Although MGM has hung the title of the seven major companies over the years, it has operated unsatisfactorily, not to mention compared with the rapidly rising Fire Lion and the DreamWorks where the Big Three gather, if you talk about its box office performance in recent years, it can only be compared with those small and medium-sized studios.

Although a few years ago, they also had great luck to launch "Legally Blonde" with a small and broad scale, which eased a few breaths.

But after that, they performed even worse than Sony, if there are several blockbuster films such as "Breaking Bad", "Elf Mouse", and "Extreme Agent".

Then MGM is really a rotten ship, less than three pounds of nails.

The new movie on June 14th seems to have been a lifesaver for them again, the last time MGM met "Ben-Hur", and this time they met - "The Wind Whisperer"!

John Woo, who has become a first-line A-level director in Hollywood, after determining his coffee position with "Mission Impossible 2", John Woo also began to challenge himself like directors of the same level as him.

It's just that the action movies he is good at can no longer satisfy him, he wants to challenge more difficult things, and Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan" shocked him.

John Woo wants to prove that he can also make war movies, and it is not a pseudo-war film like "Operation Broken Arrow", but a real war film with the attributes of an epic film.

So, he took MGM's "The Wind Whisperer", which tells the story of a soldier who served as a telegraph translator in the U.S.-Japan war in the Pacific War.

In terms of subject matter, this is a story with interesting points.

However, the level of the script and the quality of the shooting do not necessarily match the original appearance of the story, and the performance of the film ultimately depends on the final quality and the audience's judgment.

On June 14th, after a few months of postponement because of 911, it had reached the point where it had to be released, so even on this day, there were two quasi-big productions from Warner and Universal, MGM still put "The Wind Whisperer" on this day.

This kind of situation of being belated, but having to face multiple attacks, seems to have cast a shadow on "The Wind Whisperer" from the beginning.

And the box office results on Friday's first day gave MGM a blow to the head - $4.4 million!

Not only is this achievement not even a fraction of Warner's "Scooby-Doo", but it is also only half of "Spy".

The next day, Saturday, saw a slight increase at the box office, but it only stopped at $5.6 million, dropped to $4.5 million on Sunday, and ended up at $14 million over the first three days of the weekend.

Not only is this the worst of the three new films, but compared to the film's production cost of $115 million, it's clear that it's impossible to recoup the cost.

In the second week, "Wind Whisperer" performed even worse, falling directly out of the red line of 10 million, falling by more than 50%, and only collecting $6.5 million.

John Woo's name can't avoid the film being scolded as worthless by the audience and critics, and there are really few movies in the summer file that can make the attitude of film critics and audiences so consistent.

The popcorn that the average audience loves to watch will be scoffed at by film critics, such as Warner's "Scooby-Doo". But this time "The Wind Whisperer" has united everyone, although the media literati praise it for coming and can make you want to go for nine days.

But when they scold people, it is definitely a level of killing without blood.

John Woo has been calling for wind and rain since he entered Hollywood in 1996 with "Broken Arro".

In 2000, he directed "Mission Impossible 2", which had a box office of $70 million at the premiere, officially establishing John Woo's position as a Hollywood first-line director.

But "The Wind Whisperer" made this smooth sailing John oo John Wu bear the label of box office poison.

Although there are big-name stars such as Nicolas Cage joining, the film's reputation is still not ideal.

The North American box office performance of more than 40 million US dollars may not be a failure for an average Hollywood movie, but for such a major A-level production with a production cost of more than 100 million, it is simply an abyss from which nothing can be recovered.

John Woo's previous success was due to the fact that Americans saw a director who could create a wonderful story that was different from traditional Hollywood cop films.

"Changing Face" integrates Chinese ethics and family affection, and the action scene is so different, but after that, John Woo went further and further along this road.

From the most superficial point of view, the catastrophic failure of "Wind Whisperer" dealt a heavy blow to John Woo.

But more importantly, the film's failed release caused MGM's stock to plummet, causing the company's president of world market distribution, Robert Levine, to resign, and the entire MGM management was thrown into turmoil.

MGM, which was already an independent studio, has been slower to recoup its funds than the other six competitors that have become media groups.

Now the failure of "Wind Whisperer" has finally broken MGM's long-standing weak capital chain, and the sharp drop in stock price has cut off its financing channels.

Although MGM's owner, Las Vegas casino tycoon Cockrian, has not yet shown his final decision on MGM, anyone with a discerning eye knows that this guy is just waiting for the final release of Pierce Brosnan's last "007 Die Another Day" at the end of the year.

In fact, MGM, who has been in billions of debts since the 90s, is a half-legged member of the Seven Majors, a living zombie worthy of the name.

But in Sid's view, MGM's financial problems are just one of the original sins of his depravity.

The backward business ideas and poor aesthetic vision are the real reasons for MGM's depravity, when everyone knows that fantasy blockbusters are the mainstream now - Warner even did not hesitate to fight with the new line to snatch "The Golden Compass", and Disney took the lead in snatching "The Chronicles of Narnia".

MGM was confused by John Woo's "aesthetics of violence", and John Woo was overstretched when he filmed "Red Cliff" many years later, how could he control "The Wind Whisperer"?

In the end, the effect of the finished film presented a long, boring and boring face, which led to a loss of word-of-mouth and box office, which is not surprising.

In "The Wind Whisperer", John Woo wants to control the moral dilemma of the West and the brotherhood of the East at the same time, so as to integrate the East and the West, point to the box office, and then covet the Oscar.

If you want to use the director in Hollywood as an analogy, it is that he only has the life of the exploding Bay, but he has to do Spielberg's dream.

MGM, on the other hand, turned a blind eye to new trends and was slow to respond, unaware that traditional war films had long since declined, and the success of "Saving Private Ryan" was only Spielberg's exclusive exception.

Not everyone is Spielberg, and only a few people can become gods.