grumpythepenguin

I think it depends a lot on the representation. Like with Blue Beetle it still took place in the United States, so it was more important to Latino Americans, but less so in the rest of Latin America. But when an American movie also takes place in Latin America, it tends to get a lot more support. Like with Transformers: Rise of the Beasts - since much of the movie was filmed in and took place in Peru, that was one of the movie's best markets in terms of box office (per capita anyway). Just like Coco, an American movie that took place in Mexico, was that market's top grossing movie of all time when it released.

Red would've likely performed significantly better in Canada as it has an even higher percentage of east/southeast asian immigrants and that movie was by a Canadian director and takes place in Toronto.

Well, we've seen from the once a year movie day price cuts that people will show up en masse with $5 tickets across the board. The problem is that studios don't want ticket prices to be that low because it'd probably reduce their overall revenues (even if numbers made up for prices to make studio box office receipts similar, it'd probably reduce pvod/streaming numbers). Movie theatres would do incredible business of course, because they don't need to make money off tickets, their concession numbers would go through the roof. But to get prices that low, theatres would probably have to share concession revenues with studios so that everyone's incentives were aligned for cheap tickets and longer windows - which would also make movie theatre subscription deals more viable. But I don't think theatres are ready to go there yet to do this.

I think he said that Theron was professional and on time. Hardy was the problem.

It seemed like they were trying to recreate the Dune 2 marketing, which was also delayed until after the strike so their young actors could do a world tour to promote the movie. It's just that Dune 2 had an insane cast, with Timothée, Zendaya, Florence and Austin, all of whom were also coming off critically acclaimed movies/performances of their own, to say nothing of the veteran actors. The Dune 2 cast world tour for sure added tens of millions to the box office and it seemed like Challengers was trying to piggyback off that success. Many also previously considered Dune to be pretty niche sci fi material (compared to Star Wars, Star Trek, etc.) given the box office of the original film but a lot of elements clearly helped to make it more attractive to general audiences. But I agree that Challengers was a tougher sell on many levels, even though I thought the movie was good.

A Harris poll last month (and they've been doing these polls on theatre habits for many years): https://movieweb.com/moviegoers-prefer-streaming-over-theaters-poll/ Basically 2/3 of Americans preferred to watch movies on streaming over theatres with the two main reasons being ticket and concession prices. In the past, I think theatres were seen as a cheaper alternative and did quite well during recessions, but I guess right now, it's not. It's not that movie tickets - inflation adjusted - are particularly high (excluding premium screens), I just think the home alternatives (streaming, tv/device screen quality, narrower release windows, food delivery, etc.) have greatly improved (while also being less expensive). Still, 1/3 do still prefer theatres so there is still an audience - especially for films with a lot of buzz that people want to see and talk about right away.

Streaming would have been fine if the studios had stuck to selling content to Netflix, etc. (which initially they did for too little, but could've sold films for a lot more after those initial contracts), but they underestimated what it would cost to vertically integrate and go direct to consumers. It's like if the studios had bought all of the movie theatre chains - that would've been financially disastrous as well given how many have gone bankrupt (or come close in the case of AMC). Sony is the only major studio that comes to mind that just continued selling streaming rights without trying to launch their own service.

The Canadian chains are charging higher prices for it compared to other movies.

The movie theatres in Brampton and the surrounding area have been getting threats around screening South Indian films so there have been challenges trying to expand the market: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-cineplex-south-indian-film-vandals-turf-war/

Nolan did clarify that he was joking with the "evil streamers" comment. He just wanted to raise the issue of content disappearing but believed that streamers would fix it.

Deadline is estimating $32.3M for Saturday, and $93.3M overall https://deadline.com/2023/10/box-office-taylor-swift-eras-tour-concert-film-opening-1235572671/

It's definitely hard to pull off, but of course two of the biggest hits of the year managed it. Super Mario Bros. waited 30 years to release an animated movie because of how poorly the live action one did in 1993. And the Spider-Verse movies were great, and very successful, though yes, not as successful as the recent live action movies.

American movies that take place in Latin American countries tend to do great in those countries though. That's the main difference with Blue Beetle still taking place in the US (and making up a new city for the movie, rather than El Paso like in the comics). I think Coco was the top grossing movie of all time in Mexico when it debuted. And similarly this year, Transformers, Rise of the Beasts did very well in Peru, where part of the movie was filmed and takes place.

Well, one of the biggest box office successes of the year, Guardians of the Galaxy 3 was an action comedy centred around human cruelty/testing on animals. It was really difficult to watch those scenes but they really pulled off the emotional arc.

The Hollywood Reporter had a story out the other day saying that The Flash had a $300 million budget: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/barbie-transformers-ninja-turtles-summer-toys-1235566369/