Gopher

Iron Man 3 is my #1 MCU with a bullet, so nobody on this board should ever listen to me...

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/07/the-marvel-machine-breaks-down-in-thor-love-and-thunder 'There were many die-hard fans at my screening, excited moviegoers in costumes, ginned up by free swag and the giddiness of sneak-preview exclusivity. A radio DJ from a big New York station acted as a hype man for the event, doing a little Thor trivia game with the audience before the credits rolled, aided by the two new stars of ABC’s The Bachelorette. That was a bizarre bit of corporate synergy (Disney owns both Marvel and ABC), but one that, I suppose, was appropriately weird and out-of-left-field for the pre-show at a Taika Waititi movie. Once the film started, though, I could feel the crowd’s enthusiasm swiftly waning—hearty, appreciative laughs gave way to dutiful chuckles, which gave way to unnerving silence. I’m no defender of corporatized fandom, but I did feel a bit sad for the loyalists in the audience, so palpable was their disappointment.' 😬

Have figures reported as actuals ever been readjusted before? I presume Uni will just reallocate this remaining million or so elsewhere now...

The same way that the MCU was instigated by perfect timing-- imagine if they started all this with a movie that wasn't Iron Man, or if The Incredible Hulk came out at any time that wasn't six weeks after Iron Man, and a lot of what ended up happening could've been derailed-- I think their current predicament is a victim of very bad timing. Everyone at Marvel is exceptionally smart. They know if they're gonna keep all of this going after Endgame, it does make sense to try out a bunch of other things before you focus on a Galactus or whatever posing the same cosmic threat Thanos did, and risk making everything you just attempted to conclude feel more arbitrary. So try making TV, try finding more Taikas and Gunns to give your movies a unique stamp, try flirting with where things are ostensibly going to group up (Young Avengers/Thunderbolts on a micro scale, incursions/Secret Wars on a macro scale). But if you're gonna do something different than what people expect you have to do it very very carefully. If you're gonna up the quantity, the order in which all these movies came out and how they intersect or don't intersect with TV shows is very important. Covid messed all that up. It messed it up in a macro storytelling way: Strange 2 was supposed to be the film that introduced the multiverse. It was supposed to come out before Loki, and was conceived before No Way Home was even a real idea. It's hard to imagine the expectations of that film would be focused on "what are the cameos gonna be" if No Way Home (an example of Sony crashing Marvel Studios' party, insisting on a new Spider-Man every two years regardless of what's happening in the broader MCU) hadn't just set the template for what an audience would expect from a multiverse. And it messed it up in a micro storytelling way: all these projects were made under insane duress, with new creative and logistical challenges, and I think that led to their process of quality control falling off at the same time that the creative ideas were growing more ambitious. So you end up with more isolated circumstances of creative success (Wandavision, Shang-Chi, No Way Home) and lot more clunkers than we are used to (most of the TV shows, in my view, have chosen to function more like lower-budget four-hour movies than actual episodes of television, and that's been brutal for their outcomes). Thor's case it's a rare occasion in the MCU where a director gets a chance to do the same singular thing they were universally praised for doing the first time, but more because it's a sequel, and that rarely works out in or out of the MCU... I love Guardians 2, but most people preferred 1, and Iron Man 2 and Age of Ultron became templates at Marvel for what to avoid with their sequels. If this was in the Infinity Saga, a tossed-off sequel that's largely irrelevant to the broader story wouldn't bump with audiences if it's still doing something new-- that's effectively what Ragnarok was. It's the timing of Love and Thunder being potentially underwhelming at a broader moment of insecurity with the direction and quality of the MCU that is making folks feel a little more existential.

I will say: I saw an 11pm Minions the other night. It nearly filled a 500 seat theater with a bunch of older couples and a loooot of the GentleMinion crew. They were VERY VOCAL at the opening studio logos, in a fun Marvel Studios-y way, and just shut up and laughed through the movie after that. Politeness is possible! It can happen! These movies aren't nearly on the same level as Disney and Pixar as far as story construction-- and I believe the lower budgets these things have are attributed to a much smaller amount of time for visual and story development-- but I'll go to bat for the minion setpieces in these things. They're fun Looney Tunes comedies. Not a mystery why they've continued to work for so long.

Elvis turning into a bonafide sleeper. Should be in the low/mid 90s by next Sunday.

A huge sign of box office health is how the market share of each 100m opener has shifted... Spiderman (260.1m): 92.4% of cumulative box office its opening weekend The Batman (134m): 81% Doctor Strange (187.4m): 84.1% Top Gun (126.7m): 71.9% Jurassic World (145.1m): 67.8% Minions (108.51m): 56.9% Sure, Minions is the smallest of those openers... but that figure is with no other opener this weekend over a million dollars...

https://www.boxofficemojo.com/date/2016-07-02/?ref_=bo_da_nav https://www.boxofficemojo.com/date/2011-07-02/ Pretty common holds for this weekend with July 4th falls on a Monday. Everything will drop 5-15% tomorrow.

