Ultimate Dolph

Another one to be shot in Italy next Spring, a thriller (based on a true story?) they compare to THE AMERICAN (with George Clooney).

Written by Scott Mallace and Rab Berry, produced by Walter Nudo (who's also co-starring) and Cut & Dry Productions, the 87eleven team (Chad Staheleski from THE EXPENDBALES, and David Leitch) doing the stunts.

http://www.lapilli.eu/index.php/intratt ... produttore
http://www.eventinews24.com/2014/10/wal ... EtawJOUdKY
http://www.bloglovin.com/viewer?post=36 ... k=0&user=0

With Walter Nudo in April 2014:


Things must be really dry, and for some reason these guys are getting these off the ground in no time... Seems also obvious as well that Dolph is not paid what he used to be and can't afford to just make one movie per year, and these couple weeks paychecks can't be that good financially (even THE EXPENDABLES movies don't pay as well as people want to think: this isn't the 80s or 90s anymore).

If this actually happens, Is there a chance Serafini will apply himself and attempt a good movie? I mean it's not like he came out of nowhere, he made movies before, action as much as drama and documentaries so he must be able to do something when taking the time and using more common sense and taste...

Wonder if Gianni will also appear. He's good friends with Serafini.

Without a doubt, and he'll probably be a co-producer as well. This Walter Nudo already appeared in the previous ones and is supposed to be in FOUR TOWERS.

Well at least it's not another L.A. cop movie with Vinnie Jones, so it could potentially be something better.

Jox wrote:Things must be really dry, and for some reason these guys are getting these off the ground in no time... Seems also obvious as well that Dolph is not paid what he used to be and can't afford to just make one movie per year, and these couple weeks paychecks can't be that good financially (even THE EXPENDABLES movies don't pay as well as people want to think: this isn't the 80s or 90s anymore).

I'm sure the shrinking paychecks are a reality to many actors, except maybe the Stallones and the Arnolds of the world, who still can get paid almost the same weekly rates they used to, simply because the movies they are starring in are filmed faster these days, and they're not opposed to doing smaller roles.
For example if Arnold got paid even $2M for his week on EX3, it's probably close to or even more than what he used to get paid back when he made $20M+ a movie, since he would have surely worked for well over ten weeks filming them.
Same goes for Escape Plan, I'm sure he got paid the same per week or even more than Sly did, but Sly worked for more weeks so he probably got paid more overall.

I once talked to an acquaintance of mine who works in the business, and I asked him about the salaries these guys make. He's never worked with Dolph, but he estimated that his fee would be around $200,000 a week. This was after EX2.
He also said that Van Damme still likes to get paid $1M or more per movie, but the problem is that apparently his name is not worth that much anymore.
Even on the Van Damme Fan forums Sheldon Lettich said that he tried to get him for a movie he was doing and Van Damme himself seemed eager to do it, but the producers simply couldn't make it work because he was asking for too much money. And Sheldon is someone who has been working with Van Damme from the very beginning and was responsible for many of his early big movies, but still Van Damme seems to care more about the money these days than friendship and loyalty.

Serafini is not the best filmmaker Dolph has worked with, but I'm sure he can appreciate that the checks clear and that they keep coming back to him with more work all the time.

It's a sad day indeed when it has come to paycheck jobs for a lot of actors. I know it has always been that way for many, despite Seagal 'writing' (how true that is I don't know) a lot of his films and producing them (again that should be in inverted commas really) it seems from my perspective that he basically does them for the money and even I as what I would call a fan, that follows his every film, am getting mixed up they are all so similar.
In terms of Dolph, I am disappointed he has to continually work with these guys as they don't know how to produce a fucking decent movie. A Certain Justice was hilarious the way they tried to make it look all hi-tech Hollywood by adding those digital anamorphic flares in every fucking scene like it was the new 2 Chainz video. Let's upgrade a crappy script, crappy acting and crappy film-making by plastering an MTV style beam across every frame.
I wasn't expecting much from Dolph in TE3 (I wasn't expecting too much from the movie itself) but he was even more short-changed than the 2nd one I felt. It's like they get everyone on for a couple of days to fire a machine gun against a greenscreen. Am I naive in thinking that Skin Trade might help him out? Probably. Let's face it, to most, from the outside back cover it just looks like another crappy DTV movie.
Mainstream audiences wouldn't be able to tell the difference between that and Hard Rush (were the distributors watching a porno just before this film?) despite the fact there is a huge difference and producers are not going to throw him in a 50 million movie because of one impressive DTV.
That being said, surely quality products like Command Performance, (even by its budgetary limitations) and Skin Trade and Universal Soldier IV would garner him a little more credit in terms of being able to cast some decent offers across his table? Sadly, I doubt this is the case.
But as you say Jox, things must be dry if he is accepting more Serafini guff. I have hopes for War Pigs, this and 4 Towers I'm not interested in, same can probably be said for Shark Lake (awful, awful title and will no doubt have a laughable DVD cover that will do little to give Dolph more credibility than his status as a cult, if slightly silly hero).

