Weekend Numbers | actuals | 80.01M G×K: THE NEW EMPIRE | 11.35M DUNE II

[Cookson]

Good stuff! 

[grim22]

13 minutes ago, ChiefBrody said:

So weird how the KOTM BO has become the anomaly now in this franchise...

It paid for the sins of Godzilla 2014 and for having an uninteresting human cast. 

 

GvK realised why people watch these movies and pretty much jettisoned the human backstories by cutting them to the bare minimum needed - alcoholic scientist, orphaned child, conspiracy theorist, evil industrialist. All broad strokes characters just there to lead us to the Godzilla vs Kong fights - and to the huge credit of the makers, the fights delivered 120%. We came a long way from G2014 and it cutting away anytime anything the audience wanted to see actually happened.

[reddevil19]

14 minutes ago, BadOlCatSylvester said:

The tone of this thread feels wildly different to the one for King of the Monsters 5 years ago, where the steep decline of the projections with each passing day was a gut punch to the Goji fans in the site, to the point where some of them even quit the forums altogether for a while. I have a hunch they'll be feeling a lot differently this weekend.

 

I also wonder where we'd be had Godzilla vs Kong not already started filming, or not been in the can by the time King of the Monsters failed.

Oh, had GvK not been far enough along, at best we'd have seen a Justice League level abomination or, at worst cancelling the project. 

I can only speak for myself, but KOTM seemed like a complete misstep due to a complete mishandling of tones and a general lack of identity. Following the serious, at times plodding (due to the shit human characters), Godzilla-lite 2014 movie and then the absolute blast that Skull Island was, KOTM seemed to not mesh the two well or even decide on a specific track to follow. You have this HUGE sci-fi leap with the Monarch flying fortress whatever, and hollow earth, and Atlantis (?) but then you tack on overwrought human drama again and slap it all across the face with a muted aesthetic and it's just such a head-scratcher.

 

It's also very clear that - despite Godzilla riding high at the moment - it's actually Kong that's helping the Hollywood Monsterverse. Having him as the de facto protagonist makes up for all the weak human characters. The solo Godzilla movies didn't have that - the 2014 one had an insanely good marketing campaign and it being the first huge budget Hollywood attempt at the property in almost two decades helped with the opening to such an extent that its box office looked alright despite the legs. The second movie had none of the hype of the first - quite the opposite, the first had left quite a lot of people disappointed - and then the actual movie had the same problems and then some which meant it never recovered form a much weaker opening.

 

In conclusion - KONG IS KING. 

 

[titanic2187]

12 minutes ago, ChiefBrody said:

So weird how the KOTM BO has become the anomaly now in this franchise...

I think KOTM underperforms can be attributed to post-endgame syndrome. Between EG and Aladdin collecting near 4bn, as well as Pokémon and Jw3. The moviegoers certainly felt the exhaustion in that May 2019, causing series of underperformance in June like KoTM, Pets 2, dark Phoenix, MIB 

[MightyDargon]

KOTM had a bad slot, similar to what happened to Frozen Empire in this month.

[John Marston]

KOTM was hurt by the negative reception to Godzilla 2014. It was tracking for a weak opening before a single review came out

[reddevil19]

2 minutes ago, MightyDargon said:

KOTM had a bad slot, similar to what happened to Frozen Empire in this month.

"Bad slot" is an easy defence for underperforming movies when in reality the explanation is a simpler "people just didn't want to watch the damn thing". 

[MightyDargon]

1 minute ago, reddevil19 said:

"Bad slot" is an easy defence for underperforming movies when in reality the explanation is a simpler "people just didn't want to watch the damn thing". 

Bad slot is a very real phenomenon. Honor Among Thieves is an even better example because that movie was better received but flat out bombed because of being released too near Mario/Wick 4.

[cooldude97]

Honestly I understand the GA Reception to KOTM but i'm still confused on what made it the worst MV movie for critics?

[Cmasterclay]

Godzilla 2014 was awesome and so many modern blockbusters, not just kaiju movies, could take notes from how it does things like "scale" and "building tension." Yeah the human characters sucked but at least they shot it from the human scale. I get that these silly Godzilla vs a bunch of other monsters are part of the Showa legacy but those movies were cheesy and fun in a way I just don't find these. I'm a vocal hater of the last two of these though so don't let me rain on parade.

[OncomingStorm93]

I think part of the issue with KOTM was the overly-apocalyptic tone of the trailers, weirdly juxtaposed against classical/“beautiful” music and way too damn much orange/blue cinematography. Almost like a studio exec said people like those contrasting colors on posters so let’s literally drench every scene in the movie in orange or greenish-blue hues.

