Barnack

And even when it is more well known, Mojo do not seem to update themselves, they still have Guardian at 170, captain america first avenger at 140, Pirates of the Caribbean On Stranger Tides at 250, etc... Without being totally useless, they are far from a good source for budget, it is just a guy writing what was around at some point without time to follow up. Them saying that Ghost was 110 is not a strong sign that it was the case, Johansson said it was in the 130isshh range for example and she known about it much more than them.

Mojo is just a guy writing number from no where mostly no ? They have no reliability budget wise, wikipedia tend to be much better. Example: http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=21jumpstreet2.htm Production Budget: $50 million Reality: It was a 84.5 million gross production budget movie with a 69 million net budget. https://fastlane.louisianaeconomicdevelopment.com/Film/FilmSearchDetails.aspx?ProjNum=VCPHNNs1db1807DgywngyQ%3d%3d https://wikileaks.org/sony/docs/03_03/RISKMGMT/Production Files/22 Jump Street (9-29-13 to 12-18-13)/Budget/22JS Budget 15 131008_FINAL BUDGET top sheet.pdf

I think in the context that the marketing failed to sell the movies, the reviews became essential to it, Arrival made $10,390 by theater on is first weekend vs $5,429 for Ghost in a shell, I think the main factor between those 2 result was the difference in critical acclaim.

Those tend to have big name director or high-concept/IPs thought, like the MadMax (Miller doing a MadMax movie) or Pacific Rim (Del Toro/ Kaiju) for example, James Cameron big movie do not need a star either or franchise movie in general. If you remove those factor (strong director appeal like a Cameron/Nolan, strong franchise/concept appeal), you will not see many live action 100m+ films without bankable stars that are successes.

That not how I understand the article (but English is a second language to me): After vanishing in its opening weekend at the domestic box office to $18.6 million, film finance sources tell Deadline that Paramount/DreamWorks-Reliance’s Ghost In The Shell stands to lose at least $60M .... Ghost was originally part of the Shanghai/Huahua deal, with both companies supposedly vested in director Rupert Sanders’ movie alongside DreamWorks and Paramount; each studio maintained 30% exposure. While DreamWorks reportedly stands to lose as much as $20M, Paramount could incur a bigger black eye sans the Chinese funds. Paramount provided no comment. From what I understand they are saying that the movie should loose at least 60 million among those investor, the 20 million for DreamWorks and Paramount if it they have a 30% exposure, but if they had a bigger one (say it was not in fact part of the deal with Shanghai/Huahua they could loose more)

If they are exposed to more than 30%, the If the China co-financing was lost (people writing the article do not know, who own how much of the movie and how the revenue are distributed often a distributor like Paramount will take a larger share of the revenue until distribution is paid over financier, financier have often riskier deal than studio and movies have a higher break even point for them), and because they do not know how much the movie cost, have not much idea on how much it will loose.

It is not from the studios, it is only people that work in film financing that speculate on how much it will possibly loose, they do not even know how much paramount is exposed and have no idea on the movie budget, rumors goes from 110 to around 180+ million apparently. Paramount could be loosing less than 20 (and depending on the presales deal, distribution deal they got not loose money at all) to loose a lot if it was an over 180 million budget and that some China co-financing didn't go through for this movie and leaved them exposed for a lot of the lost.

When they say something like this: Ghost was originally part of the Shanghai/Huahua deal, with both companies supposedly vested in director Rupert Sanders’ movie alongside DreamWorks and Paramount; each studio maintained 30% exposure. While DreamWorks reportedly stands to lose as much as $20M, Paramount could incur a bigger black eye sans the Chinese funds. Paramount provided no comment. What I am supposed to understand, supposedly vested... why would it only be paramount taking the hit if they lost partner, I would prefer some kind of graphic/table of the different scenario instead of them trying to write it. Social media monitor RelishMix questions whether #IAmMajor had any kind of negative impact as it only charted 480 occurrences compared to #ghostintheshell (65,4K) and #scarlettjohansson (5,8K) which were the biggest drivers. Those are similar ratio to google trend (amount of online content/request about the movie that is about the controversy vs the movie in general, it is almost nothing)

? How do we know how commercial they think it is (I imagine they pooled interest of a large amount of people in every top market and have as good as an idea of the commercial appeal you can have and know that it is far from an automatic and that execution will be crucial), it is still one of most sold book of all time.

