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Jandrew

Jandrew's 2016 Winners and Losers

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3 hours ago, jandrew said:

 

Well like I said, this isnt solely about box office.

 

FWIW, my take isn't solely about box office either. That's why i think it's fair to call BvS a disappointment, despite earning 330/800. But while this isn't solely about box office, it has to be at least partially, and significantly, about box office, and IMO that same 330/800 take is too great to merit the term "loser". 

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19 minutes ago, SteveJaros said:

 

FWIW, my take isn't solely about box office either. That's why i think it's fair to call BvS a disappointment, despite earning 330/800. But while this isn't solely about box office, it has to be at least partially, and significantly, about box office, and IMO that same 330/800 take is too great to merit the term "loser". 

 

When announced, BvS had skies the limit potential. Meaning, it could've honestly finished anywhere. I mean this is a matchup we've been waiting on for decades. Instead it received a 27% RT and 64% audience score.

 

Bvs also had a 1.98, lemme repeat, ONE POINT NINE EIGHT multiplier. Not even a full 2, which is atrocious enough. I still can't get over that. Seriously, a movie that opened to $166 million was lapped by a movie that opened to $75M. How is that just "disappointing" to you?

 

WB and Snyder was too focused on making yet another brooding epic that the final product was overstuffed, bloated, and incoherent. And showed with the reception it got.

 

Again, with 9 years inflation, 3D, and PLF, BvS still couldn't beat SM3, which had awful legs on its own. It couldn't beat Guardians, which again didn't have decades of pent up demand and was headlined by a talking raccoon. It beat SS by $5M, which also like Guardians, came out of nowhere. If SS's reception was an ounce better, it would've beat it too. Even adjusted, Iron Man beats BvS by over $50 million with no 3D, and that's before anyone cared about Marvel Studios or Iron Man.

 

This movie is a loser to me. Sure in life it's fine, it 1. sold merchandise, 2. made $800 million, and 3. helped further establish the DCU. But that's not my criteria. My columns are "winner", "almost winner", "mixed", "almost loser", and "loser." There is no "disappointment" column so I am not going to call it that. And I'm not disappointed with this movie regardless, I'm baffled. This movie had one job to wheel the wedding cake to the table and dropped it all on the floor. Squandered.

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I gotta agree with Illumination being a big winner.  Everyone thought Secret Life of Pets would be big, but NOT #4 DOM big!  $368M+ DOM was huge, beating EVERY supers movie but Cap3 and the 1-2 punch of Zootopia and Jungle Book (Who had SLOP as the #3 summer movie, c'mon be honest - okay, I had it at #2 on another game, but I've been big on Illumination).  AND a few months out, Sing was supposed to lose handily to Moana, and instead, it's gonna top Moana DOM (with WW still to be decided).  That's a winner, even if you don't like Illumination.  They took 2 ORIGINAL properties and made them soar (and only had $75M production budgets each) - that's REALLY hard, even in animation.    

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22 hours ago, jandrew said:

 

8 hours ago, jandrew said:

Are yall actually reading my post? Matter of fact are you even reading the OP? This is not a list based on grosses. I made it pretty clear in my post why I considered them what I did.

 

This list isn't just about gross, but rather gross, reception, and expectations.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Even though you say that your evaluations are not solely about gross, you clearly accept it as one of the 3 basic parameters, probably even the most important one. I for my part, would consider the gross of a big-budget movie to be THE deciding factor, since money is an objective measure (THE objective measure in a capitalist world, I might add) while concepts such as "reception" & "expectations" are subjective, fluid and rather intangible. 

 

But, since my reply was referring to your OP, I will try and deal with the terms you set out. Firstly, and just like I stressed before, BvS made a hell of a lot more money than Ghostbusters did. Domestically, BvS made almost 3 times as much as Ghostbusters, and overseas it made an astonishing 5 and a half times as much! That is a gap so immense that we as observers have no other choice but to take into account and allocate it its proper significance (which is massive) If Ghostbusters was a small independent film its gross would be triumphant, if it was a mid-budgeted one it would have been mixed, but it was in fact a big-budget, high-profile reboot/remake to one of the most successful films of all time. 

