Dragonball Evolution - 7 years later

[Hellspawn28]

So it's been seven years since Dragon Ball Evolution was released in theaters. The movie was announced in 2002 than the movie got a writer in 2003. After 2003, the movie was rumor to be dead until 2007. So how do you guys still view the movie today? I haven't seen it since 2009 and seen the movie twice. The movie is bad, but I seen worst. The acting was awful, the story was terrible and the CG look like it was made in the late 90's. I did give this movie credit for starting with Piccolo first and not going straight to Radditz. The music from Brian Tyler was pretty good and James Marsters was enjoyable.

With DBE, no one was hype up for the movie and everyone knew that the movie was going to be bad. I remember a lot of people on the web said that the movie looked like a bad video game movie from the 1990's. I don't think anyone had any hopes for the movie being good at the time. At least the movie bombed at the box office and a franchise never happen. It made 9 million in the US box office and $57,497,699 worldwide on a 40-50 million budget (Plus another 10-25 million on marketing on the movie). For a movie based on a franchise with a big name, the movie could have done much better at the box office and was not a blockbuster like Fox was hoping for.

[Chuquita]

It's still a terrible adaption, but I do have it to thank for getting Toriyama upset enough to get back into the Dragon Ball game. We arguably wouldn't have the Jump 08 special, BOG, F, or Super if Toriyama hadn't experienced the loss of control during DBE.

[ArchedThunder]

The biggest stain on Dragon Ball's legacy, but oddly enough it was a blessing in disguise. We have Evolution to thank for Toriyama coming back which oddly makes me thankful for Evolution's existence.
I wonder if Hollywood will ever try again on live action Dragon Ball.

[Hellspawn28]

Probably not anytime soon. DBE didn't make enough money and most people think the idea of a live action Dragon Ball is a bad idea. I would imagine Hollywood wants to stay away from doing another live action film. Fox hurt their chances on Dragon Ball on becoming a big movie franchise. Yeah the last two animated films did fine in the US, but those are limited releases. Major movie studios don't look at those type of movies.

[Super Saiyan Swagger]

I hate the movie with all my heart... but I'm glad that it exists. I truly think that if DB Evolution didn't suck as much as it did then we wouldn't have gotten Toriyama coming back to tell new original stories.

[Hellspawn28]

It's still a terrible adaption, but I do have it to thank for getting Toriyama upset enough to get back into the Dragon Ball game. We arguably wouldn't have the Jump 08 special, BOG, F, or Super if Toriyama hadn't experienced the loss of control during DBE.

Jump 08 special came out before DBE. DBE was released in theaters in 2009 and Toriyama didn't want to do anything with the DB series after 1995. He even turn down Bandai's offer to make a new series and we got Kai instead because of that.

[JulieYBM]

I honestly wouldn't even remember this movie existed if Toriyama didn't occasionally mention how much he hates it. Or forum threads about it.

[ultimateemail5000]

I recently watched this a couple weeks ago because I was watching my blu-rays on my new projector. I said "I'm going to watch this without being a fanboy" and ended fast forwarding the high school stuff because it is very cringe worthy. I still can't believe it's almost been 10 years since this came out.

After watching this though, I did notice that Hitto, looks veeeeeery similar to movie Piccolo.

[Hellspawn28]

Goku being in High School was a stupid idea. I do remember when a lot of people said that DBE felt like a Disney Channel movie. I do agree since the whole movie feels cheap and the acting feels like something from a bad TV movie.

[Cipher]

Probably one of the worst major studio films I've ever seen.

I also forget it exists until it's brought up.

[Super Saiyan Swagger]

When I try to find the good things in the film I always only notice two things.

1. James Marsters is good as Piccolo. Chris Stuckmann described him perfectly by saying that he's like Ewan McGregor's Obi-Wan Kenobi in the Star Wars prequels; a good performance amongst several bland or just outright bad performances in a film.

2. The movie actually has a really good soundtrack. Listen to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eHIDkwTNt4
It really does not deserve to be in a film like this.

That's about it really. Everything else is just bad.

