How many Jerry Bruckheimer misfires before it's a trend?

By Sarah Sluis

Jerry Bruckheimer is having a rough time. The Sorcerer's Apprentice opened to just $17 million, and cost over $200 million, including marketing. The Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time didn't do much better, opening to $30 million and finishing at $90 million, despite a much bigger budget. Last year's G-Force and

Confessions of a Shopaholic are also cited as underperformers, but they don't fall exactly into the Bruckheimer action movie formula. THR just posted an article speculating that this might dampen Bruckheimer's power as a producer, though it's unlikely his production deal with Disney is in jeopardy.

The last Bruckheimer action movie I enjoyed was Pirates of the Caribbean. A fact almost universally acknowledged is that Johnny Depp made that movie. Everyone else was playing it straight in the pirate romp, but Depp was in his own league, acting more like the spooky CG dead pirates than an action lead. His eccentric behavior

seemed like a wink to the audience. So my problem with the most recent Bruckheimer movies is this: they don't seem like they're making fun of themselves at all. They're just typical overstuffed action movies with fantastical premises that seem interchangeable with each other.

These movies have also had problems targeting their audience. The Sorcerer's Apprentice drew half its audience from date-night couples, when it was planned to be more of a family movie. The only thing that made it seem like a kids' movie was its PG rating. All the fire and brimstone in the trailer, for example, seemed directed randomly, enough so that when the kid (Jay Baruchel) says of the sorcerer, Nicolas Cage, "Are you insane?" at the very end, we're inclined to say, "Yes, I still don't know what the plot is." Morphing cars and robotic gargoyles and shooting fire into a building just aren't entertaining if there isn't a story behind the actions.

It's possible that part of the problem for Bruckheimer's films is marketing. There are plenty of movies I want to see that are followed by bad reviews, but his movies I didn't want to see, a feeling confirmed by their poor reception at the box office. Disney has a new marketing chief, MT Carney, who has the potential to change how these movies are perceived pre-release.

Bruckheimer's next movie is a bit of a fail-safe. The fourth Pirates of the Caribbean coming next May should draw audiences, and if it doesn't, it's simply a matter of franchise fatigue. What would be worse for Bruckheimer, however, would be fatigue with his very idea of a spectacle--replaced by the geeky approach of J.J. Abrams, 3D animation and comic book movies.