THE JUSTICE LEAGUE (and The Star and Wonder) WEEKEND THREAD | PREMIUM ACCOUNT SALE NOW LIVE | Weekend Actuals ~ JL 93.84M, W 27.54M, T:R 21.66M, DH2 14.43M, MOTOE 13.80M, TS 9.81M

[LaughingEvans]

31 minutes ago, Krissykins said:

Making a profit is not a bomb or flop either technically. 

 

Yes, but tell that to an investor who threw 500 millions only to get back as much 1 year later. These people have money to launder, they don't have time to waste with visionaries like Whedon and Snyder.

[Barnack]

1 hour ago, SteveJaros said:

In the case of AS2, it clearly disappointed Sony brass, who were hoping for bigger things. But, it did earn a cash on cash return of 12% for Sony, that's not too shabby. Could they have done better with another investment? I don't know. 

 

I am a bit curious how you calculated that, what number did you use ?

 

Sony projection was to make only 14m on that movie during is lifetime, while investing over 500m on it, that movie profit margin were below 2.5%

[AndyK]

24 minutes ago, Lordmandeep said:

Technically no but it would be seen as a failure...

 

For example, if Apple Released a new phone and it barely made a profit due to bad sales, that would be seen as a huge failure as the iPhone is the cash cow of apple.  

 

This is the Justice League, having so many iconic characters should lead to a film that is a massive cash cow and a success.

 

To be brutally honest, DCU imo had a lot of built-in advantages over Marvel in making JL into a super hit movie. They had characters that already well knew and well liked.

 

Be honest, the Avengers working and being a huge hit was very lucky for Marvel, as everything went their way.

 

 

DCU, just shot themselves in the foot and have now paid the price.

As the major financier, Brett Ratner will pay the price 

[Lordmandeep]

Captain America went from a joke of a hero to most people to likely one of the most respected and liked now. 

 

 

Think being the main character in The Avengers and of couse, his role in Winter Solider really changed peoples minds. 

Edited November 20, 2017 by Lordmandeep

[JonathanLB]

I met Brett Ratner and got a pic with him at a private event earlier this year. Too bad now I really don’t feel like being seen in that picture

[Hatebox]

6 minutes ago, JonathanLB said:

I met Brett Ratner and got a pic with him at a private event earlier this year. Too bad now I really don’t feel like being seen in that picture

 

He wasn't exactly cool before all this, in fairness.

[Barnack]

20 minutes ago, LaughingEvans said:

 

Yes, but tell that to an investor who threw 500 millions only to get back as much 1 year later. These people have money to launder, they don't have time to waste with visionaries like Whedon and Snyder.

Visionaries are perfect for people with money to launder:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/20/us-justice-department-1mdb-fund-seizure-fraud-investigation

[Thrylos 7]

16 minutes ago, Lordmandeep said:

Captain America went from a joke of a hero to most people to likely one of the most respected and liked now. 

 

 

Think being the main character in The Avengers and of couse, his role in Winter Solider really changed peoples minds. 

Honestly they laid a great foundation with the first avenger. That movie is hugely underrated, it established a fantastic character that touched even people who don’t like the u.s .

This should have been the blueprint for handling superman.

[Blaze Heatnix]

2 hours ago, WrathOfHan said:

"Nope, it's still a bomb!" - @Mockingjay Raphael

 

I wonder what happened to that guy.

 

I remember reading his posts for several weeks ( perhaps even months ), where he kept saying Jigsaw would be a flop and nobody was interested. Now that the movie is almost making 10 times its budget, he vanishes. lol

 

 

[YM!]

6 minutes ago, Brainiac5 said:

 

If the drop holds up then it’s on par with FB.

The film still didn’t fall bigger than Mocking Jay part 2.

That film finished with a 2.77x and it faced Star Wars ep.7.

Same Multiplier gives JL 265dom.

Since it held better than MJ2 I’m certain it gets closer to a 3x.

There’s way more stuff for the holidays than both what Beasts and MJ2 has to deal with. Hell, I’m not so confident in Thanksgiving 5 day. JL is now sharing a PLF here. 

