Gopher

A lot of these negative top critics reviews read mixed enough that they could've been submitted as fresh four years ago. The benefit of a doubt you might've seen in a Captain Marvel review or a Thor Love & Thunder review isn't gonna be carried over with some critics here. They're just tired of this stuff now.

I'm an ancient BOT member who mostly just lurks here these days but wanted to +1 this. Mario's success seems to me seems like Wonder Woman 2017's in that regard-- and even WW's opening was deflated somewhat by WB wasting the first legit big-screen appearance of the character in BvS. But the movie ended up taking off because it was representative of everything people liked about the Wonder Woman character, just done really well. Considering how many ironic or comedic takes on Wonder Woman almost got made leading up to that movie, it's kind of amazing the movie they landed on didn't reinvent the wheel. I think a movie set in Detective Pikachu's Pokemon City that was actually about Ash/May/Brock would've been twice as big as Detective Pikachu ended up being. From a visual/verisimilitude perspective, the world of that movie was on target (and I presume why they're now developing a sequel), but you need to make a legit live-action Pokemon movie played straight before you do anything like Pikachu talking. Hiring Ryan Reynolds to voice him a couple years after Deadpool feels like the people producing a Pokemon movie not having faith in a Pokemon movie. This plagued the original Mario movie too, and why the new one is both incredibly basic and successful as a movie-- it plays into every major association people have with the property. The LEGO Movie almost feels like the exception to this idea because the association people have with LEGO is building them, not any of the characters. So that movie needed to feel as new and inventive as building a LEGO set is.

Yesterday it didn't seem super clear if we were getting a 400 mil grosser this year. Turns out we're getting a 550+ one!

Air was made for 40 mil. Amazon bid 140-160 for it before a theatrical release was ever on the table, just to nab it away from potential competitors. This was for them an advertisement for the release on Prime Video as opposed to a 'this has to make x back in theaters' play.

I think The Flash has the potential to be this summer's Lightyear, but I do hope that everybody bumps this post when it makes 800 million WW off the back of Tom Cruise's endorsement...

From the Puck newsletter on January 2nd: "Because the trailer debuted at Brazil Comic Con on Dec. 1, the same day as two other high profile summer trailers—Paramount’s Transformers: Rise of the Beasts (June 9) and Disney’s Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 3 (May 5)—rival studios were able to compare views to gauge relative strength out of the gate. After two weeks across YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and TikTok, here were the numbers, per a studio source:Transformers 7: 506 million viewsGuardians of Galaxy 3: 187 million viewsIndiana Jones 5: 79 million viewsThere’s still time, of course, and it might be that the Indy audience isn’t the most online. But the coronation seems premature." If word out of Cannes is "it's okay, too much CGI, for the best this is the last one," then I think Indy is in serious trouble-- especially hitting two weeks before another A-lister/franchise beloved by old people...

To the "well at least this sets up Kang as a threat" crew: there was nearly zero time spent attempting to make Thanos appear threatening until Infinity War. The first movie with an actual Thanos scene was a universally praised, cultural zeitgeist movie except for that one Thanos scene, which nobody even remembered happened in Guardians of the Galaxy. The movies matter, not the setups.

Not sure it's been posted here-- Quorum tracking is bad for this. 38 awareness, 5.8 interest. By comparison-- Creed III is at 47/6.1, Scream IV 54/6.2. Possible there's a lag in checking these stats after the new trailer settles in, but the lack of awareness is stunning to me considering the trailer attachments to Panther and Avatar. I think they're going to run into the problem of general audiences not knowing how seriously to take a "serious" Ant-Man movie. I enjoyed Multiverse of Madness for the Raimi of it all, but I think they're gonna look back on that one as a huge missed opportunity as far as not using the platform of a movie that seemed important to general audiences to extend the universe the way Quantumania theoretically is. The only thing this will benefit from is a total lack of tentpoles between now and its release. But March is competitive and legs will be less kind than the Summer weekday-boosted first two Ant Men. Will guess 82/100/210 for now.

IF this weekend lands at 46.535m (where the Friday/Saturday estimates are unchanged but the Sunday lands at 14.5)... Avatar (2009) had from its fourth weekend a 7.35x multiplier to its final domestic tally (before any rereleases or re-expansions). If Way of Water could happen to pull the same thing off, it would end at 813.5m domestic. That seems extraordinarily high, but worth pointing out that Way of Water has now had two consecutive frames of fairly similar holds to the original (-31% this weekend, compared to Avatar's -27%). No Way Home had from its fourth weekend a 5.19x multiplier from its pre-re-release final domestic tally. That would take Way of Water to 713 million. Considering how much better Way of Water held in its fourth weekend-- and how similarly barren the marketplace appears to be over the next few weeks-- I think if this isn't the floor, this is a reasonably conservative estimate for a final domestic total. Just for reference: Top Gun Maverick had a 5.64x multiplier from its fourth (and Father's Day inflated) weekend, a testament to the power of summer weekdays.