[MozillaVulpix]

It's weird. Because I'm realising I wouldn't have actually minded the idea of having slightly different interpretations of characters in slightly different interpretations of storylines. Goodness knows how much that must happen in Marvel and DC superhero movies, and no one seems to complain. (At least, not at Marvel).

But Dragonball Evolution was just such a bad movie not even in terms of the story, but in terms of being an movie, that it's ruined the entire idea forever.

No one is ever going to do live-action Dragon Ball again. And that saddens me. It could be incredibly successful and actually great movie if it was actually done correctly. I would love to see some of my favourite characters and moments in a live-action setting. Even if it is in a somewhat different scenario.

[VegettoEX]

I keep seeing talk of this "giant stain" on the franchise, yet everyone seems to simultaneously say, "Oh yeah, I forgot about that until it was brought up."

So which is it? I'm not sure that it can be both.

I also wonder just how many movies people have seen in their lives if Evolution is the worst thing ever. To me, Evolution is a totally serviceable, mediocre, forgettable children's movie. It appears that people started jumping back on the hate-bandwagon after Toriyama's comments, but he has far more of a reason to take things personally than anyone else does.

It's not a very good movie, but it's far from the totally offensive insult that I see people label it. It's kinda just... there.

[Ajay]

It's the film that had the Church of Faulconer join hands with the Kikuchi cult and say, "Fuck this movie".

It united one of most divided fanbases! Masterpiece.

[Esfír Dedragón]

Oh, boy... Seven years, huh?

I have a bit of an interesting story behind how I feel about the movie.

Man, it must have been 2003 or 2004 when I heard that they were thinking of making a Dragon Ball Z movie. Countingdown.com was my go-to site. I would check it almost daily. This was the only thing left from the site that I could find: a fake movie poster that nearly convinced me of its "reality"
http://www.angelfire.com/anime4/dbzmovieinfo/
Years passed and still nothing. Then, around 2007-2008, pictures on from the set started popping up and it confused fans.
Without mentioning names, I remember the whole "Dragon Ball Protest" group that started forming and heavily criticizing the production of the movie. Since I was young and had no previous exposure to Internet communities, I was horrified as to how deep the fanbase was divided. I remember reading death threats, personal insults, and watching rant videos fans made to each other and to anyone involved in making the movie. I hated it. It was my first exposure to "Fanboyism". It made me consider to stop liking the franchise! That one Serbian guy made me laugh but at the same time, I questioned his mental health. The obsession was THAT deep.

Despite this, I chose to be optimistic but silent. When the movie came out, some fans did change their minds and it was at that moment that I decided not to see it since there was barely any positive review. The haters were right, but their methods in calling out the movie's flaws were too over-the-top and too personal.

In retrospect, it was a bad movie that some not-so-smart fans took it way too personal, but it was not the end of the world. It's sad that this movie was the cause of most Dragon Ball related media released post 2008. (I don't completely like the 2008 special nor do I like all the retroactive ideas that came forth from Jaco, BOG, ROF, and Super). I despised how some fans began to view the franchise as some kind of special snowflake, stating how "impossible" it is to adapt it to a movie.
The movie could have been the next Harry Potter/LOTR/Matrix cash cow but it was in the wrong hands at the time. Maybe someday, Toei/Toriyama would be able to trust movie studios again and make a great movie out of Dragon Ball. The number of "sequels" would be crazy! Hopefully it happens before he kicks the bucket.

Some people have actually tried to look at it from a different perspective in examining how and why the movie failed. I loved watching Il Neige's take on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZqCc82rC4c

Here's also a vid on some guy who was able to contact the scriptwriter from Dragon Ball Evolution and share his thoughts on some of the changes that occurred:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZqCc82rC4c

[Zephyr]

I remember when I saw the first trailer, it absolutely didn't even occur to me that it was related to Dragon Ball.

Finally got around to seeing it last year. It was simply boring to me. What's worse, is that I was consuming alcohol, and watching with friends. That tends to make any film greatly more enjoyable to me, but it didn't really help much for this one for some reason. So I guess that's saying something.

