PlatnumRoyce

I'm struggling to think of people who came off well in the the weekend thread's various kerfuffles. Just embarrassing and aggravating stuff all around. Seems like people wanted to beat a dead horse instead of following Paul Anka's guarantee.

Aggregation from an offhand podcast comment on the ringer. Is this actually news or banal description of studio requirements applied to most films where director is forced to fight for a longer cut. Basically, is this a pro-forma contractual demand or is it a demand Marvel made to cut down the film after seeing an initial draft of it?

It's probably a bit of both. "feeling incentivized to give good reviews" is something you can apparently see for e.g. critics who physically lived near the headquarters of movie studios in the 1990s (my half-remembered regurgitation of a random academic article I found poking around databases a few months ago). I don't think you need to do all that much to nudge people towards better reviews even if it's not a "bought and sold" style thing people talk about it as.

Definitely. I'm mostly thinking out loud here especially because my early 2022 estimates clearly overestimated inflation (especially w/r/t how rises in surcharge ticketing would change things). I do like how multiple different angles here are basically agreeing on 20% inflation since 2019's average +/- 1 percentage point.

Yeah, but Food/fuel inflation is playing a decent role recently which should mess up quick comps.

tl;dr So I've been using 11.25 but I think $11.00 is the best rule of thumb answer. Comscore claims that 2021's ATP was 10.17 (someone on reddit found it in AMC's 2021 report). EntTelligence (featured on Deadline) said Year over year ticket prices increased 7.5% as of memorial day which would imply a $10.93. ATP. I know someone compared their personal movie theater's ATP relative to NATO yearly averages and, based on that, estimated Q1 2022 price was between 11 and 11.50.

Given that the number comes from Headey's (ex) agents I assume it's a highballed number. Perhaps Headey had escalators in her contract if the film hit 750M or 1 Billion WW. Those numbers are rarely included in reports of an actor's topline number but are part of total compensation debates.

So 370M in theatrical rentals (or is it theatrical/PVOD) v. 334M in production + Advertising = +36M - 25.7M Interest/overhead = 15M - 50M Participations = (-35M). But is P&A exclusively theatrical? This seems possibly close enough to a fudgeable range to claim it plausibly broke even by end of theatrical release.

No? But that 5 point "gap" basically is saying that you'd expect it to get a B+ cinemascore instead of an A-. The real penalty here is likely more the reduced chance that this reflects a film audiences "truly" universally love (A/A+) than parsing B+ v A- cinemascore importance.

I know someone mentioned it on Thursday, but it seems like we should be doing a better job of highlighting the apparently soft kid/family percentage for this film. Based on Deadline's preview numbers: Which implies, to me, that General Audiences gave the film 3.5 stars (though that might be too low). After friday, Lightyear's overall numbers were revised upwards to 4 stars and 65% recommend. While that 33% family audience percentage matches Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse, it's notably lower than other animated films which range from high 60s to mid 40 percent of OW audiences. The best comp I can think of, incredibles 2 had ~45% family audience on opening weekend (with ~30% of the audience being kids). Should we be thinking of Lightyear as more of a boy version of Maleficent (something I've yet to hear anyone suggest)? Live action reboots/reimaginings seem to generically bring this level of family audiences but I'm not basing that on many datapoints.

The wildcard remains just how insanely well Black Panther did with African-American audiences combined with, I'm assuming, that not being the forum's main demographic. My favorite "fun fact" about that film's gross is that that Black Panther 1 made 75M from black audiences on opening weekend (202M overall 3 day Opening weekend). Across all films, African American audience % is about 12%. That means that Black Panther 1 played like a film with a 623M opening weekend domestically for African-American audiences. Similarly, that implies non-African-American audiences treated it like a 144M OW. That's a gap between being bigger than Endgame and being Guardians of the Galaxy 2's Opening and that's obviously going to impact people's baseline assumptions. I assume that analysis falls apart on some level but I think it's a major cause of weirdness surrounding black panther 2 predictions.

