Dune 2 Opening Weekend Thread [3/01/24 -3/03/24] [82.5m DOM OW]

[TheFlatLannister]

29 minutes ago, HummingLemon496 said:

True, I fucked up. Edited the comment, should still easily pass $475M 

Closer to $500M breakeven I would assume due to DOM/OS heavy split

 

Still I don't see it not breaking even 

[AJG]

25 minutes ago, von Kenni said:

https://www.koimoi.com/hollywood-news/andrew-garfield-was-fired-from-playing-spider-man-after-he-failed-to-visit-sonys-event-heres-what-happened-leading-everything-to-tom-holland/#:~:text=The actor was 'let go,the cause of his absence.

 

The actor was 'let go' from the part after he failed to show up at an event where Sony CEO Kaz Hirai was meant to unveil The Amazing Spider-Man 3 for a 2017 release, it was disclosed in an email after the infamous Sony breach of 2014. 

 

Oh...and in Japanese culture that is a big no-no. Getting caught on faking to be sick and disrespecting.

 

 

So this has never been true btw.

 

The whole thing rests upon a really old racist notion that Japanese people are entirely alien to behaviours or practices the rest of the world wouldn't bat an eye at, and that they take simple slights or inconveniences as an act of dishonor like something out of an old Samurai movie. If Sony didn't know how to work with or compensate for westerners than they wouldn't even attempt to do business in the West. 

Sony rebooted their biggest movie franchise. They didn't reboot it because actor was late to a meeting or whatever.

[AniNate]

It's mainly just one person continuing to push this Dune discourse tbf. I do think there is value in trying to move people away from this binary "flop/hit" perspective that has festered on the boxoffice subreddit.

 

 

Edited March 2 by AniNate

[PlatnumRoyce]

 

1 hour ago, von Kenni said:

Sequels to The Amazing Spider-Man 2 wasn't killed by lack of profit but Studio head's personal anger toward Garfield when he felt disrespected and didn't do the promotional/attendance stuff that the Studio head personally told him to do. This is widely reported and revealed afterward.

That's a cool scoop that had an impact but the Sony Hack revealed the film was slated to get under $20M of profit for Sony at 700-715M WW and this is explicitly presented as a problem in Sony hack emails. If this was pique about Garfield, they wouldn't have taken creative control away from Sony Pictures. TASM3 would have clearly made less than TASM2 so it would have turned an obvious loss without cost reductions. The failure to move forward with TASM3 seems over determined and likely why they started talking about spinoffs that didn't involve spider man.

Edited March 2 by PlatnumRoyce

[misterpepp]

I tend to find that the whole "[X] times the budget" rule-of-thumb thing doesn't work, either because it's outdated or it over-simplifies things far too greatly. Each movie has its own individual circumstances re: budget, P&A spend, ancillaries, etc. to the point that using one blanket method to determine profitability in the theatrical window can't really be done. For instance, in the case of a $100m-budgeted movie like John Wick 4 or Oppenheimer, that rule would imply breakeven at ~$250m WW, but when you consider P&A costs and theater takes, that would be insinuating that those titles only had around $25-50m marketing spend each, which they very much did not. If I were to take a guess at a solitary breakeven point for those titles (although I do agree with AniNate that these points have a little too much significance), I think they'd be somewhere in the mid $300m's to low $400m's worldwide (that would just be on theatrical gross alone, not considering the plentiful profits down-the-road).

 

To clarify, I'm not trying to argue with any users over this, nor am I trying to make this about Dune 2's profits, I'm speaking more in a general sense.

Edited March 2 by misterpepp

[patyx]

Dune 1 OW vs Dune 2 FRIDAY:

 

NA: 40M vs 32M

GER: 4.4M vs 4.1M

FRA: 7.2M vs 5M

UK: 8M vs 3.6M (pure FRI)

AUS: 3.3M vs 2.5M

 

 

 

[AniNate]

I will say even when it comes to internal e-mails, I don't think people are very inclined to speak frankly about intangibles like audience reception. It's subjective and not something that you can support with irrefutable facts and figures, you just know when you sense that people didn't enjoy the movie much, and I imagine that factored into a lack of enthusiasm to continue the Garfield Spider-mans.

[JustLurking]

9 minutes ago, patyx said:

Dune 1 OW vs Dune 2 FRIDAY:

 

NA: 40M vs 32M

GER: 4.4M vs 4.1M

FRA: 7.2M vs 5M

UK: 8M vs 3.6M (pure FRI)

AUS: 3.3M vs 2.5M

 

 

 

nvm just realised it was dollars about the UK.

 

some of these are not friday only, "through friday" at most

Edited March 2 by JustLurking

[DInky]

8 minutes ago, misterpepp said:

I tend to find that the whole "[X] times the budget" rule-of-thumb thing doesn't work, either because it's outdated or it over-simplifies things far too greatly. Each movie has its own individual circumstances re: budget, P&A spend, ancillaries, etc. to the point that using one blanket method to determine profitability in the theatrical window can't really be done. For instance, in the case of a $100m-budgeted movie like John Wick 4 or Oppenheimer, that rule would imply breakeven at ~$250m WW, but when you consider P&A costs and theater takes, that would be insinuating that those titles only had around $25-50m marketing spend each, which they very much did not. If I were to take a guess at a solitary breakeven point for those titles (although I do agree with AniNate that these points have a little too much significance), I think they'd be somewhere in the mid $300m's to low $400m's worldwide (that would just be on theatrical gross alone, not considering the plentiful profits down-the-road).

