SUICIDE SQUAD WEEKEND THREAD | New REVISED SUNDAY NUMBER 134m FROM GURU ON PG 212 | 267.1M WW OW | Nine Lives 6.5 OW |No Spoilers Allowed!!! | ACCOUNT SALES THIS WEEKEND - see first post for details !!

[Blaze Heatnix]

14 minutes ago, Water Bottle said:

Critics and WOM influence legs and such as they affect undecided movie-goers. Clearly Star Trek Beyond's marketing hadn't sold a lot of people or put enough people on the fence to make it a success like the last two Star Trek movies. People just weren't interested for whatever reason.

 

Critics and WOM might be different.

 

There are cases and cases. Ghostbusters and Star Trek Beyond are examples. They both had amazing reviews, but weak legs because WOW hasn't been strong.

 

You might blame it on the marketing or bad trailers, but WOM isn't there for these movies. No matter how good or bad they are. You have 5 Transformers movies now, and they keep making money, despite being badly reviewed. However, if they're making money, that means lots of people are watching it, which means there's some WOW going on here, which is better than critics views about the movie.

 

Bad movies may also end up having demand and WOM. That's why you'll get a 6th Resident Evil movie, despite every previous movie getting horrible reviews. General audience liked what they saw. 

 

Maybe it depends on the movies that are being released. I mean, do people expect critics to like Robots blowing up each other? Do people expect critics to like a hero blowing up zombies heads and kicking Umbrella's ass in 3D? Maybe that's why many movies perform well despite critics. I think SS is another good example.

 

I loved SS, but critics hated it, which isn't a problem at all. Critics are also part of the public and they have every right to show their dislike towards a movie. 

 

I'm surprised that I loved a ton of rotten movies, without even knowing they were rotten at all. lol. 

Edited August 8, 2016 by Blaze Heatnix

[kowhite]

3 minutes ago, nilephelan said:

 

I posted in the Magnificent 7 thread it is damn good and a big crowd pleaser.  

 

Youve seen it?  Tell me more!

 

I love me some Denzel.

[UrosepsisFace]

If somebody wants to watch a movie, critics aren't stopping them. If somebody doesn't want to watch a movie, critics aren't going to convince them. That leaves people on the fence are sometimes absolutely ignorant of the movies. We're talking about some people who probably haven't even watched a trailer. You might be talking about a couple walking past a theater and seeing posters, and wondering if anything worth watching is available.

 

Imo, this will keep going on forever, but I feel to a lesser degree. More people will actually inform themselves about movies without looking at critic ratings. This will happen especially when they do a cursory glance at RT and see nothing they want to watch with a good rating. If this happens month-after-month, they'll just stop using RT. Light bulbs start lighting up when 2/3 of the year has gone by and you're about to watch your 5th movie and you realize you've only watched movies in which half the theater hasn't gone through puberty yet or it's a scary movie.

[Gopher]

Critics are sort of a be all end all voice for the last third of the year. Nobody will be talking about your movie (ie talking abouf its awards potential) unless critics love it. Your big prestige movie will tank unless early word is unanimously positive. Your small prestige movie may not find a distributor unless it kills with critics at a festival.

 

Summer movies usually aren't made with longevity as a bottom line - market the hell out of it and get them in opening weekend. So critics tend to be a green or yellow light. Ghostbusters would've opened to a lot less than 46 million if word going into the weekend wasn't positive. They don't always align with the film's longevity but that's a more nuanced discussion - Trek suffered from two major tentpoles in a row, Ghostbusters three, and the films didn't generate the buzz they needed to surpass them. 

[ZattMurdock]

23 minutes ago, DAJK said:

So yeah Jason Bourne was pretty great.

I just watched the first one until today. I'm playing Overwatch now but I think I'll start watching them after that. I want to know what all the fuzz is all about.

[Johnny Tran]

36 minutes ago, Water Bottle said:

 

The GIF was in response to "first female huge super blockbuster".

 

I meant first female superhero

[Water Bottle]

4 minutes ago, Blaze Heatnix said:

 

Critics and WOM might be different.

 

There are cases and cases. Ghostbusters and Star Trek Beyond are examples. They both had amazing reviews, but weak legs because WOW hasn't been strong.

 

You might blame it on the marketing or bad trailers, but WOM isn't there for these movies. No matter how good or bad they are. You have 5 Transformers movies now, and they keep making money, despite being badly reviewed. However, if they're making money, that means lots of people are watching it, which means there's some WOW going on here, which is better than critics views about the movie.

