Celedhring

Not crazy at all. A CBM always will be a better WW sell than sequel to a 60 year old family film that is only culturally relevant in the US and some countries in Western Europe.

Here it will finish 2nd-4th overall, depending on how much steam it can keep throughout the holidays. It's done gangbusters. Queen has always been popular over here, but wasn't expecting that. Didn't like the film that much but sod it, it's Queen.

The film was a bit of a disappointment. The space sequences are amazingly shot and convey the fragility and isolation astronauts must have felt like no other space movie, imho - the Gemini 8 sequence is fantastic -, but the earth-bound sequences are such a bore of manufactured drama. And they did have some good dramatic material to work with - we're talking about a guy that saw a bunch of his buddies die throughout the years while chasing a dream of dubious feasibility. But all the movie does is showing us closeups of Ryan Gosling acting like an inexpressive asshole. A pity. They could have released the film for the 50th anniversary and give a couple passes to the script.

Club-worthy, I'd say. Avengers should be a shoe-in for 600+ barring an (unexpected) bad reception. Lion King and Ep IX should get there if their reception and pre-release buildup is good enough. Toy Story 4 and Frozen 2 are the biggest outliers at the moment, imho. I'm really surprised to see them releasing Aladdin and Lion King within two months, incidentally.

Fallout's third act is ridiculous in the best possible way, and the movie is massively entertaining throughout (maybe the first act is a bit wonky until it fully gets into gear). I'm happy it's doing so well. The small drops throughout make me wonder why studios aren't being more daring when scheduling for August. Guardians and Suicide Squad thrived in past years, but it doesn't look like studios are taking the plunge and moving some of the tentpoles from earlier in the summer.

He's referring to the truly high-brow awards/reviewers, not the more mainstream stuff like the Oscars and similar. The GA won't indeed give a crap about Fury Road getting the FIPRESCI award, but it's a pretty incredible achievement for a Hollywood blockbuster to win that. It's like Alabama voting a Democrat president.

Nearly $500m in new releases. Chinese New Year is truly crazy.

Yeah, I fail to see the politics being shoved down in this incarnation of SW, unless having women protagonists is still considered politics - which would be sad. The prequels were way more on the nose about politics (Trade Federation, evil capitalists!)

No. There are movies out there that sank entire studios (hello Heaven's Gate). Solo won't even lose that much money when it's all said and done. And certainly just a blip on Disney's radar.

Out of the "largely unknown before GoT" crowd of actors, to me Natalie Dormer is the best of the lot.

The bursting film careers of Edward Furlong, Hayden Christensen, Nick Stahl, or heck, Mark Hamill, beg to disagree with that statement. These franchises have never been kind to young actors.

Don't.

Lightsaber battles are best used when they are a battle of the wills between two main characters, not some random brawl between nameless jedi/sith like often happened in the terrible prequels. I think lightsaber duels have been used well in the Disney movies. You have two big ones involving both Rey and Ren, which tell the tale of how their relationship evolves and how they grow as characters. Is drama through action.

The Conjuring. It's even managed to spawn spinoff franchises (Annabelle). I'd not count Pacific Rim unless there's a third movie. To me "franchise" entails more than 2 movies.

Honestly, I don't think Rogue One's concept is on paper particularly better than Solo's ("how the Death Star plans were stolen!", "How Solo got the Falcon!"), and that one turned out particularly well BO-wise. So poor choice of concept doesn't really explain Solo's failure to me. Something that I don't see people mentioning often is the fact that it was released so soon after TLJ. To me that was a mistake. The film had problems to create its own hype (RO actually needed quite a few trailers and time until it began catching fire), and people's SW appetite was sated (TLJ's reception also didn't help). IIRC only Marvel has been able to pull off releasing same-universe movies so close to each other and still have them all do well. Personally I think that Disney overplayed their hand. I guess they wanted to see if this could be their second MCU. It needs to be back to one movie every 1-2 years.

My biggest complain about the first movie, is that when comic book Deadpool is great, is when it manages to mix up the absurdist humor with bonafides emotional resonance. He's a broken man whose insanity is his shelter. Deadpool 1 failed on that account. So if DP2 is an improvement on that department... well then I'm all in.

During the recession many theaters slashed prices. €3 Wednesday tickets became very common in my area (Barcelona metro), plus loyalty schemes that allowed you to buy discounted tickets. I paid €5 on weekends at my favorite cinema, when the list price was €9. So "8 Apellidos" sold around the same tickets as Avatar, but at cheaper prices. Nowadays Cheap Wednesdays are the second largest day in attendance after Saturday.

Yeah, attendances have slowly been picking up over the past 2-3 years. We are now back at pre-recession levels of tickets sold. Avatar was a phenom over here. It made €77m and our second top grossing movie of all time (a local comedy) lies at €55m.

It's held great in Spain. Will certainly become the top grossing SH movie of all time in our market (Incredibly, Raimi's first Spider-Man *still* holds that record with $23m), and has a very good chance of becoming the first SH movie to win the year. Spanish market heavily favors animation and family-skewing blockbusters, so it's quite an achievement.

I wouldn't say "dead", but it's got stage IV cancer. I'm seeing something slightly over 650 DOM right now.

Monday holds weren't particularly out of order - most stuff in the top 10 decreased 70-75%. But these Tuesday increases are pretty weak in most cases. Strange.

From that list, only TGS and AQP are original films. The rest are all adaptations. I think we'll need to wait a little more for that golden age...

Just noticed that Spain is WiT's second largest OS market - bad news in itself since we're very far from being the 2nd largest market of even western Europe - and that's with a pretty mediocre take of €2.5m. Incidentally, the film got dumped with no promotion whatsoever. Only saw a trailer before The Shape of Water (which has been a smash over here) but no billboards, ads, etc... Disney always spends very conservatively over here, though.

I agree. Decades of inflation have allowed the media to cheapen what the word blockbuster originally meant. Grossing 100 or 200m doesn't mean what it meant in the 70s or 80s, when the word became popular. Out of curiosity, I went and checked Jaws (the quintessential "blockbuster") OW PTA. It adjusts to $77,000. Now that's "block busting". Of course in a fraction of the theaters than your TFA, BP or JW will open nowadays, but the queues must have been crazy. I wonder what kind of PTA one could get if for whatever reason one chose to open something like Star Wars IX on a limited release before expanding.

That Friday was nearly the equivalent of a Saturday. So yeah, it's a good drop. The film's headed towards a sub 50% second weekend after a 4-day opening and great midweek numbers - all of which burnt extra demand. It might even go sub 45%. 150m looks pretty realistic at this point and that's always good for a 50m opener outside of a holiday season.