Hilderic

Thanks for answering.

Hopefully I won't start WW3 by asking this but does Israel box office also include the West Bank, Gaza Strip (are there any cinemas there?) and East Jerusalem? I assume East Jerusalem is included.

I guess so but it doesn't look like a movie costing more than $13m.

So given that Disney surely didn't want to lose money it must have cost less than 13m. 5-10m?

In all fairness, the German market is weak in general this year and Maleficent has done comparatively well. It has already beaten X-Men, 300, Godzilla and Captain America, and Spider-man is soon to fall. Have mercy!

Thank you.

Which one is the best site to check admissions? I wanted to compare Oz, Snow White and Maleficent.Oz is at 1 543 213 entrées on Allocine, 1 592 310 on jp-boxoffice, 1 590 935 on Lumiere.Snow White is at 1 955 857 entrées on Allocine and jp-boxoffice, 1 977 622 on Lumiere.

St. Vincent seems to be much better, so there's hope for her.

A perfectly crafted product for its target audience.

I am surprised by Maleficent being behind Oz, if only because the source material is stratospherically more famous in Continental Europe.

I explicitly said that I am not arguing it's a ripoff. I was just surprised that the time elapsed between the two films should matter at all.

I am not sure why time should matter at all. If I don't care about a movie having similar themes as one from the 70s then I shouldn't care about its having similar themes as one from last year. Especially when said film from the 70s is an absolute classic which adjusts to over $550m in NA alone and got 7 Oscar nominations, hence more "visible" than many more recent movies. And if a movie is a ripoff of another then I don't see why it should matter if the movie being ripped off is Casablanca or Pulp Fiction (not arguing this is a ripoff as I haven't seen it).Having said this, I agree that ideas are to be recycled (though to a certain extent) and I'll check the movie out if I can given your recommendation.

So?

Is TFIOS really that good? I can't help thinking that it looks like a remake of Love Story (1970).

Isn't it doing more or less the same as Snow White and the Huntsman? That's the closest comparison and didn't have the World Cup so I don't think it's that bad.

Not sure rebellious Chinese districts against central government will go down well.

When I went to see it, there was just one family with children, the rest were all adults and couples. I found that surprising. There is clearly some wide appeal.

It's one of the most prominent recent examples I can think of.

That was always going to be the case. I don't know if Disney ever said they were going the Wicked route but the official synopsis they provided months before the release made it clear that this was to be a "the villain is actually the good girl" story. The idea was taken from Wicked and is clearly commercially viable. Silly Universal has not adapted Wicked yet, and they may well have had their thunder stolen now.

Fantasy films in general seem to have taken a turn for the weird in the last five years or so. I often wonder whether that's the influence of Pan's Labyrinth. At least I hope so.

But is it not official? I mean, no music studio can claim that album X sold 3m copies if Soundscan states it has sold 2.9 million.

Pardon my ignorance but are box office grosses tracked (decided?) by studios? Is there no independent tracking system like Soundscan for music sales?

Are you sure?

So this is getting $40m (perhaps something more?), according to expectations.

For the first film, Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden and Norway were all bigger than NZ. France was bigger than Germany, Italy and Spain. I still think next week is an important week.