 

Bad movies may also end up having demand and WOM. That's why you'll get a 6th Resident Evil movie, despite every previous movie getting horrible reviews. General audience liked what they saw. 

 

Maybe it depends on the movies that are being released. I mean, do people expect critics to like Robots blowing up each other? Do people expect critics to like a hero blowing up zombies heads and kicking Umbrella's ass in 3D? Maybe that's why many movies perform well despite critics. I think SS is another good example.

 

I loved SS, but critics hated it, which isn't a problem at all. Critics are also part of the public and they have every right to show their dislike towards a movie. 

 

I'm surprised that I loved a ton of rotten movies, without even knowing they were rotten at all. lol. 

 

Sure there are times when critics and WOM disagree (Tarzan) but all indicators is that Star Trek Beyond has had great WOM. But if people aren't interested in going in the first place, great WOM won't convince them.

 

Critics have given good reviews to movies with robots blowing up each other (Real Steel?) and movies where the hero blows up zombie heads (Zombieland) in the past.

 

Transformers 4: $100/$245 million. Those are terrible legs and it's $100 million less than the domestic total of Transformers 3. Which incidentally also dropped off from the second one (which increased from the well-received first one). I wouldn't say that's a sign that the Transformers have good WOM but they do have good marketing campaigns. 

 

As for Resident Evil, they tend to be modest hits (not blockbusters but whatever) and are cheap to make. It's not hard to see then why with a loyal fanbase, they've been successful enough to get 6 movies. I wouldn't say WOM on those movies are amazing. I could be wrong but they don't have good legs either.

 

Yes, critics and WOM might be different but both of them don't matter if the amount of people on the fence is low. If most people had decided to already skip it, doesn't make a difference.

[UrosepsisFace]

6 minutes ago, Blaze Heatnix said:

Maybe it depends on the movies that are being released. I mean, do people expect critics to like Robots blowing up each other? Do people expect critics to like a hero blowing up zombies heads and kicking Umbrella's ass in 3D? Maybe that's why many movies perform well despite critics.

 

Eons ago, I thought critics were really old people with really old taste. Maybe that was the case back then. I don't know for sure. I just assumed they wouldn't like genre movies and action movies or comedies that I enjoyed. I felt RT was similar to this in the beginning. Things are different now. Just about anybody can be a critic. Some don't get paid much. Other might not even be paid. Just look at the influx of bloggers and what not on RT. I think they all have the potential to love any type of movie. 

 

The problem with RT is, it favors the popular opinion without really defining it. It's a popularity contest of sorts. Each critic has a different criteria and a different opinion, and they have no system in place, just an opinion which is the opposite of objective. There are no standards for becoming a critic for some of these people. Even those who have been trained or have some sort of background to make them better at their jobs than others, they still have preconceived feelings for movies that they watch, and are not able to separate that from their experience. Even then, there is worth to them if you spend the time to read what they say. The problem with RT is, most people don't even read what they say. Some critics will say a movie has great cinematography but is rotten because the lead had a bad hair day. Some critics are absolutely ignorant of the inspiration of movies, even if its based on history, and misconstrue the whole meaning of movies. In the case of Batman v Superman, one of the more interesting criticisms was having Bruce Wayne's father played by two actors in back to back scenes, even though he dies in the first scene. Reading these criticisms, personally, I've become wary of the aggregate site. Seeing how people react to RT is even more disheartening. Many never read the reviews but just see the number. Some will see the number and that will formulate their experience in watching the movie. It all comes to a big giant headache when you read a review that says "This movie will confirm all your preconceived disdain for it" and then an audience takes on that opinion without ever watching the movie. And it further encourages mob mentality and both critic and audience begin reflecting that mentality upon each other, especially in the blogs and twittersphere of these critics. Because reviews can be submitted any time, this also encourages conforming to the mainstream view, and then even copy pasting what other critics have said. In the end, I look at RT, and feel as if we've turned this past-time into a bunch of lemmings echoing each other. Personally, I don't like RT, but that's just me. That doesn't mean it doesn't have an effect, though.

