TServo2049

I’m one of the guilty (though I forget if it was only on r/boxoffice). I was worried more that kids would be horribly upset by the dusting and that would piss off parents and lead to bad WOM, but it became quickly clear that wasn’t the case.

As a joke, the first thing I said when I left the theater on Thursday night was that quote. Not sure anybody heard it, but I couldn’t resist.

Everybody knows you never go full Homer.

I love those kinds of weekends, probably in part because they’re so rare.

Radio City Music Hall isn’t actually a movie theater most of the time, but yeah, that is crazy. And most the showings probably came close to selling out too; this is when Disney animation was like the Broadway of cinema, so Radio City was probably pulling in Broadway-level crowds for this.

Jedi played in a lot of premium 70mm venues that could go over 1,000 seats for a single screen. (Most of these theaters have been demolished or multiplexed over the years. Mostly demolished.) Even with fewer showtimes, those places could absorb 4,000-6,000 people per day (newspaper ads I can find tend to list 4-6 showtimes). Also, there was upfront demand but even something like ROTJ had much better legs than today because there was not as much supply, movies spent longer in theaters, etc. It pulled a 6.1x off of its first six days (opening Wed to Memorial Day). As for Lion King, that played at the El Capitan and Radio City Music Hall. El Capitan seats 1,100, and Radio City seats 6,015. I know from a Variety article that Radio City had 4 shows a day, and mentioned 5,000 seats available. At full capacity, RCMH would have accounted for 20,000 admissions a day. Also, those were premium-priced tickets - it wasn’t just the movie, it had stage performance stuff too. According to that article, the Rockettes were part of the Radio City program. It specifically says Radio City showings were priced at $26 for adults, $21 for children/seniors - and this was in 1994 dollars. So it didn’t sell as many tickets as you’d assume from dividing it by the average price for 1994. The adjusted average is probably overinflated too.

This is a record I didn’t think it had a chance of breaking. That record has held for almost 36 years. If it gets that high, Endgame might stay on top even after BOM’s adjustment math that pegs each movie’s ticket price to the quarter in which it opened (which would deflate EG’s adjusted numbers if 2019’s yearly average ends up below the Q2 average)

That Thing You Do! On several occasions, I have come across it while channel surfing, and every time I find it I watch it all the way through. And I am notorious for not being able to finish a movie in one sitting if I’m not in a theater.

Except that HTTYD3 was made entirely at their main Glendale studio, judging by the names I saw in the credits...

It seems like year there has to be one awful animated feature trailer that is absolutely inescapable. Free Birds and Sherlock Gnomes immediately come to mind (though this movie doesn’t look like it’s going to be as legendarily bad as those two. Phooey.) (And for those who are wondering why I didn’t mention The Emoji Movie, it’s because somehow I never saw that trailer in front of any movies I saw that year, so I was able to escape it.)

While I will admit that the film was very flawed and uneven, I will say that oh my god, that World's Fair prologue was amazing. I was certain that this was going to be everything I hoped it would be...

I believe that WB is the studio that actually owns the film rights to 1906. It was supposed to be a co- production with Disney and Pixar, but they pulled out when the project fell apart. If Brad Bird isn't the person who makes it, then my wish is for someone at WB to somehow convince Christopher Nolan to want to make it. I want the 1906 SF earthquake in IMAX 70mm, with lots of practical. Dunkirk convinced me even more that if Bird isn't the person who makes it, it needs to be Nolan.

Actually, I was split on whether to suggest Keith David or James Earl Jones. Keith David was the first name that popped into my head, but I chose to say James Earl Jones for whatever reason. Maybe because he's closer to Freeman's age? Regardless, either of them would work.

Maybe they could recast him with James Earl Jones or something.

I will gladly take Demi Lovato over Katy Perry.

At least not for a first-time director. I wonder if they'd still be OK letting Pete Docter have one for his next project (which is also original). IO went over-budget, Lasseter insisted on the luminescence effects and so on, but it made a mint. As of now, Docter is the only Pixar director to have a truly flawless track record (yes, I am counting John Carter and Tomorrowland because Disney put up the money and Lasseter/Pixar helped out to some degree or at least vouched for Stanton/Bird, and no, I am not counting Lee Unkrich because he only had one solo film and it was a sequel).

You did get my point, though? Taking the same route with the 60s/70s setting as Lucas did with the 50s setting, trying to tie it into the supernatural stuff in the pop-culture/movie zeitgeist of the time, would mean substituting alien invasion flicks with the likes of Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist. I agree with you, I don't think that'd be a good idea either.

Yeah, but the number is so exact, and we don't know what numbers they used to get that estimate. Snow White's is even stranger, where did they get 77,471,100 tickets? It's the opposite of GWTW's, how did they come to such a precise number? Even then, we do not know the individual figures that went into that.

Jaws has the same issue, the 1976 and (I think) 1979(?) re-release grosses are counted in that round $260m figure. GWTW's issue isn't that it's $189m gross is fully adjusted based on 1939 prices - it's not, that would come out to over $7 billion - but that the 1939-82 portion of its gross is adjusted based on an estimate of exactly 200 million tickets sold over the various releases up to '82. Where did that number come from? I don't know.

It's weird, the alien theme of KotCS was supposed to fit with the 50s setting, but it was honestly so Erich von Danniken/"Chariots of the Gods"-lite (aliens built the pyramids, etc.) that it almost would have made sense to have the entry set in the 60s/70s be the one about ancient aliens... Late 60s/early 70s would be a good period to work in Atlantis, or the Bermuda Triangle, or any of the other non-alien-type stuff you'd have seen Leonard Nimoy talking about on any given episode of In Search Of. Or maybe some kind of Eastern mysticism stuff of the kind that was popular with hippies and New Agers. (Or if they wanted to tie it into the dominant not-of-this-world theme of movies of the era in which the film is set, like Lucas tried to do with KotCS, they could venture into something Satanic...how "wrong" for the franchise would you folks consider Indy vs. the devil vis a vis Indy vs. aliens? It is still religious to a degree...) Point is, the era was rife with all sorts of weird spiritual/supernatural stuff floating around the zeitgeist, they could certainly tap into some of it...

They will all decrease. Nowhere to go but down. And I already said EpVIII would decrease months before TFA released. Both previous trilogies followed the same pattern: 1st episode is the peak 2nd episode drops 3rd episode increases from 2nd but still below 1st

There Was Never Just One

I offer a mea culpa.

This is true. (True story: I knew in my gut that Frozen was going to be huge when a little girl in the next row said "I wanna be Elsa next Halloween!" as the credits started rolling.)

I already researched it and found an article from 1997 saying that 1977 was $221.3m, 1978 was $43.8m, 1979 was $22.5m and 1981 was $17.2m. (There's about $2.46m of the official pre-1982-reissue $307,263,857 figure that's not accounted for in those numbers, but whatever...)