At the convention Monster Mania, James Marsters let slip during a Q&A that DB:E’s real budget was a pathetic $30 million. That’s right, Fox lied to us. Twice. It wasn’t a $100 million dollar tent pole or a $50 million dollar movie, it was a cheapie, costing even below Twilight’s mediocre budget of $37 million to produce. What a surprise.
Enterbay, a company we reported many months ago would be selling high quality Dragonball: Evolution action figures, has finally updated their website with photos.
We think they’re absolutely gorgeous. In fact, if even half the work and skill put into these extraordinary figures was put into the movie, our old website wouldn’t need to close.
According to James Marsters, a sequel to Dragonball: Evolution isn’t just speculation, but reality. From Civilized James:
In Spring and Summer, I’m on tour in Europe. Check for dates and ticket on www.jamesmarsters.com. And then we’ll start shooting the second Dragonball movie. (grins) I’ve just heard that I can actually tell that there is going to be a sequel.
Of course, things can always change in Hollywood, so don’t take this as the final word. Let’s just hope that if true, they treat the sequel with a lot more respect.
A fan recorded and uploaded part of a Q&A session with James Marsters (Piccolo) on April 25th when he was in the Netherlands last month. He speaks, off the cuff, about Dragonball: Evolution, and gives his thoughts on the movie as a whole.
He’s right about one thing. The suits at Fox don’t care, and never cared, about this movie. And that wouldn’t have mattered so much if they had stayed away from the production and let the crew do their job, but Fox is unlike any other movie studio. It’s almost as if they want to piss their workers off and create horrible movies. It’s not that the other major studios like Warner Bros. and Paramount are perfect, but they at least seem to care about quality.
Anyway, it seems like a lot of people want to know my opinion on Dragonball: Evolution, and because I haven’t had the time to write a full review, I’m just going to give you my quick thoughts here.
I enjoyed it. It was fun, cheesy, and forgettable entertainment. But probably not in the way the filmmakers intended, because it was also cheap, poorly made, uninspired and bland. And I really want to stress bland. The movie is supposed to take place in a futuristic, fantasy world but it looks exactly like any city in America (if cities in America had cheap green screen effects) and Mexico. It’s the opposite of the world that Akira Toriyama created.
But the biggest problem was the script. It sucked Dragon Balls. The plot made absolutely no sense and no one seemed to care, the dialogue sounded like it was written by a 10 year old (that was a fan of Pokemon and not Dragonball), and the cliffhanger during the credits was by far the worst cliffhanger I’ve ever seen in my life. I don’t blame Ben Ramsey for all this though, because it’s obvious Fox had their greedy little hands on the thing since day one (Goku in high school? I doubt anyone but a out of touch Hollywood executive could think up something as stupid as that), but I don’t think he was the man for the job regardless.
Still, I’m not angry. Like I said before, I did enjoy it. But I am disappointed. I just wish that Stephen Chow was given a $30 million budget to direct Dragonball at a different studio, and was allowed complete creative control. It certainly would’ve been better than this Foxed up movie.
At the end of a rather routine TV Guide interview with James Marsters (Piccolo) on April 6th, it was revealed by the host that Justin Chatwin (Goku) had said the sequel to Dragonball: Evolution was recently green-lit.
If that’s true, it’s somewhat of a surprise the studio hasn’t decided to wait until after the movie premieres in North America. But, with the newly confirmed budget of $50 million and *SPOILER* a cliffhanger at the end of Evolution, it’s not impossible.
Watch at 4:30 mark.
What do you think the possibility of a sequel is at this point?
The cast and crew of DB:E have been doing a bunch of interviews recently, so much so that it has been impossible for us to keep track of them all. We might compile a list later, but for the moment check out our favorite interview, which was conducted by MovieWeb.
Also check out ComingSoon’s video interview.
A newspaper in Chile ran an article on Dragonball: Evolution, and in it the budget of the movie was unveiled. According to the paper, the production budget was only 45 million, much less than the previous $100 million estimates. What this means is the film has already made about half its budget back in Asia alone.
There’s really no doubt now that the film will be profitable, and so sequels are a definite possibility. IGN spoke with Justin Chatwin (Goku) and James Marsters (Piccolo) who were incredibly enthusiastic about the idea… Marsters even wants 6 more films!
He went on: “All I know is I’ve been signed to three movies, but I would like to make five — seven of them. You could just pretty much paint by numbers using the wealth of source material to easily get the seven films. There’s that much there.”
