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hw64

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Everything posted by hw64

  1. hw64
    This is a bit of an aside as it's all mostly theoretical now, but I'll turn heel on my usual bullishness on Avatar 2 to say that I'm still not really sold on this idea, even if we ignore any potential artificial impediments to Avatar 2's run in China (i.e. government issues). A lot of people — and I'm not necessarily saying you're one of them, NCsoft — seem to assume because of Avatar's incredible box office run in China in 2010 that it's near-automatic that Avatar 2 will have similar amounts of adjusted-up box office success in China over a decade later. I don't agree: I don't think it's anywhere near automatic, and I don't think a huge gross for Avatar 2 in China should be taken for granted. A lot has changed in the Chinese box office market in a decade — not only through the obvious drastic increase in market size, but also through changing consumer habits, changes in the types of people in China that are now going to the cinema, and also changes in public perception and sentiment towards foreign movies. And we've seen plenty of examples in the past of sequels to movies which saw great success in nascent, early-2010s China which haven't been able to come close to their predecessors in terms of market expansion-adjusted success. Outside of huge 'want to see' figures for Avatar 2 on Maoyan which have been accumulated over the past decade and which aren't necessarily indicative of current audience interest, and some OK-but-by-no-means-incredible trailer views in China, we haven't really seen anything to indicate that Avatar 2 will have the type of performance in China that people seem to think it should have. And given how much has changed in the Chinese box office market since 2010 and how few signs we've seen recently to suggest such a huge performance, I couldn't in good faith say that $1b would be likely even in an idealized, 2019-esque China. Avatar 2 certainly had the potential to do those kinds of numbers in an unrestricted, fully-functioning China, and I'd never go anywhere close to discounting the possibility entirely, but given the above issues, I couldn't personally say that I think it would have been likely. So my question to those who are confident that Avatar 2 would have made close to or more than $1b in 2019 market conditions with no government restrictions, how are you backing up that chain of thought?
  2. hw64
    Plenty of business to go around at Christmas, I agree, but I don't think there's an argument to be made that more competition is better than no competition at Christmas, just that it's less worse than no competition than at any other time of the year due to the sheer amount of potential business that there is to go around. In the case of Jumanji and The Last Jedi, having closely followed the runs of both of those movies, I don't think you can reasonably make the argument that the significant drain of business that the well-received, crowd-pleasing Jumanji was on the divisive The Last Jedi outweighed the ostensibly small amount of spillover business that The Last Jedi gained as a result of Jumanji sell-outs. I don't think it's reasonable to claim that The Last Jedi without Jumanji would have made less than it actually did with Jumanji as competition. Given that any significant amount of spillover business is contingent on very well-performing competitors, I can't agree that Avatar 2 would have been in a better position with more competition than it has. Puss in Boots 2 is bound to do very well, and given that there's relatively little overlap between the two movies' audiences, Avatar 2 will likely benefit from some spillover business there without being significantly adversely affected by the "competition", as will Puss from Avatar. In terms of release conditions, I think that's close to ideal.
  3. hw64
    If The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker, two relatively poorly-received instalments from what was once the most frontloaded franchise of them all can both manage a hair shy of 3x multipliers with significantly higher opening weekends (with Avatar 2's opening weekend average ticket price, circa-$300m and circa-$250m respectively) and significantly more competition than Avatar 2 will have, then I don't really see any reason to expect Avatar 2 to have a multiplier as low as 3.5x unless it really doesn't hit the mark. I'd say 4-5.5x multiplier, 6x if it's another Avatar.
  4. hw64
    That's a joke if accurate, although I know EntTelligence opening weekend ticket sales data has been questioned in the past by some on here. But if it is accurate, then Avatar 2 should have no problem clearing a full-run ATP of $14.50, maybe even $15, which would make $1b domestic a very real possibility.
  5. hw64
    The quoted statistics are off. The Avatar trailer had about 31m views in its first 24 hours on YouTube and now has 117m+, so it has near-quadrupled its 24-hour YouTube views in 11 days. I don't know whether a big blockbuster trailer doubling its 24-hour views in 11 days is typical — I suspect it isn't, especially for heavily frontloaded movie trailers like Marvel's — but what I do know is that both the Avatar 2 trailer and the teaser (which had around 35m 24-hour YouTube views and now has over 216m, or over 6x as many) had far greater viewership "legs" than any major blockbuster trailer that I know of. And to illustrate that with an example, the Thor 4 teaser had 25%+ higher 24-hour viewership on YouTube than the Avatar 2 teaser — about 44m to 35m views — but the Avatar 2 teaser now has close to double the views of the Thor 4 teaser on YouTube.