 

As for expectations. It's an absolute certainty that BvS was indeed expected to make more money than Ghostbusters, which is in fact exactly what happened, by almost a factor of 4 (GB total WW-BO came in at merely 26% of what BvS did) So, if you have any way of arguing that Sony would have "mixed" feelings about making 26% of what BvS did, then please, indulge me. 

 

As for reception. What exactly are you referring to here? The RT score? Audience reactions? I'm asking because a large part of the audience did in fact like BvS (others were ambiguous about it, both liking and disliking parts of it) and were appalled at the extremely negative and one-sided reviews. In matter of fact, this issue was one of the main controversies of they year in the movie world. As for the reception received by Ghostbusters, well I guess you just *have* to consider it as a major plus for Ghostbusters since it must have been good enough in order to compensate for GB's puny performance at the BO in relation to BvS which you consider an outright loser while GBs is "mixed". As for the Ghostbusters' RT score itself. Do you honestly believe that the critics thought that it was indeed a "fresh" movie? Or is it far more likely that they were desperately trying to distance themselves from the misogynistic comments (both real & imaginary) that proliferated on social media in relation to this movie? In my view, most critics were far more concerned with the toxic narrative surrounding that movie, rather than its inherent quality.

 

But most of all, what decides truth and falsehood are not random or even dominant opinions, but facts! If Ghostbusters was indeed a "mixed" outcome for the studio/audiences/critics relative to expectations etc, and if BvS was indeed an outright "loser" then why is the latter getting multiple sequels while the former is being left to die a quiet death? 

 

 

Another noteworthy fact here. The DCEU immediate follow-up to BvS, Suicide Squad also managed well over $300M domestically and $750M WW (despite no China release) which shows that no serious fall-out has occurred after BvS. 

 

 

 

 

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8 hours ago, Jonwo said:

Sully should be a winner, over $200m WW in a $60m budget even with Hanks and Eastwood is a win.

 

New Line should be a winner with a successful summer with Conjuring 2, Me Before You, Central Intelligence etc 

 

Kinda winner should be Bridget Jones, while it flopped stateside, it was a winner OS especially in its native U.K. considering it was 12 years since the last film 

 

Oh yeah Bridget Jones, a US flop but a winner elsewhere. This and Me Before You showed there's still market for adult romance movies

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25 minutes ago, TwoMisfits said:

I gotta agree with Illumination being a big winner.  Everyone thought Secret Life of Pets would be big, but NOT #4 DOM big!  $368M+ DOM was huge, beating EVERY supers movie but Cap3 and the 1-2 punch of Zootopia and Jungle Book (Who had SLOP as the #3 summer movie, c'mon be honest - okay, I had it at #2 on another game, but I've been big on Illumination).  AND a few months out, Sing was supposed to lose handily to Moana, and instead, it's gonna top Moana DOM (with WW still to be decided).  That's a winner, even if you don't like Illumination.  They took 2 ORIGINAL properties and made them soar (and only had $75M production budgets each) - that's REALLY hard, even in animation.    

 

Agree. Pets probably prevented DORY from reaching 500M DOM and Sing as well preventing Moana from a chance of getting to 300m. And yes ORIGINAL material should be emphasized. Just look at Storks, not easy to sell an original story these days.  2016 cemented Illuminations's brand, that is not just all about Despicable Me and Minions

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1 hour ago, TwoMisfits said:

I gotta agree with Illumination being a big winner.  Everyone thought Secret Life of Pets would be big, but NOT #4 DOM big!  $368M+ DOM was huge, beating EVERY supers movie but Cap3 and the 1-2 punch of Zootopia and Jungle Book (Who had SLOP as the #3 summer movie, c'mon be honest - okay, I had it at #2 on another game, but I've been big on Illumination).  AND a few months out, Sing was supposed to lose handily to Moana, and instead, it's gonna top Moana DOM (with WW still to be decided).  That's a winner, even if you don't like Illumination.  They took 2 ORIGINAL properties and made them soar (and only had $75M production budgets each) - that's REALLY hard, even in animation.    

