What went wrong with the 2005 movie?

[Philip_Duke]

The cast was great, their General Lee was faithful, but somehow it was a disaster.

 

I only liked the city scenes, seeing the General Lee being driven out of the garage, and Jessica Simpson looking hot back then.

 

 

This music video rocks even to this day.

[HossC]

The soundtrack was quite good, but the characters and general ethos/values of the movie bore very little resemblance to the TV show. It was as if the writers had never seen the original series and just created their own back story and history to target a difference audience. The 2007 movie rewrote everything again with characters' ages and history differing from the TV show and the 2005 movie. For example, we all know from 'Happy Birthday, General Lee' that the Duke Boys found the General in a junkyard and painted it orange in Cooter's Garage, yet the 2005 movie starts with General having faded paint and crude graphics, and the 2007 movie has them finding an orange Charger with faded graphics at the bottom of a lake.

This seems to happen a lot with movie remakes of 70s/80s TV shows. The Starsky & Hutch movie was a year before the first Dukes one. I've only seen it once, and it wasn't very memorable. The A-Team movie was in 2010, and while a couple of the original cast had cameos at the end, it was overloaded with ridiculous CGI. The trailer for the 2017 CHiPs movie was enough to put me off ever wanting to see it!

[RogerDuke]

I just wonder what they were thinking. Unless they were dumb as rocks they must have known that real Dukes fans were going to be disgusted. That's a shame since the plot really was good. They must have thought that they would gain a higher number of young viewers than they would lose. In the end I'm sure it was a business decision. Does anybody know how much profit it made, if any? 

[HossC]

3 hours ago, RogerDuke said:

I just wonder what they were thinking. Unless they were dumb as rocks they must have known that real Dukes fans were going to be disgusted. That's a shame since the plot really was good. They must have thought that they would gain a higher number of young viewers than they would lose.

By casting Johnny Knoxville, they were obviously after the Jackass audience, which pretty much says it all.

3 hours ago, RogerDuke said:

In the end I'm sure it was a business decision. Does anybody know how much profit it made, if any? 

According to IMDb, the 2005 movie had an estimated budget of $50,000,000. The opening weekend in the US & Canada (August 7, 2005) was $30,675,314. The gross for the US & Canada was $80,270,227, contributing to a worldwide gross of $111,069,515. That means that nearly 3/4 of the gross came from the US & Canada, so that must've been their market.

[RogerDuke]

Interesting...thanks Hoss (out of reactions) 

[Danny]

On 1/30/2022 at 2:36 PM, HossC said:

The soundtrack was quite good, but the characters and general ethos/values of the movie bore very little resemblance to the TV show. It was as if the writers had never seen the original series and just created their own back story and history to target a difference audience. The 2007 movie rewrote everything again with characters' ages and history differing from the TV show and the 2005 movie. For example, we all know from 'Happy Birthday, General Lee' that the Duke Boys found the General in a junkyard and painted it orange in Cooter's Garage, yet the 2005 movie starts with General having faded paint and crude graphics, and the 2007 movie has them finding an orange Charger with faded graphics at the bottom of a lake.

This seems to happen a lot with movie remakes of 70s/80s TV shows. The Starsky & Hutch movie was a year before the first Dukes one. I've only seen it once, and it wasn't very memorable. The A-Team movie was in 2010, and while a couple of the original cast had cameos at the end, it was overloaded with ridiculous CGI. The trailer for the 2017 CHiPs movie was enough to put me off ever wanting to see it!

Johny from my home town was not good in the movie. The premier in my home town some family went to it. So what? I have it and the other on DVD. It was never as good as the original. And the remote controlled cars were fine. But it was never any good. And that is the new guy's opinion. And the second unrated nasty version is awful. And I'm a Christian to boot.  Just nasty.  

[RogerDuke]

I agree about it being nasty. The strange thing is that the original was just the opposite of nasty and it is not permitted to be on the air and the movie version is on all the time. That's some pretty twisted logic. 

I should add that the Georgia episodes had some PG-13 stuff in there but adjustments were made to appeal to a wider audience. And those adjustments helped to make Dukes the greatest show in TV history. 

[cugrad16]

I barely got through the first 20 or so minutes it was that terrible.  Nowhere close to the original concept of two 'good ole boys'  living with their elder Uncle Jesse prime-time family drama.  Just bad soft porn (in a sense)  The writers had changed the entire precept to Bo and Luke as cellphone carrying horn dogs, while Jesse 'ogled' Daisy incestuously, and Hogg and pals turned mean and nasty S.O. political Bs.  All fans even "raved" about were the awesome car chase scenes as the 'hit parade.  Everything else being dump, including Daisy as a blonde bombshell Playboy wannabe instead of the intelligent hometown country girl from the series.  Even Schneider and Wopat were embarrassed with its release, stating it'd somehow drifted badly from its original family concept to something nasty and unrecognizable.  It was all twisted badly written and cast nonsense that earned its 6.3 IMDb rating.