I'm old enough to remember on the Mojo boards in '09 that 1. Nobody was impressed with Avatar's numbers until its Xmas weekend hold came in, and there was derision that it briefly lost the #1 spots to Chipmunks and Sherlock, and 2. Even by New Year's when it was clear Avatar was in for a magic run domestically, the majority of the boards didn't think it was going to approach Titanic unadjusted. It was the first 'normal' weekday number going over 8 million where the top post on the thread was a wide shot from Titanic of the ship sinking. A lot of members were upset about the idea of something like Avatar having more cultural ubiquity or significance than The Dark Knight, and even after Avatar's domestic run ended there were still back-and-forth calcluations about how Avatar actually sold just below Dark Knight in admissions, and obviously would never come close to Titanic's. We're not gonna have any idea where this will end up until weekend after next. It's clear that there are holiday megatentpoles like Force Awakens and No Way Home that functioned like genuine pop culture phenomenons, holding on through March on 'you just have to see this' word of mouth that the other Marvel and Star Wars' just didn't get the same way. It's clear it's doing really well right now and a 'normal' trajectory following the holidays would put it in the approaching 2 billion camp. But its worth reflagging that unless I'm mistaken, there's absolutely nothing taking IMAX or Dolby until... uh... Titanic...

15 mil on Saturday + 14.5 mil = 29.5 mil on Sunday. 😉

A 140/560 domestic run would've been seen as a huge win two months ago, and a higher gross retention than the followups to the other highest grossers of all time (Force Awakens, Black Panther, Avengers) had...

Gonna entertain a worst case scenario and map out a weekend from the last "Return to X fantasy world" December release that happened to come out in high frame rate... THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY 17m previews 31.55m true Friday 36.28m Saturday (+15% true Friday / -25% Friday) 25.76m Sunday (-29%) 110.6m weekend Hobbit's Sunday was hit by an insane midwest blizzard... assuming a Sunday more in line with holiday tentpoles from the last 5 or so years, and a Saturday bump that reflects Way of Water's more matinee-friendly runtime: 17m previews 31.55m true Friday 37.86m Saturday (+20%) 33.59m Sunday (-11.3%) 120m weekend

TREASURE PLANET Thanksgiving weekend, adjusted for inflation: 26.26 million STRANGE WORLD Thanksgiving weekend, if it follows ENCANTO's daily holds from last year... 26.33 million. I know Disney dumped STRANGE WORLD, but they dumped TREASURE PLANET too, back in the day. Yikes.

Hmm. I do love this momentum this thread has going on. Definitely unique for these boards. I wonder if we can keep all this back and forth up somehow. Anyway, I just saw this newer movie and I liked it a lot. It's called Star Wars: The Last Jedi. What did you guys think of it?

Some real Secret Wars shit happening today! Thanks EC! (and good to see you Rich 😁)

Far From Home and Black Widow lost IMAX/PLFs its third weekend too. So maybe -50% for Thor in weekend three? I don't think it's gonna take quite the same hit since Nope is R-rated.

So-- assuming normalish drops this week, on the slightly generous side, (down high 20s percent tomorrow, up mid 60s Friday) Thor would be at 238 after a 50 mil weekend (-65.3%). Minions would be at 265 after a 28ish weekend (-39%). Ragnarok was at 212 after a 57 mil weekend. Only ended with a 2.8x from there, but that was right before it cratered -62% against Justice League. Far From Home three summers ago pulled a 3.56x from its second weekend, a testament to summer weekday power. Black Widow did 3.01x from a second weekend drop that appears to be what Thor is about to emulate. Minions 2015 pulled a 4.2x from its third weekend-- and Rise of Gru seems to be pulling ahead of the relatively poor legs the first one had... Seems the best case scenario for Thor would be Far From Home's multiplier (366) and a near-worst case scenario would be the Black Widow multiplier (316). Whereas there's a much more direct comp for Minions that if followed would head for 350 flat. Both will obviously benefit from a much lighter second half of summer than we even saw last summer. But if I was putting money on this right now... I'd actually say Minions ends above Thor?

For me the only competition is what's the worst Phase 4 project to date. Falcon & the Winter Soldier, Black Widow, Eternals, Moon Knight, and Love & Thunder would all make my bottom 10 of the entire MCU.