 

Still too easy of a choice. Yeah I could've included them, but ultimately didn't want too.

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1 hour ago, PPZVGOS said:

 

Even though you say that your evaluations are not solely about gross, you clearly accept it as one of the 3 basic parameters, probably even the most important one. I for my part, would consider the gross of a big-budget movie to be THE deciding factor, since money is an objective measure (THE objective measure in a capitalist world, I might add) while concepts such as "reception" & "expectations" are subjective, fluid and rather intangible. 

 

But, since my reply was referring to your OP, I will try and deal with the terms you set out. Firstly, and just like I stressed before, BvS made a hell of a lot more money than Ghostbusters did. Domestically, BvS made almost 3 times as much as Ghostbusters, and overseas it made an astonishing 5 and a half times as much! That is a gap so immense that we as observers have no other choice but to take into account and allocate it its proper significance (which is massive) If Ghostbusters was a small independent film its gross would be triumphant, if it was a mid-budgeted one it would have been mixed, but it was in fact a big-budget, high-profile reboot/remake to one of the most successful films of all time. 

 

As for expectations. It's an absolute certainty that BvS was indeed expected to make more money than Ghostbusters, which is in fact exactly what happened, by almost a factor of 4 (GB total WW-BO came in at merely 26% of what BvS did) So, if you have any way of arguing that Sony would have "mixed" feelings about making 26% of what BvS did, then please, indulge me. 

 

As for reception. What exactly are you referring to here? The RT score? Audience reactions? I'm asking because a large part of the audience did in fact like BvS (others were ambiguous about it, both liking and disliking parts of it) and were appalled at the extremely negative and one-sided reviews. In matter of fact, this issue was one of the main controversies of they year in the movie world. As for the reception received by Ghostbusters, well I guess you just *have* to consider it as a major plus for Ghostbusters since it must have been good enough in order to compensate for GB's puny performance at the BO in relation to BvS which you consider an outright loser while GBs is "mixed". As for the Ghostbusters' RT score itself. Do you honestly believe that the critics thought that it was indeed a "fresh" movie? Or is it far more likely that they were desperately trying to distance themselves from the misogynistic comments (both real & imaginary) that proliferated on social media in relation to this movie? In my view, most critics were far more concerned with the toxic narrative surrounding that movie, rather than its inherent quality.

 

But most of all, what decides truth and falsehood are not random or even dominant opinions, but facts! If Ghostbusters was indeed a "mixed" outcome for the studio/audiences/critics relative to expectations etc, and if BvS was indeed an outright "loser" then why is the latter getting multiple sequels while the former is being left to die a quiet death? 

 

 

Another noteworthy fact here. The DCEU immediate follow-up to BvS, Suicide Squad also managed well over $300M domestically and $750M WW (despite no China release) which shows that no serious fall-out has occurred after BvS. 

 

 

 

 

 

I'm honestly confused as to what you're trying to get at here. It seems you are comparing Ghostbusters and BvS. I'm not and don't want to. My list was very circumstantial, which is why I put Suicide Squad as a winner and BVS as a loser, even though SS had a lower RT score and there was only a $5 million domestic gap between the two. When I looked at the holistic circumstances of the two movies, I feel SS did a good, and BvS did a pretty poor one.

 

Ghostbusters was never going to be earth shattering. We only paid so much attention to it because of the title. It succeeded in breaking away from the alt-right dribble it had to endure, and it seemed to have been crowd pleasing enough, but it still didn't become the summer smash nor franchise starter that Sony was hoping for. And if I recall correctly, I put Ghostbusters as mixed, not a success. So what is the problem exactly?

