'The Legend of Tarzan' Is Here (Will It Survive?)

Well it's here folks. And the bigger question seems to be less will Tarzan save Jane and more can he survive the box office battle and critical savagery. To date the film's critical response is a lackluster 32 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, which the common complaints seeming to be centered around the script and character development. That's not encouraging, even though the film currently does have a 7.3 rating on IMDB, indicating that audiences are ignoring the negative responses (and to be fair there have been some positive notices too).

The bigger hurdle is the box office and while earlier predictions had it being overshadowed by Steven Spielberg's The BFG, it appears both films-and the cheap horror sequel The Purge: Election Year-will be beaten by the third weekend of Pixar's Finding Dory (somewhere there is a commentary waiting to be written about how once again Andrew Stanton has brought pain to ERB fans ;-)). Some though are giving some edge to Tarzan but we'll have to wait and see how it fares in the end at least here in the US. Overseas maybe another matter as we've seen a number of films fail or fall short Stateside and become huge hits in other countries (Warcraft anyone?).

The bigger question mark is how will ERB fans react to it? So far it seems to be getting a warm response and that might be the one thing that will make this fan happy. Of course that might change after I see it this weekend since we also know some ERB fans claimed that John Carter was a great tribute to ERB and we saw how that turned out. So be ready for a long July 4th and stay tuned for my review and the final results.