Friday night after work I went over to Dave and Jen's place to get dinner. Since it was their 3rd wedding anniversary on Wednesday, I treated them to dinner at Hamburger Hamlet, where we all got the baby cheeseburgers and the delicious chocolate cake for desert (they both had French onion soup as well, but I did not). After dinner we went over to Dave's parents place where his parents gave them a couple nice anniversary presents. We hung out there for a while, then left so that we could go see The Bourne Supremacy, but unfortunately it was sold out. So we went back to their place for a while, and since Dave said he was getting tired, so I checked to see if there were any showtimes in Hollywood. Sure enough, there was one at 12:30 at the Arclight, so I went and saw it there (I knew I wasn't gonna go home and go to sleep anyway, so I figured why not).
I have to say, I really liked it, and I really want to see it again. It was a little different than the first movie, The Bourne Idendity, in that it had a more serious tone to it. One of the things I liked about the first one was the "fun" angle it had to it, which helped offset some of the seriousness (the car chase involving a Mini, the way that Marie got Kane's records from the hotel, etc...). That along with the romance helped kind of lighten the tension from the serious stuff that happened throughout the movie. Even some of the earlier "spy stuff" in the movie had an element of "fun" to it. As the movie got further along it got more serious up until the very very end before the credits, but the final showdown was definitely more serious in tone. The Bourne Supremacy was like that for virtually the entire movie, and even though it took a little getting used to based on my prior expectations because of the first movie, in the end I think it worked really well. A person in that character's situation would, in fact, have very little humor in his life. There was great "spy movie" stuff throughout: good gagetry, good situations where the hero gets out of a tight spot, and one of the best car chases I've ever seen (you have to love a car chase where the cars are smashing into each other repeatedly as opposed to miraculously driving through tons of traffic at high speeds with nary a scratch).
I am glad to see that The Bourne Supremacy had a huge opening weekend, outperforming I, Robot's opening weekend a week ago, and far outperforming the opening weekend by The Bourne Identity's opening weekend two years ago, when it was beaten badly by Scooby Doo. I find that ironic because, having seen Scooby Doo and knowing how truly awful a movie it was, I thought it was rather telling that when Scooby Doo 2 came out earlier this year it only did about half as well in its opening weekend, going from $54 million for part 1, to only $29 million for part 2. With the Bourne series, however, it went from making about $27 million in the opening weekend for part 1, while part two has made over $53 million in its opening weekend. I think this shows that while slick marketing can get you a big opening weekend for a movie (like Scooby Doo had), if the movie stinks you can't expect that any sequels will do very well. However, even if bad marketing hurts your opening weekend (which I think clearly happened in the case of The Bourne Identity, which was marketed like it was a kung-fu action movie starring Matt Damon instead of Chuck Noris or something), if the movie is truly good then not only will people go see it based on good word of mouth, but that people will turn out to see a sequel because they liked the first one so much. It is important to note that even though Scooby Doo 2 had a bigger opening weekend than The Courne Identity, The Bourne Identity went on to make 45% more money than Scooby Doo 2 did. One would hope that would be motivation enough for the major studios to try to make better movies in the first place, and to place emphasis on the film rather than its marketing.
Or like Matt Damon's character quoted in the movie Rounders: "Amarillo Slim, the greatest proposition gambler of all time, held to his father's maxim: You can shear a sheep many times, but skin him only once." (soundclip)