Ipickthiswhiterose

Perhaps. It has a couple of weeks' extra difference but the timing is reasonably similar. However Antman and the Wasp also suffered from a horrible staggered international release due to the World Cup and featured a less prominent character. These bit worldwide launches are massive marketing boosts. Also, it wasn't placed in between two parts of an ongoing story.

Kevin Feige is still only 45. He's the architect of all this, movie-wise. He seems to have no intention of stopping. I'm very excited about the oncoming start of the next chapter.

Continues to confirm that Captain Marvel may have had one of the best release dates in history, Continues to suggest that Disney completely hashed the release date of AntMan & The Wasp. The two months later element was bad enough, but the staggered World Cup release now surely has to be acknowledged as a terrible call. Thanksgiving or Christmas release and surely it could have had a slice of this pie.

Hi there, and welcome. Just to clear up a couple of things: - I wasn't criticising the character elements in IW. But as you yourself state, only one character actually has a completed self-contained arc in that movie. Thanos. That is a significant contrast - by design - from Endgame. - The two movies have different rationales. I was not proffering that one was specifically better than the other. I was giving a reading as to why, given what to most would be a self-evident rough similarity in objective quality of the two movies, some people seem to significantly prefer one to another.

At some point is there any point in a debate or conversation regarding.... MCU 2019 > Star Wars Adjusted MCU 2019 > Gone With the Wind Adjusted For reference MCU 2018 was at $1.604b compared to Star Wars' $1.608b and GWTW $1.827b. That was of course with the juggernauts of both Black Panther and IW, but with the limited success of AM&TW. Is that a conversation and comparison worth having?

My apologies if it came across as me criticising IW or implying the character work in it wasn't strong. I enjoy both movies very much and myself wouldn't want to venture after only one viewing of Endgame which was stronger. It just seems based on my experiences that those who prefer one to the other *by a significant distance* seem to have those tendencies.

I'm gathering that the "Not as good as Infinity War" folks generally prefer narrative and pacing to character work. If you prefer character work to narrative and pacing then Endgame will come off as better for you. These are generalisations of course, but they seem to be the pattern. I suspect you have little to worry about so long as you like getting invested in characters.

Preston heaving all day. Both major cinemas. Midnight showing last night was literally full every screen.

I loved the movie yesterday. A really wonderful finish to the current chapter. My dearest regards to North Americans going to their screenings this evening! Hope you all have great experiences. See you on the spoiler side.

Yeah it's a weird phenomenon we have over here. It seems we have pretty much the same proportion of core MCU/genre film fans but there is much less of a spill over into the ones who aren't in that category. At least compared to North America, I think things may be the same somewhat in Western and Central mainland Europe. It seems to happen for Bond, and HP on it's better days - perhaps there because of the sense of British properties. When I went shopping in 1997 I knew that the 60 year old lady who served me in the bakery had watched Titanic. I knew that the stereotypical working class guys opposite waiting for butties had watched it. I knew the single-mums and children had watched it. It was all-encompassing. Here those in the demographic for it are as avid as anywhere else and would maybe watch it more times, but those other folks just mostly wouldn't have Avengers on their radar, or at least no plan to watch it. Nor would the art house types, who seem in the states to go to mainstream films as well.

State of the UK and the exchange rate right now, $120m seems close to the top. Would love to be proven wrong. Will certainly have a truly massive weekend showing, but not sure the cultural impact is quite there among the non-standard fans and average-Joe's to the extent of a Titanic or even a HP compared to other countries. I very much may be wrong, I'm the person who completely missed Avatar at the time and as far as I knew thought it hadn't done particularly well.

Ah well. Just goes to show how wrong one can be.

Makes sense that Breakthrough should have had a good Easter Sunday that was above estimates. Nice showing, should presumably fall off fairly soon now, though. Captain Marvel did it! Seriously impressive, just a short while ago it seemed like the 400m was going to come from the Endgame slipstream after release. After Disney's arguable foibles in their release date selection in the whole second half of last year this has turned out to be a truly supreme piece of timing. Pet Sematary increases from estimates and horror continues to make bank in an otherwise difficult market. I still have no idea why Under the Silver Lake has had the release structure it has.

