Talkie

That's 17 out of how many thousands of releases? It's not like films are blasting past the $1 billion mark every week or something.

Oh, come on! There is an entire thread here devoted to CF over $200M ravings. It's way too early to start the revisionism.

This is totally anecdotal but yesterday I went to see Thor: TDW in IMAX at the local theater, which always has a heavily Black and South Asian attendance. (It shows Bollywood films to good crowds in a Baltimore suburb.) When my showing let out after 4 PM, the place was gearing up for THG mini-marathon. It was surprisingly empty but the few people who were there were White, which is almost never the case. There were maybe half a dozen teen girls with a parent waiting for the IMAX to start seating. For Thor 2 and IM3 the place was packed with mostly Black people, lots of families with young kids. The preview numbers for CF surprised me. Given all the hype in these parts I expected it to be far higher than it is. Maybe parents refused to allow their kids to go on a school night, or people just decided to wait.

I feel the same way about it. The film is visually stunning, but that is wasted because the lead has zero charisma and no chemistry with anyone but that dog-creature, the script is lackluster and the whole thing drags interminably. Even though I was a fan of the books as a kid I didn't find the film engaging. Taylor Kitsch is one of the worst leading men of all time, but if the script had bothered to make Carter a more sympathetic character the actor's deficiencies could have been minimized. It's really hard to care about a so-called hero who spends most of the film snarling at everyone else, shirking all responsibility and refusing to act even halfway decent when implored for his help.

John Carter cost as much as it did because Andrew Stanton made a lot of rookie mistakes directing it. He didn't get a lot of shots he needed during principal photography and some footage ended up being useless when the effects houses started work. There were extensive (and expensive) reshoots that added tens of millions to the budget. I think that I read somewhere that Carter had over 30 days of reshoots with sets having to be rebuilt in the desert to accommodate them. By that time Disney had no choice but to keep pissing money down the mouse hole. The poor marketing is down to the woman Disney's ex-chief hired as head of the department. She bungled Carter's marketing badly and was blamed for problems with other films. When the studio realized that Carter was going to tank they threw more money at its marketing instead of crafting better trailers and ads. By the time TA rolled around, Disney had given responsibility for marketing it to others and she was on her way out. She was still in charge of Carter until the bitter end, however. With her (and Rich Ross) gone Disney's marketing machine is back in good form. How about $179M?

Fleming is doing a piss-poor job with box office at Deadline. How can he be even worse than Nikki was? At one point he seemed to think that TBMH was a lock for mid-30s and would challenge Thor. Now he's down to pulling for $31M. That's what he gets for regurgitating Harvey's numbers. TBMH is yet another "urban" comedy that Hollywood overlooked. Films like that are exceedingly popular because they cater to an underserved market, not to mention being very well-made. Comedies also do better than dramas overall, so no digs at Black audiences for favoring TBMH over 12YAS are warranted. And the former has higher market saturation, received better promotion, is a sequel to another hit film and stars actors more familiar to American viewers. Were TBMH's numbers for a comedy starring Seth Rogan and Judd Apatow's wife no one would bat an eyelash, but for an "urban" comedy it's a surprise.

Best of luck, Blankments! I'm watching the Ravens-Bears game and its in a storm delay right now. The NFL plays in all weather except tornadoes and hurricanes so this is extraordinary. My year in Chicagoland taught me that storms like that are nothing to play with. Stay safe!

I asked because a few pages back there was some moaning about an $84M estimate. The actual total was only $400K lower than the estimate. It's all good.

No, both Deadline and Variety are owned by Jay Penske/Penske Media. Penske acquired Deadline first, then bought out Variety last year. http://articles.latimes.com/2012/oct/09/entertainment/la-et-ct-penske-variety-20121009

Rentrak has TDW's domestic take at $86,109,000. Have the actuals been posted anywhere?

I just followed Nikki. Girlfriend is bringing it on Twitter the way she used to at Deadline. She claims that Harvey Weinstein spent the weekend feeding Deadline fake box office numbers. Her tagline says it all: "There. Will. Be. Showbiz. Blood." I would not bet against Nikki's new site being bigger and better than Deadline. It would be hilarious if she manages to surpass her old site with her new one. Jay Penske should have gotten a non-compete clause in the contract when he bought the site.

Are you talking about the $88M OW projection? Or have concrete OD numbers come out?

No, no, it's "God Of Thunder is no 'Iron Man 2'." Given Nikki's track record with BO predictions, I'll wait for numbers from another source.

Isn't there a Bad Grandpa club? I'm pretty sure I joined some club for it because I knew that it would make huge $$$ in the US.

Shorter Mike Fleming: Take your meds, Nikki!

This image alone easily erased any disturbances Eddie Murphy left me with his horrendous Metro... I liked The Fifth Element in spite of Jovovich's horrendous acting. Her character was supposedly the "perfect human" but she was just perfectly annoying. Chris Tucker made up for her, though.

In the Thursday thread people were crapping all over Insidious 2's prospects and proclaiming a $20M OW the best it could hope for. And then it went and made $20M in one day.

It deserves very little, considering all of the two-bit blogs and no-name sites that are included in RT's scores. RT would be a lot more credible if it would separate the wheat from the critical chaff and dump all reviewers who aren't published on major sites. (Not sending forth its chief editor to howl like stuck pig when one of WB's turkeys like POS MOS gets skewered by critics would be another step towards credibility for the site.)

This. WB and GdT spent far too much time and effort preaching to the geek choir instead of engaging the GA, which is the bulk of the audience. Footage and trailers were shown exclusively to conventioneers, when the studio should have been getting that material before the wider public. The silly viral marketing program centered mostly on posters of the robots and boring videos when it should have shown exciting clips from the film. The marketers basically acted as if they had a built-in fanbase instead of trying to generate real world buzz as opposed to Internet chatter. It was only when the studio realized about a month out that it had a bomb on its hand that they made a push, but it was too late by then.

I totally agree with this. In the months prior to STD's release the reaction to the trailers here and on other geek sites was positively ecstatic. They were praised for supposedly showing how "epic" the film was going to be and Cumberbatch was singled out as looking like a strong villain. Personally, I never thought the trailers were as strong as others did. Had they clearly outlined the plot and identified Khan as the villain, it might have done better.

I'm surprised at the 1D numbers, but only because some were predicting the sun and the moon for that thing. There was a crazed prediction of an August OW record in one thread, which ain't happening. All of my friends with daughters are dumping them at the theater and escaping.

Those are incredibly small samples. That plus the secretive ratings system makes metacritic suspect in my eyes. Besides, RT gets far more page views and is thus more influential with the public, deservedly or not.

I've seen a documentary about the Essex, its disastrous attack on an angry, intelligent whale and the hideously tragic events that followed. The film should be intense if it hews to the real story. I wonder how graphic they will go with the events after they're cast adrift. My sympathies were with the whale to an extent, but that crew suffered for their sins and a whole lot of others. Life of Pi meets The Donner Party about sums it up.

New clip

TWE is at 93% on RT with just 57 reviews. Wait til it gets well over a hundred before counting those chickens. And it's not as if reviews count for much in terms of box office potential, as we know all too well. If they did, MOS would have tapped out under $100M and Fruitvale Station (94%, 135 reviews counted) would be raking in the cash.