MightyDargon

Would YOU want to pit your kids' movie against Mario?

Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, while probably a better movie than Extinction or Last Knight, utterly sucks in comparison to the entire rest of the series in a way that Knight or Extinction don't compared to other Transformers movies. Also Ford is WAAAYYYY too old for this type of role by now.

Its IMDB score and modifiers so far don't indicate a movie with particularly good reception or a leggy run.

I assume all the carping about Mel Gibson/Donnie Yen was "very online" rather than enough to actually sink the movie.

I seriously doubt WB cares enough about this movie to bother.

RT audience scores aren't terribly reliable anyway. And by that I mean people seem to be arguing this movie isn't generally considered "good" using the same sort of very anecdotal evidence that Shazam 2 was "good" by a very small slice of noninfluential reviews on a metric of dubious value. Similar to the endless fights over Dominion's RT score rather than IMDB/Metacritic/Letterboxd whatever.

Wick 4

Does this look like 65 mil plus material yet?

Shazam 2 is gonna do less than half of 1. "Aquabro" is gonna horribly underperform stuff like Rise of Skywalker and Avatar 2. Might as well punt for Wonka, esp. if Blue Beetle also gets squished.

At the risk of sounding stupid, how do previews get counted into the gross? And also, is there a way to track the impact on regular ticket sales from this?

I honestly don't know why people keep casting her. Ecks vs. Sever was pretty damning.

It's a waste of its slot vs. movies that have actual potential and a future. If it has crap reviews/buzz people simply won't go. Nobody HAS to see any tentpole. WB should consider punting it and slotting in something else where there's still time. And no, this is not about Heard. Levi's antivax stuff wasn't the reason Shazam bombed either.

Is 800-900k a good figure for the D&D previews?

I guess you can say this movie got Shankzam'd

Then they should consider moving up Wonka to Christmas weekend. Aquaman is very likely screwed and a waste of its IMAX slots.

Dr. Strange 2 didn't flop at all. Quantumania, on the other hand....

It is over for about 5-10 years IMO. Certainly Neill's last one, sadly. Won't get that boost again.

I'm skeptical that Blue Beetle does figure into their larger plans. It doesn't really seem "big solo movie on Christmas" event level either.

Is there a way we can calculate EEAO's Amazon sales of DVD and Blu-Ray? I think that would be the real windfall for that film at this point.

Once it's clear Shazam 2 ain't going over 100 mil US, Aquaman is getting chunked to a carp slot next year. WB will try to bury the news at some point when people are talking about a different movie (Mario?). Keeping the "big Christmas movie" as something from a dead universe that the fanbase is apathetic to is a terrible strategy. WB will then move a different movie up (Dune?) to take advantage of the IMAX. BTW the better screens were something like a third of Shazam 2's gross. It would have been even deader this Christmas.

Yeah, but Mario killed Shazam's chances of a kid audience specifically. John Wick killed Shazam's chances of an adult audience specifically. If we're going there we should probably argue about 12 year olds sneaking into John Wick or whatever.

No Way Home made such a shitload of money that there was no way they would have stopped. And yes I know it's a Sony co-production.

This would have to have a sucky launch to go under 30.5 mil.

I think Shazam suffered because adults were saving money for John Wick and parents were saving money for Mario.

Transformers is the bigger threat than Elemental IMO. Indy looks horrendous but that's a bit later in the run to do max damage.