von Kenni

Strong 8/10 (as a reference Last of Us was 6/10 for me...had high notes like episode 3 but then character developments and writing ended dissapointing toward the end). I know the game but didnt ever play it. The first episode was a bit mixed but got better after that and the season ended on a high note. Main character and the ghoul were great acting and character arc wise. Maximus was a bit annoying but got better toward the end. The dark humor with a right amount of gore for me was a joy. Themes were nice but a bit watered down but maybe for this it's the point, to have a fun ride and not have too high concept, deep themes to get in the way. Stakes felt okay and episodes had some nice novelty factors. One Piece was a 9/10 for me but somehow I'm more eagerly waiting the next season for this than for One Piece. I guess the world of Fallout with the vaults, mechs, time jumps, and ghouls is more interesting.

I wonder how long it takes until Dune turns sour. Probably after Villeneuve leaves it and others come to milk it. I guess this is the natural cycle for most IPs.

Fair points and I agree on the development hell parts too and the OG makers being the reason that the GB 3 wasn't ever made. Yeah, I made it sound easy but regardless of reasons why GB has gone as it has I wanted to bring my own perspective as a fan of the original. They was referring to the whole bunch of studio execs, original filmmakers, and new ones but that wasn't so much the point what I made but how I felt that the IP could have gone and be in a better position right now. We can always fall back how it's all arbitraty to get anything good through the production hell but can also think how things could have gone. A great script with all that time is a fair ask too or not to do it at all. Okay l, studios want to just do with what they have to milk it, but that's not a reason to just let it be and not express what is inherently wrong with G2016, GBA, and GBFE (and to certain extent GB2).

Just anecdotally how I feel about Ghostbusters and why I didn't go to see GBFE even though I'm a fan of the original and their cast. I think the IP has been mismanaged by timing and lousy storytelling. There's no reason why GB III wouldn't have been a huge success with the original cast at the end of the 90s or early 2000s IF it would have had a story worth telling, a story found and not created. Then we got a 2016 reboot that threw the original cast out of the window (literally). When I watched it I thought it was in the same "universe" but during the movie, I realized no (I missed the online chatter). I was just wondering why they did this? Reboot the whole thing? Don't they have the creativity to do something new with the original cast? GB2016 had some moments I liked but overall the slapstick comedy didn't work for me and especially the ending made the whole thing feel mediocre at best. As a side note, I've watched almost all of Melissa McCarthy's films but this is at the bottom end for me. Okay, so that's it for GB I thought until I found out about the GBA and possibly seeing the old gang there one FINAL time. Trailers and promotions made me feel that they had captured some of the original DNA and my expectations got high. Saw it and walked out okayish...but deep down I felt mixed. It had potential, and the ingredients were there, but again the story was more created as with 2016 and not found. The original crew appeared mostly just at the very end and almost wheeled on the stage for some arbitrary reason at the very end. Okay, not the best, but at least some closure with the original gang, and now they can go and make stranger things versions with the kids that I probably don't care much seeing (unless the story is there, but what are the chances of that happening...). Then GBFE came and suddenly the old gang is prominently shown in the promotions and the trailer. Based on the trailer and seeing again redone scenes (the mayor's office!) my feelings for this were just apathy at best and mostly indifference. I wasn't expecting a great story and any new original angle to GB so even $5 T-mobile tickets didn't get me to see it. Too little, too late. Maybe if there weren't GB2016 and GBA I would have gone to see this movie, at least 20 years ago, but not now. To sum it up, of course, it's not about just the old characters but for the people that grew up with GB 1 & 2 and loved them, they are a multiplier. I.e. story x execution x characters/original DNA. I don't doubt that the execution is there for GBFE but if the story is just a mixed bag of memberberries, redoing old scenes, a weak baddie, and a million characters without space for character arcs, it's going to be 30% * 80% * 90% = 22% -> rotten for me. In hindsight, they should have done GB III in 2016 with the old gang doing one final appearance and passing the torch to a younger generation (if the franchise money must flow) but with a great script and story and not with weak ones like with GB2016, GBA, GBFE (likely because haven't seen it), or even GB 2. You can't recreate the OG lightning in the bottle. You don't need to, but there's no excuse that with a quarter of a century, you can't make better scripts than the last three have had!?