BB driver by a good margin, Hot Fuzz is one of my favorite movie ever, that is a pure Wright passion project, rare to see at that good budget level from a director that does not have the commercial track record to justify it, thank you Sony and Universal.

Like said above it is extremely hard to evaluate, it will be a of a really generic movie that had massive re-shoot did very well, without knowing much what the movie would have looked like and made without them. Lords of the rings 2/3 for example could be candidate, the massive performance of the third and the massive home video success are linked to the sustained quality, how much of that success is due to those massive reshoot Viggo Mortensen talked about in that interview: http://www.blastr.com/2014-5-15/why-viggo-mortensen-says-lord-rings-trilogy-was-mess According to him, the reshoots were a difference from strait to video quality to 2 of the most acclaimed and successful movie of all time, depending of how much it is not an exaggeration The 2 towers and Return of the kings must be up there as the best reshoot money spent candidate. And other one would be Malick Days of Heaven, apparently according to Richard Gere the movie was entirely reshoot with a different "script", the movie is still selling today and often in top 400 movie of all time type of list.

Exactly they are putting it on the media reaction and distancing the media reaction from the movie quality. Probably 2 good moves to do in public (specially with the movie still in theater) as long as they are more objective and in problem solving for the next movie project mode in private.

That not what I understand, Paramount metric are probably showing that bad reviews had a huge impact (good tracking before the embargo, lot of interest, lot of traffic and views of reviews and the difference in box office in market that didn't had those bad reviews vs domestic). They are blaming the bad reviews for domestic market bombage, and blaming the white-washing controversy influencing the critics for those bad reviews.

It is interesting specially that it was if I remember correctly it was 0 controversy at all for Edge in the mainstream US, the contrast is good, I think there is many factor for that difference. 1) The difference level of franchise awareness, there is a reason that Ghost in the Shell did keep the franchise name and a lot of is element, even thought it is not that well known it is still a well known name, it is part of the general culture of the age demography that buy the most movie ticket by capita, even if you have not seen any of the movie you have usually heard of the name. Edge of tomorrow you need to start you article explaining about All you need is kill, not as easy getting traffic your way and look like a more forced one. 2) The reshaping of the story in Europe did help I think, you really need to make research to know about it, having the story set in Tokyo, character name, make it much more obvious, argument can be made purely on a aesthetic/artistic/disbelief side without involving any politics. 3) 2014 vs 2017, with some list of failed commercial movie that were accused of whitewashing since the greenlight of Edge of Tomorrow, maybe the obvious commercial obligation is less obvious, giving better traction to those story. 4) Maybe yes some gender and age bias, I would imagine that publishing story (at the same level of controversy) on Internet involving young beautiful actress is a better source of revenues than older actor.

I think that the very long end game, is having diversity behind camera that will naturally bring diversity in front on it in smaller prestigious movies. That will create a more diverse array of actor with clout that have worked with the big producer/studios/director and known by audience that studio can cast on big movies with financial pressure with their pre-sales/co-financing/loan obligation that make the executive only at ease if a big name is attached. Once the diversity on screen is not really an issue thought it will maybe not be a subject of any importance for fictional movie (the casting precision will probably always be there historical character), leaving the artist liberty to cast anyone they want for any roles, but the option will be there and commonly used.

In a big number of theater around 8 to 12 week, they stay around 16 to 26 week total but in a small number of theater.

There it would not have been a problem (like for Dr Strange casting an Asian would not have been an issue at all in the US), but in Asia it seem that it can be hard and you need to be sensitive that all Asians are not one entity, if you want both those Chinese and Japanese dollar (those 2 should be the big market for GITS) you certainly have to take it into account (specially when we are talking about a character that is anything close to Tibet). It would not have surprised me if a lot of Japanese audience would have reacted more to an iconic character played by a Chinese actress than by Johansson (that said I know close to anything about it and goes by wikipedia article and repeating what I read random Internet people say about it, I could be all wrong). It is not particularly fair to compare world release movie to US tv show (with americans that will simply all put all Asians together without caring much)

It did happen in the past (in sometime both China and Japan can get angry at the same time over it): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memoirs_of_a_Geisha_(film)#Casting_controversy http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/3648434/Memoirs-of-a-very-controversial-geisha.html The film received some hostile responses in Mainland China, including its banning by the People's Republic of China. And the Japanese studio used the same type of defense than Paramount kind of did, Gong Li and Zhang Ziyi being much bigger box office draw than any Japanese actress.

