There May Be Trouble Ahead.

The Incredible Hulk has a lot of baggage to overcome, the previous Hulk movie directed by Oscar winning Ang Lee sucked! I think that was the technical term for it.
Good idea, badly executed, the wrong story and the wrong director combined to make the wrong movie, instead of a crash bang wallop comic book action movie the audience were waiting for we ended up with an examination of a flawed father son relationship. Not what the audiences were expecting and they voted with their feet, the film opened well then died at the box office.
The new film starring Edward Norton and Tim Roth once again on paper looks good, but the biggest job for the team behind the film is not getting the script and the action or the direction right, its about winning over the millions of fans who were left gutted by how bad the first film was, and the regular cinema going audience who also could not comprehend how they got the film so far off target. Fans of comic books can be one of the hardest audiences to please because unlike books, where images are left to the imagination, comic books fill in all the blanks; you have a graphic representation of all the characters involved. And you know how they should look and behave on screen.

Speed Racer is an altogether different proposition, it has no track record with UK audiences, it maybe filled with some of the most spectacular and original images to come out of Hollywood since The Matrix, which just happened to be made by the same directorial team the Wachowski brothers, but what do you know about the film? Not much? Believe me you are not alone. The film is based on a 1960's Japanese animation known as Mach Go Go, there it has cult status, but sometimes cult means cool but know one watches it. That could well be the case for this film, in America its profile is higher than in Europe but still it has never reached the mass audience. Speed Racer is expected to do well, but I am still to be convinced, who is going to go and see it? It's a PG which makes it accessible for the entire family, but its also over two hours fifteen minutes long, which is not particularly family friendly, its about motor racing which makes it a very male film, can you really see mom's taking their little boys you see fast cars and flashing lights for around three hours. The biggest problem that it is going to have is the fact that no one knows anything about the film, the only reason the film was probably made was the directors thinking that it would be a cool project to work on and it would be a work bench for some more cutting edge technology.

Does the desire of the filmmaker to turn their pet project into a big screen adventure translate into box office; I don't think it will for this film, Speed Racer could turn out to be one of the first casualties of this summer's box office wars. Only time will tell!