I find it SO interesting how Sony marketed No Way Home compared to Disney's handling of Strange and Thor. No Way Home revealed almost nothing after what happens in the first 30 minutes and that ignited this lightning-in-a-bottle fervor of people debating if Tobey and Andrew were in the movie, how they'd be in the movie, etc. Less was so much more there. Strange attaches a full trailer to the end of No Way Home and uses Patrick Stewart's voice in the second trailer because they know promising a comparable experience to the "ZOMG" multiverse appearances of No Way Home will get the most butts in seats, and because that movie has relatively little interest in the multiverse audiences are largely displeased. And as someone who unfortunately knows too much about all these movies before I see them, I still watched that first Love & Thunder trailer and presumed the whole thing was gonna be a Guardians team-up movie. The end of Endgame suggests that kind of story, so why not? The second trailer corrects that, but if you only saw the first trailer in front of Doctor Strange, you'd probably be a little confused that they're given nothing to do and leave by minute 20 or so. So yes, I think this Thor opening is phenomenal for the laziest MCU marketing campaign since Iron Man 2. It shows how much people loved what they did with his character from Ragnarok through Endgame. And like Iron Man 2, it basically matched Ragnarok's opening adjusted for inflation and will barely crest over the last one's gross. At best audiences will find this one forgettable but enjoyable. At worst they'll be actively disappointed by the marketing campaign's vague misdirect, or how much flatter the comedy is than Ragnarok, or the weird tonal shifts this movie probably wisely never tried to reflect in its marketing.

Haha... I'm gonna! Dark World is not a great movie, but it looks awesome (it's the only one where Asgard has some actual Game of Thrones style grandeur - the Asgards in every other Thor look like screensavers), it has a wonderful portal jumping conceit for its third act, and a lot of it is actually guided by a compelling idea that no matter what he's done you can never live with or without your brother. And even if the infinity stone stuff in that movie feels fairly perfunctory, it ends up paying out huge in Endgame, which I never would've expected... Love & Thunder has the energy of an Austin Powers or Anchorman sequel, where they really wanna triple down on all the jokes that felt fresh in Ragnarok and don't work a second time, but it also shares its stage with a hyper-sad storyline that doesn't have emotional logic to it so it's just a huge bummer against the bad flat comedy surrounding it (which Portman unsuccessfully plays, sadly). It also has the same baffling fetchquest storytelling logic of Rise of Skywalker, where you can truly feel how many scenes were cut out and how little anybody involved with the movie cared to make the story work dramatically, so they're just telling everything as fast as they can. Nearly every actor (even Hemsworth) feels like they were told what was going on in the scene moments before they filmed it. And it feels very apparent that the, uh, macguffins the villain has were added late into reshoots and just amplify all the other tonal clashes going on. Bale beats Eccelson, though, I'll give it that...

Hard to imagine Thor ending much below Jurassic Dominion total with July weekdays. Ant Man and the Wasp collapsed -62% weekend two, which I imagine Thor would be lucky to match, and legged it out from there to nearly a 3x. July weekdays are too strong and there's nothing getting this out of bigger auditoriums until Nope. Anyone else feeling a big Bullet Train breakout? I've heard the script is phenomenal, and it's the kind of ensemble engineered to get every demo through the door...

The thing that sucks about Marvel and Lucasfilm taking over TV and the other services doubling down on these too-expensive shows (I say too expensive though I've never seen television feel more low-rent than Moon Knight or Obi-Wan Kenobi) is that they're not embracing what's awesome about TV as a medium at all. There's a reason Wandavision became the only legitimate phenomenon out of the Disney/Marvel lot since Endgame: it declared it would wholeheartedly function like a television series. Each episode would feel like its own chapter with its own point, and there would be enough episodes for you to develop an emotional investment (and yes, that was before a finale that became a C-grade Marvel movie third act). That's what made the word of mouth on that show such a beast, people genuinely wanted to tune back in. Six episodes has been far too short for the rest of these television projects-- and stories that could have maybe made it work with that time or budget limit are being told, for some reason, to execute a Marvel movie's worth of spectacle. Disney+ was a chance to try genuinely low-fi MCU stories, and it's an extreme disservice to the talented people involved in all these shows that they have to try and measure up to the action of the movies for some reason (and use the most rushed VFX plates imaginable). For me, Loki and Ms. Marvel have some of the best performances and writing and direction of the entire MCU... just good luck lingering in it for more than a moment before they're onto the next plotpoint and/or beam of flashing colored light and/or reference to a previous movie. Obi Wan and Boba Fett fell into this same trap too: is anyone actually happier when these huge-IP projects are four chopped-up hours of content, instead of a singular big-budget 2-3 hour experience?

If I'm at Marvel I'm paying Marcus & McFeely whatever they want to be the official or unofficial script doctors for Phases 4 and 5, the same way almost every script from Thor 1 through to Winter Soldier had Joss Whedon's fingerprints all over it. Production issues and how hands-on producers are or aren't with a movie is gonna be subject to 100 different things. Yet collectively the scripts themselves are suffering the most right now. And without speaking with any specificity, I believe this has become a broad concern at Marvel Studios...