PlatnumRoyce

Someone threw together a personal regression analysis of deadline's P&L estimates and came up with an estimated loss of 165M with a 300M budget. Given this takes it up to ~320M, it seems like it's likely in 175-200M range.

Why are they framing this as a 130M loss? It's a pretty atypical use. "The corporate entity Disney set up to make IJ5 reports a 130M loss" != Disney's reasonable projected P&L estimate for the film.

Do we? It's not like leaking alleged vote counts right before a vote is independent from attempts to influence the results. It's a good source but what's the raw claim here? Backrock and price are supporting disney which counteracts commitments counted last week?

Iger's also pretty directly causally connected to the good and the bad of 2020/2021 and 2022/2023 and it seems pretty undeniable some of these actions have been taken in light of this activist investor pressure. What happens in a vacuum? That's not a rhetorical question. I'd love to figure out if anyone has a good read on that question.

Blood Diamond did fairly weakly at the US box office but one reason this reappraisal point doesn't really work is that I don't think Blood Diamond is fairly understood as a flop. The director wrote a book and recently did an interview tour which includes an anecdote about Blood Diamond turning a $40M profit. It did fine overseas and clearly saw robust early home video runs. https://forward.com/culture/film-tv/580608/in-hollywood-the-rarest-of-people-not-a-score-settler-or-a-tattletale-just-a-mensch/

That big "Comcast loves PVOD" piece in the NYT from mid-2023 included an explicit acknowledgement of a PVOD/SVOD value tradeoff (while arguing PVOD doesn't steal from other revenue streams)

No, there was a big WSJ(?) piece a month ago that revealed WB has clean rights to make a "Harry Potter book series" adaptation while Rowling can veto other ideas and that's clearly motivating this decision. Hard to tell? What are you seeing.

eh, this rolled post over to a new page. Let's focus on something more interesting.

I'd give an edge to Hancock.

I think we're crossing streams here. The monday comment predates this controversy and was about people's baseline expectations for a film/tv show before marketing has started. If someone announced a Letty spinoff of Fast & Furious, it would have pre-release expectations that say Fall Guy (pretty much forgotten TV show outside of Australia) didn't on announcement. Without reading Mackie's comments today, your description sounds right. Perhaps you can read discontent from a close reading of this type of statement but it's generally banal hype stuff that gets aggregated and blown up.

It's a spinoff of an existing franchise not Shang-Chi.

edit: nope, I'm an idiot who misremembered this.

I didn't see FatWS but I just assumed Brave New World would be a sequel to that. I don't understand this move. Mackie's functionally the fourth billed character in Winter Soldier. Moving on to Civil War and he's, at best, given the seventh? most prominent role in the film (RDJ, Evans, Stan, Boseman, ScarJo, villain mcvillain face). How much bigger is Mackie than Olson or Holland in that film? This feels like spending $250M-350M to make a Han (from Fast & Furious) spinoff. I love Han, I'd 100% see it, but it's a stupid idea in a way that "a F&F movie but without Vin Diesel" (and Paul Walker and The Rock/Statham) isn't. Sebastian Stan's much closer to a breakout supporting character from those films and having Mackie and Stan gives you a firmer hook to the nebulous "Captain America franchise" to go along with the shield iconography. It also limits the narrative dissonance of Mackie rather than Stan being anointed Rodgers' heir in Endgame. "Why isn't ___ in it" seems like it's going to be a self-evident marketing problem where "__" now includes both Evans and Stan.

I've heard 2023's Aliens: Dark Descent is really captures the Aliens vibe though it's a AA game not a big video game tentpole clicked no that video and...yeah, that's not what was sold to me. I guess the gameplay mechanically "feels right" but that plot seems insane/inane.

The Flash wasn't so much test screening rumors as big on the record statements to the press by the major WB executives. You really should have believed those rumors because of how much credibility WB expended to send this signal.

Funnily enough I don't think that's really the case even if it was clearly intended. You have Mando S1 -> S2 -> Spinoff in Lieu of S3 (Book of Boba) -> S3 -> Movie in lieu of season 4. Rangers of the New Republic (obvious spinoff) canned alongside one/two AAA video games that likely felt like spiritual spinoffs of Mando really means that we didn't get inundated with "Mando" content versus basically one long running TV show. Hard to know how skeleton crew will read. Ahsoka being "Rebels: live action" makes the comparison murkier especially as they leaned into that + jedi instead of the Mando-world.

