Maaatt

Warner Brothers retained distribution rights to its Legendary franchises, both Dune and Godzilla/Monsterverse. I’m gonna assume they also retained similar co-financing agreements for these movies similar to what they had under the prior output deal too(they contributed something like 20% or 25% to the cost of the production in addition to handling distribution) .. though I am not positive on that part.

Was just about to say the same thing. At my screening for Dune the trailers for both Ghostbusters and Godzilla x Kong played and they both had audible groans and mock laughing.

I second this. After the success of Oppenheimer coming fast on the heels of CBM’s not being the sure things they had been for well over a decade there was some talk of what does is it say about modern audience tastes, how can the Oppenheimer model be replicated to make a steady stream of hits for theaters (if theaters can no longer bank on the guaranteed stream of blockbusters from superhero movies, where will the blockbusters come from?) and the easy joke about that was to say we need more Christopher Nolan movies but he can only do so much.. But what you said above is the correct answer to me, or at least part of it, we need more quality auteur-directors with big & loyal fanbases capable of opening movies, like Nolan. Thats my dream at least.

Does anyone else remember the Deadline 2024 box office preview articles? On one of them they went through and listed every movie that currently was seen by exhibition (the theater circuits) of having potential to get past the 100 million dollar century mark at the domestic box office (i think they counted around 23 on the release calendar at that time). For the most part its a fairly predictable list, with the first releasee of 2024 that was seen as having a chance being Bob Marley:One Love. The title that jumped out at me though was ”Cabrini” which at that time id barely even heard of and thought was insane. Their brief justification was basically just that its the studio that made Sound Of Freedom & targets an audience that is often underserved (religious), which is true but man i still don’t get who was seeing this to get to north of $100 million domestic. Ever since then ive been curious to follow how it tracks to see if i just have a blind spot in this area or if the exhibition sources informing the article were delusional/overly optimistic.

I actually think the gap between films could be somewhat of a benefit here. Sometimes you can see IP start to become tired and stale to the public and that leading to diminishing returns. Its not that the quality of the films necessarily has gone down, its just that they gradually start to lead to a build up of feelings among many of "been there, done that" and there's always something shiny and new and more exciting to capture the target audiences attention. But once you give that IP a good break from the popular culture and then it returns to the scene another powerful motivator/feeling can push viewers in the opposite direction and bring them back.. nostalgia. We've seen the studios really lean into the nostalgia play in the last decade and its often worked. Had Jurassic World arrived not long after Jurassic Park 3 it very likely would not of been the huge runaway success it became after a more then dozen year delay for instance. Animated movies might be a bit different because they are so kids focused but I still think having a good amount of time between the last films is more a positive here.

as mentioned, this doesn't have to do with tracking so i don't wanna clog up the board anymore after pointing this out but the trades clearly say Warner Brothers retains distribution rights on the Godzilla/Monsterverse and Dune franchises. Yes, technically Legendary is the owner of the film rights but WB retained distribution rights to those franchises. See article below: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/legendary-pictures-forges-new-partnership-with-sony-1235223847/ Specifically this passage on Legendary's pact with Sony: "The pact does not include the Dune or Godzilla franchises, which will continue to be released by Warner Bros., Legendary’s previous partner. Dune: Part Two is due out from Warners on Nov. 3, 2023. There is no formal deal for Sony to co-finance Legendary films, though it’s possible the two could explore that option down the road."

Sorry didn't see this till now, been super busy the last day. Yeah I know Legendary is with Sony now, I was actually gonna mention that in my original response but it had already gotten too long so left it out. This isn't the first time they've left WB, they previously had left Warner in 2014 and went to Universal, only to come back to WB in 2019.

Dune was quite notoriously considered by many to be "unfilmable." A number of different filmmakers admired the book and wanted and/or attempted to make a film adaptation (including Ridley Scott) but those attempts always failed and the projects were never made.. Except of course David Lynch's 1980's film which was a massive flop and despised by critics. The general consensus in Hollywood after that was that the belief the IP was simply too dense and unfilmable had been correct. Eventually SyFy made a miniseries which made sense given the time needed to fully tell such a dense story but miniseries at the time had budgets nowhere close to those of theatrical movies and a good budget was really needed to tell the story at the level fans of the book wanted. It is somewhat surprising studios didn't jump at making it after LOTR but I'm assuming many executives still had memories of the 1980's Lynch film. Legendary then got the rights in 2016 after they went on the hunt for potential franchise properties and Game of Thrones had exploded into popularity. Warners does technically co-finance the films with Legendary, though its a relatively small percentage of something like 20-25%. A lot of the studios like these sorts of distribution/co-financing output deals because it limits their risk (granted it also limits the potential upside) and they make money off a distribution fee even if the film is a financial failure.

Will be curious to see if that really moves the needle much, college spring breaks are very staggered (there are a small number that have even been in break this last week. It nuts to me to have spring break in February), a larger number have break staring today but even more have them later in March into early April (the week with the largest number of colleges going on break are those that begin next Friday I believe). On top of it only being a portion of colleges, the opening night demos showed this is not necessarily a big college age film with most the audience being over 25.

