Has Following the Box Office Lost Its Appeal and Luster?

[SchumacherFTW]

26 minutes ago, CJohn said:

You are probably right. I feel pretty miserable looking at the USA and local box office every weekend and it isn't healthy at all. 

Portugal was fucked pre-covid though 😉

[Legion Again]

I mean, as long as transformers 22 was opening to 357M, and transformers 27 was having amazing 15th weekends… yeah, that’s still pretty cool box office. I wouldn’t be *as* happy as with the MCU doing it, but still pretty amazing numbers. And still pretty interesting to track presales for, try to predict internal Multis, legs, look at industry evolution, etc etc.   

 

I am a numbers guy, and at the end of the day if we had some presales data, or OD data, or few days daily data for [AUDIOVISUAL PRODUCT 37544B] which was a completely abstracted black box that I knew I would never learn any details about as a narrative work, I wouldn’t really care that much. That basically already is the case for most movies whose box office I think about, and I still enjoy it. If MCU dominance is a turn off, then I would argue what’s lost its luster is the era of surprise independent/original hits (which I know some people were very attached to) more than “the box office” per se.

Edited April 18, 2022 by Thanos Legion

[cannastop]

100% yes, and it's 100% due to COVID. I can't make sense of this stuff anymore.

 

Also frick Chapek for taking Turning Red from theaters.

[EmpireCity]

The other factor, as some have mentioned, is that tracking and predicting the box office has become incredibly accurate once you get to pre-sales.  You see it every week in the tracking thread.  You aren't going to get any complete surprises at this point, the tracking is way too good.  

 

We also have multiple insiders that give numbers out and give them early and accurate.  There is no more waiting for Deadline or others to give you a hint.  They have pretty much stopped because guys like Charlie are beating the hell out of them.  

[lab276]

Not just yet. For me losing the old BOM was a much bigger hit than the pandemic, although that shock made the pandemic less of a shock I guess. The Australian box office is still for me fairly enjoyable to follow, and I still go to the cinema very often. It's honestly a fairly expensive habit to have these days, but it's worth it because I don't know for how much longer we'll even have cinemas, so I have to enjoy it as much as I can. 

[Legion Again]

I will echo that Mojo dying was just awful though.

[lab276]

One thing I will say about the Australian box office that might make it more interesting than DOM is the almost total lack of sources and whatever sources we do have, it's all very fragmented and all over the place. Imagine if domestically, you only had the top ten weekend and weekly box office, and that's it, no estimates, no dailies, no preview numbers, just the weekend top ten on Monday. Or Tuesday if Monday happens to be a public holiday lol.

 

And if it wasn't for a German box office website, there was no archive of it either

 

http://www.insidekino.de/BO/AUS2022.htm

Edited April 18, 2022 by lab276

[lab276]

It's also just nostalgia for when things were better, although unlike how some people are nostalgic for the 80s or the 50s or whatever, it literally *was* better in the 2000s and 2010s.

[Brainbug]

24 minutes ago, EmpireCity said:

 

This right here is most of the problem.  You have created a narrative in your mind where only Marvel wins and everything else is a giant bomb.  That is silly and far from the reality.  There are great runs, films that are surprising, films doing great and a lot of things to look at other than Marvel. 

 

Uncharted, Lost City, the Sonic movies, A Quiet Place 2, Dune, Scream 5, No Time to Die, Godzilla vs Kong, F9 and Sing 2 are exampls of Non-Superhero films that were/are successfull just looking at the pandemic years.

 

I agree, you dont have to be a SH movie to do well even nowadays. They are the biggest kind of films by a mile right now, but that doesnt mean other movies cant be thriving as well.

[George Parr]

13 minutes ago, Eric Says Trans Rights said:

No offense, but let me ask you, and everybody else here who are acting like people like me are the problem: let's propose a different scenario. Let's say the biggest movie franchise was Transformers, or some other maligned franchise you hate. Let's say that there were 3 or 4 Transformers movies per year, each one was making billions of dollars, and they were the only franchise making billions of dollars, while everything else was tanking left and right.