Thanks, I check out what Charlie's had to say on the matter. I thought Spider-Man v. Spider-Man was an incredibly fun race people were downplaying. Just using real world inflation to fill gap, SM1 would have grossed ~700M versus NWH's 800M. If we assume PLF/IMAX screens average 50% higher prices than normal tickets (basically true) and SM1 had no PLF/IMAX screens (false but I'm not sure how to estimate it), the breakeven point is if ~3 out of every 8 tickets sold to NWH were special or surcharge tickets. That's clearly too high for the entire film's run so we don't have to estimate SM1's IMAX share but it highlights how it was a decently close run thing.

I can't find a full list of markets Lightyear is opening in, but deadline says its 79% of international box office, so I looked at Cars 3 and excluding the markets I know lightyear isn't releasing in this weekend. That gives me a list of 45 markets that had opening weekends of 42.8M whenever they opened (so not opening weekend). That's obviously not perfect but it should be a ballpark estimate to compare against lightyear's 34M. (territories I grabbed from mojo) - Bolivia, Colombia, Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, Paraguay, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Uruguay, Mexico, Bulgaria, Iceland, India, Romania, South Africa, Türkiye, Venezuela, Australia, New Zealand, Netherlands, Brazil, South Korea, Argentina, Chile, Hong Kong, Spain, United Kingdom, Portugal, Belgium, Philippines, Finland, Lithuania, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia, Norway, Malaysia, Denmark, Singapore, Sweden, Italy, Germany, Austria

Sure, but I think you're still underplaying inflation. pre-shutdown NATO ticket prices suggest that very low rate of inflation (~1.5%) which is part inflation part ticket composition flux but having to shut down and re-open theaters made prices much less sticky even for 2021. We don't have super strong objective data, but here's my read on the data: A guy on box office subreddit pulled his (same theater) ticket price changes over time and thinks was ~11.25 ATP in q1 and I basically believe it. This which would imply a 22% increase from 2019. I've pulled all EntTelligence OW price datapoints and while it's risky to compare across datasets, they go from a low of 10.87 for Father Stu's OW to 11.66 for the lost ciy and between 12.60 and 13.00 for big PLF heavy blockbusters. https://old.reddit.com/r/boxoffice/comments/sxfxgr/movie_theater_ticket_prices_over_10_years/ https://old.reddit.com/r/boxoffice/comments/uajer4/estimating_the_domestic_average_ticket_price_of/

Does anyone have any thoughts on the quorum's public tracking data? It really aggressively argues against the "people are waiting for pixar at home" but I'm not sure how well correlated it really has been to box office results. https://thequorum.com/film/?filmID=202

Clearly over 800M, no? We've clearly seen more than 10% inflation on blockbuster ticket prices since the middle of 2019.

66% positive which based on films with similar % positive implies a % recommended of somewhere in the 40s (I'd say 45 but comps are between 38-52 %)

but better than Onward because Deadline notable refused to give any aggregate data for onward implying that it's likely lower than an aggregate 4/5 stars

The 4 stars are much better than the 62% recommended. Pulling my posttrak database, I see 48 films with an explicit posttrak rec of 60-64% by end of OW including Boxtrolls, Jungle Cruise, Screem, Lost City, Tom and Jerry, It, Uncharted, Cruella, No Time to Die, XMen Apocalypse, Kong: Skull Island, FB: Secrets of Dumbledore, Ambulance, Doctor Sleep, Angel has fallen, The Suicide Squad (2021), The King's Man, Good Boys, Joker, Birds of Prey, Many saints of Newark, Quiet Place 2, Eternals, and Zombeland 2 I don't know if I'd classify it as a true "yikes" but the best kids movie comp appears to be Tom and Jerry. It's more complicated because lots of posttrak data only contains either recommended or % positive based on time when the film was released so there may be more relevant comps I'd need to track down.

tk

if you completely ignore the 1/10 and 10/10 numbers and use 8-9 and 2-3 to estimate what they "should" be, you're going to get something like a 7.1 "fake imdb score" which would be alongside the mediocre pixar films. Honestly don't know if that's helpful or pure fake data b.s. .

I want to push back on this. If you look systematically at largest gaps between verified Audience scores and cinemascore, the biggest errors are on kids movies which is obviously due to composition effects (10 year olds aren't rating films on these websites). Only looking at 74 films with a B cinemascore or higher, kids movies rank 2 (Addams Family), 5 (Space Jam 2), 6 (Lion King), 7 (Addams Family 2), 8 (Boss Baby 2) and 20th (Aladdin).