These film companies have hit on a way to sell films off movie stars names, whilst only having to bring them in for a week or two. They're given supporting roles or if they lead they don't feature that much and get spread thin over the films. I'm not a huge fan of this way but it seems to be becoming the norm somewhat now. Where-as Dolph used to headline a DTV film and be there for the majority of the shoot, earning 1-2 million, nowadays he's doing 3-4 bit part films a year in order to earn what he used to get in one movie I suppose.

Honestly, in these films I think quality control is almost at an all time low now.

Hopefully though 1-2 of these can surprise people. War Pigs seems the best bet on that front. I suppose we can also hope that we might get Nordic Light and Unisol 5 in the next year or so too.

I think we'll now see the action guys winding down now. They might do one more Expendables but I'd imagine it'll be something to close off the franchise, and I don't think there'll be much interest from audiences at all. I expect some of the productions we see D and JC in will be even smaller and independent. People are losing interest, even in DTV.

I wouldn't be surprised, everyone is over 50 now apart from Statham and he ain't that far away, and he himself said he wouldn't do like Sly and still be making them at 70. Just need to hope they all give us a few more decent movies before they ride into the sunset. Somehow though, I doubt The Stranger will be one of them, based on the last three turds, and I don't care what anyone says, in my opinion, Serafini's were all turds.

I imagine a title change will most likely be under way... Surprised that no one else has pointed out that Steve Austin starred in a dtv gem called THE STRANGER about four years ago...

Either way, it's a shame that stars now opt for these quick three-week shoot paycheck jobs. When did this become the status quo and norm? If the opportunity arose, I've gotta believe that these guys would gladly spend ten weeks on a shoot if it meant a quality picture was under way. With Seagal, I lost hope a long time ago...He's been churning out turds for well over a decade now. Van Damme seems to opt for these quick 2-3 week shoots, I've always thought, due to his bi-polar health. As a result, he seems to have made peace playing supporting roles. But everyone else? When did this become the preferred way to get work? Money over quality? And the quality is ridiculous... And these stars (even the likes of Seagal, Van Damme, and Dolph) are okay with it? Whatever happened to an artist taking pride in their work? Has that a thing of the past?

I don't think its a case of not taking pride in their work, its just what's out there for them. They are working actors, they all need to get paid. I can imagine that some actors are probably used to a certain kind of lifestyle as well.

I think piracy has a part to play, loads of people just download torrents or whatever resulting in dwindling budgets for DTV films especially so I guess they have to make whatever budget they have go further. Its got so bad that on IMDB ( I think anyway correct me if I am wrong) Isaac Florentine posted on the Undisputed thread telling the fans to buy the DVD instead of downloading torrents or illegal copies just so Undisputed 4 could get made!

I wonder what D' future plans are?

I think the old school action genre seems to be dying off again. Everyone is more interested in the Marvel/DC sort of thing.
The Expendables 3 was a disaster in the US. It did get salvaged in the worldwide market but the problem is, it's the US market that predominantly gives these guys jobs. That's where they're getting most of their work, from people based in L.A etc.

Look at John Wick this weekend. It's a proper old school, hard R and the critical response was amazing, particularly for a straight up revenge flick starring Keanu. Yet the numbers came back slightly disappointing. 14million for a film that's not a particularly huge budget is pretty good, but I think people expected it to top the box-office and be more impressive. Something closer to what The Equalizer did.

This Taken-esque vibe of film has been popular recently but it'll be interesting to see if audiences still go for it in 6months-a year. The takings on Taken 3 will be a great indicator.

You see it on the big screen and I guess it's tailing off down into the DVD/VOD market. The days when Jean-Claude could get 4-5 million dollars for a DTV film, with a budget of around 10-15 are long gone.

