult to make successful disaster movies. It’s a bit like he was just looking for an excuse for what’s happening now.

Aside from being beaten on opening night by a film that is essentially a series of stunts performed by a group of teenagers trying to hurt themselves in a male-dominated group in a funny and mind-bogglingly stupid way, Moonfall even lost out to the Jackass team in the critics’ department.

Jackass Forever currently has an 86% freshness rating on Rotten Tomatoes, peaking at one point in the mid-90% range, and the film is projected to gross up to $18 million this weekend, which would be enough to make Spider-Man: No Way Home to take the top spot on the charts. As for Moonfall, however, it currently stands at 40% support and a weekend projection of between $9 million and $14 million, a far cry from what a film with a $146 million budget would like to see in its opening weekend.

Moonfall reviews are harsh – the Rotten Tomatoes consensus is that “Whether Moonfall is so bad it’s good or simply bad will depend on your tolerance for B-movie cheese – but either way, this is an Emmerich disaster thriller through and through.”

Considering the film’s budget, which rivals many Marvel movies and is mega-sized compared to the paltry $10 million budget of Jackass Forever, and the names of stars like Halle Berry, Donald Sutherland and Patrick Wilson, it’s hard to understand why the film failed with most critics and, it seems, audiences.

The general perception seems to be that, as much as director Roland Emmerich claims that disaster movies like Moonfall suffer from the visuals of Marvel, DC and Star Wars films, his latest film just seems like an awful, clichéd and unoriginal movie. It’s more than ironic, given that Emmerich’s main objection to the big franchises is that “they offer nothing original.”

As the wise Americans say: be careful playing baseball if you live in a glass house!

Source: SerieStation