PNF2187

I feel like positive reactions from Pixar screenings at CinemaCon are almost a given at this point, so Inside Out 2 having good reactions from CinemaCon isn't particularly surprising nor exciting IMO. I have a feeling this and Moana 2 are going to be better than the last 2 years of movie output from WDAS and Pixar though. Not that I think it's much of a bar to clear (Elemental notwithstanding), but I do have hope for this, even if they both almost certainly won't be as good as the first Inside Out and Moana. Although it could just be Disney doing a far better job at selling their sequels than their originals...

I was gonna say something along the lines of chocolate spiced lattes but spicy chocolate lattes already exist. I feel there was a missed opportunity to do some cross promo with Wonka and Dune since they're both WBD, but I guess the popcorn bucket was already weird enough. Still need to get one of those for myself. As an aside, Dune: Part Two was fantastic. I saw it on Thursday and it gets better the more I think about it. I think Arrival is still going to remain my favourite Villeneuve movie, but it's great to see it doing well.

I had this plus Ghostbusters and Civil War... so pretty much everything on the IMAX website through the end of June save for Inside Out 2.

You know, maybe Moana 2 being converted from a TV show to a movie isn't so bad after all. It's probably not a bunch of disjoint episodes hastily sewn together seeing as this was originally supposed to be a big budget 6-8 episode serial ala the MCU/Star Wars/Percy Jackson shows. WDAS does major rewrites mere months before release for a lot of their movies anyways, so this isn't entirely out of the ordinary for them, and maybe they already had a plot together and are just trimming down the fat, which is more than what can probably be said about Frozen 2 and Wish nine months out from their releases. We'll see though, this was very much greenlit for money, but a bad Moana 2 would do a lot of damage to the brand (and potentially doom the remake), so if they're pushing this to theatres then surely it's at least a halfway decent movie for general audiences like the Ralph and Frozen sequels. Those were a step (or multiple) below their originals, but they were still received well enough and given the Frozen 2 docuseries, I don't think the issues stemmed from a lack of trying. If Moana 2 is at least on that level, then it'll make a killing at the box office and on streaming.

I think people were speculating Lilo and Stitch for September. That date is still listed as UNTITLED DISNEY MOVIE though.

Wait what? No mention of Auli'i in the article either. I mean surely they'd try to get both of them back though, considering the original film was one of the few WDAS films that was selling the lead actors' names on the poster AND in the trailers. Assuming that falls into place, we'll finally have a new record holder for biggest Thanksgiving opener after Frozen held the crown for 11 years.

I wonder how much the strikes screwed this one over. I have a feeling they realized this still needed more time in the oven considering they were thinking about delaying this, but this was also their 100th anniversary movie and they wanted the movie done in 2023.

Eras is still in 646 theatres and grossed $550k this weekend. A hefty drop, but the PTA is still higher than that of The Marvels which is still playing in over 3,000 theatres.

Around $60M-$65M domestic I think? Theatres are probably going to keep Trolls over this over the holidays, which will probably nullify the lack of a Disney+ penalty that Encanto and Strange World dealt with. This will probably lose theatres pretty quickly too since unlike Encanto or Moana, it's not doing very well relative to the marketplace right now. Weaker WoM will also hurt the drops. At least it's crossing $100M worldwide, but that's not ringing a lot of hope when this is barely going to be over what Raya did DOM in early 2021 as a hybrid release when there were half as many theatres playing the movie.

Just from comping this against a few other Thanksgiving openers, a 61% drop seems like the best case scenario here with a Strange World comp. Coco, Ralph 2, and Encanto comps put this closer to a 64% drop.

Wouldn't be surprised if Wish falls 65% this weekend. 60%+ is basically already locked, but I feel like this is just going to keep trending downwards. On the "bright" side, the multiplier off Wish's 3-day (1.72x) has officially passed that of The Marvels current running total (1.69x).

I think the case could be made for either Ralph 2 or Raya, although I would lean towards Raya. Ralph 2 was the first sign of a demonstrably weaker audience reception and was two full years removed from Moana, but with the Ralph/Frozen sequels they were at least commercially successful and critically both movies had decent enough reception (the Renaissance era wasn't without its critical hiccups either). Raya is actually fairly well received among critics and audiences outside of the internet, but commercially there's an entire pandemic and the Disney+ effect separating it from Frozen 2, and we've had 4 straight movies with less than stellar box office results now.

Most movies usually see single digit percentage changes on the Saturday after Black Friday. If the $7M number is for Wish, then that's actually a pretty similar drop to what Strange World and Encanto had from their Black Fridays, although that's not great because Encanto and Strange World had Universal's Christmas animations stealing some thunder on Saturday. Wish has Trolls, but that would have been siphoning off the entire 5-day total and not just Saturday.

Well I just got back from seeing this, and... eh? The musical numbers are all fine at the very least, but most of them didn't really leave much of an impression. It's sort of like Strange World again, where there's nothing that's overall outrageously bad, but a lot of movie didn't leave me feeling much outside of thinking it was a movie. The characters are nothing special for the most part save for a select few, for better or worse. The animation didn't wow me as much as I expected it to, but I hope they play around with different artstyles more for future WDAS films.