 

To clarify, I'm not trying to argue with any users over this, nor am I trying to make this about Dune 2's profits, I'm speaking more in a general sense.

 

This right here. They easily spent 150M on marketing Dune Part Two so the breakeven is probably around 700M.

[lorddemaxus]

2 minutes ago, DInky said:

 

This right here. They easily spent 150M on marketing Dune Part Two so the breakeven is probably around 700M.

The theatrical gross is not supposed to cover every single cost of the movie. The movie will make a shitton of money in ancillaries.

[Eric Lasagna]

 

[von Kenni]

3 minutes ago, AJG said:

 

So this has never been true btw.

 

The whole thing rests upon a really old racist notion that Japanese people are entirely alien to behaviours or practices the rest of the world wouldn't bat an eye at, and that they take simple slights or inconveniences as an act of dishonor like something out of an old Samurai movie. If Sony didn't know how to work with or compensate for westerners than they wouldn't even attempt to do business in the West. 

Sony rebooted their biggest movie franchise. They didn't reboot it because actor was late to a meeting or whatever.

Wow, this took a turn. I hope you're referring there to something in the story that I didn't now read myself all the way or something around that and not specifically what I said. I feel quite a tainted misrepresentation there deducted on what I said if that's the case. And I'm not denying that there can be something else regarding Garfield's firing/film cancellations and that this was just an excuse or just a part of the whole cancelation.

 

There are cultural differences and suddenly deducting some "old racist" notion on Japanese here seems a bit overkill. Nowhere I or the context I suggested in my post implies somehow that Japanese couldn't work or do business with westerners or they would be socially somehow inferior or negatively different. I would see American studio head with a big ego rather doing illogical decisions due to personal chemistry or spite (heard second hand stories on these) than perhaps Japanese.

 

I've always worked in a multicultural environment leading international teams and have made business with Japanese as well. I even studied the language in a University. There are differences with cultures regardless of whether we see them good or bad which relate to the culture and subcultures and generations in them. E.g. from experience I can say that Japanese don't like to say "no" directly to business proposals because of politeness even if they decline.

 

And we can argue how hierarchical and traditional Japanese large corporational culture still is and how much less it is rhat today as the same progress has happened in Western cultures but how it is still different and what role respect and things like honor might play in those but I hope we don't start to conflate these things and throw casually words like racist here when we discuss box office dynamics here.

[Dominic Draper]

3 minutes ago, lorddemaxus said:

The theatrical gross is not supposed to cover every single cost of the movie. The movie will make a shitton of money in ancillaries.

Movies don't really make a shit ton on ancillaries anymore unless its on merch and that's usually kids movies specialty.

 

Maybe I'm wrong but Dune merch doesn't seem all that big.

[HowSway]

4 minutes ago, Dominic Draper said:

Movies don't really make a shit ton on ancillaries anymore unless its on merch and that's usually kids movies specialty.

 

Maybe I'm wrong but Dune merch doesn't seem all that big.

PVOD, Blu Rays and licensing fees are ancillaries no?

[Dominic Draper]

1 minute ago, HowSway said:

PVOD, Blu Rays and licensing fees are ancillaries no?

Yes, but physical media and pvod is nowhere close to what it used to be.

 

Movies quickly go to streaming services which don't pay out like the peak DVD days did.

[DInky]

1 minute ago, HowSway said:

PVOD, Blu Rays and licensing fees are ancillaries no?

 

Blu-ray sales are a pittance at this point and there's really not  a lot of money in streaming if the movie goes to a streaming service owned by the same company that produced the film (no money from a licensing deal).

[JustLurking]

1 minute ago, DInky said:

 

Blu-ray sales are a pittance at this point and there's really not  a lot of money in streaming if the movie goes to a streaming service owned by the same company that produced the film (no money from a licensing deal).

HBO Max does not even exist in most of the world.

[von Kenni]

 

11 minutes ago, Dominic Draper said:

Movies don't really make a shit ton on ancillaries anymore unless its on merch and that's usually kids movies specialty.

 

Maybe I'm wrong but Dune merch doesn't seem all that big.

 

Who wouldn't want this beautiful creation?

 

[PlatnumRoyce]

25 minutes ago, misterpepp said:

I tend to find that the whole "[X] times the budget" rule-of-thumb thing doesn't work, either because it's outdated

Purely as a point of trivia, I've been poking around the Lantern digital media project and it's really funny just how long the "2x the production budget" rule of thumb lasted. I've seen it cited in the 1950s, 1980s, 1990s, and (obviously) 2000s-present. There's probably truth to it that's changed over time but "conventional wisdom" can be pretty old.  

 

https://archive.org/details/filmbulletin195523film/page/n95/mode/2up?view=theater

 

[HowSway]

2 minutes ago, DInky said:

 

there's really not  a lot of money in streaming if the movie goes to a streaming service owned by the same company that produced the film (no money from a licensing deal).

Iirc, there might not be actual cash paid out but the streaming division still "pays" a fee to the production division in order to add it to streaming.