Tag Archives: Dogs of War

That is a question I am wondering about. This all started last night when I saw some advertisement of Belvedere Vodka with Daniel Craig (kind of) dancing in it. This reminded me of Christoper Walken in the video of Weapon of choice by Fatboy Slim. This is how it started. You see, in 1980 he starred in a movie called Dogs of war, made after a book by Frederick Forsyth. The cast was good, I personally liked the movie, yet it only made $5.4 million on a $8 million budget. A failure Hollywood would say. Another movie made on an unpublished work was The Wild Geese from 1978, also all star cast making almost 10 million on a nearly 12 million budget. Another failure according to Hollywood. Still they were good movies and both had unorthodox settings in those days. The audience was not ready for these movies.

So what happens when Netflix, Apple or Amazon takes a stab at these making them massively darker, making them larger (like a Mini series) You see, these movies could never be made in 135 minutes. But in 4-6 episodes of 60-90 minutes this takes on a whole new form and this time it is to an audience who is ready for the setting of either movie. And not for nothing, Frederick Forsyth has published a whole range of books that could be redone. Some more readily then others. We think of the fourth protocol as the movie that launched Pierce Brosnan into stardom, and opposing Michael Caine he did the job, but in this day and age that setting is suddenly a lot more real than ever before. The Fourth Protocol made twice the budget, as such it might not be seen as a failure. Yet these stories could rake in the viewers and therefor the cash. I am considering the thought that these movies were ahead of their time and Hollywood trying to blockbuster whatever they could got to these scripts too early. This is merely a personal view and optionally not the right one. Yet I wonder if anyone in these three houses looked at the movies that never made a profit and wondered if they could now. Both Wild Geese and the Dogs of War had the setting of a good story, they had the background to make it interesting (especially Steward Granger as the exploiting merchant banker Sir Edward Matheson in Wild Geese), all sides that were never explored, you could not do that in 134 minutes. Yet now, in the streaming age these jewels could make a new appearance, they are over 40 years old now. I wonder what more these three could find if they altered the vision they have. 

Good movies aren’t grown on trees, they are found in scripts and at the moment the search for scripts is a whole new problem (until the strikes are a thing of the past). They might not have script writers now, but the preamble to prepare for tomorrow is not something you want to leave in the field, not in this day and age.

Enjoy Monday, the weekend is almost yesterday.