[John Marston]

Critics reviews don't seem to matter much for blockbusters. WOM is what determines what happens to the film. Also some movies just have a strong upfront fanbase no matter what 

Edited August 8, 2016 by John Marston

[Water Bottle]

16 minutes ago, UrosepsisFace said:

If somebody wants to watch a movie, critics aren't stopping them. If somebody doesn't want to watch a movie, critics aren't going to convince them. That leaves people on the fence are sometimes absolutely ignorant of the movies. We're talking about some people who probably haven't even watched a trailer. You might be talking about a couple walking past a theater and seeing posters, and wondering if anything worth watching is available.

 

Imo, this will keep going on forever, but I feel to a lesser degree. More people will actually inform themselves about movies without looking at critic ratings. This will happen especially when they do a cursory glance at RT and see nothing they want to watch with a good rating. If this happens month-after-month, they'll just stop using RT. Light bulbs start lighting up when 2/3 of the year has gone by and you're about to watch your 5th movie and you realize you've only watched movies in which half the theater hasn't gone through puberty yet or it's a scary movie.

 

It's possible someone on the fence are absolutely ignorant of the movies but a lot of them aren't. I'm on the fence on many wide releases. I think a lot of people when they inform themselves about movies will look at critics. Maybe not RT but they'll check out a local critic's review or load up a site they like.

 

On the second point, if most people stopped using RT over time, it's traffic would be going down but traffic is actually pretty consistent according to quantcast.

 

[Dementeleus]

Just now, UrosepsisFace said:

 

Eons ago, I thought critics were really old people with really old taste.

 

Some are.  But some that you'd think are pretty snobby grew up big genre fans, coming of age in the 70s when people like Cronenberg and Hill and Friedkin and Craven (and many others) were redefining what genre films could be. And sometimes even the crabbiest and most obstinately contrarian of them can fall dramatically in love with a big-budget tentpole now. (Just go read Walter Chaw's review of THE FORCE AWAKENS as an example).

[filmlover]

34 minutes ago, Gopher said:

Critics are sort of a be all end all voice for the last third of the year. Nobody will be talking about your movie (ie talking abouf its awards potential) unless critics love it. Your big prestige movie will tank unless early word is unanimously positive. Your small prestige movie may not find a distributor unless it kills with critics at a festival.

 

This. So much this. Especially after so many Sundance favorites have gone on to go nowhere with the public (remember Me & Earl & the Dying Girl, which actually won the all-important audience award but couldn't get audiences to care? Yeah, didn't think so).

[John Marston]

holy shit I forgot how amazing this trailer was. And it is absolutely nothing like the finished movie

 

 

 

[Wonder Midget]

Critics weaken legs!

[Dementeleus]

If you can dodge a critic, you can dodge a ball!

[RRA]

1 hour ago, superweirdo87 said:

Critics influence legs. The relationship is not perfect, but it is there. And we'll have to see how SS actually does. BvS did appreciably worse than Civil War on legs/multiplier.

 

I posted this elsewhere but I'm rehashing here:

 

Fri-to-Sat drop % for some recent comic book movies:

SS: 41%
Apocalypse: 22%
BVS: 37.9%
Deadpool: 10%
Civil War: 18.9%
Fant4stic: 24%
Ant-Man: 14%
AOU 33%
GOTG: 18%
Winter Soldier: 6.1%

 

 

[MikeQ]

The idea that ‘frontloading = bad WOM’ for Star Trek Beyond seems insufficient to me. We tend to assume with movies that poor legs (or frontloading) indicate bad WOM, and that good legs (or backloading) indicate good WOM, but there are also likely a host of factors that influence the extent to which a given film is frontloaded or backloaded. We all know many standard factors that are important. We frequently cite WOM and reviews as factors, but we know other factors are important too, such as the time of year in which the film is released; the kind of audience it targets; the extent to which it is marketed and saturated; etc. 

 

Here’s a thought experiment. Maybe Star Trek Beyond had a perfectly solid opening because it attracted all of the usual Trekkies for opening weekend and enticed some of the general audience with good reviews. Perhaps it has subsequently dropped hard because, overall, general audiences decided they just aren’t as totally interested in seeing a Star Trek movie anymore, and since the film faced stiff direct competition with both Jason Bourne and Suicide Squad opening the following weeks, more people opted out. 

 

It’s now the third movie in the rebooted Star Trek series, and I would suggest that sometimes in this case it’s not just about how good the movie is or actual word-of-mouth, but that some portions of the larger general audience just decided they weren’t interested this time around. Reviews for the movie were certainly solid and positive, but they weren’t out-of this-world, nor did they indicate the film is a “must-see” summer event. I would say this is often a factor in long running blockbuster film series that don’t have defined end points - sometimes an entity just isn’t as “fresh” anymore, and so it doesn’t attract general audiences in the same way it did the first (and even second) time around in the absence of reviews or WOM that indicate this is a “must-see” new entry.