I just put the $4M Thursday number into my tracker for Wish's 5-day against all the big Thanksgiving releases from 2010 onward + Treasure Planet... and YIKES. Most comps are pointing towards a 5-day in the neighbourhood of $35M Penguins of Madagascar and Rise of the Guardians are the highest comps here which at $38.7M and $37.7M respectively. The Muppets falls a bit lower at $32.5M, but its also the only live-action movie in this set The three more recent comps are even worse though. Strange World and Encanto comps point toward a ~$31M 5-day, but the silver lining is that unlike Sing 2 and Puss in Boots 2, Migration doesn't have EA screenings on Saturday AFAIK so the Saturday hold might go a bit better. Wish still has to deal with Trolls eating away at its audience for its entire run though so I don't know how much that will matter. The Croods 2 comp points towards a 5-day below Encanto's 3-day, but I don't think it's a good comp here since it was the only one to increase on Thursday and didn't have any previews to speak of The 3-days are all pretty awful here. It's mostly in the range of $20M-$25M, with Strange World, Encanto, and The Croods 2 comps pointing towards sub-$20M

71% and 3 1/2 stars is a big yikes here. Strange World had 82% and 4 stars. Kinda interesting how it's the inverse of last year. Wish is skewing female but men like it more, whereas Strange World skewed male but had women enjoying it more.

Would continue the tradition of the series coming out on top during both pre-Thanksgiving and Thanksgiving weekends.

I think the biggest losses from pre-pandemic Thanksgivings are felt in the Disney releases and THG. Trolls is doing better than most DWA releases on Thanksgiving because it opened the weekend prior instead of the first weekend of November, and as badly as Napoleon is doing relative to its budget, it's still a fair bit better than most live-action films that do open on Thanksgiving. From there, THG's numbers are solid enough on its own but nominally its well behind the Twilight and THG films of the 2010s, and it still paces behind the first Fantastic Beasts and Justice League. But both big Disney movies bombing are really putting a sting on the Thanksgiving numbers. The Marvels is practically abandoned compared to the other November MCU releases, and Wish is struggling to hit $40M, which is a far cry compared to when Disney's animated movies were doing $70M+ at their lowest during the late 2010s.

That's like, really bad right? I don't expect this to hold nearly as well as Encanto's pure Wed-Thu drop, so say Thursday drops to like $4.5M (-25% from pure Wed - Strange World was -26% from pure Wed), then we're potentially looking at sub-$40M for the 5-day... which with this kind of reception, would probably throw $100M DOM out the window.

Just comping Wish against past Disney Thanksgiving openers. Including EA and full previews as separate calculations: Frozen ($1,200,000, 78.0): $179,381,575, $140,885,581 w/o EA The Good Dinosaur ($1,300,000, 42.7): $98,113,908, $77,284,797 Moana ($2,600,000, 31.6): $72,609,473, $57,324,805 Coco ($2,300,000, 31.7): $72,908,930, $57,559,163 Ralph Breaks the Internet ($3,800,000, 22.3): $51,296,298, $40,644,929 Encanto ($1,500,000, 27.0): $62,203,152, $49,180,728 Strange World ($800,000, 23.6): $54,208,574, $42,924,101 I get a feeling Wish is going to be on the lower end here.

I think Illumination is just aware that even with their marketing machine, they're going to have a harder time selling this movie to the masses on its own. This is Illumination's first original movie in 7 years, and it's coming at a time when people are less willing to shell out money to see an original movie, even with an existing brand name attached to it. There isn't a load of slapstick pet comedy or an in movie contemporary song for kids to sing along to, so the odds are somewhat stacked against it. Attaching Mooned seems like less of a quality concern and more of a means to get more people to buy tickets for the movie, which is totally reasonable. Disney did it with Elemental and Coco to... results, but I don't really think this a bad omen for Migration, at least in terms of quality. Plus, it has the holidays to leg it out. Trolls and Wish are going to be pushed out in favour of this, and I think this is going to be the best reviewed mainstream animated movie of Q4 (even if that's not a high bar to clear).

Yeah, Letterboxd is just sort of weird in general and I don't think it really means much unless a movie gets below 3 or above 4. Just going back to the Revival Era until Raya we have: The Princess and the Frog: 3.8 Tangled: 3.9 Winnie the Pooh: 3.6 Wreck-It Ralph: 3.6 Frozen: 3.3 Big Hero 6: 3.8 Zootopia: 3.7 Moana: 3.7 Ralph Breaks the Internet: 2.9 Frozen II: 3.1 Raya and the Last Dragon: 3.3

Also me seeing Wish's Metascore being the same as Home on the Range and only being above Chicken Little and Brother Bear. I haven't seen two of those though. At the same time though, Elemental is only above Cars 2 over at Pixarland and I still like that movie more than a good third of Pixar's library. Also been meaning to change the dp for a while now, but I guess I'll keep it for a bit longer. Maybe once Inside Out 2 comes out.

This is actually a pretty late review embargo for WDAS standards. Most other WDAS films get at least a week before opening day. Wish got 5 days, which isn't too bad on its own, except for the fact that the embargo lifted only a day before the early access screenings.

In other news, Wish has officially gone rotten. Down to 58% right now with 53 reviews and a 6.2 average.