Cooper Legion

I think it's notable that the Cruella trailer was 5.28.21 and the Luca trailer was "summer." I think Cruella is sticking pretty much come hell or high water, but BW, Luca, Shang-Chi, Jungle Cruise are all subject to one last round of shuffling as the situation demands.

Sending any more movies than absolutely necessary to PA would be insanity after Raya. People (domestically) will be comfortable going back by May and this entire “Disney ‘forcing’ people back to theaters” talking point will disappear.

DOM and Asia will be good to go for May, Latin America might still be struggling in July. The decisive factor is how they feel comfortable handling Europe, which unfortunately is now looking like it won’t really spin back up until June/July. Although it would kill my club, and miss May Day holidays, I think the wisest move at this point is to June, with the possibility of slightly delayed release in European countries as need be. Probably the June 11 spot Peter Rabbit just vacated, gets you Dragon Boat Festival in China. Then Luca to the July 2 spot Minions just vacated and Shang-Chi to Aug (Aug 6 imo and just bully TSS somewhere else, but there are more diplomatic options later in the month).

Well, fair enough then. That’s very consistent

I mean... theaters are corporations too? It’s largely a corporation vs corporation fight. Seems pretty reasonable for consumers to express a preference for the model they prefer. I agree that sometimes the tone gets a little eyebrow raising, but that’s also true in the other direction. 👀

Yeah, also feel like we already went over this with Mulan. The $30 price tag just isn’t made with individuals in mind, and it’s pretty brutal for them, but that’s just how it will be. If you price such that it’s attractive to a viewing party of one, it’s a total steal for the real target audience of households size 3-6 or whatever. An equilibrium where poeple pay $10 at a theater to see it solo and a family pays $30 instead of $40 on D+ is fine for Disney. An equilibrium where the solo is paying 15 for at-home convenience and the family is paying 15 instead of 40 is leaving a lot of money on the table. I personally think they should have experimented with 25 though.

The subscriber numbers are an important part of the different tone. A larger base for the service takes a larger bite out of a hybrid release. But even still this is pretty bad and I haven’t seen many people say otherwise so I’m not really sure what the “whaa, Disney favoritism” brigade is on about to begin with.

$20M is possible already this weekend. So is 25. Not sure if much higher yet. The central awkward dynamic is you can’t really test the market without marquee content but it doesn’t make sense to release marquee content in the current market. Market capacity will grow a lot this month but we don’t have any releases that will be illuminating until GvK or maaaaaaaybe Nobody.

Yeah this is pretty key. This thing is failing even in markets that are banging. The 8-9M is a bummer for the movie but not really an indictment of the broader market recovery. If T&J opened this weekend with no competition it might well have beaten WW84 (much to my surprise, I really didn’t think T&J had much brand value but seems it did).

It was pretty solid, though a bit hard to disentangle from Xmas. But it was probably 1B potential if released like, this August. For it to work out sending a huge movie to D+ for free you really need a lot of people to sub who weren’t going to otherwise, and then stay subbed for a long time. I think they’ll be happier with Soul than Mulan or Raya, and as a “let’s just try to keep parents happy with some animated content and not get too blocked up on delayed films” move it worked pretty well. But it was also inherently less of a real experiment than the PA stuff, nobody was thinking “maybe the future of Disney is to send Luca, Encanto, Lightyear, etc all to D+ free as a pure sub play.”

Disney has been experimenting, and though we can’t say for sure without internal metrics I feel all 3 experiments basically failed — Mulan as exclusive PA didn’t seem to do that much business, might have been better to delay and theatrical Soul did really good BO business considering, but didn’t see much sub bump and D+ has plenty of original content coming in 2021 anyway, not a drought like 2020. Probably would have been better delayed and theatrical (or even PA, lol) Raya seems to be doing poorly. Probably would have been better delayed and theatrical Seems like there’s a pretty clear signal here about how to proceed, especially as virus will be basically done domestically by May or June at latest and Europe not lagging that much behind.

From deadline This was actually super reasonable. Disney wasn’t trying to squeeze anybody with terms like that, it’s more generous than pre-pandemic terms. Seems the theater hissy fit was more over the 0-day window at all than the rental terms per se.

The biggest and 3rd biggest Japanese chains declined to play it, huge impact in that market at least. Afaik it’s not a problem in China or SK though.

Just including Marvel Studios productions is a pretty clear dividing line. Wandavision is basically on a tier with the movies. All the previous shows probably aren’t even canon.

Just to add to that, WV’s actual runtime (minus credits, previously on, marvel intros, etc) is just 270 minutes. You wouldn’t have to trim that much for a 150 minute movie or something. The sitcom through the decades stuff was a kind of fun and out there framing device but I don’t know that it was really necessary for the core story here.

Having seen the whole thing I would have preferred a movie, I think. Not completely sure. But we aren’t getting 12 movies/yr, so some things are just gonna have to be executed as shows.

Yeah I agree, this was actually my main complaint about it.

The PA money is a big unknown, but I’m skeptical of it doing super well. Just seems like an all around misfire, unfortunately. 0-day hybrid PA looking pretty dead I think. Am rather curious on legs, wouldn’t be shocked for this to get to 50ish. Could even end up as top 3 DOM of pandemic movies (released so far) behind Tenet and Croods, depending on T&J’s legs as well. But definitely not the result I, or Disney, or many folks, were hoping for. Most eyes now turn to GvK but I think nobody could also surprise to the upside.

Ah, must be that time of thread again: https://boxd.it/1KoZu

The moral of the story is more people should title their movies “Franchise: Infinity Noun”

Indeed, not trying to imply otherwise.

Starting to feel like a lot of people went into this MCU project expecting it to be... not MCU, for some reason? The lame MCU tropes built a 23B franchise, like em or dislike em they’re probably not going anywhere.

Yeah any kind of “Disney deliberately tried to make Raya less successful because XYZ” is just frankly insane conspiracy nonsense. I don’t think there’s any need to mince words with such stupidity. It does seem like trying to get usual theater terms with a 0-day window is working out very very poorly for them, and they might have also botched marketing (I don’t actually know, I doubt I would see that much even if they did it great). Raya basically feels like it was sacrificed to find out that 0-day hybrid PA is not a great plan. Had to find that out eventually using a movie of at least roughly comparable scale. If reception is good (and seems to be) then maybe we get some D+ show about it and if that does well maybe a sequel someday. It’s not like the financial issues stemming from the weird situation will lead to Disney blackballing the IP.

I agree. I would consider that high end mixed. Apologies for any confusion.