PlatnumRoyce

Did anyone else get the feeling that there's some cut knowhere subplot (Nebula storyline?)? The "are you ok Nebula" scene in the middle of the fight just feels like it's supposed to come from an established character instead of random knowhere citizen #3. Similarly, the amount of mooks depicted as invading knowhere aren't really fully accounted for in the brief Kraglin scene we get.

The focus report?

I'm just fascinated to see what posttrak says <12 audience score is (especially if they give us a late-in-weekend score instead of just opening day). I remember argument being that MoM didn't see the expected lower kids scores but I really can imagine audience whiplash after being bravelittletoastered

Is this true? Social media noise seems a lot less interesting that whatever studios think is or isn't a problem. I poked around Sony Hack emails and found re: 2014's Annie (Jamie Foxx/Beasts of Southern Wild kid) multiple datapoints showing Sony concerned about it. The initial marketing research flagged race of protagonists as a significant concern and when Sony sent the film around to international distributors (?), two of them mentioned the race of protagonist as a problem for them. It just pretty directly seems that Sony treated this as a concern they wanted to keep tabs on even if it wasn't the biggest thing they focused on. Amy Pascal freaked out (at least momentarily) by poor test screening scores in a super-majority white test screening of 2014's Annie in a liberal suburb of Denver ("they are one of the most liberal places aside from here so i want to be sure its not about why did they remake it") and wanted to order a lot more test screenings to confirm if this was or wasn't audiences perceiving the film as "black annie" and that hurting audience reception (she said "I dont want to jump to conclusions but i wont stick my head in the sand either"). The claim was that scores were different among parents but not kids. Of course, both sets of scores were much better than film's 33% RT critics score so even if true, was it just reflecting an active bonus among black audiences (which according to sony constantly expressed sky high interest in the annie reboot). Honestly not sure how applicable this is to Disney reboots but I went looking and this is what I found.

To be fair, that's less cynicism, it was an attempt to write around Doctor Strange 2 and No Way Home switching release dates. I also think the release schedule changes also impacted the literal description of the core conflict of the film (I'm pretty sure the plan was to have NWH be an "incursion" (or whatever they called it in Doctor Strange) instead of the random "everyone who knows spider-man's name is coming through the portal" dropped in at the last second. Yeah, you're right that No Way Home is a big hokey comic book crossover. It would be interesting to see how much it would have made if it was 15% worse at creating a fun roller coaster ride.

I'd argue Joker is the extreme example of basic rule that there really are impacts beyond an unmediated interaction between critic and work. Not to go on a tangent, but you really can't use Joker as an example of critics merely getting bored with a story because it's self-evidently a much weirder story. It's a movie that got caught up in an unrelated moral panic over incels which got weirdly inserted into the movie (amplified by misinformation about 2012 shooting in Aurora which inaccurately connected deranged shooter to idealizing a Batman villain). "This movie will inspire violent acts of terrorism" was both self-evidently unhinged and a completely normal thing for people to write. Heck, moral panic was so successful it got large police departments to issue " no known threat" warnings + promises to station police near movie theaters. That's deeply _____ing weird and none of it has anything to do with the actual movie. However, all of that clearly primed reviews. I'm perfectly willing to grant a version of "it's a poor man's riff on King of Comedy" but it's also just self-evidently not what explained the film's genuinely weirdly low ratings (e.g. it's not worth an 80s metascore, but it's hard to believe it deserved a score in the 50s - the film really is often masterful on a technical level especially in the kinetic final act). https://www.vulture.com/2019/10/all-the-joker-controversy-and-threats-explained.html

huh, weird. I'd probably just go with that image over podcast comments made in response to host's questions. I thought that number sounded slightly low but I guess it could be random variation.

Isn't OP functionally just saying that "some Marvel movies were massively overrated on release" which isn't really blocked by an appeal to RT definition. Yeah, looks like it. There's a database of RT reviews floating around the internet pre-pandemic. Eyeballing that list after filtering for 95% reviews+, The nearest thing I can see is 2015's "eye in the sky" at 7.6/95%. Dolemite is my Name is a 7.9. I probably spot checked a dozen or so of the 112 films meeting that filter (excluding documentaries and INT films). There's definitely more complex stuff you could do to get a more substantial result but Spy! looks like a massive outlier. https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/eye_in_the_sky unrelated tangent: why the heck is "Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit" so high up on multiple review sites? The numbers treat it like a Spider-verse style success which isn't my recollection.

The Quorum had GotG3 at 4% unaided awareness (given as part of an open ended question as opposed to normal awareness prompted by film name, tagline and poster) a week ago. Herren was on a podcast doing interviews about a new study commissioned by cinema foundation @Eric Foreman seems to be keeping track of qorum data so I'll ping him.

I doubt it. That article pretty clearly implied we're getting more GotG content in the post-Gunn future and explicitly said it wouldn't involve Bautista or Saldana. I imagine Disney's going to dump a truckful of money into Pratt's front yard to get him to stay and I imagine there's some sort of "no rival superhero movies" clause in that contract (but that could be completely wrong). Of course, leaks could reveal Pratt dies in GotG3 or something but don't tell me if that's the case.

To be presumably overly charitable, nothing will be "this summer's TG: Maverick" because Maverick was a once in a decade box office run. If you have a film as crowd pleasing as TG: Maverick it really seems to make sense to get people to see it as soon as possible. WB execs are clearly trying to mimic semi-organic word of mouth marketing for Maverick (due to film's abnormally long delay between shooting and release).

Culture war stuff seems really high variance and I just don't have a read on how this ultimately shakes out. I was really just making a Gary Hart shitpost. In less than a month, Hart went from announcing his campaign, leading at ~35% in the polls, to dropping out of the race (before reentering 7 months later). I don't think anyone can/will top that.