 

Anyway, I’m pleasantly surprised at how non-abysmal the reviews for this are and how strong the opening weekend looks to be.

 

Long live the moviegoers.

[grim22]

1 minute ago, MightyDargon said:

Bad slot is a very real phenomenon. Honor Among Thieves is an even better example because that movie was better received but flat out bombed because of being released too near Mario/Wick 4.

I feel like Reddevil has a point. You omit that Honour Among Thieves is actually "Dungeons and Dragons: Honour Among Thieves". The D&D brand is one of the very few brands left which is still firmly "nerd niche" and not broken out into the mainstream. There was an overall hesitation to watch a D&D movie among audiences regardless of how good the reviews or word of mouth is.

[grim22]

1 minute ago, Cmasterclay said:

Godzilla 2014 was awesome and so many modern blockbusters, not just kaiju movies, could take notes from how it does things like "scale" and "building tension." 

 

The thing is, for those to work, you actually need to release the tension instead of blueballing the audience. 

 

Even Jaws which is used as an example of what Godzilla 2014 was trying to do, didn't cut away after the big reveal. Everything till the Hawaii airport scene, I'm fully on board with the cutaways and maintaining suspense. Once the big reveal happens in Hawaii, every cutaway loses the audience more and more.

[MightyDargon]

Also people basically know what Godzilla looks like at this point and other movies (Minus One) have used the "less is more" Godzilla approach in superior ways to 2014. It was not exactly unique in terms of what it was doing.

[toutvabien]

Damn, I knew this film was probably gonna showcase that the MonsterVerse is alive and get it closer to Godzilla 2014 numbers, but I did not expect that it was actually gonna come that close? This may be the 2nd film in the franchise to crack $200M dom. Even with the drop in China, this is probably also gonna challenge Skull Island worldwide. Gonna outlive the DCEU for sure now.

[BadOlCatSylvester]

15 minutes ago, reddevil19 said:

I can only speak for myself, but KOTM seemed like a complete misstep due to a complete mishandling of tones and a general lack of identity. Following the serious, at times plodding (due to the shit human characters), Godzilla-lite 2014 movie and then the absolute blast that Skull Island was, KOTM seemed to not mesh the two well or even decide on a specific track to follow. You have this HUGE sci-fi leap with the Monarch flying fortress whatever, and hollow earth, and Atlantis (?) but then you tack on overwrought human drama again and slap it all across the face with a muted aesthetic and it's just such a head-scratcher.

I hate King of the Monsters too. It's utterly pretentious drivel, made by people who don't understand the themes they're trying to present. The infuriating thing is, the kaiju themselves are fantastic, and all have distinct and memorable personalities, but even they are marred by the overwhelming weather effects and the surrounding story being atrocious.

[reddevil19]

3 minutes ago, grim22 said:

I feel like Reddevil has a point. You omit that Honour Among Thieves is actually "Dungeons and Dragons: Honour Among Thieves". The D&D brand is one of the very few brands left which is still firmly "nerd niche" and not broken out into the mainstream. There was an overall hesitation to watch a D&D movie among audiences regardless of how good the reviews or word of mouth is.

This. Yes, bad slot is real - look at Dead Reckoning last year. Personally I think that one is the weakest of the "new batch" of Mission Impossible movies and probably second weakest in the entire series. But it's still very clear that without Barbenheimer, it could easily have made another 100 million WW even with all its own problems.

 

However, we have also seen back-to-back-to-back 300 million movies. We've seen plenty of films co-exist around the mid-high success point - as is when they're making 200-300 million. It's definitely more difficult for something to thrive in the immediate shadow of a 500-600 million monster. But we haven't had that in March this year. Yes, Dune is big, but let's not pretend it's Endgame, nor should we ignore that it still burnt off plenty of demand in the three weeks leading up to Frozen Empire. And KFP3 is also hardly Shrek 2 in terms of box office, nor is it targeting anywhere near the same audience as Frozen Empire. 

 

Inevitably there will be movies GENUINELY hurt by bad scheduling, but a lot of those that end up with this defense are simply victims of the far simpler phenomenon of "no one wants to watch it" - either because the brand has become toxic and/or tired and the series irrelevant to audiences (recent DC or latter part X-Men flicks), the core audience never expanded and there's just no demand for new product (Ghostbusters), the predecessors were badly received (KOTM) or the stigma attached to the product (Dungeons and Dragons). 

[budice]

 

[ChiefBrody]

I think this movie is now proof you don’t need a large or all star cast to have success 

[MightyDargon]

How much does Legendary have to shill out to Kadokawa to put Gamera in the third one?