  6. hw64
    I really don't understand this in the slightest. In what way would — at the low end — 53-54m admissions, worse than Top Gun: Maverick and No Way Home in the past year alone (let alone comparing it to pre-pandemic movies), be anywhere near as good a performance as the biggest movie domestically in a decade since The Phantom Menace in 1999? And that's even without going into the way in which Avatar made its money, which puts the impressiveness of its performance far beyond its raw ticket sales.
  7. hw64
    Gap between movies: 3 years Gap between movies: 3 years Gap between movies: 4 years Gap between movies: 2 years Gap between Avatar and Avatar 2: 13 years Might be a fundamental difference there?
  8. hw64
    The goal for me is €50m in Spain (stretch goal €60m) and €45m in Italy (stretch goal around €55m).
  9. hw64
    I was reading the comments of I think an old Deadline article from prior to Avatar's release in 2009, and I saw a few comments saying the exact same things that are being said today: "good CGI isn't a draw anymore," "it's all been done before," etc., citing movies like King Kong and Pirates of the Caribbean. These takes aren't grounded in any reality, especially when some of the biggest franchises today consistently release movies with rushed, inconsistent, and often outright bad visual effects. And in any case, it wasn't merely the CGI that was a big component of Avatar's success, it was the use of CGI to create a fully-realized, believable alien world to transport the audience to — how often has that been done since 2009?
  10. hw64
    According to this source — and I'm not sure how reliable it is — Avatar 2 has passed censorship in China, which is one of the prerequisites for getting a release. Doesn't guarantee it, of couse, as we've seen many times over the past year. https://www.rfa.org/mandarin/yataibaodao/meiti/gt1-11072022000850.html "Film industry insiders told this station that the Hollywood blockbuster "Avatar 2" has just passed the review of China's State Film Administration, but the film has not yet obtained a public performance license." "According to the website of the State Electric Power Administration of the Central Propaganda Department, a film must obtain a project registration number, a public screening license, and film censorship from filming to release, and foreign films must undergo more censorship."
  11. hw64
    I never said it wouldn't be good to have a potentially bigger opening weekend, I'm just saying that I'm convinced that the movie's word-of-mouth is going to be positive enough to eventually capture the interests of all of the people who would have seen Avatar 2 on opening weekend if they'd have been given a better narrative hook, so even if I'd have preferred for them to have put more narrative hooks out there to placate those parts of the audience, I think the effect on the box office is going to be pretty negligible. And while I agree that having a bigger opening weekend is better in pretty much every normal scenario, I think that there's a decent argument to be made that one of the key components of both Titanic and Avatar's huge success was the concept of "underpromising and overdelivering"; audiences were not sold at all on either of those movies prior to their release, and the massive gap between pre-release expectations and the actual movies themselves was a key driver of the incredibly positive word-of-mouth that both movies received. For pretty much any other movie, it'd be a stupid idea and aiming for a higher opening weekend would be the only logical strategy, but he's managed to pull it off twice in a row now under very similar circumstances, so if it is a deliberate strategy, then as bold and as foolish as it might seem, it might well pay off. It's not like they would be deliberately tanking the opening weekend in the wild hope that word-of-mouth would eventually win back the audience that they themselves threw away; it's just a minor thing, and the eventual benefits of not playing their hand earlier could well outweigh the slightly higher opening weekend that a clearer narrative picture would entail. With every movie, there are things that could be done to increase the opening weekend that aren't simply because they're not seen as beneficial in the long term (see e.g. not revealing Tobey and Andrew in the marketing for No Way Home last year), and this is the same thing.
  12. hw64
    Again, those that are left wanting for a reason to go will be given one during the extended holiday period when word-of-mouth about the movie gets out. The only real advantage of frontloading like that is as a safety blanket if you think the movie is going to be mediocre or shit, in which case you want to cram as many gullible people into the opening weekend as possible; I don't think that's a danger here. In fact, thinking about it now, doesn't the clear disinterest in providing any real narrative hooks itself signal a confidence in the movie's quality? As I say, if you were concerned about the quality of the movie or about general audience interest, then the optimal strategy would be to provide the audience with as many hooks as possible in order to frontload as much as you can before the word of mouth gets out.