Industry-ish perspective here... we forget how much this summer/early fall has been affected by the pandemic production slowdown. Last summer was for all the movies that were basically picture locked and ready to go before the pandemic hit. This summer we still have a few of those titles-- Top Gun by all accounts was done by March 2020 except for the Gaga song, Minions was maybe 80% done-- a lot of productions that started before and were interrupted by covid (Elvis obviously, Jurassic World Dominion started Feb 2020, Bobs Burgers and Lightyear were in production pre-pandemic because animation takes forever), and a few productions that rolled the dice and started shooting pre-vaccines (Bullet Train started Oct 2020, Black Phone Feb 2021). Strange and Thor are in their own worlds because those productions are able to be so contained due to high budgets and heavy greenscreens (the MCU delays schedule were due to a bottleneck of projects overwhelming a finite number of VFX houses, in case you were wondering why Moon Knight or She-Hulk both Look Like That). The reason 2023 is an ONSLAUGHT is that's the batch of movies that were all waiting until vaccines were rolled out and the future of everything seemed a little more certain to get up and running. What we saw with television this past spring-- a total bottleneck of high-profile shows all hitting simultaneously-- seems something like what we're getting next summer, given the compressed production timeline of television compared to film. I'm curious what the last big movie we'll see with footage shot pre-pandemic is. We've still got MI7 and Avatar 2 shot before and during. And maybe Merrily We Roll Along in 18 years if they haven't thrown out what they already shot...

Likely huge hype for Ford's last performance as Indy, likely strong reviews (Mangold is arguably more dialed into what makes these big popcorn movies work right now than Spielberg has been over the past decade), likely riding the wave of legacy sequels for old people (Crystal Skull funny enough came well before this wave), likely the right amount of time after Crystal Skull so that audiences don't have the taste of that one in their mouths, likely the entire weight of the Disney marketing machine behind it for the first time... and 330 would be a 20% drop in admissions from Crystal Skull. So I think it can do it!

Next summer's gonna be something goddamn insane. I'm certain one of these will be a megabreakout we can't see coming, but the FLOOR for some of these seems rather high... Mermaid 380 Guardians 3 360 Indiana Jones 330 Marvels 300 Mission Impossible 280 Spiderverse 280 Barbie 260 Flash, I... don't think anyone can predict this at the moment...

Talked out of my butt there... truly thought from its worldwide opening there was no way it could miss, but if you make a lousy movie, anything can happen... Tangentially, an underspoken element of the new theatrical/streaming age is that shareholders of these big corporations are driven more by perceived success than actual revenue. It becomes easy to say in hindsight 'well Lightyear should've always been a Disney+ TV show' and deny any film they have like it coming up an actual box office run where it can make money before its streaming debut because they don't want the stink of failure that independent box office reporting may give you. And in reality Lightyear's serious underperformance has still been helping keep the daily box office humming alongside all the other movies that are doing as well or better than expected. The only way we'll get back to near pre-pandemic levels is if everything in the top ten is doing at least a couple million dollars-- so Lightyear pulling a couple million the July 15th weekend does make a difference...

Last six weeks have been more promising for the future of our industry than the two years before it combined. We'd been building to this from Croods to A Quiet Place to Free Guy to No Way Home. But this has been a nutso summer given the low quantity of movies getting released. A shocking overperformance from an action legacy sequel driven by older audiences, on track to become a top five domestic grosser. A slight underperformance for a megatentpole that's still probably doing the big numbers it'd always be doing. A biopic hit, a horror hit, and now a family movie absolutely crushing tracking and officially taking the throne as Universal's biggest franchise. And the one high-profile failure was the crassest piece of IP explotation from the studio whose brand had been the most tarnished by streaming.

Likely three movies over 30 mil this weekend. All targeting adults. One has been out a month. Two family movies close behind. Yes, Elvis didn't pull a Bohemian Rhapsody, but this is probably the most hopeful box office weekend since the end of 2019.

Have now seen this with two different audiences and think it'll be the rare horror movie with legs. People loved the emotion in this. Hoping it can exceed Candyman's OW.

...is today the day Maverick jumps over Jurassic? A -28% Weds drop for the latter would do it...

