Zoom (2006) and Other Similar Stories

I’m a person who likes to put movies into categories. This doesn’t mean a genre. The genre or genres in which a movie falls might have some influence on the categories, but the categories themselves are much more specific. They might come down to an actor’s work. They might involve a theme that a director or writer likes to put into their work. There might be some story beats involved. I like to dig into these smaller similarities between movies and see how many fit into these more specific categories. I find it interesting. Follow me as I go down a rabbit-hole for one of these smaller subcategories of movies.

Let’s start from the outside and work our way in. People like to generalize movies into different genres. That’s where I’m going to start. Most of the movies involved in this category are part of the action genre. It basically comes with the category. Digging a little deeper, the action genre can split off down many avenues. This category will take the superhero avenue. Superhero movies can branch off into a few other things. Getting a little deeper, I’m going to be taking a look at superhero teams. And, to branch down one level deeper, I want to look at superhero team movies where the heroes are children and/or teenagers learning to use their abilities for good. Got that? Good. Let’s go.

The logical place to begin with a discussion of teaching a superhero team would be the most famous example. The X-Men came into existence thanks to Jack Kirby and Stan Lee in the early 1960s. They would see their popularity rise through the 1970s and eventually get the feature film treatment in 2000. One of the primary settings of the X-Men comics and movies is the X-Mansion, a school for mutant children, run by Charles Xavier. It was essentially a training facility for mutants to become part of a superhero team.

Most of the focus through the first trilogy of X-Men films was on the adult characters. They were teachers at the school. Characters like Wolverine, Cyclops, Jean Grey, and Beast taught the growing mutants how to harness their powers for better, while also travelling around and saving the world from evil. They were mostly saving the world from Magneto. Some of the notable students in the films were Rogue, Kitty Pryde, and Iceman. The team was already a thing, though, so these movies didn’t quite feel as much a part of the category as some others that will be coming up.

That all changed with X-Men: First Class. Sure, the focus of the film was the relationship between Xavier, Magneto, and Mystique. But the idea behind the movie was that they were putting together a team of mutants. They were going to teach and train the mutants to be a superhero team to take down the Hellfire Club, a group of bad mutants. It shifted the focus away from the teachers and put it more onto everyone working together to become the first true X-Men team. It was a bunch of superhero teens learning to use their abilities for the greater good.

One thing that makes the X-Men characters stand out above other teenage superhero teams is their mutant abilities. Many stories about superhero teams feature a mixture of superpowers that feel very tired and cliché. The X-Men tend to have more unique powers, if only because of how many X-Men there have been throughout the franchise’s history. Some can teleport or have telekinesis, while others have bones that protrude from their hands into claws or drain people’s powers through touch. They get more specific, which makes them more interesting.

A few years earlier, a couple other movies came out that featured a similar concept. The first of the two was Sky High, which came out in 2005. The premise was fairly straight forward. A high school was set up for superhero teens. If there was any chance of the teens becoming superheroes, they were sent to the high school to hone their skills. Some of them would be sent into a curriculum to be heroes, while others would be sent into a curriculum to become sidekicks. It was through this sidekick track that the team was formed. They worked together to take down the supervillain terrorizing the school.

Sky High fell victim to many of the standard superhero powers that befall the superhero movies not based on Marvel or DC properties. The main character had super strength and could fly. His father had super strength. His mother could fly. There was a guy who could create fire. There was a shapeshifter. There was someone who had an elastic body, and someone else who could run fast. None of them seemed all that unique or rare. Aside from the popsicle boy, I guess. Someone who can melt into a fluid is an interesting power.

The other movie from around that same time was Zoom. Jack Shepard (Tim Allen) was a superhero when he was younger. He was a speedy guy known as Zoom. When the military discovered an incoming supervillain threat by the name of Concussion (Kevin Zegers), psychologist Dr. Marsha Holloway (Courteney Cox) was tasked with getting Jack to head a new superhero team called the Zenith Project. They trained Dylan West (Michael Cassidy), Summer Jones (Kate Mara), Tucker Williams (Spencer Breslin), and Cindy Collins (Ryan Whitney) to use their superpowers to stop Concussion from attacking the world.

