BoxOfficeFangrl

The budget for A Man Called Ove was $300,000. Obviously, a movie from a Hollywood studio starring Tom Hanks was going to be more expensive, but 166 times more expensive? Though to be fair, the "Covid tax" is real and in 2019, maybe Otto costs $35 million. Incredible for Puss in Boots 2!

Per Deadline, Otto's budget itself is $50 million: Hanks is a big star, but still...do CGI cats and snow add that much to a budget? But Otto skews older and it's Sony, so it should have legs and not get thrown to PVOD/streaming too quickly.

Cake, LOL, but even that didn't come out of no where during nomination voting week. We've all seen stars do SM posts about contenders they like, but usually it's a bit less manufactured? Or maybe the cult-like nature of the praise is part of the campaign. It's so weird, very sloppy for a PR push. If Deadwyler misses and Riseborough makes it in...not that Oscar voters care about poor optics, but Film Twitter and the media will be happy to remind them...

Anyone else following the last minute Andrea Riseborough push? A lot of the posts have very similar wording and just appeared in the last few days: Was there only money to campaign during Oscar nomination voting? Does Riseborough's agent have dirt on...everyone, and that's why they've posted the same gushing blurbs? Did Hollywood see the potential Best Actress lineup featuring so many women of color and say, "Not on our watch!" What is going on?

Maybe because Otto didn’t even have a full weekend in 2022? It was a limited release on 12/30 and the Sunday fell in 2023. It can't be based on the wide release date, because The Numbers classifies American Sniper a 2014 movie. FWIW, Box Office Mojo lists it for 2022 when going by in-year release.

That's odd, locally I am seeing limited showtimes for Skinamarink but a couple starting at 4:00 pm or so and some on Sunday, though one location only has a single afternoon showing on the 15th. I guess it depends on the theater?

M3GAN has some horror competition this weekend, who knew?

I saw this and everyone stayed to collect themselves watch the credits. Now I understand the 97 percent audience score on RT, though not the $50 million budget, unless they pulled a Revenant and sat around in Pittsburgh for weeks, waiting for actual snow. Can't wait for Fox News to realize in a couple of weeks that they are very, very outraged about this...

IDK, Disney has owned ABC for decades and it hasn't really helped them dominate the Oscars. They couldn't get that Popular Film category added, or Endgame into Best Picture. No Way Home was Sony, but Disney gets a cut and the Hashtag Oscars were supposed to be the MCU's shining moment. So, I'm not too worried about undo influence. On the other hand, Netflix has pursued awards a whole lot more than Disney in the last decade, and the SAG Awards might be more easily influenced. Mildly surprised Elvis didn't make Ensemble, since SAG went for Bohemian Rhapsody there. Babylon and Women Talking live! Sandler has been campaigning hard for Hustle and SAG has had way more random nominations than that before.

The awards boosts were huge that year, plus a Top 10 with stuff like Parental Guidance and The Guilt Trip, they'd be straight to streaming now. Relive the weekend:

A Texas Chainsaw movie in 3D couldn't match the illustrious heights of The Devil Inside the year before-talk about a one weekend wonder...

A Man Called Otto has a much easier/more relatable premise to general audiences vs The Fabelmans or Babylon, and the ads/trailers did a much better job in selling it. As for miscasting, if people could tolerate what Hanks did in Elvis, then seeing him play a regular old grump is nothing.

This lands in an interesting zone of probably being too surface for the people who wanted something grittier than the typical musician biopic, yet not sanitized enough for fans who prefer to focus on Whitney's glory days. The acting was strong; the screenplay and cinematography... Lots of tight shots. Naomi Ackie got Whitney's speaking voice, attitude, and sold the lip syncing (not all actors do). Still, as I watched, I kept thinking it was too bad Brandy wouldn't be the subject of an Oscar bait biopic because that's the singer Naomi resembles.

Some people gave up on moviegoing altogether and I think the shortened windows have cut into repeat viewings, which also affects box office in a way. Not that there are no repeat viewers, but maybe less than before? Because you know it's going to show up on Disney+ or HBO Max or wherever in a couple of months. That affects some types of movies more than others. Family movies aren't back to where they were, awards bait has been decimated, and further down the Top 50, Top 100 domestic yearly chart, the totals have fallen off a cliff compared to their pre-pandemic levels. Even this weekend that's so much bigger than expected, not every Top 10 title cleared $1 million (a regular occurrence these days). This weekend 10 years ago, every single movie in the Top 10 had made at least $4 million and the entire Top 20 was over $1 million each. Just flashing back to this weekend in January 2020, you have to get to 15th place before a movie doesn’t cross the $1 million mark. If you only focus on the top of the charts, it's easy to think everything is back to "normal" but it's really not. The Top 3 doing well is better than nothing, granted.

Otto's set in Pittsburgh, I doubt it features a big action setpiece at Acrisure Stadium Heinz Field: where'd $50 million go? The Upside cost $37.5 million but has Kevin Hart, Bryan Cranston, and Kidman. Pre-Covid but with more stars and shot in Philadelphia, which seems like it'd be more expensive than Pittsburgh. A $35-40 million budget was more what I expected. I'd like to think $50m means the crew got paid better, but knowing the industry... Will Avatar or M3gan sell more tickets this weekend and how close would the admissions be?

Deadline was busy defending Babylon's floppage ("It's made more than Nightmare Alley!") and probably forgot about IWDWS. Not bad for A Man Called Otto, maybe it can stick around long enough for word of mouth to boost its theatrical run.

Maybe it'll be a Susan Lucci situation, where she stopped getting nominated after she finally won the Daytime Emmy. That was a competitive win, unlike Warren "only" getting an Honorary Oscar. There are Oscar completists out there who watch every nominated movie, but I can picture 80 for Brady being a bridge too far for them. I think it's just that 80 and Brady sort of rhyme?

More about Regal's Monday Mystery Movie: they've already said it's not from a streamer...

Michelle Williams hasn't actually watched The Fabelmans, but she felt like a lead when she was filming: BRB, time traveling to run Adrien Brody's Best Actor campaign for The Thin Red Line...

Of course, Puss in Boots 2 is the far safer holiday bet for Universal...maybe if The Fabelmans was with Focus? It's wild that She Said got released in so many more theaters than Spielberg's latest.

I saw an article pointing out that Babylon will soon pass Nightmare Alley's box office. One of the most bungled releases in recent memory. Gotta find wins where you can, I guess... After all that trailer action, this scene plays out differently in the movie itself, lol.

Hindsight is 20/20, but maybe scheduling the "wide release" around Thanksgiving was a mistake. Universal should've pushed it to later in December and snapped up the 23rd before Babylon or I Wanna Dance With Somebody got there. The Fabelmans' holiday run is a smaller scale version of the boost prestige movies used to get this time of year. Would it have been a bigger boost if it were newer and in more theaters (not 3,000 but maybe 1,800)? Possibly. I think the trailers were misleading, but if you're going to go with the "heartwarming" angle for a movie, mid-to-late December is the season for that... The Fabelmans was never going to be a blockbuster but it's certainly less polarizing than Babylon and over a half hour shorter.

It's a better debut than Women Talking? Not that A Man Called Otto is likely to be a hit, but it's not really the kind of movie that ever flourished with a NY/LA platform release, even pre-pandemic. Stuff like Green Book or Lion didn't start out amazingly (for their time) and everyone mistakenly wrote them off after their opening weekends. The reviews for Otto also aren't great.

The Discourse surrounding this film could have been even more annoying...