PlatnumRoyce

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.

That's a fair counterpoint and certainly reads as plausible given the very limited stuff I've gleaned of his persona. So I'd probably want to revise my initial point to simply say that either a perceived position of confidence or weakness by DeSantis plausibly explains these actions to me. The same instincts that pretty objectively caused a big political victory a year ago strike me as likely as inspiring this fight. Different circumstances may mean that's a good or bad move (I honestly can't really see how this resolves yet).

What was the birds of prey lie and was it coming from leakers (which I'm generally ignorant of) or trade press? I saw a decent amount of hte latter which seemed reasonably likely to be true? https://variety.com/2019/film/news/dc-comics-superman-michael-b-jordan-green-lantern-aquaman-birds-of-prey-1203415757/ Deadline's OW autopsy said "I hear the first cut tested really poorly, and that DC film boss Walter Hamada got Birds of Prey into shape of being the critically praised film that it is. Reshoots were needed based off the first testing." I thought I saw a surprising amount of reporting on Stahelski & co's involvement and, even if post-release comments argue for it being exaggerated, I don't see an argument that it's a lie in the vein of lost of test screening claims.

This is probably clear to everyone else, but this is referencing scenes set in the real world (as opposed to barbie world/land) not "real world stuff"/controversies forcing reshoots.

If you can get a B+ cinemascore, you're not getting much below an 80 on vRT% and 3 transformers movies received sub-20% critical praise but the lowest cinemascore grade was a B+. Explicitly adding vRT% (which, yeah, has skews to adjust for) doesn't really add new insights to this discrepency, it's just displayed in a readily accessible way.

I don't want to dispute any of this but I also do think it bears noting that yes, this is a genuinely bad rating. if you throw in a ">50 million DBO" filter for 21st century animated films, Super Mario places something like 100th out of ~140 in RT and ~125th in Metascore (I grabbed a pre-pandemic dataset so numbers could raise/fall after those are added in). If you're a 10th percentile score, you're doing poorly relative to peers.

Disney clearly lost the first round of this and the second round is actively ongoing. I just don't see how you can confidently say Disney's already won their decision to embarrass DeSantis over his group's inattention to detail. If DeSantis thought he had his ass handed to him, he wouldn't have doubled down right now. Let's look at the big picture instead of the blow-by-blow: How does getting embroiled in a fight over if Disney World will receive a punitive regulatory tax "win" anything for Disney? How does Disney benefit from being a piñata on a GOP presidential primary debate stage? "Disneyworld can host LGBTQ forums" isn't exactly how the first round of this fight got started (which I'd argue is why Disney's is trying to have PR set that as the response to DeSantis instead of public policy lobbying over K-5 education). The best case for Disney is the fight gets defined along those lines which only bakes in extra bad will among the hyper political RWers instead of a broader conservative population. Political fights don't have to have a sole winner/loser but "lose/lose" just seems like a good case for Disney here. Disney making DeSantis lose doesn't necessarily place Disney in a better position than it was without these rolling controversies and DeSantis punishing Disney doesn't necessarily help his presidential campaign. I feel crazy here: getting people to cheer Disney fighting an active presidential candidate may be cathartic but that's a purely defensive posture that does nothing but burn generalized goodwill. I don't see arguments for Disney winning relative to a baseline without this fight. This is all downside mitigation.

I wonder if Infinity War/Endgame threw off their marketing more than anticipated. It both nukes the franchise's core relationship (in a way that trailers don't really suggest will be undone) and it's honestly just been long enough that it doesn't really even feel like a cliff hanger (especially as GotG isn't telegraphing the new story will be able that relationship).

Way too low for what? To clarify, those numbers appear to have come from a studio having obtaining rights to make a Barbie film but before the concrete aspects of the film were locked down. This is a real number that was aggregated from Sony hacks. We could say the budget may have potentially been lower but it really doesn't look as if current Barbie is all that expensive (even if its also not cheap). I agree that's way too low for Robbie-Gosling's Barbie film but I'm arguing that's highlighting how Barbie's having a good marketing campaign and people are confident in the film's ultimate quality. It's just an above average outcome so far.

I mean, I'd kill for an actual deep dive into Mario but not Detective Pikachu (lets not forget how much money those 1999/2000 anime films made at the DBO). How reasonable were ultimately disproven hypotheses and what does Mario and Sonic tell us about all three films/franchises?

I feel like Thor is sneakily underrated and Branagh basically did what he was hired to do. Pre-Avengers Marvel clearly wasn't "the MCU" and there are plenty of other big budget mythology and/or sword and sorcery films to compare it against. It did very well and Branagh allowed them to anchor the "Shakespearean" marketing push (even if the film is hardly great in execution). Thor 1 really is a vindication of how a name director can draw more attention and prestige as well as prime marketing for a superhero film even if it's not an A+ tentpole like SuperBat. I don't think Whedon can be placed in either of the camps you've constructed. He was clearly a known "brand" at the time and a brand that fit with Avengers pitch even if that didn't position him as a "prestige director." He's much more Shane Black than Russo Bros.

On the other hand "fuck the prequels, we're going back to real star wars" has to be easier marketing jiujitsu than "Harrison Ford was way too old to play Indiana Jones 15 years ago but that's not a problem now"

Yeah, it's just discussing the tweet above and pretending this is confirmed to be happening based on it.

If anyone wants a baseline for this film (that I don't really see being brought up): The initial estimates for the first version of a Barbie film floated 165M WW (90M Domestic box office + 75M INT box office). Not sure how much the size of film changed but is it a good measuring stick for this film?

To be fair, didn't Marvel do something vaguely like this in the runup to Infinity War (in order to successfully sell it as a stand alone capstone)?

I'll again flag morning consult actually did the sensible thing and just...polled people on this subject and published the results. https://assets.morningconsult.com/wp-uploads/2022/04/13134209/2204053_crosstabs_MC_ENTERTAINMENT_HARRY_POTTERJK_ROWLING_Adults_v1_SH.pdf Just ask people if they have boycotted or are considering boycotting it along with opinions on Rowling/controversy.

Worth flagging that CM1 wasn't actually particularly female-skewing despite the big representational push (though posttrak saw 86% positive for women versus 80% positive for men). It will be interesting to see if e.g. there's a group of people who saw WW or Hunger Games but not Captain Marvel that Disney can activate.

To be fair, the marketing has to assume general audience knows literally nothing about other 2 characters, who...appear to be both genuinely positioned as leads?

Does anyone have Simpsons movie demos? That the only big animated films that didn't have significantly better than normal legs (for a generic movie).

anonym?

On the same vein, there's no reason for the aggregator to be as mediocre as RT. If you poke around at the site pre-fandango purchase, you'll see them experimenting with a few different objective filters (__ critics circle member, digitial only reviewer, etc.). There was even a "my critics" list for a while. That's all gone replaced by top critic filter or nothing. There's a lot of interesting stuff you could make available under the topline aggregate that RT simply doesn't want to do. At least an unweighted critical consensus.