REC

I'm pulling for this one. There's an interesting (if not spotty legacy) in the invisible man category... Hollow Man, The Invisible Man (Chevy Chase). The concept gets rebooted into something else every 15 years or so and veers from comedy/scifi to horror/scifi/drama to adventure/action/comedy and now this. In the past these movies have done innovative things with visual effects at the time... usually the fx of subtraction and compositing. But a pure horror/thriller in this category sounds smart. I'll admit though the marketing has so far confused me. I thought I was looking at a domestic abuse drama but by the end of the trailer I'm told its something more like scifi/thriller/horror. That makes me a little worried they're having a hard time figuring out how to market it.

I've pretty consistently thought that ep9 was going to massively underperform and do about 950m WW. Guess it's going to beat my expectations by just a bit.

And IMDb gives it a 6.9/10, which matches my expectation that a fair score is mid 60s.

Is it possible that the RT audience score just isn’t all that trustworthy, or a very good representative sample of what people actually think? The all audiences score is more like 78, and the top critics is more like 49. Personally I think the true value is closer to the average of these numbers. I’m more in line with top critics, but I would concede some people will think “that movie was a pretty-OK movie” meaning the truth is probably closer to mid-60s.

TROS dom under F2 dom

I'm wondering how TROS compares to other extremely frontloaded movies with no legs. I have a feeling this is going to fall off a cliff completely, and the vast majority of its theatrical earnings are already earned. Of course since it made 720m or whatever and assuming it can squeek out 1.1bn, the above statement would be true. But I still think the underperformance will be strong with this one, shocking most all of us. I'm still going to be surprised if it goes over 1bn.

Are you saying it's not dropping off a cliff?

Only 94m in the 2nd weekend internationally? That sounds horrible for legs. I mean what, next weekend internationally will be sub-40m? How in the world does this make it past 1b WW?

It really will be the justice league of Star Wars movies. A collapse for sure. The reasons for the collapse are debatable, but a collapse nonetheless.

I don't think this is a very convincing sample size yet. TLJ has over 200k user scores, and I think there's a chance that 11k reviews from 'verified audiences' is largely of Thurs night diehards and is self-selecting. I'd like to see at least 100k users before we have some kind of representative consensus.

They're not afraid of puns. MC seemed like they were also in a really salty mood:

I'll be surprised if it has a good total.

I'm skeptical of all the numbers, we're dealing with projections still. Of course I shouldn't be surprised if it does have a successful OW, but conversely I don't think anyone pulling for this movie to succeed should be surprised if it collapses bizarrely. I'm dying to know how this sorts out. Also there's already conspiracies forming among the detractors of this movie that the RT audience score is being flooded with bots and fake accounts to boost it up. There's no way I know to prove or disprove thinking like this, but if it holds higher than the critic score I think that will be a suspicion going forward in that community. All this crap with RT critic and audience scores seems to cut both ways... if it doesn't fit your particular belief then it must be fake somehow. I bristle every time someone claims a negative audience score must be getting review bombed somehow, these accusations are out of control. It's really too bad this is as good as our critiquing system gets, that we can't even get a consensus around the consensus.

How does Solo fit into the theory of too big to fail? Not a snark, honestly curious. We've heard this before... its too big to fail. The fans always show up. Etc etc. They said that about Solo, and then it didn't happen. Seems like too big to fail is true until it isn't.

I think a lot of people are going to be shocked... nay perplexed at the peculiar Justice League-style numbers Ep9 gets.

I'm guessing there will be strong overperformance on Jumanji 2 and surprising underperformance on ep9. Could be heading towards another Justice League type of result.

I don't know why anyone at the studio thought this movie could succeed. When the last 3 Terminator movies are all various degrees of either objectively bad or just disappointing for fans, what would make anyone think that a 4th stab at some kind of T2 sequel could work? I expected it to be a critical failure. Didn't really expect it to financially bomb this hard (I figured maybe break even with a strong marketing push), but I guess looking at the final trailers and general marketing it makes sense. The signature scene shows them fighting in the desert on a bridge... this has 2 problems: It doesn't show us anything new, and it looks somewhat cheap. I don't understand how this marketing was meant to get people into the theater. And if you're wondering how a 70% on RT proves that it's bad, look at the actual critic average. The actual critic average is 6.21/10, not the RT weighted-up 7/10. 62% is mediocre. Among top critics, which I think is more reliable anyway, the movie is 55%. The movie needed to add about 30 points to their critic score to have a chance here.

Shazam does about as well as Ant-man. Audiences seem to regard superhero comedies about the same.

When it's not a kids film and its a cartoon, then it's a family movie unless its specifically adult. Is 'hybrid' movie even a thing? How many other hybrid animation films are there? It seems to me there's no real market for Pika. The movie is a novelty. It didn't seem to substantially attract the 85m pokemon go players. I saw it, and I can't figure out who this movie was really for. Ryan Reynolds is miscast. The whole thing screams "this is a one-off and we won't be back again". So I'm not sure what the reasoning or logic was behind this movie, unless its target is asia and I'm not meant to get it.

So basically endgame is right on schedule to either maybe possibly or maybe possibly not taking that WW title. Maybe maybe. Pika Pika.

I’m truly impressed by how endgame is shaping out. We have never seen anything like this before. Did anyone seriously expect it to be the number 2 grossing movie of all time by the second weekend before it released? All bets are off with future MCU movies as well. Yeah this is a culmination of films and characters, but they’ve also mainstreamed nerd and comic culture in a way that hasn’t been done before, creating a large mainstream audience. GOTG 3 could have insane numbers that defy expectations set by the first two movies.

I can't imagine anyone complaining about these numbers though. It's already outpacing Thor 3 by a good amount. For whatever its worth, I thought CM was pretty ok-to-good. It's in my head in the same space as Dr Strange. It's not offensive to me in any way, it's not great either. It showed me just enough that was new or interesting and didn't deviate too far from what's expected of the MCU. It was fine. 😎

I'm stunned right now. Apparently he's still on to do Suicide Squad reboot first, then Guardians 3. This whole escapade didn't kill him, it made him more powerful.

Scrulls through several pages just to learn that Deadline transposed 2 numbers accidentally. Well, lesson learned here. 🤣

There's absolutely a contingent of youtube opinionmakers who desperately want to hate this movie. Even though it will clearly make money and be successful, for various agenda reasons they will find reasons to drum up hate against it. I've already heard conspiracy theories that Disney is cooking the books on this one, that the earnings can't be really real. Or how the short legs in China means something other than, well, China. I think there's times when grievances against a movie's sins are legitimate and other times when they are not. This is definitely not one of those times. Brie Larson's words have been weaponized and taken out of context to serve the agendas of others. I dunno. Everyone is trying to cash in on the game. Youtubers have audiences and want to drive views, make money off of any perceived slight. There's inexplicable resentment that a big company with a big money investment in a film would do a big marketing push. People want to seem to find reasons to feel wronged.