I am pretty heavily ensconced in the horror community in the UK and I don't know anyone remotely interested in La Llorona from within that group - the only CU film that gets any rep over here is Annabelle: Conjuring. From what I can tell outside of a handful of genuine rabid fans it's the same in the US as well. Which isn't meant to be a diss. What I'm really saying is that it's a pretty remarkable testament of the Conjuring Universe formula that it manages to hit these injections into the wider non-horror audience that just completely bypasses aficionados of the genre. There is clearly a specific fan base for these movies and they reliably show up and keep getting delivered what they want. The cinemascore is a testament to that. Far above vastly, vastly superior recent horror movies. There's maybe an art in refusing to play with conventions and tropes and just working within the parameters of hitting the ball down the middle of the fairway.

It's becoming clearer with drops stabilising and good performances in Western Europe that Dumbo only needed the vague semblance of a sensible budget for it only to have had a mild/okay return as opposed to a complete disaster.

As some have already said here, In The Heights doesn't come across as especially cinematic to me, it feels really important that there is an intimate and somewhat interactive relationship between Usnavi and the audience. Great direction will be able to get round that, but recent experience is that very few directors still working understand musical theatre - heck the movie that possibly understands MT the most is Mamma Mia - and there hasn't been a truly good movie musical adaptation since, what, Reefer Madness? That said, some of the set pieces like Blackout might legit work on film, and the source material is strong.

We should absolutely go back to the era of comic book movies that had absolutely no politics whatsoever. Like Watchmen, that has no politics in it at all. Or even better, go back to a time when celebrities kept out of anything to do with politics. You wouldn't find the likes of Charlton Heston, Jane Fonda, Doris Day or Gene Kelly making political statements or supporting activist groups.

Film about the fact people are defined by multiple identities by the different people in their lives, and realising that being the best person you can be - "a hero" - means being the person that the soul opposite needs you to be at that particular moment = SJW movie. But..... Film about a person finding a family, only to realise that the term "family" is a relative, fluid word that can't be perceived with a literal biological meaning and "family" actually includes lots of people from different walks of life, perhaps maybe a range of races and a gay person and parents with no biological connection to the children = not an SJW movie, apparently. I really don't know what to be more annoyed about by the fauxjectivist types these days, their obnoxious politics or just their abysmal incompetence at analysis.

The exchange rate in the last 10-15 years has been so turbulent that it is REALLY hard to track relative successes of UK movies, so what seem like low rankings against films from 7-15 years ago are actually pretty decent relatively. Captain Marvel's current $42.7m in 2019 is from around £32.75m (as of the end of last weekend). EDIT: $45.3m from £34.6m Hancock made $49.17m in 2008 from what would have been around £25m

I suppose it depends how one does it. But really, I'm not sure that this twitter user is legitimately trying to make a point so much as is aiming for a response or attention, which is deeply unfortunate for the majority of people aiming to improve representation. Of course, it is this individual - who possibly doesn't even believe in her point herself because it is just so self evidently nonsensical - that the reactive sites on the other side will cherry pick and discuss, and round and round we go. In other news I loved Shazam and hope it plays long. Just seems like its exposure is different in different areas both nationally and internationally. Pet Sematary and Shazam are perhaps two of the best suited movies opening in the same week that make for an ideal double bill in a long time. Offset each other really nicely. Not only did my friend and I do this myself, but anecdotally I've heard it a lot.