Taylor Swift and Five Nights At Freddy’s would have something to say about that

That nearly 3 hour run time really makes later evening showtimes unattractive to me, especially on a non holiday (or holiday break), non summer weeknight. I rarely will go late night for a movie as it is but when its a long movie its an absolute dealbreaker.

Since it appears to be me you are accusing of “just wanting to see what they wanna see” i guess ill respond.. if by “seeing what i want to see” means reading the actual articles you link to where the reporters in both instances go out of the way to tell the reader the studio projection is being “conservative” then yeah i guess me and Variety and Deadline and everyone who reads the trades daily and sees this practice done routinely is “seeing what we wanna see.” Theres a reason studios do this, I’m not making this up, theres a reason the reporters go to exhibitors, other professional tracking services and rival distributors to get a more accurate picture of what they are seeing. Im not breaking new ground here explaining this. This is studio PR by the books. All i was attempting to do was be helpful and say you should take a studio projection that they are giving to the media with a huge grain of salt because you seemed to focus so much on this WB number.. and you don’t have to take my word for it cause the reporters all but tell you too when they point out the studios stated projection does not align with what the rest of the industry is seeing. I was never trying to shade how you or anyone is seeing this particular movies weekend box office play out, merely wanting to give a helpful hint that a studios publicly given projection is not worth the paper its printed on because they have a vested interest to try to shade reporters expectations (hell, the discourse tonight on here shows you exactly why a studio does this). Thats it.

I think you might be focusing too much on the Warner expectation relative to the rest of the data in that article (and another similar article in Variety). As both Deadline and Variety point out the WB’s number is decidedly conservative compared to the current expectations and thinking of exhibitors and others in the industry, which is not unusual for a studio to do (in fact its quite common), studios frequently underestimate or lowball their expected weekend box office (at least the number they are reporting/leaking to the media.. they very well could have internal numbers that better align with exhibitors & the professional trackers). Why do that? In part, they’re playing a game of expectation setting with the entertainment reporters that cover box office, trying to set expectations at a level they know they are likely to not just meet but jump through & thus hopefully generate headlines about “over-performance!” or “exceeding expectations!” come Monday morning. This is especially the case in scenarios where expectations have risen in the weeks leading up to a release and the studio doesn’t want the media to get ahead of itself. Last year during the week of “Barbenheimer” you can find articles of WB projecting $75 million for Barbie and Universal sticking with $40 million for Oppenheimer even as by the start of that release week it was clear to most paying attention that both films would perform better then that.

That was an “early estimate” not official WB numbers.. which probably wont come out until perhaps Friday morning with the figure imbedded with the Thursday preview numbers.

Is that true about the eyeballs for Canada TV being on a Saturday broadcast? Cause its like the polar opposite in the US where Saturday is an infamous dead zone in terms of television audience (at least since the 1990’s, prior to that it had been a big night for NBC in the 80’s & was CBS’s top rated night in the 70’s). Traditionally in the US studios wanted to market their films most heavily on Thursday nights. Its one of the reasons Thursday nights became “must see tv” on NBC in the 80’s & 90’s and why the other networks worked hard to break the monopoly NBC had on total viewership for that night. Advertising rates for Thursday nights were higher in part because the Hollywood studios used that night so aggressively to market their film slates for the upcoming weekend (there were also other types of advertisers who favored Thursday nights because the product they were marketing was more likely to be bought by households on the weekend, but given the importance of weekend box office relative to weekday it was just particularly important for the studios). Sorry, i know that was a bit off topic and a tangent, but i bring up this marketing history just to point to the challenges the marketing departments at studios have nowadays. Flooding the airwaves of television on the Thursday night before your movie opens just doesn’t help you in the same way it used to, theres nowhere near as many eyeballs watching and of the smaller number that are, some are either delaying viewing to fast forward through commercials or flipping through their phones during ad breaks, not paying attention. In terms of what Warner believes for who the audience of Dune is, I disagree that they have assessed this to just be a movie for the core fans, in fact I think they are doing what they can to position this movie for audience beyond the core Dune fans (that doesn’t necessarily mean their efforts will be successful). Matt Belloni (now at Puck News, previously the editor of the Hollywood Reporter) has said that the marketing and exhibition teams at WB have been frustrated/struggled on expanding the audience & getting this movie to track at the level they think it should & could be tracking at. Anyways this is already way too long (sorry guys!) but they are trying, they delayed release to March to ensure they’d open after the SAG strike precisely because they see the young cast as an important marketing tool to younger audiences (its why they’ve been sending them around the world for the last month), theres been weeks of across the board ad spending on tv, Youtube, socials, radio, etc. they screened the movie for exhibitors in early January to get them excited, screened the movie for critics/media far & wide & lifted embargoes early, re-released Dune in theaters w/ part 2 previews, this weeks Tenet IMAX re-release w/ Dune previews, early access screenings tonight to gin up word of mouth for this week, etc. ok really am done now! Sorry that was so long.