PlatnumRoyce

At this point, I just hope my interpretation of the reporting around Miller is just wrong because that's a world in which fewer people in truly marginalized and incredibly vulnerable positions are being abused and exploited. These are just truly disturbing claims surrounding, sex, violence and drug use. Given Miller's clear mental health troubles, Miller's attitude towards guns and other weapons is also well attested to be concerning. I really hate the cynical bullshit WB's pushing by seemingly successfully getting people to run with "Miller's problems are solved by admitting to needing therapy and not being seen in public for 10 months." That's just not consistent with what's actually been alleged about Miller's behavior. They're just not addressing the worst stuff and defining what Miller's been accused of down to stuff much less serious. [end rant].

Yeah, it's an executive's job to overhype aspects of a film in order to get attention/interest in the film up. But you're downplaying specific story here. "Audiences will respond to this film in the way they responded to Top Gun: Maverick" is clearly the film's main marketing pitch (heck, they literally planted a story in variety whose combination of text and subtext was that Flash had Tom Cruise's blessing). To be fair, some of this is due to Miller. WB strongly pushed the "Keaton is back, baby!" line but if they're selling the specific emotional beats of the film, they're talking explicitly about Ezra Miller. Most films don't sell "this is literally the greatest thing since sliced bread." If Miller didn't have multiple restraining orders taken out by parents of minor children, a history of menacing women, a history of assaulting women, accusations of grooming, accusations of sex cult stuff, etc. The Flash's marketing pitch for "this is a great movie" would be talking a lot more about the mother-son bond in the film. The more normal way to sell a film as great is to lay down priming for specific scenes or emotions not the cut straight to saying "GOAT"

Why so low? Am I just overestimating generic internal multipliers (I rarely dive deeply into previews)? Edit: I see you essentially answered this is the comment above and the answer is "yes."

This is exactly the type of thing I've been trying to find for a while. Going to be fun to see what I can find in older versions of these ominbus releases.

I can't really agree with you on this because this just obviously isn't a movie about "the Joker." It's Phillips' semi-pulpy homage to 70s Scorsese classics. There's just nothing about the actual characterization that I recognize in other uses of the same character. It's similar to something like WWZ where you're just not sure what's actually been adapted. I always find "you must be faithful to source material" arguments online funny because the same people will often praise 2019's Joker and it's just an illustration of the exact opposite point: great execution of a concept will make people incorporate your story into their conception of a character/franchise. I actually really like 2019's Joker and have independently re-watched the final 20/30 minutes of the film multiple times via HBO Max because I just think it's an incredibly electric bit of filmmaking.

Avatar (2009) but I think the core point is a smart one. I'd also argue Fury Road (2015) received some degree of this reaction but the film's box office doesn't really reflect it.

I think "greatest overall film" versus "people just praised Phoenix's performance" sets up an unhelpful false dichotomy. I think the best argument against Joker is simply that it's much less than the sum of its parts because you really can't downplay the undeniably strong technical aspects of the film. You can think the film ultimately gets say a 3/5 star grade but I can't imagine very many people feel that the film's praise for sound mixing, score, cinematography, etc. was undeserved. Here's the first negative review I saw on RT (2/5 stars) I would give Nightmare Alley a 2/5 star grade but there's clearly award worthy craft work going on in the film.

No, but like IMDb they generically publicize some degree of anti-brigading/vote manipulation protection.

So Echelon Insights apparently published crosstabs on interest in various summer films. https://echelonin.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/May-2023-Omnibus-Crosstabs-EXTERNAL.pdf Jumping directly onto the political angle: The "raw" numbers have 29/30% Democratic/democratic leaning support which drops down to 26/27% if you attempt to isolate for non-African-American audiences (46% interest). That comes to 19% GOP leaners. when you look the year before, both lightyear(!!) and minions didn't show a partisan divergence in interest. https://echelonin.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/May-2022-Omnibus-External-Crosstabs.pdf however 28% of GOP leaners say they're interested in no summer movies versus 19% of democrats.

to that point, Someone on reddit calculated that implied deadline breakeven is more like 2.7x +/- 0.4 (with raw 2.5 achieved with something like a 50% domestic gross and 0% china.

That implies people thought the DCEU was alive to begin with. If you polled people arriving at the theater, how many people could tell you The Batman wasn't part of an interconnected universe unlike Shazam? There's really nothing in the film that's incompatable with a Justice League crossover.

anyone know a "box office admits" aggregator for non european markets?

Nick Fury shifting from David Hasselhof to Sam Jackson apparently started in Marvel Ultimates but clearly was supercharged by MCU even if there is a complicated in-universe justification about how they're separate people. Based on Fury's inclusion in FFH, it appears he meets Sony's definition of a "major marvel character" (or words to that effect). I doubt this counts as a "major" race bending but there's clearly a longer term visual legacy to the 2016's Suicide Squad movie's casting of Will Smith as Deadshot. Stuff like "Kill the Justice League" (video game) and Assault on Arkham (movie) both feature Deadshot as African-American. Apparently this doesn't carry over to the comics but they clearly don't want to abandon the Will Smith connection as Deathshot remains semi-elevated as a character able to lead stories as the head of the suicide squad.

go to the html style inspector and search for "score-detail-audience-section" and they'll just tell you the real number of reviews.