True. I've always had a soft spot for him.

Yeah, the subplot with the pigeon lady gets me always in tears.

There's a depth, intelligence, and mystery that Chalamet has that Holland with all his lovable self is lacking in comparison.

Just now realizing what the Twisters is. The creativity of modern day Hollywood never seize to amaze me...

Yeah, now that we got Dune out, Horizon is what I'm most waiting this year. I hope Costner's life experience and love for the genre pays off. Wishing the stars align.

Yeah, seeing the trailer in IMAX before doing gave the same vibe as the last Transformers. Especially the moment "we made some upgrades" make me feel But I have to say that I'm warming up a bit and maybe the unadulterated monster bashing could be fun. I left my Godzilla for the 90s version with Matthew Broderick which was the first film ever for me that I used fasforwarding on vhs player for a movie. I always had a rule that if I start to watch a movie I watch it completely regardless of quality. Godzilla was the first one that I couldn't finish. Even Independence Day was a work of art compared to it. Maybe time to give a second chance. PS. Seeing the mayor scene on GBFE on its IMAX trailer had the same feeling. They really drove that IP off a cliff when they diverged from GB 3. Furiosa was beautiful but I remain skeptical. Can go either way.

This coming from WB and loving the Ralph Bakshi animation, I'm definitely giving it a shot without yet knowing anything about it. Maybe it can be palette cleanser after the Amazon Studios crap.

Dune doing around 130% more than the first part USD wise is excellent and even the exchange rate adjusted +80%? is great growth from the first one. There's not much that you can do for the inherent interest for Dune type of sci-fi and its cultural roots.

With those numbers $700m WW is very likely. Has a shot to $750m, may it be unlikely.

I just came from a 3rd viewing in IMAX and again, what an achievement. I prepared myself to be as receptive as possible without overthinking anything, especially since I love the depth of Frank Herbert's original creation. This is just an incredible adaptation and shows how Denis Villeneuve understands the source material deeper than you could expect from a Hollywood blockbuster director. It is a sheer culmination of his life's work, his growth as a filmmaker, and his team of equally incredible craftspeople. The cast is on point and the minuscule imperfections of the film highlight how perfect it is. They are so small that you wonder how this was ever made in the sea of mediocrity. Maybe it is his French heritage that brings a deeper understanding of esthetics to the screen. Looking at those compositions, the sound, the music, the play of everything. It is like a symphony on screen. The depth in detail and the lore of Dune was a tour de force. Things like someone at the end kissing someone's ring without kissing it like in good aristocratic manners. Or visions that are part of the Messiah. Or having specific dialects of Fremen language. The God mode that the film jumps toward the end... Sheer cinematic power. Timothy Chalameet is the perfect Paul and when you know the inner dialogues in the book or the prescience that he has, knowing where his choices lead, and the bittersweetness of all of it, he deserves an Oscar for the performance that was filled with nuance. I can see the countless discussions with Villeneuve that he has had about the reasons for Paul's actions. The subtext that we see on screen is evidence of it. Javier Bardem had such a levity and natural ease in his performance. Though the character didn't have much depth on screen, his performance earned another Oscar. Rebecca Ferguson and Florence Pugh shined too. Souheila Yacoub as Chani's friend was a delight. There weren't any weak links in the cast. This should get 10+ Oscars of which Villeneuve is first in line. But whatever the number of Oscars it receives, nothing can take away the fact that it is a masterpiece.

Kudos for what you just wrote. Pulling my Generational cycle hat from the drawer I doubt that the counterculture notes of The Prisoner can fly today when we are in the crisis era. It might take that 25-40 years until we're next in the suitable generational cycle. You could play the notes that are relevant even today but ...will it capture the spirit and essence of The Prisoner like you wondered? Or the depth of it? Like you said, good luck...

