redfirebird2008

Watched The Martian last night. Damn good movie of course. Really enjoy Damon’s performance. The rescue aspect felt pretty similar to Apollo 13, another great space movie.

The opening is pretty hard to believe. But I also have a tough time believing the legs will be strong given the content of the movie. It’s definitely not a “fun” summer movie. That said, it seems to have a pretty good chance to reach $200M. Anything over that is just icing on the cake for Universal.

Massive screen count is more important. Barbie had the huge screen count to help meet the huge demand.

Absolutely the case for me too. I was disoriented by the quick editing until Matt Damon showed up. It did not help that I was running on 2-3 hours of sleep, which probably was a factor in my confusion during the early part of the movie. I’ll be seeing it again on Tuesday. Will be interesting to see how it plays on the 2nd watch.

For 5-day openings, I like to take the average of the 5-day total and 3-day weekend. An example would be Spidey 2 as a Wednesday opener with 5-day total of $152M and 3-day weekend of $88M. This averages out to $120M for a Friday opening weekend. It’s trickier to use this approach on 6-day, 7-day openings. I just kind of shrug my shoulders on that type of opening. Hard to compare it with a Friday opening.

I wasn’t really sure what to make of the fast editing and whatnot in the early part of the movie. Didn’t help that I only had 2-3 hours of sleep the night before seeing the movie. Around the time Matt Damon shows up, I was able to focus more and enjoyed the rest of the movie to the end.

We need way more PLF’s. Convert 2-3 tiny screens at each theater into a giant PLF auditorium with a ton of seats and massive screens. Repeat this across every theater. Instead of 20 small screens & auditoriums, you could have 10 giant screens in huge auditoriums with a ton of seats.

$28M for Oppy would be similar to Dunkirk’s 23% Saturday increase.

Perhaps a drop similar to Dunkirk. These are Nolan’s 2nd weekend drops in July: -61% for TDKR -52% for TDK -47% for Dunkirk -32% for Inception

Barbie could pull a TDK or TDKR on Sunday. Both of them had kind of shaky numbers on Saturday and then really strong Sunday holds. Flip side is that Twilight and 50 Shades franchises were extremely frontloaded. Can’t rule out a scenario where Barbie goes in that direction. Maybe it just lands in between those two scenarios, which would be a somewhat boring result as a box office observer. But the movie is gonna make enormous profits no matter how it plays out.

Regal RPX, Cinemark XD, Dolby Cinema, and so many other PLF formats were pretty much non-existent in July 2010. I don’t think the current average ticket price comes anywhere close to properly accounting for the PLF boost. Deadline reported Oppenheimer’s Friday gross had 50% of the money coming from PLF. IMAX accounted for only 12% of Inception’s opening weekend and it pretty much had zero boost from “other” PLF since those screens mostly didn’t exist at the time.

It’s around $82M, but also need to adjust for PLF boost that did not exist in the 2010 ticket price. So maybe around $90M weekend in 2023 dollars with the full PLF boost included.

Frontloading on Friday and Saturday is natural. TDK & TDKR did something similar to this on Saturday and then had epic drops below 11% on Sunday to stay above $40M on that day. Cannot rule out something like that for Barbie.

Dunkirk dropped 25% on Sunday, but Nolan’s other 3 movies in July had really good Sunday numbers. Hoping we see that again here for Oppenheimer. TDK - 8.5% TDKR - 10.5% Inception - 11.8% Dunkirk - 24.6% Oppy’s Saturday increase of 15.5% is very similar to Inception’s 16% Saturday increase. Would be pretty cool if it can also do something similar to Inception on Sunday at 12% drop.

So around 15-16% increase from True Friday. Very similar to Inception’s Saturday percentage increase. Nice!

Better directors have been snubbed their entire careers, Hitchcock and Kubrick being the most high profile examples. At least they finally gave Nolan a nomination with Dunkirk. Maybe he can get one for Oppenheimer, but we'll see about that.

I think hell freezes over before he ever wins Best Picture or Best Director.

Ain't even the same fucking sport!

Not just violence, a ton of blood! LOL

Both RDJ and Nolan have called Strauss a complicated guy, and I think that lines up with how they portrayed him in the movie. He does some shady stuff, but I also think he (and others) had legit reasons to be very concerned about Oppenheimer's background. Oppenheimer himself was a complicated guy.

That was just a random guess on Friday afternoon. It's tracking for around $20-21M on the weekend, which is a 62-63% drop. Still not too bad considering. I do wonder about next weekend. There are some theaters that actually had MI7 on more screens than Oppenheimer, probably from contractual obligations. Those type of screens will be dropping next weekend and shifting to Barbie/Oppie.

Paramount is interesting. They seem vulnerable enough to be a candidate for acquisition by someone bigger than them. But they have CBS, which would seem to complicate any merger. CBS is still one of the most important TV networks out there. Disney/ABC or NBC/Universal would not be allowed to take over Paramount/CBS. I suppose Warner might be able to do it, since they don't currently own a major broadcast channel. They only have cable channels like Discovery, HGTV, TNT, and TBS. Interesting thing is TNT & TBS already work with CBS on March Madness college basketball. Not gonna lie, a merger of Paramount & Warner film libraries into a single streaming service would be pretty damn epic. Both of them have amazing history going back 100 years.

Woah, y’all think it can jump that much? Nolan’s previous July movies did not do that. Of course they were not 3 hours long with pretty bad screen count restrictions on Thursday & Friday. EDIT: Actually looks like Inception & Dunkirk did have pretty good jumps on Saturday, excluding preview grosses for Friday. Nice...

You would have thought Mendes’ influence was strong enough to get that project off the ground. It wasn’t too long after his Oscar success with American Beauty.

When is the Korean release?