ZeroHour

Does it really make much difference? Taylor’s fans have happily ignored all of her previous movie roles. It doesn’t seem like they’re particularly invested in the idea of her as an actress.

I think there should be more skepticism at this point on whether hoovering up more TV/film IP is really a huge path toward continued success for a company like Sony. It's a real question mark that buying Fox actually helped Disney that much and as far as I can tell, WB adding the Discovery catalogue hasn't done much for them. Maybe buying smaller assets like a Marvel or a Dreamworks Animation makes business sense, but absorbing another studio like this? Sony would be stuck with a lot of declining linear channels. It's too late in the game for them to make a major play in the streaming space and all of their own product is tied up in streaming deals with Netflix and Disney for the foreseeable future so Paramount+ would be a pretty worthless asset for them. Is all that trouble really worth it just so you could churn out some Mission Impossible and Transformers movies (franchises that haven't exactly blown up the box office recently)? Why not just let your studio continue to do its thing doing decently in theaters and acting pretty successfully as an "arms dealer" to the streamers and spend this money expanding into something with more potential upside?

I wish we could ditch bored movie stars introducing trailers. It always looks like a hostage video. It's even more annoying than when directors thank me for showing up to a theater at the start of a movie.

James Cameron would have had the courage to call this Gladiator$.

I think Porthos is talking more how COVID (and the strikes) affected the movies/shows themselves, not the impact of releasing movies in a marketplace affected by COVID. It's not talked about a lot, but COVID shaped a lot of the product that was filmed during the pandemic. Look at the last season of Stranger Things, the storyline intentionally split up the characters into separate groups with stories playing out in separate locations and never brought them together physically. That's a production choice shaped by the realities of COVID and adhering to testing protocols. It probably involved a lot of last minute rewrites and changes to shooting locations. How well a production adapted to those sorts of last minute (in terms of the LONG production processes) curveballs shaped how those movies/shows turned out. In the case of Marvel, they got hit with a pandemic requiring a lot of last minute reworking on all of their projects at the same time they had demands from on high to basically triple their output. That's a recipe for trouble. For instance, the director of the first season of Loki has said they basically had to form a new mini writer's room in the middle of production to rewrite all of the finalized scripts because of the realities of COVID. That's a situation where they got away with it, but others appear to have been less lucky. Everything up through The Marvels was a COVID production. Even in animation, suddenly all of these well oiled production machines had to adjust to most of their workforce working from home. That certainly had an impact on movies like Lightyear and Strange World. That doesn't necessarily mean we would have gotten better versions of those films without the pandemic but the pandemic certainly didn't help those movies. We see some studios and productions have handled the pandemic better than others but it has definitely shaped the movies and shows we've seen over the last few years.

Princess and the Frog has definitely been a valuable property for Disney but it was not the big comeback hit for hand drawn animation that it was positioned to be when it released in theaters. Funnily enough, I think it shares one big problem with Wish, a forgettable soundtrack without any lasting hit songs.

Pocahontas did not kill hand drawn animation at Disney. They had hand drawn hits after that including Mulan, Tarzan, and Lilo & Stitch. It was really Shrek in 2001 (six years after Pocahontas) that set the table for the end of 2D at Disney. That movie was not only a giant computer animated hit, but it mercilessly made fun of the films that were Disney's bread and butter and solidified the impression that Disney animated films were deeply uncool. Big expensive flops that followed in Shrek's wake like Atlantis and Treasure Planet pretty much sealed the deal along with Pixar's continued assent. Whether true or not, the success of computer animated films at Dreamworks and Pixar at that point created the impression in the industry that audiences did not want traditionally animated films. Then of course there's John Lasseter's failed attempt to revive hand drawn with Princess and the Frog and Winnie the Pooh.

Damn. This is probably coming out too late to make a Dog Man and Night Bitch double feature work.

I can't believe you would sabotage the Rock like that.

This is such a weird conversation. Black Adam was not even a good movie. Certainly not anything you could hang an entire cinematic universe on.

Variety didn’t really put in much extra work. Both stories are quoting off the same press release.

https://variety.com/2024/film/news/wish-ratings-views-disney-plus-1235964539/ None, Deadline just got it wrong. Disney is only claiming it’s their third highest opening for a Disney Animation Studios film which mostly means it was just bigger than Strange World.

This is not the third biggest premiere on the service. Only the third biggest for a Disney Animation Studios film. Elemental and the Little Mermaid last year were both bigger just to name a couple.

They were probably mostly children.

This is James Cameron. Saying he's going to do something soon could mean 10 years from now.