 

Are you upset that I called BvS a loser? Or are you upset that I gave Ghostbusters more props than I should have? Because I've already explained my reasoning on BVS more than once now.

 

 

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22 minutes ago, jandrew said:

 

Still too easy of a choice. Yeah I could've included them, but ultimately didn't want too.

Disney was the easiest choice as a winner and you made that one...so, just b/c it's easy, doesn't make it not right...

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15 minutes ago, TwoMisfits said:

Disney was the easiest choice as a winner and you made that one...so, just b/c it's easy, doesn't make it not right...

 

They had a special year. If they do the same thing this year, they won't be on my 2017 list...

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@jandrew

 

I think what I was saying there was that a far more precise assessment would be that BvS was a mixed bag, because even though it made a lot of money, it was a movie that understandably had sky-high expectations that it did not manage to meet. Also, Ghostbusters was an unmitigated disaster, at the BO, in terms of quality and as an effort to launch a new franchise. The only "silver lining" for Ghostbusters was the ideologically-invested pity that critics and part of the audience showed it.

 

BTW, and this is largely unrelated to the OP, why are so many people terrified of calling Ghostbusters what it was, an atrocious excuse for a movie, literally one of the worst of all time. Just because some far-right elements targeted this pile of garbage for their own purposes cannot redeem it in the slightest. This is the "Hitler slept on a bed" fallacy.  If anything, the critics that gave GB a pass make themselves look biased and hypocritical. 

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11 hours ago, jandrew said:

 

When announced, BvS had skies the limit potential. Meaning, it could've honestly finished anywhere. I mean this is a matchup we've been waiting on for decades. Instead it received a 27% RT and 64% audience score.

 

Bvs also had a 1.98, lemme repeat, ONE POINT NINE EIGHT multiplier. Not even a full 2, which is atrocious enough. I still can't get over that. Seriously, a movie that opened to $166 million was lapped by a movie that opened to $75M. How is that just "disappointing" to you?

 

WB and Snyder was too focused on making yet another brooding epic that the final product was overstuffed, bloated, and incoherent. And showed with the reception it got.

 

Again, with 9 years inflation, 3D, and PLF, BvS still couldn't beat SM3, which had awful legs on its own. It couldn't beat Guardians, which again didn't have decades of pent up demand and was headlined by a talking raccoon. It beat SS by $5M, which also like Guardians, came out of nowhere. If SS's reception was an ounce better, it would've beat it too. Even adjusted, Iron Man beats BvS by over $50 million with no 3D, and that's before anyone cared about Marvel Studios or Iron Man.

 

This movie is a loser to me. Sure in life it's fine, it 1. sold merchandise, 2. made $800 million, and 3. helped further establish the DCU. But that's not my criteria. My columns are "winner", "almost winner", "mixed", "almost loser", and "loser." There is no "disappointment" column so I am not going to call it that. And I'm not disappointed with this movie regardless, I'm baffled. This movie had one job to wheel the wedding cake to the table and dropped it all on the floor. Squandered.

 

You seem to find that 1.98 multiplier so awful that it mesmerizes you from considering that it came on top of an OW of $166m, which is really really good! So what we have here isn't something that is just plain bad (loserville!) but a mix of bad and good, which would be something else. And of the two, the multiplier is really less important, because multipliers have value only to the extent that they translate into actual box office numbers. 

 

I mean, what if Avatar 2 is released, and does $600m DOM its first week, and then "only" $400m the rest of its DOM run? That would be a multiplier of 1.66, which I guess is dreadful (I don't really follow multipliers but if you are laughing at 1.98 ...), but my response would be "So What? It still earned $1B DOM, which is awesome"! So we can't dwell too much on multipliers. In the end, no matter what other films did or didn't do, 330/800 is still a lot of money.

 

Which leads to this: If a film that did 330/800 is a "loser", what would we have called BvS if it had done Alice 2 numbers?  Surely, it would be worth noting, in a categorical way, the difference between the BvS that actually exists and a hypothetical one that put up Alice 2 numbers, but your scale can't accommodate  that.