I don't think it's pretty hart to think of other prominent candidates whose campaigns were completely kneecapped from the start after monkeying around instead of focusing on business.

What's the context on that number

The downside of "this is good but not as great so I'm implicitly punishing you for violating my expectations" seems infinitely better than downsides of having film defined by allegations about Ezra Miller's personal actions. I just don't see how anything that reduces risk by x% all of that stuff becomes the film's core narrative is a bad move. People should be more discerning but this is pretty clearly the/a core marketing pitch for the film that WB's actively attempting to push out there not simply a random leaker going crazy with praise.

I agree with the step down hypothesis but Posttrak scores seem to give an edge to GotG2 GotG1 - 90% positive - 75% recommend - 32% exceed expectations (on a scale of exceeded/met/didn't meet expectations) GotG2 - 93% positive, 77% definite recommend - 46% of audiences say it exceeded expectations

I could be wildly off about this but looking at the schedule on the website, I assume it's more like 1.5-2.5 hours. They have some sort of dolby presentation about 2022 films, are giving out a couple of awards and two people are giving "state of the industry" speeches. Just based on generic "conference timing" it just wouldn't surprise me to see that go 2 hours (though it could also be significantly shorter).

No, the claim there is at Sony created paper losses on MiB to basically steal money from talent. A recent article in deadline's profit series alluded to Spielberg's massive cut from MiB so that's probably also playing a major role. Also, isn't Wikileaks a trump card? MiB3 made 650M WW on a 245M budget (less 60M financing benefit) but is credited on Sony's books as a $27M loss due to 88M in participations + 40M in investor share. Why would Sony lie to Sony execs lie to each other about Men in Black's success or failure? That gave us "real" non-cherry picked numbers on over 100 films. The "all budget numbers are b.s." point is important but these sorts of rules of thumb seem to be supported by genuinely reputable sources. SNL Kagan's film revenue model from a decade ago is floating around online and basically supports generic rules of thumb and it is mirrored by seemingly credible sources like "movie business book" I picked up a few months ago.

Even worldwide is mostly driven by missing markets (China + Russia). Thor 4 sold 17M tickets in EU+UK versus 15M for Thor 3 and overall they're in the ballpark of each other when you use exchange rates + CPI as a ticket price inflation proxy WW and only look at common markets.

Circling back to that episode, am I the only one who thinks many of that episode's problems scream changes in the edit/production troubles? A couple of ideas for villain motive get implicitly thrown out to audience with most not really picked back up on. The Ugnaughts providing any sort of useful information doesn't really make sense from literal context. It's very much an fun, old fashioned sci-fi adventure at its core but it feels like there's something funky going on in the execution. Of course, I've only watched it once so I may be missing something.

Nah, this is the opposite of unrelated: it's literally just part of the same story. I had the unfortunate scenario of having to read waaay too many articles about this controversy while it was happening. You're missing the obvious story: no previous film with LGBTQ content attracted anything close to Lightyear's coverage in conservative circles (I grabbed kids movies included in glaad's SRI list and spot check them against coverage in various conservative web outlets). What was different about Lightyear: obviously the fact that left wing activists pretty explicitly tied it to the more general fight against Republicans/DeSantis/Florida GOP education bill. That's also presumably what supercharged representation fights around Marvel (compare coverage of 3rd world bans pre/post Disney fight). Chapek pretty much got the worst of all worlds in terms of how he handled it. If Disney employees hadn't pressured Chapek to attempt to repeal FL laws, I really don't think Lightyear would have attracted 1% of the controversy from less hyper online right wing critics. Just look at Onward (a film whose gay representation got nary a mention in conservative media). Lightyear's status as a "sexual orientation in kids entertainment" flashpoint was caused by left wing pressure groups inside of Disney defining it in these terms. Here's a quick variety article but you can find similar coverage over basically a month in all major mainstream print newspapers. https://variety.com/2022/film/news/pixar-lightyear-same-sex-kiss-1235209179/

Do we have to guess on this stuff? GLAAD produces yearly reports but without a true overview outside of broadcast TV (which mentions 6-13% of regular characters being coded as a minority sexual orientation on broadcast). https://cdn-cf.glaad.org/sites/default/files/GLAAD 202122 WWATV.pdf though UCLA doesn't collect this in their TV data complaining that "Currently, however, there are no independently verifiable and consistently updated databases that track information about these other identities, particularly for disability and LGBTQ status, for those working in key roles in Hollywood. - https://socialsciences.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/UCLA-Hollywood-Diversity-Report-2022-Television-10-27-2022.pdf It would be nice to know actual numbers for this sort of thing. People's vibes on percentages is often significantly off. anyone know if one of these places used Nielsen top 10 lists as dataset to look at shows demo breakdowns (only realistic way I can think of to capture significant streaming shows)?

So let's see what the actual breakeven point was according to Deadline: (1) let's pretend participations are a flat 18.5% of first dollar gross (300/total revenue) - I might use 20% for ease of math. (2) theatrical = 80% of overall revenue (subtracting video costs from video revenue for ease of math). [Revenue] = [Rentals] * 5/4 [Costs] = 687 + .185* [revenue] Revenue = costs at 674M in theatrical rentals / 843M in overall revenue. Given that Deadline thinks Disney took in 54/55% of box office revenue, that translates to an estimated 1.231B breakeven point

I don't get how Home Entertainment be so low when home video costs are pinned at 100M. You're supposed to see 1/3 of home video go to home video costs not 2/3rds (and even that is by industry consensus as exaggeration of physical media costs. home entertainment also includes some digital transactions).

Which is also downstream of how this 2023 fight isn't exactly identical to the 2022 one. 2023 has much weaker grounds for DeSantis to fight on than Disney's self-inflicted quagmire of 2022.