Yeah, this has always confused me. Near as I can tell, there's a very narrow age range (people who were ~10 years old in the mid/late 1980s) who conceive of this as a genuine franchise after having bounced from a hit film to an animated kids tv show. It apparently ran ~140 episodes which is enough to give kids watching it buy in for lore beyond "here's the villain of the film." It just feels like that age is a common key to explaining some people's reactions (at least above and beyond [insert one's favorite way to explain political-cultural nexuses]). I think this age point sort of gets lost in sexier discussions but I think it's a very conceptually strong one. I think the Sony Hack contradicts that in a couple of ways. One simply way is that we can see emails saying "we've commissioned a brand study of Ghostbusters" but the actual study either never was leaked or was removed years ago. It would have been interesting to see what it said. Either way we know what one of those looks like so it really wasn't just them poll. However, more importantly, Ghostbusters is always listed as one of the few "franchises" Sony has control over and Sony really can't stress enough at the time how much they financially want/need more such properties to compete. They cut the budget in half for the very different reboot. That's not showing a massive amount of confidence.

That's helpful. So if the economics of the show didn't really work at the time, that's useful and explains a good chunk of my confusion. Internet forums devoted to the TV show Firefly (which apparently are the rare fansites to stay up - I constantly stumble across them looking for contemporary to mid 2000s articles) has someone's aggregation of sci-fi show budget reports. Glancing at that, let's say it's about half the price of a somewhat expensive network tv show on a per episode basis. I just always struggle to figure out what "TCW" means in practice because it just swings from a "core canon" artifact (look at Ahsoka and the initially reported plans for a Mandoverse film) to a stray tv show. I was a star wars obsessed kid when TCW tv show came out and outside of a Mac'N'Cheese advertisements at the grocery store, it was just completely invisible to me. I may have known that Anakin had a Padawan but it wasn't "really" canon/true/important just like nailing down a bit of lore added in random star wars book X. I agree it got discovered on Netflix (that's definitely how I really stumbled upon it) but I've never been able to really get a good sense of the actual scale of buy-in. Another way to look at "1 million an episode" is to compare it to the Direct to consumer film Open Season 2 (2008) which was a sequel to a marginal profitable theatrical film. It had a 25M budget so basically the same cost as a full season of Clone Wars (though OS3 went down to ~15M). Anyways, I know that's a bit rambling but my thoughts on this are a little scattered. These star wars animated films are just in this interesting little spot relative to star wars and now to the insane budgets a lot of Disney content has been receiving.

Do we know how expensive? There's a clear upgrade in quality but I don't really get why these shows have gotten significantly more expensive than stuff budgeted to make a profit on cable with 25 episodes a season. Are they still activating that kids demo or is this to compete for attention from an older audience who comes in for the sequel to a show they watched a few years ago?

Since this thread is talking about Eternals https://deadline.com/2021/11/eternals-brand-marketing-campaign-lexus-la-rams-mcdonalds-geico-1234868393/ It wasn't Spider-Man but Marvel really did put a lot of eggs in the Eternals basket. I really think a fun question is to try and figure out the relative blame for Eternals v. Thor 4 versus Ant-Man 3 in the current status of the MCU.

No mention of "The Hunt" in discussions of the film's ability to be impacted by "cultural moments?" High variance doesn't mean all upside. Either way, it seems like Garland's comments aren't perfectly threading the marketing needle A24 presumably wants to thread but they, unlike everyone else's comments, do seem tailored to avoid that sort of reading. It's going to be interesting to see how the marketing doublespeak plays out. I played the "did this get coverage on fox news" game and turned up nothing (though you have a couple of articles aggregating that sort of framing) and I think "is cable news covering this" is actually a good proxy for if we'll reach meaningful levels of cultural discourse (for good or ill). re: film twitter, it probably matters that A24 fandom is clearly overlapping with something like film twitter but the film is expensive enough that it needs to move beyond such core audiences to be a success anyways.

The marketing is going to be really interesting because on paper it's just not "Gladiator 2." I don't really agree that March 2022 is the same market as 2023/4 especially because you're ultimately dealing with an older audience skew especially because we know the film clearly significantly over-indexed on PVOD (because Focus was happy with the film's performance and all re-partnered with Eggers on Nosferatu). The Northman was never going to be a commercial hit (I don't really get why it didn't resonate as a good mix of drama and action but it clearly didn't) but if its released in Jan 2024 it's probably clawing closer to 50M than 25M

"people outside of E[r]u [Ilúvatar] don't like Dune?" Dwarves just hate the sand + long runtimes?

Isn't the problem more that the character dynamics are already a little unnecessarily derailed? You probably want Kamala to be more firmly and organically connected int the villain's story for the villain's sake (it doesn't help they clearly cut to pieces whatever was originally planned for the "villain obtains mcguffin" idea). The messiness is just a function of the production clash. Despite a physical connection between kid-sidekick and villain, there's no actual connection, parallel, etc. "Kamala's the captain marvel fangirl, Monica's the friend who feels like she was abandoned by Danvers and Dar-Benn feels like CM is 'the annihilator.' The film's cut down length doesn't help but the dynamics just don't really do a great job of reinforcing each other and just get in each others way.

Didn't realize Cabrini was basically a $50M passion project that literally has a 501(c)3 as the film's producer though I guess that explains the $50M budget.