As I've already written today referring to Pet Sematary, there has been a problem for a long time with horror that if one doesn't like a movie purely on its subjective qualities - which many people try to suppress anyway - that it is easy to dismiss as trash. And rather than fighting against these tendencies self-proclaimed horror fans all too often actually exacerbate the problem. So we've now found ourselves in a situation that in order to be received really positively a horror movie has to either straddle another genre (To whit: A Quiet Place straddling family drama, IT straddling the nostalgia factor, and countless films like Silence of the Lambs/Sixth Sense/Signs straddling thriller) or play the pure jump scare factory game (The Conjuring, Don't Breathe, Lights Out, Insidious, Paranormal Activity) So when dealing with horror movies that actually try to do something with the genre it gets even worse. Hereditary, The Witch, Neon Demon all are films that *should* be rampantly supported even by horror fans who don't subjectively go for them because they all have interesting rationales, are well executed and are doing something with the genre - but all of those movies have huge numbers of detractors within the horror community when they're a hard enough sell to the mainstream audience in the first place. But seemingly at least half of horror fandom sees something they don't go for and rather than evaluating it outside of whether they specifically like it simply dismiss it as trash. Us has found itself in a really odd position, because as a stye of film it is far more of the Hereditary, Witch style (although not as good as either, mostly for the simple reason of the plot falling apart in the third act) auteur movie than the straddle-mainstream movies. Get Out was a straddle-mainstream movie, and in my opinion was so not just because of the sociological and demographic aspects but more so because it played as a well crafted mystery drama/thriller more than it played as an actual horror movie. Us, for anything else about it, IS 100% a horror movie. From start to finish. I get your point about it *seeming* four quadrant, because the Peele fandom created that monster, but it created it with a movie that was different and far more mainstream in its style than Us is. So, essentially, I think it is a unique box office creature that is by its nature going to be an anomaly one way or another. It is the least mainstream movie to have opened to this kind of figure for a very, very long time and has only done so because of a rather unique set of circumstances.

Right so.....not much precedent then given that Get Out is also by Peele and was not initially launched as a mainstream film, and anything that debuted under 30m is clearly not comparable. I mean, nobody is arguing the case that Us has specifically good word of mouth - it doesn't as I've already said on this thread - but we're in pretty rare territory here in that there's not much precedent in the first place in original horrors opening with the kind of figure Us did, least of all ones that are of an auteur/conceptual nature. AQP - due to its structure and the fact it's just as readable as a survival movie with family drama as a horror film and The Conjuring - due to its jump-scare nature are themselves fairly awkward equivalents. The biggest equivalent is early M Night, and yes I suspect in time Peele is setting himself up for a similar trajectory including potential falloff: except Peele clearly has far more pure filmaking tendencies that override story and nobody is likely to start throwing 50, 60, 70m at Peele to make whatever he wants as started happening to M Night.

I mean, how many acclaimed, original, mainstream horror movies even are there? Outside of Peele, I mean, we're talking what? Sixth Sense? Signs? Anything in the last 10 years other than AQP?

While I think that Us may have been slightly impacted by the increasing percentage of casual observers being frustrated with the last act I do think that it's far more that really this is just a case of burning through the market quickly, and that it's not a film to necessarily watch multiple times. Hotel Mumbai has done pretty decently for a movie that's not really timed well and has limited pull.

I thought it was a really interesting film to think about in terms of the craft of adaptation. Firstly I thought the acting was really strong and the atmosphere in the first and last acts extremely enjoyable and there were a couple of decent set pieces in between. However, I think the underlying issue is that there's about 1.5 movies worth of material in the source text and they try to fit everything in. Because of this they really undercut the really important thematic elements such that the decisions of the main character just seem too stupid That said, the polarising nature of the reception for what is essentially something that should be easy to agree upon as simply an "okay" movie proves once again why horror fans are their own worst enemy. They can't call a movie that had objective mixed qualities but that they didn't necessarily go for themselves a 'decent' movie or 'not for me' but have to slate it and they defend to an outrageous degree movies that aren't particularly good but that do it for them. Heck above we even have a self-professed horror fan trumpet Hereditary as a "D+" movie, which even if one didn't like it oneself is frankly beyond preposterous.