Zoom was very much a movie about a team of superhero children or teens being trained to use their powers for good. The main difference between it and the other movies was that the schooling wasn’t an official school. In the X-Men movies, the X-Mansion was also referred to as a school for gifted children. The older mutants were teachers for the younger ones in official classes and such things. Sky High was about a school for superheroes and their sidekicks. It was a school. There was a school bus driver. With Zoom, the school, if it could be called that, was a military experiment that found four children/teens with superpowers and helped them harness it. They were being trained by a mentor. But there wasn’t a curriculum. There wasn’t an agenda that they were being taught. They were simply being taught to strengthen their powers. It was more like an intensive gym session than a school. Especially when the kids went back to their normal schooling after the Concussion situation.

Jack Shepard became the mentor to all the kids. He taught them what it meant to be a superhero after starting his tenure as their mentor by not caring at all about them. His past kept him from caring. Jack was part of a teenage superhero team in his younger years. The government did things a little differently back then. The present day team was being trained to use their powers. The older team had been hit with gamma radiation to accelerate their power growth curve. Jack didn’t want to train the newer team because he was worried the government was going to do the same thing. And they tried to. Jack, instead, took them into the field to fight the bad guy as they were. X-Men: First Class featured mentors who wanted to train the new heroes. Sky High featured a bunch of official teachers. Zoom was about a man reluctant to bring new heroes into the world of superheroes because of his past. It twisted things in a different way.

Different wasn’t apparent in the superpowers, themselves, though. The superpowers in Zoom had no real originality to them. Jack Shepard had super-speed. Cindy was strong. Summer could control things with her mind. Dylan could turn himself invisible. It wasn’t anything out of the ordinary when it came to superhero team powers. If anything, it lacked any originality at all. The most original superpower was Tucker’s, where he could inflate whatever part of his body he wanted. That originality couldn’t save the others from feeling tired, though.

There are probably a few other movies where children and/or teenagers were trained to be heroes with superpowers. The Umbrella Academy would probably fit into this category if the focus wasn’t on the adult versions of the characters, and if it was a movie. Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children could maybe slip into here, but I haven’t seen it, so I wouldn’t have too much to say about it. Others might exist as well.

I like to categorize movies like this. I like to boil them down to specific story elements, perhaps including the people involved. It’s interesting to me. Those categories don’t define the movies so much as the movies define them. Each movie throughout this post fit into a specific category, but they tackled those ideas in different ways. They stood on their own instead of being derivative due to the similar story. The story of the children/teens being taught to become a superhero team was only one element of each movie. It wasn’t all that the movies were. That’s why there can be good and bad within the category. None of the movies did the same thing.

People like to define movies and categorize them into little boxes that they don’t let the movies out of. A horror movie is a horror movie and can’t be anything else. Stuff like that. I’m a little more fluid in my categories. It’s interesting to see the elements that movies share, but it’s also interesting to see how they do different things with those elements. No two movies are exactly the same. To categorize them as exactly the same doesn’t do them justice. Categories are fun to look at, but they aren’t everything when it comes to a movie. That’s what makes movies fun.

A little less fun, but still interesting to look at, are these notes:

• Chevy Chase made his fourth Sunday “Bad” Movies appearance in Zoom, after appearing in Nothing but Trouble (week 267), The Karate Dog (week 281), and Not Another Not Another Movie (week 402).
• Matthew Wood has now appeared in three Sunday “Bad” Movies. They were The Emoji Movie (week 373), Star Wars: The Clone Wars (week 377), and Zoom.
• Zoom also saw the third appearance of Willie Garson, who was previously seen in Sex and the City (week 370) and Sex and the City 2 (week 370).
• Nick Baga was in Jack and Jill (week 101) and Zoom.
• John Watson returned from Gooby (week 166) to appear in Zoom.
• Zoom wasn’t the only superhero team movie to feature Kate Mara. She was also in Fant4stic (week 172).
• Spencer Breslin was in Zoom and one of my favourite Sunday “Bad” Movies, The Happening (week 185).
• Ryan Whitney was in Zoom, and then grew up to be in Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No! (week 190).
• Sadey Paige Nifong appeared in both Jem and the Holograms (week 238) and Zoom.
• Finally, Thomas F. Wilson made a quick turnaround, showing up in both Zoom and Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector (week 455).
• Have you seen Zoom? What did you think of it? What do you think of movies where children and/or children are trained to be superheroes? Are there others that I haven’t mentioned? Let me know in the comments or find me on Twitter to discuss it.
• Twitter and the comments are good places to let me know what movies I should be checking out for Sunday “Bad” Movies. If there’s one that you think would fit, hit me up.
• Make sure to head over to Sunday “Bad” Movies on Instagram to check out more bad movie fun.
• Next week, I’m going a little foreign. By that, I mean I’ll be checking out a foreign film. I’ll be going to Hong Kong for the flick Five Element Ninjas. Come on back in a week to see what I thought. See you then.