[SteveJaros]

53 minutes ago, JonathanLB said:

 

I wasn’t aware that Hulk isn’t iconic. Furthermore, Star Wars is even more bulletproof than any DC character or Spider-Man, so let’s not pretend that Disney is hurting  They don’t envy anyone. Everyone envies Disney. They may even buy Fox and if they do, they’ll be an unstoppable powerhouse. Already with Marvel, Star Wars, and Pixar plus their live action redoes they’re in pretty shape. Beauty and the Beast would be the year’s top film if their own Star Wars movie wasn’t about to destroy it.

I said Disney was arguably in a more enviable position than WB. I didn't say Disney was envying anyone, other than for the fact that they would like to own all the Marvel properties like WB owns all the DC properties. But clearly, with Marvel, Star Wars, and Pixar, Disney is in a very good "franchise" position. Probably the best.

[Rebeccas]

27 minutes ago, Thrylos 7 said:

Marvel’s handling of captain America in the MCU  is one for the history books. They turned him into the coolest hero of the cu , and I am not from America.

Yeah, I remember seeing trailers for CA: TFA thinking it looked so fucking lame. It was also just a weird time to have a patriotic boy scout hero since all the trends were for dark gritty heroes or snarky Tony Stark heroes.

[SteveJaros]

1 hour ago, redfirebird2008 said:

 

Disney owns Star Wars, PIXAR, and a bunch of animated classics that they will continue to adapt into live action profit machines.

 

The Mouse House’s biggest problem is ESPN. The people running ESPN spent a ton of money on broadcasting rights and now they are losing many subscribers each year due to cord-cutting. Disney probably wants to sell ESPN, but no one is stupid enough to buy it. 

To me, Disney's ESPN problems are overrated. ESPN is still a cash cow, just not as much of one as it used to be, and that is due as much to paying tons of money for rights as it is to cord-cutting.

 

Let's face it: ESPN and Disney are themselves in a great position to move to a "cord cut" model themselves, if by that we mean moving away from the cable model of paying one big fee for lots of channels you don't really want. The only aspect of cord-cutting they aren't in a position to mitigate is the pirating aspect, where people cut cable but then use bogus methods to stream content - including ESPN - for "free" via illegal methods on the internet. 
 

So to me, when discussing cord-cutting, we have to distinguish between genuine, legal cord cutting and the pirating variety.

Edited November 20, 2017 by SteveJaros

[meriodejaneiro]

1 hour ago, SteveJaros said:

Agree and disagree. Agree that your last statement is spot-on, the mere presence of a profit doesn't make something a 'success', because we do have to consider the opportunity cost. If a movie earns an ROI of 5% but the studio could have earned 8% investing that money in stocks, then yes, the movie was the wrong choice to make. 

 

Still, an investment that earns 5% is far from an actual objective "disaster", as the hyperbole around here often declares. A disaster is a movie that actually loses a lot of money, not just fails to make as much as an alternative investment would have.

 

Disagree, in that we can't necessarily use a studios hopes as a guide, because studios themselves can define something as a 'failure' using their own subjective standards that are themselves divorced from a larger reality. E.g., Disney might have green-lit CoCo on an expectation of a 35% ROI, but if it actually earns 20% ROI, while that might disappoint Disney brass, in the real world a 20% ROI is a very good ROI and can't reasonably be called a failure, Disney just had outlandish expectations for it. 

 

In the case of AS2, it clearly disappointed Sony brass, who were hoping for bigger things. But, it did earn a cash on cash return of 12% for Sony, that's not too shabby. Could they have done better with another investment? I don't know. 

 

As for "franchise damage", that again is a bigger-picture issue. What is the "franchise"? Is it the two-movie "Amazing Spiderman" sequence from 2012-2014, or is the broader category of "spider man" movies generally? I say the latter, and in that case, spider man is a great example of what I'm talking about: The character is so iconic that "franchise damage" doesn't really count as a concept, because even if the studio makes an underwhelming dud that loses money, they can always re-boot in a few years with a new cast and crew, and the public will give it the same chance. The character itself is bullet-proof. 

 

So while Sony may have been dismayed a by long-term trend of declining box office for spider man films - maybe not just from AS to AS2, but going back to the 02/04/07 trilogy - that doesn't mean the 'franchise', the character was declining. It wasn't, because it's a cultural icon.