 

Charlie, and everybody else for that matter, would you be saying the same thing still? This is a legit query, because it feels like the MCU stans are the people who are doing this whole "things are better than ever! You're just getting older" mantra to everybody here. And I think you, and other people here for that matter, would magically be on our side if Marvel wasn't top dog. I think that's a really, really gigantic sign that when only one group of people are happy, that yes indeed, the box office has lost its appeal and luster and that it was better back in the olden days, and that maybe, just maybe, there is a problem with the box office at this point. Just a little food for thought.

Wouldn't that be more of an issue with the movie industry and the interests of the general audience?

 

Whether one likes a movie or not isn't relevant to whether its box office run is interesting. And while one might certainly have a period where even interesting box office stories cannot pull one in, because one doesn't care for the movie(s) or might even hate them, this in itself would not come from the box office being any more or less boring than in the past, but from the released movies not capturing your interest. In other words: if I didn't care for a single movie released over an entire year, but every weekend saw an interesting new facet in terms of box office runs, than the box office isn't the issue, my lack of interest in the released movies would be. That wouldn't mean that I am the problem, but neither would the box office be at fault. Lack of something I'm interested in, doesn't equal a lack of interesting stuff in general. I don't get to define what is or isn't an interesting box office, I only get to define what is an interesting box office for me. I didn't care nearly as much for the box office between something like 2008 and 2014 than I did before or afterwards, yet that period had plenty of very interesting box office runs. Now I'm back into a lull again, in part because there is no movie I'm really interested in, in part because the whole Corona-crisis has drastically reduced the available movies.

 

Following the box office run of a movie one is interested in is likely going to be far more interesting than following random stuff. This should apply to most people. Though there is an obvious difference between those who merely take interest in something, and those who gush or bash stuff. The latter tend to treat it as if it was some sort of competition, their "team" must win. If it does, they act as if the success falls back on them, even though they couldn't have less to do with it. And if something else is doing better, then it is time to insult everything connected to that movie / franchise. It's rather absurd really. Just like some people who root for a movie to fail because they saw it and didn't like it, as if commercial failure would somehow make up for that.

 

It's not like interest in a movie itself must drive how much a person is interested in what is going on. I don't care much one way or the other for Marvel. The Avengers or Spiderman doing big numbers only caused a minimal pique of interest for me. On the other hand, I wouldn't even think about watching a movie like Demon Slayer, yet I just had to follow its run in Japan week by week until it wasn't even in the top 10 anymore.

[john2000]

1 hour ago, Eric Says Trans Rights said:

No offense, but let me ask you, and everybody else here who are acting like people like me are the problem: let's propose a different scenario. Let's say the biggest movie franchise was Transformers, or some other maligned franchise you hate. Let's say that there were 3 or 4 Transformers movies per year, each one was making billions of dollars, and they were the only franchise making billions of dollars, while everything else was tanking left and right.

 

Charlie, and everybody else for that matter, would you be saying the same thing still? This is a legit query, because it feels like the MCU stans are the people who are doing this whole "things are better than ever! You're just getting older" mantra to everybody here. And I think you, and other people here for that matter, would magically be on our side if Marvel wasn't top dog. I think that's a really, really gigantic sign that when only one group of people are happy, that yes indeed, the box office has lost its appeal and luster and that it was better back in the olden days, and that maybe, just maybe, there is a problem with the box office at this point. Just a little food for thought.

Most of us wouldnt have a problem with that bc at the end of the day we are here for big numbers regardless of where they come from.The ironic part here is the fact that you blame other people for being bias and yet you basically do exactly the same.There are many suprise successes that arent marvel (uncharted,,sonic,the lost city, bad boys for life,sing 2 etc).If the concept of a movie is intresting enough people will go and watch it.This is something that has been proven over and over again .I am also old enough to remember many forum users being very happy with the success of movies like uncharted, lost city etc.

Edited April 18, 2022 by john2000

[CJohn]

50 minutes ago, SchumacherFTW said:

Portugal was fucked pre-covid though 😉

Not on this level, it wasn't.