Echoing thoughts in this thread: just scanned LA theaters and never seen demand for a movie exceed supply like Top Gun today. Jurassic is doing pretty well in most larger auditoriums. Lightyear hit or miss depending on the theater and PLFs. Top Gun is getting an average of 3 mid-ranged screens per theater and except for front rows you can't get a seat until 10pm-on. Even big Marvel opening weekends have enough showtimes that 1 or 2 out of six will be largely empty just because showtimes are stacked so close together. If I were Paramount I would spend whatever it takes to get it back onto IMAX screens this weekend. They'll sell out. And then there's an opportunity to keep evening shows over July 4th weekend (will Minions really be filling seats after 5pm/7pm?).

Why would they spend 200 million dollars on a movie for streaming when they could lower their tracking expectations for a theatrical run, keep marketing costs smaller than Lightyear's and make some money off a mild theatrical run before it makes the same killing on Disney+ 30 days later that it would've if it just launched there? Based on every piece of evidence the past few months, this is closer to the future the streamers are going toward, let alone the older studios... theatrical prestige followed by exclusive hyped streaming runs.

Two things can be true... 1. Chapek/Disney will likely not punt every Pixar movie to Disney+. Their movies cost at least 200 million a pop. Yes, subscriber data translated to good quarter earnings reports, but they lost so much actual money on Soul, Luca and Turning Red (and lest we forget had already commited to theatrical-sized marketing budgets before they were put straight to streaming), and the current culture of streaming dictates more and more that individual projects have to be sound investments. Nobody but Apple can afford to spend astronomical figures on streaming-only movies anymore, and even Apple is gonna start giving theatrical-first runs for their Pixar-sized budget titles. Not to mention Pixar is so expensive to operate as is, or that Pixar culture is different enough from Disney's that they are willing to publicly leverage their beliefs and positions (enough that Disney put the lesbian relationship back into Lightyear). 2. The combination of putting high-quality original Pixar movies on streaming and returning to theaters with this less-than-warmly-received piece of IP that has also confused every potential viewer for different reasons... that has hurt Pixar's theatrical brand. They can get it back by making great movies, with great, easy-to-digest premises, that have exclusive theatrical runs. I hope they do, because Lightyear as a movie and as a performance comp is not sustainable for anybody.

Clay is 100% right. As an 'industry person' or whatever I can say there was more relief this year over movies like Dog and EEAO pulling the numbers they did than Dr Strange or Jurassic World because the multiplex will not survive on the little variety we're seeing right now. Disney can force Lightyear onto 3-5 screens per multiplex because aside from two other tentpoles there's no other options right now, and if a Lightyear-type movie underperforms at all, there's less for theaters to rely on filling auditoriums.

Going 1.1/5.5/16.6/18.4/19.5 for the final weekend-- but it'll probably be estimated closer to 60 flat since I doubt the studios will predict Father's Day increases in their estimates. This will sound like hyperbole, but when Lightyear was announced, that Chris Evans tweet describing it as "not about the toy, but about the real human Buzz Lightyear is based on"... I think this was never gonna gain the momentum they probably wanted it to after that tweet. For one, they start the actual movie with text correcting that tweet, because Pixar attested people became so confused by what this movie even was. But that eventual sort-of clarification never helped people understand why they made this movie, what it was going to feel like to watch, or why they would find the real Buzz Lightyear interesting when the appeal of the character is the comedy of a toy who thinks he's a space ranger. A 61/190-200 run isn't bad, and is of the higher end we've seen family movies perform at lately, but I feel like if Pixar wanted to borrow IP to make huge-budget sci-fi, they should've convinced Lucasfilm to let them make an animated Star Wars movie... Or just, y'know, made an original sci-fi movie that people would've given a shot anyway...

Anybody else starting to feel Jurassic will repeat at #1 against Lightyear? Considering Fallen Kingdom did -58% without a Father's Day bump-- and based on these initial holds it's not behaving any more or less frontloaded-- a -55% drop to 65m is pretty reasonable. Meanwhile I'm struggling to see Lightyear muster more than 5 mil from previews, which indicates a 60m opening weekend. Awareness is there, so walkups could be enormous I guess, but I have the feeling audiences are gonna be more than happy to check this one out later. No one has an emotional connection to the person Lightyear was based on... just the toy Tim Allen played...

It's been six years since we've had a box office weekend with five films pulling over 20 million (Star Trek Beyond opening weekend, alongside Secret Life of Pets, Lights Out, Ice Age 5 and Ghostbusters '16). Looking exceedingly likely that we'll be able to repeat that over June 24-26 (Lightyear, Jurassic, Elvis, Top Gun, Black Phone).

Laughing that it took 14 days-- and losing all its expensive auditoriums to preview shows for one of the year's biggest tentpoles-- for Top Gun to have a less-than-extraordinary daily hold. When opening weekend numbers came in, I was predicting a first Thursday of 8-9 mil.

This is gonna MATCH Doctor Strange's 10-day?? After opening 60 million dollars lower???