We arguably need a new definition of what is backlash now that it is so easy to do one and to promote it online, we can agree that any movie now will get some negative comments in a youtube section and some form of backlash about anything possible to have one. We need to define what would be a minimum of people reacting (and it need to be over 1) to start calling it backlash, I'm probably not the only one that had to google what was Death Note and that theyre was some controversy, I don't think it came close to the mainstream media. If we compare Ghost in a shell backlash or Death note backlash, with a real one like Bill O'Reilly backlash, we see than those whitewashing stuff are really niche: https://trends.google.ca/trends/explore?date=today 3-m&q=maxine waters bill oreilly,Death note whitewashing,Ghost in a shell Whitewashing,Ghost in a shell Are we making something up bigger than it is from some Internet bubble ? Caring about what less than 1% of the population think about something ? Nothing in the most 9 item requested related to Internet queries had to do with whitewashing or any controversy, if I'm looking correctly and if it is accurate internet traffic about the movie controversy never got bigger than 1.3% of the movie Internet traffic. All those long stuff to say, that yes Gits would still got some form of backlash if they would transferred and updated the story, but it would have been a different one and maybe a smaller one.

There were at some point some rumors of glasses less 3D (ultra-D), I needed step for 3D to ever become popular and the norm in people house. And the only I can think off that could reproduce the excitement of the Avatar 3D in some way. Underwater live action 3D could be nice and be sold as new I think, but it would not be exhibition technical stuff.

I even heard backlash from conservator feeling that Logan was shoving people throat pro undocumented worker, an anti-Trump message. I'm not sure movie are particularly politicized now vs the past, it is probably the other way around. Wanting to sell to mass audience worldwide and not loose anyone by being controversial, make them rarely taken on politics side that much versus the 70's and so on. The popular movies are often set in magical franchise world, with magical made up problem that has no relevance to our life solved with magical superpowers, maybe that why people want to see allegory and politicize them so much, because they tend to really not be. And even then, when they create all that distance is the allegory are too direct like in Elysium, they do not work as well and people complain a lot about the movie being too political. I mean people started to talk about anti-Trump propaganda about movies like rogue one and Fantastic Beasts, movie that were wrote (and even shoot for one of them) before Trump became something serious. I have not seen Gits, but I didn't heard much political/ethical talk surrounding it (outside some aesthetic one about casting), it does not sound like a particularly political movie or failed at starting any conversation.

xXx made around 36 to 38 million in profit in is China theatrical release, WB hoping to sell King Arthur 20 sound optimistic. That would need people expecting that it has a good chance of making 22 million for a possible 10% ROI that would require to do around a 97 to 100 million CBO (25% - releasing cost) Are we sure those number are not involving some other revenue source, like a streaming service ?

Statham as a rare modern home video career apparently (him and Sanders), with a good track records on renting: https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/movies/2016/08/23/why-is-there-a-mechanic-sequel-jason-statham/89110234/ Has for being a potentially Box office poison, that is a strange statement imo, Lucy made over 400 million, how is it possible with a poison, she has yet to make a single movie that have a bad performance commercially that need some explanation from casting, same for the she get too much money part, rumors were of a 10 million + participation bonus offer for the lead. Wahlberg is making 15, 19 and 20 million on the Transformer triology, with a participation bonus that start way before profit, Meryl Streep got 5 million for Ricky and the flash. 10m would be a really good price for them (so much that I must imagine she achieved to get more).

I suspect that it is a bit circular, on a lot of those movie most of the audience tend to be adult anyway (X-men apocalypse first weekend was 78% 18 or over, so I imagine 80+% were 17 or over, Logan being R rated was not a risk at all) Same for BvS (78% adult audience first weekend), Skyfall 75%, but they spend the giant budget only on those movie that will have that audience boost from family and kids and it became really hard to compete with 300 million dollars movie with a 200 million world release for the R-rated movie that were not getting comparable resource anymore.

In the 90's most of the BO was made from R rating: http://www.the-numbers.com/market/mpaa-ratings It is early 2000's were it shifted to pg-13 (with Spiderman, Lords of the rings, Potters (PG), X-Men, well franchises)