  13. hw64
    I don't watch many trailers, but my brain is telling me that this is something that's extremely rare, and that it's something really only Avatar 2 has done in recently memory (when it comes to big blockbusters). Other people seem to agree that the trailer is a highly unusual one for the class of film that Avatar 2 is in: https://www.polygon.com/23436717/avatar-2-way-water-trailer-breakdown-3d-release-james-cameron. I'm not saying you're wrong because, again, I don't watch a lot of trailers, but what are some of the other examples you have in mind when it comes to "heavy on vibes and world setting selling, light on character beats or actual story points" marketing for a tentpole blockbuster?
  14. hw64
    I agree that a more narrative-focused trailer would have been a good idea to appeal to the plot-obsessed [American] audiences of current year (especially those who will be watching Black Panther in about a week), but I don't agree that this is "Mystery Box Marketing." My intuitive intepretation of that phrase would be the teasing of potential (but not necessarily actual) plot points and/or character arcs as a means of driving interest. The fact that the trailer hasn't given much away about the plot doesn't mean it's "Mystery Box Marketing." "Mystery Box Marketing" is giving the audience speculation fodder. The Avatar 2 trailer doesn't do that: it point-blank refuses to reveal any significant, non-obvious plot details, instead relying on vibes, spectacle and feeling to generate interest, which I think it does very well. The trailer's very effective, and I wouldn't necessarily replace it with a more narrative-focused trailer given the chance, but I think having a more narrative-focused third trailer would be ideal to appeal to certain sections of moviegoers. In any case, as others have pointed out, regardless of the outcome it's hardly going to affect the box office in the long term; it's just a choice between a lower opening and better legs, or a higher opening and worse legs.
  15. hw64
    He means Michelle Yeoh. But she's not actually in Avatar 2, only 3 and beyond it looks like.
  16. hw64
    Cameron wouldn't be saying things like like "I guarantee you, you won’t be able to predict it. What people hate the most is to go and see a movie and say ‘oh… predictable.’ This is not predictable, I don’t think. I defy anybody to predict where this story goes." or have spent around 5 years writing the stories and scripts for the entire saga if Avatar 2 was simply a retread of the first movie. Even outside of that, you need only the most cursory knowledge of James Cameron and his filmography to know that Avatar 2's plot isn't merely going to be a repeat. I mean, it's the worst thing you could possibly do: you're creating a sequel to a movie whose primary criticism (of which Cameron is acutely aware) is its unoriginal story, and then you make a sequel which is the same plot again. How stupid do people take Cameron to be?
  17. hw64
    Teaser: 33.9m views on YouTube at 24 hours (10.7m main channel) Trailer: 31.3m views on YouTube at 24 hours (18m main channel) Will note also that there was an issue where most non-official uploads of the trailer were copyright claimed and unavailable to anyone outside of India for about the first 7-8 hours of the trailer's release yesterday.
  18. hw64
    Adjusting your expectations for Avatar 2 based on a trailer of all things is a bold move, I'll give you that. All that matters is the movie itself, and the overall experience of watching it at the cinema. No trailer, no matter how good, is ever going to come anywhere close to doing justice to the magic Cameron can create at the cinema.
  19. hw64
    Avatar's average ticket price was near-double that of Titanic, whereas Avatar 2's average ticket price will be nowhere near double that of The Force Awakens.
  20. hw64
    The Numbers seems to calculates its "years" as the period through the Sunday of the last week of the year, even if that week partially rolls into the next year. So they've taken Avatar's 2009 gross to be its gross through Sunday, January 3rd, rather than through Thursday, December 31st. But yeah, can't trust any of them in general any more — always cross-reference.
  21. hw64
    Impossible for Avatar to be #2 in 2009 and 2010 as the highest-grossing films of those years were Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince with $934m and Toy Story 3 with $1.067b respectively, which would cap Avatar's gross at under $2b. Pretty sure it was the 5th highest-grossing film of calendar year 2009 with circa-$800m through New Year's Eve, and then obviously the highest-grossing film of calendar year 2010 with nearly $2b. The same is true domestically: Avatar was 5th of calendar year 2009, and 1st of calendar year 2010. Edit: could've actually been 4th for 2009 and 1st for 2010. Its gross through Wednesday, December 30th 2009 was $794.1m, and it made $14.7m domestically on New Year's Eve for a total of $808.8m. Would've needed around $27.5m overseas on New Year's Eve to upend Revenge of the Fallen's $836.3m total, and it made $36.9m overseas on December 30th. New Year's Eve would have seen a dip overseas, but that's still potentially possible.
