Legion Again

What a missed opportunity by Disney! Should have released this two weekends ago before the piracy, could have done soooooo much better. This reception would be enough to hit 1B in normal times imo.

Audience scores are still pretty small, but all audience is getting around 1000. Very similar to BoP so far.

Audience score starts at 80%

Looks like Xmas comes in strong (relatively) with 100k. Just 13k CGV PS for Sat, gonna aim at 64k. 330k for 5-day still looking good.

Deja vu. Very curious about how RT aud will go, as well as letterboxd and IMDb when the sample size improves. Starting to feel more and more like @ViewerAnon was not as off as people hoped. But, still hasn’t debuted to public in its most important by far market, so we’ll see what we see when we see it.

I wish we had enough presales going on for the (useful, largely quantitative) presales discussions to dominate the (largely useless and opinion-based) review discussion. Still mourning Pulse and akvalley. But in like 24 hours it should all get washed away by the “I saw it and here's what I think” stuff and the “wow, Deadline’s (super reliable) midday OD projection would be [great/Terrible].”

There's something to be said for critiquing films with a bias. Like I said earlier, that’s basically always happened, and is unavoidable since every human’s got their own personal bundle of background and beliefs informing how they look at stuff. Diversity of frameworks is good. But if the bias totally dominates the actual material of the film rather than interacting with it, I don’t really see how that’s valuable to anybody. Like conceivably some blogger could have a bit where their review of every single film was either “passes the Bechdel test, positive.” or “doesn’t pass the Bechdel test, negative.” Maybe they think the Bechdel test is super important, but they wouldn’t really be adding any value because those “reviews.” would be discarding essentially all information about the films in question. Obviously above is a reductio ad absurdum — I haven’t seen anything quite that silly in real life. And this is more of a problem, afaics, from bigots on the right than zealots on the left. But regardless of the direction, I feel like I see more “Bias instead of a review” rather than “bias informing a review.” than I used to, and it’s a bit of a bummer. But also, averages solve a lot. I’m not bemoaning the review industry as hopelessly flawed or anything.

I wouldn’t say “people,” as in plural, this was just one review I saw that stuck in my mind for that reason but is clearly an outlier.

Like, to be clear, I probably would have approved if they casted a nonwhite actress for Cheetah. I would certainly prefer some kind of queer romantic storyline for Diana than “Steve, who died movingly 70 years ago, but is back now... kinda.” I think these and the larger industry trends they’re apart of are fine things to mention in a review, and critique, and contribute to someone’s evaluation of it. But I think if that specific complaint takes up too large a % of your final score, you’re entering nonsense territory.

Well, one part of me thinks it’s better to just not respond to this at all. But, I also don’t want to not respond to something I disagree with just because it contained “as a Mod™️,” so I hope we can have some reasonable discussion on this topic without things getter out of hand. I thought the crazy right wing review posted some pages ago which judged the movie on the writer’s preexisting political axes to grind without really treating it as a movie was bad, and I hope it should be pretty uncontroversial that it’s possible to do it the same disservice coming from the other extreme instead. Racial representation is important, sure. So is lgbtqia+ representation. I haven’t seen the movie yet myself, so I can’t comment on how it handled either of those directly. But to base one’s review of a 150 minute experience largely around it not having as many queer or minority woman as you wanted is not an effective way to either advance those causes within the industry or to help educate someone who stumbled across your review when searching for “WW84 reviews” about what they can expect from the movie.

Mmm, shouldn't have changed to 40 from the 41 I initially wrote. Fri CGV PS are pretty strong at 25k. I forgot Xmas is actually much more relevant in SK than neighboring Japan. Today might go for around 88k but more volatility there than a usual day 3.

Lol, completely forgot that was even coming out here this weekend, Let’s take a look. PS ¥1M ballpark between locals, same day piracy, and I assume little marketing looks like it will make pennies here unless it’s a Coco/Zootopia/Croods 1 kind of run (doubt strongly).

Occupancy under 6% for over 60% real drop 👀 Maybe it will crack 10% occupancy tomorrow for first time on 3.5k screens. Maybe not 😆

I saw a *negative* review of WW84 on RT because its feminism was too white and not racially representative or lgbtqqipaa+ enough or some nonsense like that. Some people nowadays review films from lenses that I personally find just bizarre and totally removed from quality... but, y’know, that has always been the case. Critics were out here in 1990, and 1960, and 1930, applying their own personal biases and social mores of the time to the perspective through which they experienced film. That’s why using your own opinion is a better way to find out whether a movie works for you than any review aggregator — and still, miraculously, there is a decent correlation between reviews and aggregate audience rating. “Just throw it in the average,” as they say.

So the 9.4 Maoyan is real then? I was thinking it didn’t looks super impressive in PS/OD, but with reception like that it will be nice to see how it evolves over the next week.

I know it’s not healthy to pay much attention to individual reviews, but we’re so starved for BO content, I appear to be getting sucked down this rabbit hole. These have got to be the two funniest positive reviews: I’m sure you could find similar examples of very unenthusiastic but not quite marked negative reviews for every film, I just think it’s funny. Exposes some of the (well-known) weakness in RT’s binary system.

I also got the impression from skimming that there were a lot of reviews that sounded... not positive, but the reviewer ended up marking it positive. Oftentimes with pablum about how “it’s message of hope is just what theaters and broader society need at the end of such an awful year.” I suspect that it might be a double digit % lower if it was simply released as normal in June in a non-covid world. But — we will never know. And it doesn’t really matter either. AT&T strangled this thing’s box office potential in the crib, and everyone will be able to make their own judgement about how it lined up with their personal tastes in a day anyway.

It was set up by SMH very clearly. Don’t need to see all the mundane stuff happening between movies. Better not too tbh.

In RMB it’s gonna be like -40% TLJ, +10% TROS. In its own special way this is one of the most interesting single market runs of the year.

At least Falcon, Fury, Rhodey are going to be leads soon. Kamala and Riri too.

Probably a bad PSA on 24th will lead to more screen loss when Dream of Eternity opens on 25th. Not sure about hitting 1.3x

That would explain a drop, sure. But history says it’s quite unlikely. Also this doesn’t prevent it from getting the FLOP label, just explain why. We don’t know for sure, but seemingly not that much domestically, it was like 8/7th Homecoming admits. Actually the question is how much interest is there in the MCU in Dec 2021 compared to 2019. We don’t know, but no particular reason to assume it will be lower. This is the one possibility that would fully excuse 350 (or even lower). If it’s evident in July-Nov or so that audience habits have permanently changed from covid, all expectations will have to be totally recalibrated and even like 200M could be considered a gangbusters performance in the new paradigm. Hopefully this won’t be the case.

Trust in Feige. This will be the 2nd entry in the “multiverse trilogy,” with DS2 coming 3 months later will already have some marketing. It’s not going to be some Sony-style crammed mess, there is a specific plan here even if we don’t know it just from casting scraps. Also FFH had a huge cliffhanger to be a hook to this movie, neither SMH nor AEG really had a cliffhanger to set up FFH.

If it does less admits than FFH with the Xmas corridor nearly all to itself there will be no word but FLOP