[B]

It's very poor independent of being an adaptation of a pre-existing work. It does a disservice to basic storytelling and filmmaking; not just Dragon Ball itself. I kind of can't be offended by it because it's so ridiculous and so far removed from anything else in the franchise that I just forget about it.

A straightforward live-action adaptation of this series was always going to be a bad idea. This is never brought up in the movie(I think) but the concept of the Dragon Radar is utter nonsense when it's not in the confines of a cartoon/comic book.

[Kunzait_83]

I've said it before, I'll say it again: this was the live action Double Dragon movie of the 2000s. Nothing more, nothing less. It's not even unintentionally funny enough to warrant a comparison to the Van Damme Street Fighter movie. Its just that big of a failure pile in a sadness bowl.

The true mark of mid to late 2000s Hollywood hackery: it even throws in elements and story beats of the 2002 Sam Raimi Spider-Man movie's formula, one of the single most overly tired, exhausted, and whored out screenplay formulas of the last 15 solid years. If Ivan Raimi isn't one of the single richest men in Hollywood by this point, he damn well ought to be just from residual checks collected from all the screenwriting hacks who have endlessly continued to regurgitate and recycle story beats and narrative structure from that one fucking script of his.

Whatever measure of disdain I can be bothered to muster for DBE on the rare instances where I remember it was a thing that even happened at all stems less from my seeing it as any sort of affront to Dragon Ball itself (the FUNimation dub is FAR worse at that than this movie ever was or probably could've hoped to have been) and more just for it being yet another soul-deadening example of the beyond flogged to death 2000s summer tentpole "geek property adaptation" formula. It just epitomizes nearly everything I fucking hated (mainstream movie-wise at least) about the 2000s in general, only in an even sadder and chintzier way that some of the more high profile examples of its cinematic ilk tend to.

Its just such an empty, forgettable nothing of a corporate product.

A straightforward live-action adaptation of this series was always going to be a bad idea.

For the MOST part, but within a VERY specific context like say... if Golden Harvest had done one back around circa 1992/1993 or thereabouts (at around the apex of Z's popularity, not to mention well within the heyday of its particular stripe of whacked out genre-blending wuxia media) and actually sunk some real budget and production values into it, unlike something like The Magic Begins, which was a D grade afterthought of a production across the board from a nobody Taiwanese studio: and STILL manages to be, by comparison, a way more memorable and fun movie than Evolution by vast degrees, despite not being terribly good itself. Also not to mention if the Golden Harvest of this alternate reality 1993 had gotten some of the top Hong Kong talent of the time behind it (Wong Jing or Jeffrey Lau at that point in their careers would've been a pretty good fit for the material insofar as martial arts/wuxia film directors of that particular style and era went).

In that VERY specific scenario, it could've potentially been something pretty cool and fitting. Possibly. Maybe.

With the right makeup/prosthetic work, someone like Simon Yam - in his younger days back then - could've made an awesome Freeza at the very least. No one in early 90s Hong Kong films did edgy psychopaths better than him (the truly sick and haunting Category III film Dr. Lamb containing what still remains one of my all time favorite performances of his). Back in those days I also used to have Yuen Biao fantasy-cast as Kuririn (since Gordon Liu was too old at that point).

Beyond that, yeah, this didn't have very many possible avenues where it'd be destined for quality. The time for that style of "anything goes" genre-hybrid epic fantasy martial arts in Asian film had been well long past by 2009, and attempts to revive it in recent years have tended to be a mixed bag at best. And mainstream Hollywood is STILL too stubbornly attached to the same exhausted fucking superhero film formula its been regurgitating ad nauseam for the last decade and a half now (just with "shared universe" connective tissue thrown in as of more recent years) to really do much of anything else that's radically different in terms of genre.

[Herms]

One of these days I might even watch it.

[Iberian_Saiyan]

I've been watching Netflix Original Series and they're godly amazing so I wouldn't mind if they would make a "Dragon Ball: Origins" series when Gokou was still in his younger years without all the fancy beam battles, loud screams and so on but instead focusing on martial arts, comedy and romance.

One of these days I might even watch it.

It's slightly better with the Japanese dub, in my opinion.