So the dust is beginning to settle on the summer movie season and for better or worse, the world has voted with its dollars, and made “Transformers: The Dark The Of The Moon” a $1.1 billion success. [Slow clap]. Way to go everybody. But apparently, there is even more money to milked out of the movie so get ready, the Autobots and Decepticons are coming back and getting ready to rumble.
Starting this weekend and running until September 8th, “Transformers: The Dark The Of The Moon” will be getting an IMAX re-release on 246 screens. For those of you who actually care, the film has been “digitally remastered with proprietary IMAX technology” which means the explosions will be even more explosiony than even before. As for the 3D, it was thoroughly forgettable the first time around and no amount of digital tinkering is going to change that.
As we noted in our review back in June, the film isn’t entirely terrible and when it comes to delivering the action goods, Michael Bay shines, particularly in the last 40 minutes of the movie when he’s freed from the constraints of the narrative and allowed to just lay waste to metropolitan Chicago. There are some great setpieces including the skydiving sequence and the extended scene set inside a collapsing office tower. It’s great, breathless stuff — it’s just too bad it takes a truly tedious 90 minutes or so of pointless story to get there.
So our advice? If you must go, save yourself a bunch of time and just plan to show up when there is about an hour left in the movie and you’ll be more than pleased. Believe us, there is not much plot you’ll be missing and if anything, you’ll be spared Alan Tudyk‘s and Ken Jeong‘s truly embarrassing mugging for the camera. [THR]
Some movies may schedule re-releases just for the sake of making more money, but in all fairness, Transformers had a VERY limited release in most cities in Imax due to Harry Potter. I was excited about seeing Dark of the Moon in Imax here in my city, but it only played there for 2 weeks and was then bumped by Harry Potter. Because there were no major releases after that, Harry Potter has been playing consistently for 5 weeks straight now. Rereleases will become more common now as movies have to fight for limited screens in either 3D or Imax. For years that wasn\’t a problem, but now it\’s a lot more competitive. Another example is this past week. 3 new 3D movies came out and had to compete with Final Destination and Smurfs. As a result here in my city, everything ended up in 3D theaters except for Spy Kids, which was the one designed to be in 3D. If given a rerelease when there\’s less competition, that would be my only chance to see that in 3D as well.