Actually, I believe the title is "Oz The Great and Powerful," though we are splitting hairs.
Industry insiders expect Oz to be a much more popular film with the public than Jack will be. HSX has Jack trading at a price of about $80/share (whivh means about $80 mil of boxoffice over its first 3 weekends of release) while Oz is trading at $180. Jack is skewing much younger/family oriented while Oz is probably going for a teen/young adult as well as fantasy/sci-fi audience. My bet is that Oz hopes to capture a good portion of the Hobbit crowd.
There is not much buzz yet. I am not aware of any critics who have seen the film yet to start posting reviews. I have a screening early next week, but I will be unable to attend that. While you may not trust him, Rami has a good reputation and a pretty solid track record -- especially when you consider that he has mostly done low-brow horror kind of films that typically do not make for high-quality filmmaking.
That said, the screenwriters are a pair of guys who are experienced but haven't done much really great stuff (one of them wrote The Whole Nine Yards, the other wrote Rise of the Guardians). I am quite concerned that this will be another "re-imagining" similar to what Disney did with Alice in Wonderland a couple years ago, where the focus is largely on spectacle and 3D effects as opposed to great storytelling. I have head that this film is full of expensive CGI sets and characters, which either means lots of fun eye candy or lots of junk distracting us from the story. The film carries a production budget of around $200 million.
My bet is that it will be good, but not nearly great. I bet it follows a very predictable character arc for Oz (shady but lovable at first, unsure of himself in the middle, then rise to being the hero at the end). I am not sure how you do much of a character arc for the witches, who will (by definition) either be "Good" or "Evil." Any hope for nuance in the witches is probably a fool's errand.
But, I am just guessing. I would be delighted if it surprised me and was better than Alice in Wonderland was.
-Jason "so much for a conversation about Jack
" Evans