[TomCruiseTop]

1 hour ago, Brainbug the Dinosaur said:

As long as the Jurassic World movies are hits, there is no problem with the box office

Same but Avatar.

[Brainbug]

2 minutes ago, JamesCameronScholar said:

Same but Avatar.

 

Fair enough.

[Legion Again]

Yearly top 5 mcu+JW+Avatar, is this the new face of Hollywood 🤔

[grim22]

29 minutes ago, john2000 said:

I am also old enough to remember @charlie Jatinder , @Thanos Legion etc being very happy with the success of movies like uncharted, lost city etc.

 

At least don't lie in such a bald faced way

 

 

On 3/25/2022 at 9:00 AM, Thanos Legion said:

Don’t want to become too much a  parody of myself, but let’s keep things in perspective. The fact that 30s is great for a movie like this is not very great for the prospects of Hollywood execs chasing a resurgence of movies like this.

 

On 3/25/2022 at 5:08 PM, Thanos Legion said:

Yes, this is good relative to pre-pandemic numbers for Bullock or comedies. What I think a lot of people try to dance around is that the pre-pandemic numbers for these things were happening at the same time as the increasing blockbusterfication and IPification that people love to complain about. Making a 2 ROI on a 100M total spend is nice but it’s not really going to displace the recent chasing of 1.5 ROI on 500M total spend. 
 

I think it’s absolutely correct to view this as a good opening and an over performance against expectations. But like I said originally — these numbers being an overperformance demonstrates the weakness of the base case. If people want to see that trend actually reverse, what we’ll need to see is not the occasional overperformance but for the whole reference class to get to a point where these numbers are more like z=0 than z=1.5

 

On 3/25/2022 at 5:21 PM, Thanos Legion said:

I am expecting 36-40 atm fwiw, if it hits the high end I will sound even more impressed. 

 

[john2000]

8 minutes ago, grim22 said:

 

At least don't lie in such a bald faced way

 

 

 

 

 

I didnt, most of the guys in this forum  found uncharted box office run to be very suprising in a good way, regardless of their opinion about the movies quality.

 

.

Edited April 18, 2022 by john2000

[YM!]

31 minutes ago, Brainbug the Dinosaur said:

 

Uncharted, Lost City, the Sonic movies, A Quiet Place 2, Dune, Scream 5, No Time to Die, Godzilla vs Kong, F9 and Sing 2 are exampls of Non-Superhero films that were/are successfull just looking at the pandemic years.

 

I agree, you dont have to be a SH movie to do well even nowadays. They are the biggest kind of films by a mile right now, but that doesnt mean other movies cant be thriving as well.

I mean, yes I agree but one could argue that most of these movies outside of Lost City and Sing 2 (depending on where your stance is on Sonic those movies too) are still IP based films. Granted, it’s been that way for a while now but I think the point Eric was arguing is the fact that it seems mainly just four quadrant films are reaping the box office benefits while other genres are struggling or flatlining.
 

I know we’re still in a pandemic and will take a few years to get the demographics back in place for moviegoing and yes these trends were indicative since well 2013 but I understand the sentiment. There’s little room for anything not a tentpole.

[Legion Again]

Yeah I dunno what John is talking about there, I don’t think LC was particularly impressive. Uncharted either really. They both beat my long range expectations but they aren’t beating pre-pandemic expectations by a notable % or anything imo, which is what it takes to get me really excited.

[charlie Jatinder]

1 hour ago, Eric Says Trans Rights said:

No offense, but let me ask you, and everybody else here who are acting like people like me are the problem: let's propose a different scenario. Let's say the biggest movie franchise was Transformers, or some other maligned franchise you hate. Let's say that there were 3 or 4 Transformers movies per year, each one was making billions of dollars, and they were the only franchise making billions of dollars, while everything else was tanking left and right.

 

Charlie, and everybody else for that matter, would you be saying the same thing still?

SRK is my favourite actor. He has been shitting at box office for almost a decade and his competitors were on rise. I was still following box office.

 

I used to big on cricket in 2000s, grew out of it in mid 2010s, when India actually started dominating the game.

Edited April 18, 2022 by charlie Jatinder