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Oprah's a producer producer on the movie (she'll get nominated if it makes Best Picture), why wouldn't she know a ballpark budget amount? Musicals on that scale have a lot of moving parts and take time to film, especially with at least some Covid protocols to follow in 2022. She discussed the pressure to cast a Rihanna or Beyonce with the budget being where it is. Supposing the studio had got their way, it seems like the budget either would have been even higher, or they'd have cut other corners somewhere else. Looking at these numbers maybe they should have... Dreamgirls' budget adjusts to about $115-120 million though it had more star power and wasn't such a downer story. It was still weaker internationally; while the Civil Rights era is a backdrop it's hardly the main focus of the story vs universal personal drama.

Hidden Figures has Kevin Costner and Jim Parsons and Kirsten Dunst in supporting roles and is rated PG, so not a "trauma porn" story which broadens its appeal. But even there Black social critic types lumped in certain HF scenes as following "white savior" tropes and said it soft peddled the racism. The same people complaining about too much Black trauma on films, so I doubt there's any satisfying them. But seven years is a lifetime ago in moviegoing, a lot of casual audiences cannot be bothered anymore and The Color Purple only seems to be an "event" for one demo. I truly hope this movie is more of a weekend thing but this collapse is really dispiriting.

They spend way less on marketing this way, too. Unfortunate about The Color Purple's post-Christmas Day results. It's getting the "Black trauma porn" allegations from social media (younger people) and the 1985 version got heat through the years for negative portrayals of Black men in particular. So that tracks with the attendance now being skewed so strongly to older Black women, the group least likely to have an issue with TCP conceptually. Maybe WB should have pulled a Boy and the Heron and "prorated" the early screenings into the daily numbers. Hoping the weekend numbers rebound...

George Clooney's latest Oscar bait directorial effect, mid reviews but it's based on a bestselling book.The Boys in the Boat was both the Regal Mystery Movie and part of AMC Screen Unseen a couple weeks ago, so I'm wondering if the Christmas Day gross was padded by those numbers.

I don't know if there will be many other movies to track with advanced private screenings like TCP, but I have family who attended one and can offer some insight. Many of The Color Purple shows were fundraisers with tickets publicly sold on event/ticketing platforms like Eventbrite. The screening my family went to was at a Regal, but the AMC in that city also held a different private screening the same afternoon. Not to mention other screenings in adjacent cities on that day, the next day, the next weekend, etc. The screenings were advertised with the location and time, which would make it a little easier to work out the auditorium not on the regular schedule. The total early screenings for TCP had to be in the low-to-mid hundreds at least. As fundraisers, the ticket prices were somewhat-to-egregiously inflated. I suppose WB charged a flat fee per screening and let the organization keep the rest, but the fee was probably higher than the pandemic-era rate.

Regal is running a family ticket promotion now (4 tickets all at children's prices, R rated movies excluded) but there still has to be at least 4 people and two kids under 12, which doesn’t cover every family situation. It's a start, though still not cheaper than staying home for streaming.

They added a bunch of new international voters as part of the Globes being reformed, I guess they canceled out all the old HFPA members who were easy marks for even the most mid musicals, let alone good ones. It's not just the Globes, many precursors have been lukewarm on TCP so far. Maybe the box office will give voters warmer feelings about it.

With fewer than 50 ratings, but even so, I have never seen a perfect Verified Audience score before.

Even our rundown Regal that's on the bankruptcy list has had multiple Color Purple sellouts today, in its largest auditorium! It's normally a ghost town. Their concession counter is generally pretty lacking even when the theater is sparsely attended, so I hope they restocked.

Second trailer:

Well, the six-day opening weekend is one way to boost the numbers...

NSYNC could do appearances in the months and weeks before Trolls World Tour was relessed, but IIRC publicly performing the tie-in song was against SAG strike rules while that was going on. Also, Timberlake was the big star of the group and his ex-girlfriend's recent memoir did not paint a pretty picture. Maybe there were just enough millennial moms out there who were Team Britney, to help deflate attendance? I think the PVOD success of the second movie was always a bit of a "right place, right time" phenomenon and didn't exactly prime its audience to go back to theaters.

It's voters who were former HFPA members. Playing the tiniest violin for them, truly... The members say they have audio recordings. Do they think they're going to call a press conference, play the proof they were lied to, and get sympathy that their continuous Golden Globes tickets were cut off? Wipe those tears with the $75,000...

I wouldn't have pictured them together in the nineties but now? Sure... Her ex-husband was a professional rodeo/bull rider so I guess her type is "cowboy".

