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| A deliciously splashy color scheme and an eye-popping monster shark visual adorns this fine poster for Jon Turteltaub's The Meg |
A scientist team gets ready to break through a mist that was believed to be the bottom of the Mariana Trench. But under this veil lies a previously unknown marine animal life, - including a megalodon, which escapes with them up into the open sea!
The Meg is written by Dean Georgaris (Clementine (2014, TV movie)), Jon Hoeber and Erich Hoeber (RED (2010, both)), adapting Steve Alten's (Domain (2001)) The Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror (1997), and directed by Jon Turteltaub (Think Big (1989)).
Jason Statham (Homefront (2013)) is the intensely looking man, who is brought to the rescue, when the shit hits the fan; apparently to spit wisecracks and participate in some of the year's worst dramatic scenes together with Li Bingbing's (Cat and Mouse (2003)) daughter in the film, who gets a lot of unnatural dialog to doodle around in here. The racially (demographically sales motivated) diversified team also consists of the science station's head engineer, played by Ruby Rose (Pitch Perfect 3 (2017)) who looks like a starving, punky supermodel... A lot of The Meg takes place in Asia, again for commercial reasons, as giant monster movies are especially big business there.
Rainn Wilson (Mom (2019-20)) is very good as a douchebag billionaire, who is awarded a death scene which is among the film's few highlights. A late in the film catastrophe scene on a crowded beach is pretty much the other highlight, and you can guess what happens.
We never feel anything for the protagonist or the extras in The Meg, which means that it never becomes exciting or terrifying in anything resembling the heights we have experienced in Jaws (1975), but it does cultivate its own brand of 'mean fun' without shame and scores some points there.
Watch a trailer for the film here
Cost: 130 - 178 mil. $ (different reports)
Box office: 530.2 mil. $
= Box office success (returned between 2.97 - 4.07 times its cost)
[The Meg premiered 8 August (Indonesia, the Philippines) and runs 113 minutes. Disney held the rights until 1999 without coming up with a script they were satisfied with. New Line Cinema then developed the project but dropped it also. Eli Roth was hired to direct the eventual film but was 'replaced' due to 'creative differences'. Shooting took place in New Zealand and China from October 2016 - January 2017. The film opened #1 to a 45.4 mil. $ first weekend in North America, the biggest in both Turteltaub and Statham's careers, and it stayed in the top 5 for another 5 weekends (#2-#2-#2-#2-#4), grossing 145.4 mil. $ (27.4 % of the total gross). North America was the film's 2nd largest market; China beat it with a 153 mil. $ (28.9 %) gross. 3rd largest was Mexico with 21 mil. $ (4 %). 140 mil. $ were reportedly spent on marketing and prints. Sequel The Meg 2: The Trench is currently in development. The Meg is rotten at 45 % with a 5.30/10 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]
What do you think of The Meg?
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