#MONSTER TRUCK JAM MOVIES MOVIE#

#MONSTER TRUCK JAM MOVIES MOVIE#

We are now in an era where a live-action movie that is explicitly for kids feels like an aberration worthy of mockery. The stuff that used to be “for kids, and maybe adults will enjoy them too” are now pitched as much to audiences who are my age who grew up on the given franchises. The newest Superman movie only makes coherent narrative sense in an R-rated cut. Transformers films have running jokes about statutory rape. But we’re still in a world where Star Wars and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies have brutal PG-13 violence. Walt Disney’s “live-action fairy tale” sub-genre has brought some of that back by default. We lost the films in between the animated comedies and the PG-13 action-adventures. We also lost the live-action PG-rated “just for kids” movies. When I watched the trailer last June, my reaction was “Hmm, looks like a pleasantly goofy 'boy and his dog' story and my son will enjoy this.” As I’ve discussed too many times to count for the last several years, when Hollywood switched to the four-quadrant PG-13 fantasy blockbuster, we didn’t just lose the R-rated adult dramas. That’s a shame, because at a more reasonable budget, say $65 million, there is absolutely nothing wrong with a live-action Monster Trucks movie pitched by and targeted directly at young children. Even if it’s surprisingly good, does Monster Trucks look like the kind of movie that tops $300m worldwide? At $125m, Monster Trucks has to make at around $312m just to break even. Because DreamWorks SKG only spent $80m on the picture, it didn’t have to go nuts worldwide. The $80 million Over the Top “homage” earned $85m domestic but a whopping $299m worldwide, making it one of the biggest-grossing underdog sports movies ever after The Blind Side and Rocky IV. Random example, but it was a modest surprise in the fall of 2011 when Hugh Jackman’s “fighting robots” father/son drama Real Steel turned out to be not halfway decent and relatively successful.

Thus, the core problem with Monster Trucks isn’t that it exists but rather than it cost $125 million to produce.

Monster truck jam movies