JWR

General audiences still associate Harry Potter with those movies and that cast. That's one of the biggest hurdles.

That or they're going to have to re-cast the kids every season or two, which is going to be more trouble than its worth.

That's the other thing: Will people who aren't already hardcore book fans care?

$700M-$1.0B is my estimate for right now. I think it has a chance of winning the summer, but competition will be fierce.

Even if we ignore the P.R. element of making a Harry Potter show, I still don't know this is going to work. Seven seasons in today's television climate is already a pipe dream. Most shows are lucky to make it to three or four. Maybe five if they're really fortunate. Now try making seven seasons of a VFX heavy tv show with high production values for at least 7 consecutive years. Look at how it took Stranger Things 9 years to produce 5 seasons. By the time we get to the Half-Blood Prince (assuming it gets that far), these kids are going to be 30.

Sounds promising.

Will Moana 2 hurt Wicked more or vice versa?

Trailer looks adorable. I hope the film is more Wall-E or Lilo & Stitch than Lightyear or Strange World. Animated sci-fi is usually box office poison. So, WOM and marketing will have to be strong.

Hoping this one performs more like Wall-E than Lightyear or Strange World.

If you told me a year ago that the next Alien movie would make more than the sequel to Joker, I'd have called you crazy. And yet, here we are...

Fully a Doo Doo

I can't believe I live in a world where the seventh Alien movie made more money than a sequel to Joker in its opening weekend.

Andrew Stanton wasn't even in director's jail for a long stretch, anyway. A year after John Carter flopped, he announced he was making Finding Dory and now he's direction episodes of TV shows like Obi-Wan, Stranger Things, and other Apple projects.

Zaslav being a jackass who doesn't give a shit about animation is nothing new for him, nor is it new for a lot of execs.

$190-200M is a lot. But other recent flops have cost more and lost their respective studios more money than however much Joker 2 costs Warner Brothers. At worst, this is just yet another flop from DC that will make James Gunn's job that much trickier.