 

Well, actually it can, if you just place BvS correctly. It should be "mixed", or at worst, "almost loser" - which basically correspond to my definition of "disappointment". With the "loser" zone reserved for films that were disappointing in all the ways you describe BvS, and also really did tank at the box office.  Otherwise, your scale just doesn't seem to work.

 

 

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7 hours ago, PPZVGOS said:

BTW, and this is largely unrelated to the OP, why are so many people terrified of calling Ghostbusters what it was, an atrocious excuse for a movie, literally one of the worst of all time. Just because some far-right elements targeted this pile of garbage for their own purposes cannot redeem it in the slightest. This is the "Hitler slept on a bed" fallacy.  If anything, the critics that gave GB a pass make themselves look biased and hypocritical. 

 

First, I think you answered your own question: Some critics may have given GB 2016 more praise than it deserved because they got caught up in the ideological/political tempest in a teapot that the film briefly provoked. That happens, particularly in an emotional election year. 

 

Second, I disagree with your characterization of how bad it was. Did I like it? No, I gave it a negative review. And am I a liberal? No, FWIW, I am politically more conservative.

 

But that said, I had no issue with remaking the film with an all-female ghostbusting cast, and judged it on its own terms. And of the 140 films I saw in theaters last year, Ghostbusters was far from the worst, not even in the bottom 30 or so. It wasn't good, nowhere near as good as the 1984 classic, but IMO not anywhere near "atrocious". So I can understand how others wouldn't find it atrocious, either. 

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21 hours ago, Maxmoser3 said:

Would Star Trek:Beyond be considered a loser? Since it failed to make $350 million worldwide. Paramount is the main loser of 2016, with only 4 hits for them and 6-7(Jack Reacher failed to break-even stateside)flops they are in some trouble. Bankability for actors: Winner: Ben Affleck two hit films one being Batman V. Superman being his highest grossing yet, and The Accountant made a solid amount considering it wasn't an Oscar or award nominated film it did fine for an R-rated action thriller. Loser: Melissa McCarthy had a decent past few years with films like Identity Thief, The Heat, Spy, and Tammy  making very solid numbers. But not so much with two of her films in 2016, The Boss did ok with its $29 million budget and made over $70 million worldwide but it was by far her lowest-grossing film with her as the lead role of the film. Then the summer Ghostbusters which had the highest grossing start for the actress, but died off quickly, although it made $128 million, it failed to recoup with its $144 million budget, and even with overseas and with what Sony was expecting to be a sucessful "Summer tentpole" it's easy to say it was a loser. 

Winners

Horror: 2016 was the biggest year for horror yet! With 4 of them making over $70 million domestic, and one over $65 million, and one at $55 million. Horror also did sucessful overseas with several making $100 million worldwide and so on. 

Toss-up

R-rated comedies: only Bad Moms was the R-rated comedy made $100 million domestic this year, which is the lowest in over a decade. But Sausage Party, Neighbors 2, Mike & Dave, Dirty Grandpa, and How To Be Single(forgot Why Him, and Office Christmas Party)managed to make money back. While Brothers Grimsby, Popstar, Keanu, and Bad Santa 2 flopped.

Star Trek Beyond was a winner in our hearts

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@SteveJaros  @jandrew

 

One more thing. You fail to even be accurate about what the BvS total WW gross really was. It wasn't $800M, it was in fact $873.3M, you seem to nonchalantly knocked-off around 9% of its total WW take. And the implications here are obvious, if a movie with admittedly very high expectations makes $873.3M WW and is deemed an outright loser (at the bottom of the scale) then what is to be said about something like Moana? Weren't expectations high for that one? Especially after mega-hits such as Frozen (almost $1.3B WW) Inside Out & Zootopia? For a scale of evaluation to be making any sense, its criteria must be objective and applied equally to everything it purports to measure. BvS made way more than double the money Alice ($300M) Star Trek (343M) ID4-2 (390M) Moana ($410M, may finish with around $450M) Jason Bourne ($416M) TMNT-2 ($246M) If BvS did in fact "drop its cake on the floor" then what did all these other (big-budget) movies do?