Bolero (1984)

Certain movies can make a studio. You’ve probably heard time and time again that New Line Cinema was the house that Freddy built. That was due to the massive success of A Nightmare on Elm Street and its sequels when New Line Cinema was starting out. The money that the studio got from the releases of those movies led to their ability to fund other projects that would also find success. This would eventually lead to bigger movies that were more popular and profitable like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Austin Powers, Rush Hour, and the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

That said, there are also movies that can break a studio. Going back to New Line Cinema, they were independent until 2008. At that point, they folded into Warner Bros. as another arm in the major production company. They were no longer distributing their own work, and anything they produced would be under the watchful eye of Warner Bros. That was due to the financial failure of The Golden Compass in 2007. It was successful internationally, but New Line Cinema had sold the rights to international distribution, meaning that they didn’t see any profits through that avenue. Time Warner, their partner at the time, decided that the company needed to merge with their more successful studio, Warner Bros.

You might be wondering right now how New Line Cinema ties into this week’s post. Bolero, the movie I’ll be writing about, wasn’t a movie made by New Line Cinema. It wasn’t distributed by New Line Cinema. It didn’t build up the company or lead to its demise. Why, then, have I brought the lifespan of New Line Cinema into the discussion? It’s because Bolero was one of those movies, a make or break example, for another studio. Bolero led to the eventual downfall of The Cannon Group. It was the movie that led to MGM cutting their distribution deal with The Cannon Group due to breach of contract, pushing The Cannon Group on their path to financial woes that would plague the remainder of their existence.

Bolero was a 1984 flick directed by John Derek. Lida MacGillivery (Bo Derek) graduated college and was off on her newest adventure as a grown woman. She was going to find a man to take her virginity. She travelled with her driver Cotton (George Kennedy) and her friend Catalina (Ana Obregón) to distant lands to find a lover. First, they went to Morocco, where Lida found a sheik (Greg Benson), who fell asleep while licking honey off her naked body. After the failure in Morocco, they went to Spain. Lida quickly fell in love with a bullfighter named Angel (Andrea Occhipinti). Soon after taking her virginity, Angel was gored by a bull. Lida nursed him back to health and showed him that they could still have wild, passionate sex.

MGM had some major issues with Bolero when it was presented to them for distribution. John Derek had put together an erotic film that was all about sex. The primary goal of the characters, particularly Lida and Catalina, was to lose their virginities. They were looking for men who could help them with that. John Derek wasn’t going to shy away from the explicit content, either. The sex scenes were in there, in full. It wasn’t necessarily real sex. There was no penetration shown. But there were people rubbing up against one another while naked in ways that, at times, were difficult to tell if it was acting or reality. There was full frontal female nudity, and male butts. There was even a ballsack at one point.

That explicit nature was what Golan and Globus, the people behind The Cannon Group, loved about the movie. In fact, they wanted more of it. There was already too much. I’m not the kind of person to say that sex scenes don’t belong in movies. There are certainly times and places for sex scenes. In much of Bolero, the eroticism was wholly justified. It was a movie about young women wanting to have sex. It made sense that the sex would be shown, to show how they felt in the moment of achieving their goal. The sex scenes were an essential part of the storytelling in the way that the bullfighting was. Without it, there would be something missing from the overall arc.

However, the movie went too far with one of the supporting characters in the film. When Lida and her friends made it to Spain, they befriended a teenage acquaintance of Angel, Paloma (Olivia d’Abo). She lived with Angel and became a close friend of Lida and Catalina. She talked openly about wanting to have sex with Angel, who was kind of a pedophile. His girlfriend before Lida was a woman who he had met and slept with when she was fourteen. Paloma wanted to take that woman’s place, since she was now fourteen years old. That was a little strange for a movie to be so open about. It was definitely weirder for Angel to not be looked at negatively for wanting to have sex with fourteen-year-old girls. It got even worse when Paloma got naked in multiple scenes of the movie. Bolero had multiple scenes of full frontal fourteen-year-old girl nudity.