There definitely was an upside in that limited supply and like you said it helped to discover things that you otherwise wouldn't have. Today it's easy to end up in echo chambers and familiar personal patterns regarding entertainment, films, and TV series. Growing up I came to appreciate more what those limitations gave me. We got to see films from 30s to all the way to present times and the same with TV shows, like I love Lucy, Happy Days, Bill Cosby Show, Columbo, etc. and many of these we watched as a family. I got reruns of Star Trek OG and right after that TNG. How many 5 to 15-year-old kids would give now any chance of trying out TV shows or films 30, 40, or 50 years ago? Or tune in to the latest from Netflix, shuffle through TikTok, Youtube, etc. For me, the limitations ended up giving a great perspective on life through popular culture immersing me into all those different eras at the same time...which I of course didn't realize at the time and nagged about why couldn't we have cable or more TVs.

Yeap, back in the 80s in rural parts two channels and one TV. At the end of the 90s four channels and two TVs, no smartphones, and of course no streaming. Funny enough our first pirate CD copy that circulated with friends was VGA quality Matrix (though old millennial here and not Gen X). Fastforward the last 20 years and the landscape has changed faster than ever in human history and keeps doing that with all the different entertainment and content firehose ways. The whole cinema is doing great in that context and part of it is that you can't ultimately take away the shared first-hand human experience. There are always people longing for it no matter how cool new gadgets and tech we have.

I think these ceilings are pretty arbitrary to define because so many variables define them starting from what John Marston said here: "Imagine if they actually made a good Ghostbusters movie". 1. So if the writing, story, and execution would be A+ could the GBFE make $55M, $65M, or even more in OW? I'm a fan of the original GB and liked GBA even though I was dissapointed for the ending and how the old gang was involved (or how little) a would give something like 3 or 3.5 stars out of 5. Seeing the GBFE trailer before Dune 2 in cinema made me feel indifference and slightly annoyed like recycling the mayor seen (SWFA vibes) and you can see the poster that has characters like Infinity War without the build up so you already know that this isn't any A+ stuff. Even with the $5 deal me and my partner will pass this in cinema just because the reasons mentioned here. 2. How about if the marketing would have been better or the competitive landscape easier today? Would it make $5M, $10M, or $20M more in OW? 3. What about that positioning? Is it more comedy, horror with comedic undertones, or stranger things family movie? How those affect the ceiling and if it is transitioning it's positioning (which it seems to be doing) will the ceiling be higher after the transition? 4. What if it can hit the zeitgeist cultural demand with the storytelling like Barbie, Oppenheimer, TGM, Avatar, or the original GB "sticking it to the man" (over simplification) that spoke to Gen X. Can the ceiling suddenly go 50% or even 100% up. I'm sure there's more that we can think here but already with this I could argue that GB ceiling can be anywhere between $50M to $100M+. It's a matter of how many things you can get right when producing and rolling it out. No movie is ever hitting its ceiling/full potential but even if we arbitrarily set it around 80% of the full potential it's still varying. So which of the above variables we should treat as constants and how? Same with Dune. If there would have been competition like last time with Bond and Eternals the numbers would be lower. Would be then say that's the Dune ceiling. If Dune 1 would have been better like 2 and less GA alienation would Dune 2 make 10%, 20%, or even more now? If the director would have been Nolan, that would have given 10-25%extra boost with his name. What if the competition would have been a bit easier and marketing worked better? With these I could argue that maybe Dune's ultimate ceiling is $1B instead of $700M where it's now heading. For me ceilings seem quite ambiguous or how should we frame them?

Very good point especially on the exhibitor side. I was thinking the positioning of cinema when writing my #4 driver. Worst place to be is in the middle, I.e. neither specifically. Cheaper one has wider audience number potential but luxury has potentially higher revenue/profit potential. One option is to create two separate brands, e.g. (cheaper, family oriented?) popcorn cinema and (adult, couples, cinephile oriented?) luxury cinema and somehow brand them stand alones, different, and not just as the real experience and the lite experience. But how you would do that in cooperation with filmmakers, distributors, and studios would be trickie. If you choose one or the other, luxury option would make business wise more sense from customer acquisition perspective. And ways, a conscious chose needs to be made and then really run with it.