Meanwhile, Chatwin is also obviously thinking about Dragonball as a series of movies, with the actor seeing Evolution as an introduction piece to the wider universe.
He said: “There’s a whole generation of kids waiting to be introduced to Dragonball, so this first movie is really important for that. I mean the main plot is the battle between Piccolo and Goku, but this first film still serves to introduce the characters and where they’re from and what they’re deals are. And so to cover that ground really takes up most of the first movie.”He goes on: “I know what they have in store for the second one and it’s really cool! It’s more in the vein of the Dragonball saga… it goes into other places, there’s other characters, other fighters and there’s a lot of action that is just really awesome.
“It actually goes more into Dragon Ball Z land and it’s just really exciting. It goes into the whole legend of Dragonball. I cant really say more than that, but it made me think this is a cool franchise to be a part off because there’s so much we haven’t shown yet.”
IGN interviewed James Marsters (Piccolo) who talked about everything Dragonball: Evolution, including how faithful the movie is to the source material. Read the full interview on IGN.com.
IGN: You knew Piccolo very well going in. What is the take on him like in the film versus what most people know from Dragon Ball Z and other source material?
Marsters: This character is nothing like you’re going to recognize from Dragon Ball Z because this is a story that happens before Dragon Ball Z. In the actual source material that we were adapting, we were only dealing with Dragon Ball. In Dragon Ball, Lord Piccolo is a very old, kind of shriveled Namic. This green guy who has to walk with a walking stick, he’s so old. And at the very end of the season, when he finally fights little Goku – and Goku in the manga is only 7 years old – he throws off his coat and it’s actually kind of surprising he has a body left at all. So, my kind of template to do this Piccolo was, “Let’s make him as old as possible.” We don’t want to make him as decrepit as the manga because he is the only villain for this part of the story of Goku, so we should make him maybe a little more powerful. But let’s not give the audience the young Piccolo yet, because in the story, Lord Piccolo comes back to the Earth to get the Dragonballs to wish himself young and then take over the Earth. And if we started Piccolo being young, there would be no reason for him to get the Dragonballs in the first place.
IGN: I’m very impressed talking to you about your knowledge of the source material. I’d assume some of your costars might have been a lot more unfamiliar with it all. Did anyone ever come to you for some advice?
Marsters: [Laughs] I think that if any of them didn’t know the source material going into the project, they certainly started reading it and watching it to prepare for the shoot because I didn’t really get the sense that anyone was behind the ball. We didn’t really talk about the plotline in Dragon Ball Z. There’s enough plotline to be talking about in Dragon Ball. But I didn’t start talking to them about Vegeta or Bojack and all of that – or Boo. [Laughs] I just kept my mouth shut about that because that’s just too complex.
IGN: Fans are always concerned when there’s an adaptation that it holds true to or respects the source material. As a fan yourself, can you speak to that?
Marsters: Well, that’s the thing, man. I think that we have made an artistic risk because we have decided to be very respectful of the source material. I think Akira Toriyama – I hope, I haven’t talked to him about it – but I suspect he would be pleased that we didn’t start this movie with Dragon Ball Z. That the first shot of our hero is not blond Goku firing a massive energy blast and wiping a mountain out. That would be very cool, but that’s not the beginning of the story. The beginning of the story, for the manga, is a 7 year old kid fighting midgets. He starts it way more on a smaller level and builds it up. And then by the time that Goku is that massive guy with the blond hair, then we’re more invested in him. And so, we have decided not to do Dragon Ball Z, but to do Dragon Ball.
Instead of having Goku as a 7 year old fighting midgets, we take him at 17, just on his 18th birthday, so thematically, we’re in the same ball park, but we get to push it a little more towards Z. But still doing justice to this character of Goku and where he starts. Remember in the first Spider-Man movie, everyone was like, “Where are all the special effects? Where is all the big stuff?” And Sam Raimi was like, “We’ve got to start this dude at the beginning. This is what we’re doing.” And I think it would have been easier money if we would have just blown it out with Dragon Ball Z right from the beginning. But I don’t think that would have been as true to the story and to the source material. I’m kind of proud that we’ve taken the risk in trusting the audience and that they’ll want to see the beginning of this character. In that way, when he is more massive, it’ll be way cooler.
So I don’t know, man. People that only know Dragon Ball Z and only want Dragon Ball Z, they’re going to have to get used to this. But people that really know the material, they’re going to be well pleased.
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