Bloodsport was impacted by the pandemic in the way you're describing not Birds of Prey. Just pull up contemporary reporting. I'm not saying there was 0 impact but BoP was still well before significant behavioral changes occurred and the data pretty directly proves it. The overall weekend gross of Birds of Prey's OW increased from the week prior. Sonic had a completely solid box office run after BoP opened. It's not like the overall box office gross in Feb was radically different from say 2017's gross. The box office on the weekend of march 13th plunged 50%! from the week before. That's the real start of the pandemic box office - six weeks after BoP entered theaters.

IF Namor gets a solo film, we'll know Marvel agrees with you. Otherwise, they're in the same rights trap as Hulk which apparently limits how they're able to write and advertise the character if they don't want to hand over 30%(?)+ of the film's revenue to another studio. I know a marvel exec glancingly talked about how much trouble the contractual stuff gave them with marketing namor.

I really liked the film but...no, it's an objectively bad number that was savaged in trade press which also included executives leaking to pass the buck. You don't get that if BoP was a moral victory. Also, take another look at the film's 4 quadrant age/gender splits: the decision to make it a big R rated Deadpool-like just nuked what could have been the film's core audience. Deadpool is the exception not the rule as both R rated SS spinoffs pretty neatly illustrate. The film's Word of mouth as "objectively" measured on OW was worse than conventional wisdom because the people show showed up really weren't the target demo for that specific film.

The premise of all of this is that the average person doesn't really know very much specifically about the flash film or Miller beyond that which the 100M+ marketing campaign is pushing in front of their faces. I think this argument fails because you're arguing the aforementioned nine figure marketing campaign should push "The Flash 2 is happening" as one of the film's core marketing pitches and that provides an organic entry point for all of Ezra Miller's scandals to be relitigated and to spotlight Miller's absence. If people read a headline about Flash 2, there's a 20%(?) chance they'll hear about all of the ugly stuff Miller is accused of and if they read an article about it, there's a 90% chance they'll hear about it. I just can't imagine the net effect of that is to increase interest in buying a ticket. The default is apathy and this marketing campaign alteration needs to "get people off of the sidelines." If you're telling people that this is the start of a decade of films staring Ezra Miller, the salience of digging into those stories just goes way up and even if you're right that the public doesn't care a lot about this, I imagine Zaslov, Gunn, etc. don't want a few waves of stories about abusive behavior, restraining orders, etc. West Side Story is a perfect example of this: the film was literally unable to run with a "romeo and juliet" marketing pitch and poor tracking didn't make them revisit that decision (presumably helped by having Spielberg as a juicy interview option). Similarly WB literally paid Depp twenty to thirty million dollars to avoid negative PR of being associated with him following UK defamation case result. That's a credible signal. On the other hand, Depp-Heard trial got genuine mainstream news coverage and Depp remains an A list movie star in "interest/awareness" polls (if not in box office results). Sure...but that's because people already like these people for their music/athletic performance. Ezra Miller isn't already a movie star. There's not really a strong reason to assume Miller as a brand can sell anything. And at some intersection of preexisting popularity and severity of crime, people start to care and/or people don't get jobs. Kobe Bryant survived a rape case but Luke Heimlich never got a professional contract.

There's also Mission Impossible where the franchise rebounded but has never regained "top 2-3 biggest film of the year" status the first two films achieved.

...and that's how you get Ezra Miller headlines. This is literally a movie whose first and second biggest characters are played by Ezra Miller and they're forced to run away from that marketing pitch. I don't really see how you can blame marketing here when it's a macro level decision about whether or not you're publicly in bed with Miller going forward. They've done everything else to hype up the quality of the film so this is clearly strategic.

Don't we get some ordinal rankings from DEG and major platforms release their top sellers weekly? I don't really know how to translate those (because there's obviously not a uniform weekly home video market gross to split up) but I imagine there's at least some way to use those to estimate how a film like Northman or Woman King did post-theatrically.

Isn't Magic Mike mostly just a weird situation where WB used it as a test case for alternative distribution strategies (significantly reduced theater count with promised local monopolies). Pre-pandemic, you can see films like Logan Lucky or Snowpiercer get dinged for this sort of thing.

Can you please screenshot where messages is? I don't need to DM anyone but I genuinely can't find it so I'm obviously missing something simple. I made a help desk(?) about this a while ago but never got a response.

Which is weird because that is very obviously not the age the character is written to be. Tyrone Power was 32 when the original was filmed and the book says Clem is 21 in their equivalent of this scene. Like Ford in Crystal Skull, Cooper really was too old for this role.

The plot of the movie is "let's remember some crappy B movies from the 1950s." Is there genuine interest in answering this question? How many film's first 50 reviews were ~50% positive and ended up 15?/20? points higher? Is a basic descriptive question we can answer. Granted, it's likely to not control for Cannes effect so what's the testable hypothesis?