I think this relates to the questions that I was pondering in my earlier post. Moviemakers can't do much about the changing media and entertainment landscape as a whole, i.e. how the short format content or general flooding of constant entertainment content does for our attention spans or need for long format movie experiences. Whether these are part of the reason, I've found myself more inclined to watch TV shows or even shorter content on Youtube than films before. However, I suspect that there will be a collective awakening/realization that takes us back to a long-format type of content and storytelling. You could argue podcasts showing that already. As Cmasterclay already referred here, at least making quality films is in the hands of the moviemakers (if you include studios and financiers in them and not just the production people). In addition to that theaters have some room to evolve and I'd say film marketing is still partly living in the past.

I'm not doom and gloom about the box office or industry even though arguably we are at a low point right now. As @DAJK said, it's transitory and I'm wondering where we are heading. The following underlying currents and their overall strength in molding the future box office and film industry are what I'm pondering after drinking my morning coffee (meaning that I probably forget a lot of other drivers): 1. Changes in the overall media and entertainment landscape in the past 10 years from the consumer side. How TikToks and other short format instant gratification formats have made us less inclined to watch movies even at home, let alone to schedule and reserve a ticket, drive and get our asses into a movie theatre and sit down for a couple of hours without using our mobile phones. How does this change (shrink) the overall potential moviegoer customer base? Does the increased entertainment content supply (TV, social media, games, etc.) shrink the potential customer base in the same way? 2. Changes in the film and TV production side when streamers and studios are trying to push out too much content without having an adequate talent pool to do so or don't allocate enough time for production. I.e. writers don't have enough time to write (there are billions of examples of this and it's analogous to what has happened in news media, how the demand for pushing news stories and articles out in a shorter timeframe has become unsustainable), there aren't enough talented production crews and craftsmen/people to produce, or groomed directors to direct (e.g. MCU and Disney have a growing tendency to give big budget productions to inexperienced filmmakers as a norm rather than the exception). All this ends up producing mediocre results at best with a few outlier success stories. I think after the writers' strike we (hopefully) have passed the pinnacle of this and are getting back to the common sense on how you make a good movie production-wise. 3. The recession in creativity and underlying reasons for it. How much is it due to studios over-milking existing IPs with reboots, sequels, prequels, and spin-offs and trying to make a franchise or a universe out of everything? Then how much that is due to having the financial decision-making power in the hands of calculating "Wall Street" type of entities with public stock pressures? How this has changed and is changing? How much are the representation quotas (merit and talent as secondary), political correctness (or whatever we call it), DEI, etc. flavor of the zeitgeist limiting creativity and estranging parts of the overall moviegoing audience? At least comedies and comedians are more risk-aversive due to this. Will this in part be addressed by the deterioration of Hollywood and the rise of new filmmaking epicenters? 4. How do theaters adjust and change? Is the play to have more pure cinematic experiences as Dune and Oppenheimer taking advantage of IMAX while people are dining in providing extra revenue for exhibitors? How can theaters lower the friction for consumers to do the all things that they need to get there? How can they make themselves more attractive? Can they make movies more as shining events? 5. What other big currents are there? I think that how MCU and superhero genre ate up the air from other kinds of productions for a large extent for 10 years or so makes now a void after their downfall but that will be filled eventually when the new shiny thing is found (hopefully Oppenheimer and Dune are steering that a bit). Though they exacerbated points 2. and 3. But what are more fundamental currents of change that I'm missing and what are the real extent of my previous wondering points? I think 1. is the most fundamental competition and challenge for the box office and to address it 2.-4. need to be fixed, i.e. investing time and money to groom filmmakers like Nolan, Villeneuve, [insert other solid ones] and the crafts teams around them step-by-step while giving them room to fail along the way. I think market dynamics will much correct 2. and 3. but it's a bit sad to see time and time again studios taking the wrong lessons and making over and over again the same mistakes so it might take time. Overall I'm hopeful for the future of cinema as a shared experience when seeing movies like Oppenheimer and Dune in IMAX. There's always a market for that regardless of how funny TikTok videos, engaging games, or virtual reality experiences I could enjoy at home.

Seeing Rama on IMAX by Villeneuve could be transcendental...just small expectations.

More likely than not to go over $700m WW. Almost highly likely to pass $275m DOM and $425m OS. Both staying under those numbers unlikely. I'm doing comparison market to market OS Dune 1 and 2 this weekend but I guess we're expecting it to hit between $700-750m WW with a small chance it goes under and smallish chance it'll go over.