The Globes go up against the last game of the NFL regular season. The Chiefs actually play in LA that day, but the game times haven't been set: the NFL likes to wait and see which matchups will have the biggest playoff implications. It's hard to imagine Chiefs/Chargers being on Sunday Night Football that week, but even the afternoon game could end close to 5 PM Pacific, the start time of the Globes. Guessing Taylor sits with the also-nomimated Selena Gomez and hits the afterparties with Travis.

Netflix got two movies into the 2019 Picture lineup and it wasn't even 10 slots. And the precursor run of Netflix's top priority has been...rocky is too strong a word, but the critics groups so far aren't exactly showering Maestro with wins. Netflix has pivoted from their presumed #1 choice before, when one of their smaller budgeted movies performs well with the groups and guilds. May December supporters are hoping the critical love and the Melton wins will propel it into Best Picture. They might be in a bit of a bubble (it's US only on Netflix but even there managed just a week at #9 for movies, even Pain Hustlers got 2 weeks in the US Top 5), but Oscar nominations can be the result of passion over consensus.

New trailer, dances around the Golden Globes underperformance:

The Globes were without a host for years. They're not a lavish setup and the lack of monologue and bits keep the show moving. I get that a host is good for prestige and advertising but as you said it's a thankless job.

It's on CBS, I'm surprised they didn't just lean on Colbert to do it.

I don't think Gosling will perform regardless (he didn't with La La Land), but I figured WB will push "I'm Just Ken" and "What Was I Made For" as the two thematically strongest songs within the movie. People left the movie talking about "I'm Just Ken", it's not another "Dos Origuitas". But "Dance the Night" is such a good show opener. Box office success never hurts but I wonder if The Color Purple will be too American in appeal for the newer, more international Academy membership. May December seems to be having a moment in awards season. Todd Haynes movies have missed in Best Picture before but maybe this is his year.

The About the HFPA page on the Golden Globes site goes full "404 Not Found", it's the only way the Globes were going to survive and who knows if this arrangement will last. The Golden Globes have historically been pretty generous in nominating musicals with mid to outright poor reviews. Just in the 21st century there's been: The Phantom of the Opera (33 percent RT), The Producers (51 percent), Mamma Mia! (55 percent RT but it was huge internationally, I get it), Nine (39 percent), Alice in Wonderland, Burlesque, Sia's Music (7 percent!)... But maybe part of the Globes reforming is not validating just any old musical anymore. They clearly saw The Color Purple, gave it some nominations but even snubbed the new song writen for the movie. Yet they had room for "Peaches" from Super Mario Bros, which is barely even a song. The Color Purple hasn't done great with critics groups as a film so far, but WB held early screenings across the country and even a premiere, yet official reviews are still embargoed. It's feeling more like a commercial play than awards contender when ideally it should be both.

The HFPA was disbanded and the Globes added hundreds of new voters. Plus, all the stars (except Brendan Fraser for obvious reasons) showed up last year so that moral hurdle was already crossed, and the ceremony got a new TV deal. To be fair, the Globes didn't have a Box Office Achievement category in the 1970s. And three of Barbie's nominations are for Original Song which pads out the total. Pretty bad for The Color Purple to miss at the Globes in Musical/Comedy.

Locally there were multiple special screenings yesterday for The Color Purple, hosted by different sororities and also an NAACP chapter. My mom bought tickets for one at $35 a pop and that was the low end (though it did include a full meal). There have got to be at least a hundred screenings like this across the US, probably more. I wonder if/how the revenue counts toward TCP's box office? Like, does WB just let groups see the movie early for free to build WOM, and let these groups fundraise off the back of it as some sort of tax thing? Or are these early paid events going to be counted as private screenings that get rolled into TCP's opening day/weekend?

The funniest thing was the "Ohtani on a private jet to Canada" rumor which turned out to be Robert Herjavec from Shark Tank with his family.

The Trinity test sequence got a lot of hype for having "no CGI" and general audiences seem turned off by very obvious/bad effects in other big movies. Other Nolan movies have been nominated for VFX and even won. The work in Oppenheimer was minimal for the category, but I think the idea was that if it could get the nomination, it could pull off the win from the Academy at large. Kind of like the years when a so-so Disney movie wins Best Animated Feature because of name recognition, even if animators aren't that impressed with it. I thought Oppenheimer might falter at the nomination or shortlist stage, but missing the Top 20 to the likes of Quantumania, that just seems disrespectful.