Yeah, it’s easy to understand why MGM didn’t want to distribute this one. The sexual story with explicit sex scenes would be enough to give Bolero an X-rating. There was no NC-17 at the time, so X was what it would have gotten. The underage nudity would make that X-rating a sure thing. MGM would only distribute the film if the necessary cuts were made to receive an R-rating. Golan and Globus wanted it more erotic, so they obviously disagreed. John Derek was confident in his vision as it was, so he disagreed. MGM wouldn’t budge on their stance, and it ended up destroying the relationship between the studio and the production company.

How did this negatively affect The Cannon Group? The company survived for another ten years. It didn’t necessarily die directly from the release of Bolero. However, Bolero was a crucial turning point. MGM cut their distribution agreement with The Cannon Group. That meant The Cannon Group had to self-distribute their movies. That meant The Cannon Group had to put more of their money into marketing and distribution, which meant they also had to earn more money to make back what they spent. This was particularly costly with their production output rising to forty-three films in 1986. Without that MGM deal, they were losing more money. The company would ink a deal with Viacom in 1986, and would later get some licensed properties like Superman and Masters of the Universe, but it wasn’t enough to save the company. They would be bought out by Pathé by the end of the decade and The Cannon Group would never be the same. It shut down by 1994.

To sum it all up, Bolero might not have been the sole movie to kill The Cannon Group. The company lived on for ten years after its release. Bolero just set the company on its course to failure. They were rising high, producing more movies every year. They were finding an audience through their theatrical releases and making enough money to fund future movies. But then Bolero came along and took away a major theatrical distribution arm. It severed the deal that was helping push The Cannon Group forward. Without that deal, they couldn’t release their movies as wide as MGM could have. They couldn’t grow their audience as quickly. They were making more movies than they had an audience for, because the avenue to the audience had been cut off. Bolero did that. It was the movie that did that.

The tale of The Golden Compass leading to the demise of New Line Cinema as a standalone studio was much more definitive than Bolero causing the end of The Cannon Group. A much more definitive movie would be Superman IV: The Quest for Peace. The failure of that flick was the final straw, which led to the purchase by Pathé. However, The Cannon Group would have never been on the path to creating that low-budget licensed property if it weren’t for Bolero. Bolero steered the ship in that direction. It caused the financial troubles that would lead to licensed properties being made on low-budgets. It created the difficulty for The Cannon Group to find a theatrical audience. It may not have been the toppling domino that caused the demise, but it could be seen as the finger pushing the domino.

Any movie could make or break a studio. You never know what movie it will be until the movie goes into production. You might not even know until the release that it is the movie which will cause the rise of a studio’s fortunes, or the fall of a studio from grace. The studio business is a fickle one. Every single movie can be as important as any other. For many people, every movie is important. Their livelihoods depend on the success of whatever movie they put out. And if the movies don’t succeed, the people behind them could lose their careers. It’s a make or break business.

Here come a few quick notes to close things out:

• Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (week 403) was mentioned in this post.
• John Derek directed Bolero and Tarzan the Ape Man (week 273).
• Bolero starred Bo Derek, who was also in Orca (week 144), Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No! (week 190), and Tarzan the Ape Man (week 273).
• Finally, George Kennedy was in View from the Top (week 83) and Bolero.
• Have you seen Bolero? What did you think? What movies can you think of that made a studio or destroyed a studio? You can discuss this and more in the comments or on Twitter.
• If there’s a movie that you think would fit well into Sunday “Bad” Movies, let me know. Find me on Twitter and tell me. You could also drop the movie title in the comments. I’m always looking for movies I might not otherwise know.
• Make sure to check out Sunday “Bad” Movies on Instagram for more fun throughout the week.
• Before you go, it’s time to take a look at what’s up next for Sunday “Bad” Movies. There’s this idea of twin films, where two studios happen to release similar movies around the same time. In the summer of 2005, Sky High was released. A year later, another movie came out about young superheroes in training. It was called Zoom, and I’ll be watching it for next week’s post. See you then!