 

I'm sure we can all think of films where we thought "this looks good/decent" but for some reason or another we didn't check it out in theatres, because it didn't quite entice us enough, or there were other films opening around that time that targeted us and spoke to us more, or the film was another entry in a series and didn't have that same "must-see" excitement, or whatever. 

 

So, it could be a confluence of these sorts of factors that has left Star Trek Beyond in the position that it is.

 

Peace,

Mike

[RRA]

 

2 hours ago, superweirdo87 said:

A hundred million dollar question: Will WW be *fun*?

 

Better question: what "lessons" will WB learn from SS (whether it's a hit or a failure) and apply to WW in post?

 

 

 

[RRA]

5 minutes ago, MikeQ said:

The idea that ‘frontloading = bad WOM’ for Star Trek Beyond seems insufficient to me. We tend to assume with movies that poor legs (or frontloading) indicate bad WOM, and that good legs (or backloading) indicate good WOM, but there are also likely a host of factors that influence the extent to which a given film is frontloaded or backloaded. We all know many standard factors that are important. We frequently cite WOM and reviews as factors, but we know other factors are important too, such as the time of year in which the film is released; the kind of audience it targets; the extent to which it is marketed and saturated; etc. 

 

Here’s a thought experiment. Maybe Star Trek Beyond had a perfectly solid opening because it attracted all of the usual Trekkies for opening weekend and enticed some of the general audience with good reviews. Perhaps it has subsequently dropped hard because, overall, general audiences decided they just aren’t as totally interested in seeing a Star Trek movie anymore, and since the film faced stiff direct competition with both Jason Bourne and Suicide Squad opening the following weeks, more people opted out. 

 

It’s now the third movie in the rebooted Star Trek series, and I would suggest that sometimes in this case it’s not just about how good the movie is or actual word-of-mouth, but that some portions of the larger general audience just decided they weren’t interested this time around. Reviews for the movie were certainly solid and positive, but they weren’t out-of this-world, nor did they indicate the film is a “must-see” summer event. I would say this is often a factor in long running blockbuster film series that don’t have defined end points - sometimes an entity just isn’t as “fresh” anymore, and so it doesn’t attract general audiences in the same way it did the first (and even second) time around in the absence of reviews or WOM that indicate this is a “must-see” new entry.

 

I'm sure we can all think of films where we thought "this looks good/decent" but for some reason or another we didn't check it out in theatres, because it didn't quite entice us enough, or there were other films opening around that time that targeted us and spoke to us more, or the film was another entry in a series and didn't have that same "must-see" excitement, or whatever. 

 

So, it could be a confluence of these sorts of factors that has left Star Trek Beyond in the position that it is.

 

Peace,

Mike

 

I think Paramount now has learned that despite their best efforts and great hopes, the rebooted Star Trek is running like the original Trek film series did where they have a steady reliably fanbase. Not major moneymakers (barring something that did get some mainstream cross-over success like THE VOYAGE HOME), but dependable grossers. Paramount had hoped the new movies would reach out to non-Trek mainstream audiences and become a major blockbuster series like TRANSFORMERS has been for them, and as part of that strategy they've given this rebooted series big blockbuster-worthy budgets.

 

If you've already noticed the problem here: the original Trek movies (barring the big/waaaaay overbudget THE MOTION PICTURE) were modest budget affairs, basically glorified TV episodes. (And I don't mean that as a knock.) Those movies didn't make "alot" but with those budgets, most of them made a profit. Now the reboot series with their budgets, the more you spend the more you have to make back to break even/make profit.

[Dementeleus]

17 minutes ago, MikeQ said:

Here’s a thought experiment. Maybe Star Trek Beyond had a perfectly solid opening because it attracted all of the usual Trekkies for opening weekend and enticed some of the general audience with good reviews. Perhaps it has subsequently dropped hard because, overall, general audiences decided they just aren’t as totally interested in seeing a Star Trek movie anymore, and since the film faced stiff direct competition with both Jason Bourne and Suicide Squad opening the following weeks, more people opted out. 

 

I think this is completely true, and I also think it applies to any long-running series.