  22. hw64
    This is an absurd stance — inflation is not merely a fanboy 'gotcha' or an agenda-driven tool for unnecessary negativity as you seem to want to claim. It has nothing to do with those things: ticket price inflation is a fact, and taking it into consideration is an absolute necessity if you want to attempt to objectively evaluate and compare the performances of movies released more than a few years apart, or predict the performance of an upcoming movie based on past comparables. The idea that its sole purpose is for fanboy argument-winning or for dogging on a particular movie's performance is no more credible than if you'd have made that same claim about any other factor that affects box office gross, like competition, critical or audience reception, exchange rates, which countries a movie releases in, etc. And the idea that inflation is "literally" only brought up to paint a certain movie's performance in a negative light is ridiculous — case in point, ticket price inflation is often brought up in the Avatar thread, because again it's an imperative consideration when trying to predict Avatar 2's performance given the decade between it and the original film. And if Avatar 2 makes more than Avatar, then I'll be the first to say that it probably wasn't as big as the original film, because its run will have been helped significantly by over a decade of ticket price inflation and overseas market expansion. Neither of these things have anything to do with fanboyism or dogging on a particular movie; inflation consideration is merely being used as a tool to assist with accurate prediction, or in the pursuit of an objective analysis of a box office run. I mean, exchange rates are often brought up in fanboy arguments — especially Endgame vs. Avatar ones — but I'm not ringing the alarm and claiming that exchange rate considerations are bad because they're "literally" only used to disparage Avatar's performance, like I could based on the same line of reasoning as your own. Because much like ticket price inflation, exchange rate differences between movies are simply a fact, and they cannot simply be ignored or argued away because it's inconvenient or not to your liking, or because they're used to (correctly) contextualize a certain movie's run in a way that doesn't suit you. In fact, you haven't actually made any logical arguments against inflation considerations in your post, you've just tried to paint those that bring it up as being agenda-driven, and the implication that you seemingly want people to draw from that is that the consideration of inflation itself is a bad thing (if not, then what on Earth are you trying to say?) Again, inflation considerations are perfectly valid and indeed necessary for comparing the performances of movies released more than a few years apart, because ticket prices domestically have doubled over the past 20 to 25 years, tripled over the past 30 to 35, and increased by somewhere around 20% over the past few years alone, and it is therefore an indisputable fact that ticket price inflation has an extremely significant impact on unadjusted box office gross. Your position on this is so misguided that I'm very surprised that it's coming from someone with over 28,000 posts on a dedicated box office forum. Anyway, this is getting quite off topic, so this is the last post I'll make on the subject in this thread — I think I've made my point.
  23. hw64
    This isn't a matter of personal opinion, though. The lists of the highest-grossing films are heavily stacked in favor of new releases — 15 of the top 20 highest-grossing films, both domestically and worldwide, are from 2015 onwards, with 18 of the top 20 highest-grossing films worldwide being from 2010 onwards (20 out of 20 if not for the two James Cameron mega-anomalies). It is indisputable that ticket price inflation (and market expansion for global grosses) far outstrips any declines in cinematic attendance in the mature markets, at least for the biggest blockbusters. And if you're talking about post-pandemic to pre-pandemic, we've just had the unadjusted 3rd highest-grossing movie of all time domestically and the unadjusted 5th highest-grossing movie of all time domestically within the span of about 6 months, so I don't think there's any real argument that can be made — again, at least for the biggest blockbusters — that movies today are at a disadvantage in relation to their unadjusted grosses compared to pre-pandemic movies, or that they're on an equal footing. For the biggest blockbusters, the huge post-pandemic ticket price inflation simply outstrips any declines in general moviegoing attendance, which big blockbusters are largely insulated from, anyway. Perhaps not in general, but Black Panther in particular made around 1/7th of its gross after day 35. I'd say that the lack of breathing room that Black Panther 2 will get during the later parts of its run is likely to negatively affect its gross compared to the original.
  24. hw64
    Just Disney trying to throw their weight around and posturing (probably) to try and get what they want, as usual. I expect they'll come to an arrangement and Black Panther 2 will end up being shown in France, and I don't think there's any danger at all for Avatar 2 given its extremely lofty cinematic prospects in France (as the re-release has reminded us).
  25. hw64
    I don't think anybody was actually panicking, I think most of us were just making fun of the idea of a single tweet about a test screening that could be for any movie spelling doom on Avatar 2's prospects. For the most part, I think those of us that are predicting big numbers for Avatar 2 are extremely confident that Cameron is going to deliver with this movie in a similar way to Titanic and Avatar (and all of his other movies) and there's very little that's going to convince us otherwise, so you're probably not going to see the kind of meltdowns over trivial little things that are customary on BOT.
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