Menor the Destroyer

Crouching Tiger did very well in the US.

Oh yeah if he gets a serve he will be top 10. I was shocked to see someone who was able to outgrind Novak in long rallies like that. More impressed with him than when I saw Korda at Wimbledon. On the bolded, I actually don't think I agree. There have been quite a few players who have given Djokovic a tough first couple of sets before he pulls away (Nadal in the first 3 sets at FO, Berrettini in the final 2 at FO, Shapo at Wimbledon, there were several at the AO, though I wasn't able to watch those to see if they were as close as the scoreline seemed). Musetti actually played very similar to this (though his playstyle was very different ofc) where he played lights out the first two sets and then fell apart physically. The difference, for me, is more in the way he plays. He plays very high percentage tennis and is able to win an impressive amount of points without having to rely on massive weapons. The others (Rafa excepted but that is an unfair comparison) mostly relied on redlining which is not sustainable. He has really strong fundamentals.

I started watching during that game. Really good stuff but Brooksby will not be going deep in slams with that serve. He hits great groundstrokes and moves really well but having to fight for every single service game eventually broke him physically. Djokovic-Berrettini will be a fun QF though but I don't think Berrettini has a varied enough game to win it. Zverev and Medvedev (if they make it that far) will be the big tests for Novak. Those should be some really good matches.

I don't think 2 movies doing 1 billion OS qualifies as consistency. F6 did around 550 OS in the same year that Iron Man 3 did 800. F9 in normalcy may have done around 700 OS which has been done by MCU movies like FFH, CM.

There is a good distribution of Indian films in the US. With the Chinese-American population being bigger, it's definitely odd we don't have as good of one for Chinese-language films.

I don't know where people are getting this idea that F9 would hit 1B OS without the pandemic. China didn't have any pandemic restrictions when it opened and it dropped almost 200 million compared to F8, which itself barely broke 1B OS. Also are IW and Endgame not MCU films? Why should they be ignored here?

Paul Walker's death absolutely brought a lot of attention to the Fast franchise. F7 had a massive surge from 6. F8 retained some of that hype but the franchise has gone into decline (F9, in markets where things were mostly normal at the time like USA and China, did very similar to the spinoff H&S). I think F10/11 (don't know exactly what the plan is) will get an ending bump but I don't think it will be enough to return to the highs of F7. Especially since F9 had pretty meh WOM in many markets.

You're comparing the biggest Furious entry to the 3rd-biggest MCU entry. Obviously it will look worse. F7 should be compared to Endgame and F8 to IW since those are the 2 biggest of the respective franchises. We had a "solo entry" of the Fast franchise in H&S, that did 585M international. Obviously a very good gross but several MCU solos have beaten that.

MCU is much bigger. Yeah Fast films will beat some of the solo films but they won't be coming close to Avengers movies now that the franchise has come back to earth in China. Solid #2 for now, let's see how JW Dominion does to be sure of it though. Also I would say 1 billion overseas would be incredibly unlikely even in normalcy considering it dropped big time in China and F8 did just above 1b. USA gross, though higher than many of us expected, was still well down from F8 -- and it opened at the best point for Covid cases.

V2 should not be compared to TSS. It will be way stronger OS.

This for sure. We needed a moment of true reconciliation for both his arc and Shang-Chi's. Him giving up the rings was an attempt at that but was too short. There needed to be some actual words (just a few).

Yeah, I agree with that. V2 has much more going for it than TSS, which is why I'm predicting a stable gross domestically (OS will probably drop of course, but no movie can do much about that). And of course it will be theatrical exclusive. But I don't think V2 destroying TSS's gross will have much to do with reception per se, more to do with these other factors.

Actually I'm not sure the difference between Venom and Suicide Squad's reception is as big as people think. Both had ok multipliers (TSS multi was not that good but we have seen a lot worse, and it opened much higher than Venom), identical Cinemascores, and Venom's PostTrak scores (as reported by Deadline) were somewhat higher but not overwhelmingly so.

No way was Venom's reception on the same level as JW. JW was a legit hit with audiences. It had a great multi even off a massive OW, with an A Cinemascore and 4.5 stars on PostTrak (compare to B+ and 4 stars for Venom). Despite that Fallen Kingdom had a big drop, but JW sold itself on nostalgia while Venom did not, so Venom 2 has that advantage vs FK. Also re what people have said about Venom's trailers, they have certainly done really well, but no better than the first one's trailers. Not sure it will increase much but probably won't have a big drop either.

I feel like it's very common for people to call protagonists boring when secondary characters and villains stand out. Luke gets a ton of this online, people in my family even called Han "the real protagonist" which is crazy to me. I see a lot of Aang-bashing for ATLA because of how well Zuko's arc was done. But personally, I loved both protagonists, and so did many people (see how after TLJ a lot of that latent love for Luke came out on both sides of the debate).

It was definitely a big thing that people said BP was "boring" in his movie and way better in Civil War. I never understood that criticism and don't particularly understand the criticism in SC as well. Both Black Panther and Shang-Chi were engaging protagonists imo and only look worse because both movies had fantastic villains (not the norm in MCU movies). Was Simu RDJ level of course not. But I thought he did pretty well.

Part of it was HBO Max, part of it was just TSS didn't do well for a superhero film. In the UK it did the equivalent of a 40 million OW in these times.

24th would be a better date but I guess they want to give a bit more time for the marketing campaign. Still I'm sort of glad they chose October 1 so Shang-Chi can still have 4 weekends to itself.

I expect something like this. Feige knows that there is work to do with making Shang-Chi more popular in China/East Asia with mixed reception in the region so far. So adjustments will be made.

Close enough that actuals can put it over.

Ok I didn't see those Monday PS from Keyser. Those are incredible. Now I understand the high predictions from the weekend thread. I think we are seeing WOM kick in here.

That fits with the WOM basically everywhere else lol. SC at 91%, pretty good I think.

Looking at the Ghostbusters trailer numbers they are actually okay. I could see this doing well. Actually second trailer did really bad for some reason it didn't seem to get uploaded to the main Sony Channel, only the Ghostbusters channel.

Trailer seemed to be really heavy on nostalgia. Probably will attract an older audience at least to a degree.

Is buzz there though after the 2016 version had poor reception? Being a good movie is only part of the battle.