PlatnumRoyce

Sorry, what abomination? Is this referencing the PVOD release date for Wonka or something else?

Sure, but the timeline to streaming clearly mattered. The big "Netflix correction" last year/two years ago changed thinking on streaming and it really would have mattered what side of that line you were on with streaming service investments and how they were treated by wall street.

I don't know if I agree. If anything, I'd argue it has the opposite problem. I don't think the "CW" sneer is quite capturing it but people are, I think, correctly picking up that they've seen this type of movie released before. I can't define it but it really feels like the film knows it's part of a specific subgenre of trashy movie.

I don't know but I'm 100% confident whatever Sony's doing is tied into the Disney-Marvel/MCU Spider-Man contract. My uninformed read of the situation is that they were using the Sinister Six/Sonyverse as leverage when Marvel tried to own half of future Spider-Man films. As long as Sony and the MCU are connected, there's real financial reasons for Disney to not want the general audience to believe that bad SUMC films are really MCU films. Given Morbius; reception and the bad signs from Kraven and Madame Webb, I suspect we're going to eventually get a Spider-Man and/versus Venom film (note that crossover in NWH) with the rest of the universe sort of quietly dying and/or rebooting out of Spider-Man 5 or something like that.

(1) It sounds like all "major" shows had a similar budget but (2) I will never understand why this interview never "resurfaces" https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/she-hulk-steve-rogers-virginity-cut-scenes-1235342096/ This isn't just on She-Hulk for blowing budget, it's a systematic problem. Also, more "Jen" to cut budget and actually utilize Maslani's acting ability in scenes with other people would have been the right call.

From what I've randomly gathered over time, it really seems as if Vaughn fought hard to maintain the relevant rights to his stuff. https://collider.com/who-owns-kingsman-rights-matthew-vaughn-comments-kingsman-3/ and here's "Marv" talking about aggressive plans for more kingsman stuff that's clearly not Disney's idea for future projects. https://deadline.com/2020/12/marv-planning-around-seven-more-kingsman-films-says-new-ceo-1234651341/#! Whatever deal Vaughn signed with fox could easily be near expiration especially if it requires disney to commit to another film in the franchise to retain rights.

Didn't it also do well in China in real world 2020? I don't know if this a good argument or not but I was always high on Soul because the marketing vaguely looked like a spiritual sequel to Inside Out which was then still a relatively recent big Pixar hit.

Jonathan Majors saga (given that it's tied into "AVENGERS") probably stops The Marvels from being the metonym for the decline of the MCU. OTOH Marvels/Marvel might help it achieve that result. I just suspect no one film gets blamed for the MCU given how it's tied into D+ integration.

Do you know who also thought that was crazy? SONY (or at least their advertising director who pitched the often reported on first phase of a SUMC before the Homecoming reboot). From wikileaks Obviously, Sony loaning Spider-Man was less far fetched than he believed.

To be fair, Joker mostly exists as a vehicle to justify spending $70M on a drama. I highly suspect that the MCU-Sony agreement explicitly bars Spider-Man to Sony crossover films.

"EST" was about 67% larger than packaged media sales in 2022 (last year we got physical media rentals & sales split) and VOD rentals is 4x as large as physical rental.

That was obvious when they announced it as a full season drop. There was apparently a report last summer that this was initially an 8 episode show that got cut down. I'll give marvel's PR team a lot of credit for getting good PR from the initial tease of the show but the simplest answer was always that this is a clunker. I'll throw people the generic "RT scores for tv are fairly meaningless" but Disney's decision to make this a one-shot drop was a very costly signal.

So...how would DICKS: The Musical have done if it was, as I always assumed, a musical adaptation of the film Dick

Given that a Mandalorian theatrical film is "jumping" in from of Ahsoka season 2, this feels to me like it's likely going to actually be something closer to a stand alone event. Remember just how much money they've recently lost from The Marvels' attempt to synergize film/tv.

That movie was such a weird hit, everyone simply decided to memoryhole it instead of trying to explain it.

Yeah, that's all fair. The anti-Fences-as-comp case I was thinking about revolved more around scale than tone. Fences just has that obvious "this is adapting a play" tells where you're ultimately set in a single, relatively sparse location (the house) while TCP's marketing gave clear signposting of the scale of the film you can make on a $90M budget. But yeah, Fences is an obviously reasonable comps. The BO response has been really interesting. Despite "objective" scores, we're seeing a straight up rejection of the film and I'm still trying to put together my specific takeaway.

Why would it be obviously closer to Fences than Hairspray? TCP has a number of things working for it on paper. Even with penalties for adult movies post-covid this is just a bad number for the type of lavish tentpole film this is.

Not to derail thread, but have you made the positive case for TLD streaming numbers elsewhere?

Seems like every time I pop in to look at TCP, it's final estimated gross drops another $10M.

What's the vague range of people's final DOM gross estimates for TCP?

He is right now but I thought that wasn't how it initially launched. Looks like "Kevin Reilly" was head of Max content until August 2020 and Bloys absorbed it after an exec mass firing (thus after these decisions were made). https://www.businessinsider.com/hbo-max-kevin-reilly-interview-dc-snyder-cut-harry-potter-2020-5?op=1 But it's also a genuine question. I don't have a great sense of how the WB sausage was made and it's been 2 years since I read those deep dives into snyder cut history various outlets published.

simplest reading remains that directors cuts are seen as a positive good in and of themselves but it's subordinate to larger corporate strategy concerns. I thought the post-release reporting fingered Killar as a real booster of this idea. Wouldn't Bloys be outside of the chain of command for this decision? It's paid for by "Max" and he runs "HBO."

I don't want to be mean but I'm fairly certain some of the choices in the final season were made because they just cast the wrong 10 year old in GOT S1. Bran's actor just failed to do the (difficult) job of conveying the "shaman" stuff (especially nonverbal warfare/engagement with the trees/memory). On top of that, the showrunners disliked "the magic stuff" so sidelining it wasn't a huge leap. The Night King also doesn't exist in the books (and it seems very likely Kings Landing was supposed to be resolved before the final battle in the north).

If there isn't a good answer to "What was Phase 4's Iron Man" (or even "what was Phase 4's Avengers 1") then this argument self-evidently fails. Hits that create interest matter a great deal.

I see where you're coming from but I think it's more muddled. The Flash was a pretty key lodestone in the "Hamada-sprint-to-crisis" ("Keaton as Nick Fury") and WB pushed all-in on the film even after that was abandoned. "Ant-Man 3" was positioned as the start of "bringing the multiverse strands together" (aka "phase 5") and it was supposed to have the "Young Avengers" tease (which fell victim to the changed ending of that film). The multiverse stuff is advanced in the Marvels but it's debatably the least important building block film of 2023-2025 (excluding self contained GotG3) because it is, itself, the payoff of Marvel's big bet on TV-film crossovers. So that means "All our macguffins are infinity stones; the big final crossover is going to involve Thanos in some way and our non-sequel films will be GotG, Black Panther and Captain Marvel," right? That big new MCU book talked a lot about how CM's core concept was in flux (making it hard to secure directing talent) and how late in the game Infinity War 1 & 2 were locked down.