People may ask, regarding Dolph, why he isn't picking more interesting roles. Stuff like Small Apartments, but I would imagine he's just not getting offers. He's shown a willingness to branch out, and S.A probably gave him one of the smallest paycheques he's ever had. I don't think it's entirely about money. If someone offered him more artistically rewarding roles for less money, he'd probably go for them.

You're also getting so many huge stars in DTV now, that it's kind of pushing some of the B level guys like Dolph, even further down the food chain too. Why watch a Lundgren or JCVD DTV when you can watch a Dwayne Johnson or Willis etc?

Plot:

A mysterious stranger travels to a remote village where, 15 years earlier, his wife and daughter were kidnapped.

(intriguing)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4142394/combined

First it isn't confirmed yet that Dolph signed on.

Then I think there's different factors at play (in particular order):

- Cinema is very grueling and taxing and you can imagine after almost 30 years of doing it and getting frustrated movie after movie, comes a point when your life becomes a priority and you don't necessarily want to go through the pain and fights on every single project, so these are easy and quick.

- 10 weeks projects have become very very rare for this genre and low/medium budgets. Dolph's filming schedules came down from about 7-8 weeks to 3-4 weeks after THE PEACEKEEPER (shot in 1996), with the exception of SWEEPERS (summer 1997) so it's been a while and therefore it's no surprise these kinds of movies are getting even lower standards now. And because of my previous point I think even if one came about it'd have to be a really good project for them to get involved, but again they come their way (or anybody's way because 8 weeks schedules are not affordable for 80-90% productions)

- I think Dolph wants to raise the quality on the movies he's producing and directing more than the acting gigs, but doesn't want to go through the pain with the others which are just keeping busy like training or musical scales. I noticed he cares more about the character he's playing than the project himself. He's an actor and the character is what he's working on.

- The scripts are not written and/or produced by the same generation of writers who even in B movies had more of a serious craft and taste about back then. Now everybody thinks he's a writer and this is the Facebook/ Kickstarter /digital generation.

- there's no John Sayles writing genre films like MEN OF WAR for a living anymore (he does the bigger Ron Howard stuff) and these big scale prestige B movies aren't being made as such anymore (even back then it was hard and MOW was lucky not to have been canceled or shit down because it almost was). Old-school producers are either making more shit or retiring, Y generation writers/producers are coming to the front trying to breakthrough in the industry, with no good sense of taste, character arc or experience, come on with these projects with making some kind of deals.

- Dolph, like others, is in the second/later part of his career (even if he still has 20 years to go), in which most actors end with relatively bad work compared to their glory days (even big times stars, look at the last decade or two of most actors), and he doesn't want, doesn't have the energy or will to go through grueling experiences on every movie and wants to take it easy between big projects.

By the way, the story Sly tells (at 16 mins in) about his signing on for THE SPECIALIST is interesting and quite revealing about how things can go:

There is a classic exemple of where an agent is trying to put you in a film in using intimidation.

Never again. But I did it again, and again!... They get that part of you, that ego...

What happened to this one? I'm assuming the project was cancelled... But it seemed like a go deal with that shot of D on set back in October... Any ideas why it was put on the backburner? Or why it was cancelled?

savagesketch wrote:But it seemed like a go deal with that shot of D on set back in October...

I don't think it was ever a go deal, at least not on Doph's part. There's a shot of him with the writer but it wasn't on the set, probably just a meeting, that doesn't mean anything. I'm not even sure Dolph was signed like they claimed. Even FOUR TOWERS which was going to start 6 months prior and was ready to go with Scott Adkins seems back to one now...

I watched Game of Death with Wesley Snipes the other day, which I didn't realise was also directed by Serafini. That guy can't make an interesting movie for shit. A Certain Justice and Hard Rush were pretty boring and bland but Game of Death, fuck me, I have never seen such a dull, uninspired, boring, uninteresting film ever. Wesley Snipes looked like he was about to fall asleep even when firing his gun! I mean I know it was just before he went to jail, but I can't imagine anything duller than this movie. I felt sorry for Robert Davi and even Gary Daniels being a part of it! The only good bit was Wesley and Daniels fight and even old Wes looked like he was sleeping for most of that. Awful director, hope Dolph manages to swerve any more plodding Serafini bullets.

What's interesting about Game Of Death was that Abel Ferrara was originally supposed to direct. He's not always the best director, and he's been off the boil for a few years, but I've found a lot of his films pretty interesting. He's kind of like a grimy, exploitation version of Scorsese. King Of New York and Bad Lieutenant were really good. Game Of Death might have been a lot more interesting had he not left the project.