On June 24, 2016, Jaume Collet-Serra's The Shallows was released and showed that a shark movie could, based on an appropriate budget, make money. Shark movies had their course and haven't really been mainstream, movie theatre entertainment. B-movie studio The Asylum had sparked a low budget spree of shark films since Mega Shark Vs. Giant Octopus. It was a hoot of a movie, and saw a lot of films that came after with crazy plots from Swamp Shark (which I thought was a good deal of fun), to 2-Headed Shark Attack (which is forgettable), to Sharktopus (which was not as fun). The culmination of all of this was in 2013 when Sharknado became a goofy pop culture event. Even though there were a lot of shark movies happening, they weren't populating theatres.
After The Shallows came along, all of a sudden sharks were viewed as possible money makers. I remember seeing an episode of the television show Scorpion (I don't make it a habit to watch that show) where evil sharks were afoot and someone was on a buoy, just like in The Shallows. Then we got 47 Meters Down which had a $5.5 million budget and was a profitable endeavour. This summer, we have the largest of the large in a megalodon. Humans are on the menu, and the trailer shows that this shark takes no prisoners.
The trailer uses an unusual music choice to let us know that this movie is going to be aiming at being fun and not taking itself super seriously. That's a good thing, because the special effects do not look special at all. There have been a lot of schlocky shark movies made, and I have seen a pile of them. Judging from the trailer, having fun may be about all this movie has going for it.
A number of the shark attack scenes in the trailer are over the top looking, and, if you have seen Shark Attack 3 (and I highly recommend that you do), nothing will seem original about this movie. We have Jason Statham thrown in there as the man to battle the shark, but will he be better at it than professional shark wrangler Thomas Jane from Deep Blue Sea? That remains to be seen, but Statham can have a great presence in the right roles. There isn't much of him talking shown in the trailer to let us get an idea if this is one of those roles that he will excel at.
According to Wikipedia, The Meg has a budget of $150 million. I so hope that is off by a factor of ten. Fifteen million is about as high as the budget for a movie like this should be, and the effects look like they came in at that price tag. If the number on Wikipedia is right, then I think someone may have been in an altered state at the studio when this thing got green lit. Well, a bit of research found a Forbes article that confirmed that huge budget. I am honestly shocked and beside myself. First of all, that is way too much money to throw at a b-looking flick such as this. Second of all, where the heck did that budget go? This is some Adam Sandler style money spending going on right here with presumably very little to show for it.
This isn't quite a trailer review. It has morphed, and I apologize. There is a chance, from what the trailer showed, that there may be some fun adventure to be had in this movie. What it is, though, is the exact kind of movie that was popular five to nine years ago, movies on a cheap budget that were made for video or the Syfy channel. Yes, there have been two examples of successful shark movies in theatres the past two years, but both of those movies combined didn't make enough to earn a profit for The Meg. I smell a disaster washing up on shore on August 10th.
I actually think the special effects look pretty good, but I agree that a $150 million dollar budget probably spells disaster for something released in August and stars Jason Statham. This movie actually got greenlit right after the massive success of 'Jurassic World', so that is what they are banking on. But this doesn't have the name or even the star power of that movie, plus we're looking to be getting a maximum of two giant monsters in this one compared to the army in the other. My biggest concern from a quality standpoint is the camp ends up too on the nose, because most knowingly campy movies wear out their welcome after a half hour unless there is more to it. 'The Shallows' was a glorious b-movie that still had real stakes and didn't allow the humour to over-power it.
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