Thing is, Marvel only has one such iconic character - and Disney doesn't even own it, Sony does, whereas DC has at least two - Batman and Superman - and arguably three, with Wonder Woman. That gives WB/DC the leeway to "fail" because they can always just re-boot again. 

 

 

1 hour ago, SteveJaros said:

 

Why would they panic?  Even if WB decides that the DCU concept was a bad one, they can still make tons of money out to infinity just making stand-alone Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman films for sure, and then there's also no reason they can't develop characters like Aqua Man and the Flash in to big-hit franchises themselves.

 

Long run, WB is in an enviable position with the DC stable of characters. Universal, FOX, Paramount, would all kill to have their "panic" problem with the DCU. That's why Universal was desperate to start a "Dark Universe" with Frankenstein et al. because they know they can't make Fast and Furious and Jurassic Park movies forever like WB can with the DC properties.

 

Only Disney is arguably in a better long run position, and even Disney has problems WB doesn't have, because they still have the irksome issue of other studios owning some of the key Marvel properties. 
 

 

3 minutes ago, SteveJaros said:

I said Disney was arguably in a more enviable position than WB. I didn't say Disney was envying anyone, other than for the fact that they would like to own all the Marvel properties like WB owns all the DC properties. But clearly, with Marvel, Star Wars, and Pixar, Disney is in a very good "franchise" position. Probably the best.

Ok, whatever ... but can we start laughing at JL ridiculous ow numbers already? 

[SteveJaros]

32 minutes ago, Barnack said:

I am a bit curious how you calculated that, what number did you use ?

 

Sony projection was to make only 14m on that movie during is lifetime, while investing over 500m on it, that movie profit margin were below 2.5%

 

I didn't calculate it, i used Deadline's analysis, which said AS2 had a 12% cash on cash return.

[DAR]

34 minutes ago, Thrylos 7 said:

Marvel’s handling of captain America in the MCU  is one for the history books. They turned him into the coolest hero of the cu , and I am not from America.

 

29 minutes ago, Lordmandeep said:

Captain America went from a joke of a hero to most people to likely one of the most respected and liked now. 

 

 

Think being the main character in The Avengers and of couse, his role in Winter Solider really changed peoples minds. 

Actually the comics about 10 years ago started to move the title into more of a spy/thriller genre.  Ed Brubaker's run was great and set the groundwork for the character in the MCU

[expensiveho]

1 hour ago, Lordmandeep said:

Something barely making a profit is not a success.

 

 

That is just someone who does not understand finance.

 

 

That is more like you avoided complete disaster. 

Exactly. Fanboys were screaming that WB wasn't worried because BvS still made +$100m profit, but what are they gonna say now that it costed +$600m (box-office only, it has gone from conservative $1.3b to optimistic $700m) for Justice League and a complete re-structuring of the whole DC brand (outside WW ofc) or are we still pretending the shitload of movies they've announced are still happening? They'd be nuts to even consider going forward with SS2.

 

 

[Rebeccas]

In some ways, tiny profit margins are the worst cause if it was a straight up bomb, they could just write it off and move on.

[Elessar]

2 minutes ago, expensiveho said:

They'd be nuts to even consider going forward with SS2.

 

 

lol what? SS just made over $700m, making a sequel to that - from the point of view of the top brass - is a much safer bet than investing hundreds of million in some unproven property.

[redfirebird2008]

14 minutes ago, SteveJaros said:

To me, Disney's ESPN problems are overrated. ESPN is still a cash cow, just not as much of one as it used to be, and that is due as much to paying tons of money for rights as it is to cord-cutting.

 

Let's face it: ESPN and Disney are themselves in a great position to move to a "cord cut" model themselves, if by that we mean moving away from the cable model of paying one big fee for lots of channels you don't really want. The only aspect of cord-cutting they aren't in a position to mitigate is the pirating aspect, where people cut cable but then use bogus methods to stream content - including ESPN - for "free" via illegal methods on the internet. 
 

So to me, when discussing cord-cutting, we have to distinguish between genuine, legal cord cutting and the pirating variety.

 

ESPN is paying a crazy amount of money for broadcast rights that they will not be able to afford in the very near future as they continue to lose subscribers. ESPN is a middle-man. At some point, all of the sports content itself will be streamed directly to consumers without ESPN's involvement. They do not have their own original content like HBO or Disney for instance.