 

BvS also made more money than movies considered to have been outright winners (which they were) such as Deadpool ($783M, no China) Suicide Squad ($746M, no China) Doctor Strange ($660M, with a massive $110M coming from China) 

 

Why am I referring to China specifically? Because: a) It's far and away the biggest non-North American market out there, and 2) The Chinese theater chains only cough back to Hollywood studios 25% of the total Chinese gross. Just like with everything else, the Chinese are leveraging their immense size and future potential to their own benefit. 

 

With this in mind, the entire gap between BvS & Zootopia completely melts away if China is taken out of the equation. Even though Zootopia made $150M million more than BvS WW, $140M of that is entirely thanks to China. Out of that extra $140M, Disney will only be getting $35M from the Chinese. 

 

In any case, my point here is that any objective analysis of the facts, points towards BvS being at worst a "mixed" bag for WB, while some other movies that some are labeling as "mixed" were in fact outright losers. 

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42 minutes ago, PPZVGOS said:

@SteveJaros  @jandrew

 

One more thing. You fail to even be accurate about what the BvS total WW gross really was. It wasn't $800M, it was in fact $873.3M, you seem to nonchalantly knocked-off around 9% of its total WW take. And the implications here are obvious, if a movie with admittedly very high expectations makes $873.3M WW and is deemed an outright loser (at the bottom of the scale) then what is to be said about something like Moana? Weren't expectations high for that one?

 

FWIW, I have cited the 800 WW figure for BvS in ignorance. I thought that was about what it made, but $875 would be a more accurate round-off number. Not on purpose, as the higher number actually benefits the case I was making. Thanks for enlightening me about the actual WW number. 

 

As for your critique, I agree with it, partially. But IMO you aren't giving proper credence to "Jandrew"'s stated view, which is that his ratings aren't solely based on box office. It's fair for people to define their own terms. For my part, I think that even on his own terms, where box office is part of the picture but not the totality of it, it's not reasonable to call BvS a loser.

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18 minutes ago, Telemachos said:

I don't have any problem with calling BVS a loser. It underperformed expectations, got absolutely hideous critical reception, and mixed WOM (at best). 

 

The OP has a scale that ranges from Winner-almost winner-mixed-almost loser-Loser. On that kind of scale, I don't know how you can meaningfully call BvS a "loser", because then what do you call a film with the same expectations, WOM, and critical reception, but earned $500m less? Even with box office being one factor among a few that define a movie and not the whole ballgame, on his scale, it has to be something not as bad as a "loser". 

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3 minutes ago, SteveJaros said:

 

FWIW, I have cited the 800 WW figure for BvS in ignorance. I thought that was about what it made, but $875 would be a more accurate round-off number. Not on purpose, as the higher number actually benefits the case I was making. Thanks for enlightening me about the actual WW number. 

 

As for your critique, I agree with it, partially. But IMO you aren't giving proper credence to "Jandrew"'s stated view, which is that his ratings aren't solely based on box office. It's fair for people to define their own terms. For my part, I think that even on his own terms, where box office is part of the picture but not the totality of it, it's not reasonable to call BvS a loser.

 

Yes, I did not mean to imply that you used the $800M number in a deceitful number, and I acknowledge that you and I are on the same page in regarding BvS as a mixed bag and not as an outright loser. And if you read my previous posts, I accepted Jandrew's own criteria in evaluating 2016's movies and pointed out some of the inconsistencies in his conclusions. By his own criteria, as well as his own evaluations about other movies, there's no rational way in arguing that BvS was an outright loser. 

 

In any case, as this is a specifically Box-Office oriented forum, and since we live in societies where money is the absolute measure of everything (for good or ill, I am not preaching here) the BO should be given particular attention. 

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