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Barbie and Oppenheimer release this weekend and in the pre weekend previews they made 22 million and 10.5 million respectively. That preview for barbie is the highest for any movie this year. (Note that this year's highest grossing movie Mario Bros being a children's and family movie chose not to have previews because movies that target those demographics usually don't do well in weekday preview showings)
With such a strong opening and decent reviews there's good chance both will bring in great money despite not being superhero movies or existing famous action franchises. (think F&F or Mission Impossible)
Marketing for Barbie has been ubiquitous on social media and they seemed to have successfully convinced women to make it an event with people dressing up in pink to go see the movie. Despite both of them opening this weekend which might have had both cannibalize ticket sales, it seems like the attempts to synergize and make the two movies a movie going event, "Barbenheimer" has had some level of positive affect.
Post-covid Hollywood has had a hard time getting people to come out to movies, and even superhero movies are no longer the same massive 1 billion dollar draw that Disney had gotten used to. Even reliable studios like Disney's Pixar have had tough times with their previous movie Lightyear only grossing 226 million. Their most recent movie, Elemental, has done slightly better with longer staying power but a box office of a little more than 311 million is a flop and loss for Disney.
To some extent consumers have gotten used to streaming during the pandemic, and when going to the movies is more expensive in a post covid world, it seems like most consumers prefer to simply wait til the movie hits a streaming platform and check it out. Going to the movies is no longer something people do casually, it's become an event to go to the theaters.
Some of the movies in the past few years that have done better have been the ones that have been able to grab the zeitgeist and make their movies into events. Universal lucked into when their Minions movie released last year all the kids who grew up with Despicable Me and the minions made it a tiktok trend to go to the movie in their prom/graduation formal attire. M3gan, a creepy doll horror movie, wrote a scene of the doll dancing creepily and put it into the trailer. They then marketed that and made it into a semi-viral tiktok dance. The only new big time comedy movie of the past few years, No Hard Feelings, tried a funny and provocative marketing strategy and leveraged Jennifer Lawrence's return to cinema (she had a child) and did quite well for a nonfranchise R-rated comedy with only 1 star.
With all that context I have a couple random questions and discussion points.
Directly relevant:
Random Other thoughts:
Hollywood seems to be learning from the 2 confusing hits of 2022 : Minions and RRR.
As we came out of covid, both movies recognized that going to the movies was more about creating experiences than the movie itself. RRR released their viral dance 1 year in advance, and the movie screening felt more like an interactive experience than a watching experience. Does this look like a movie screening to any of you ?
At least with RRR, people genuinely cared about it being an amazing movie. Minions went the other way, pioneering the "movie as an ingroup meme". It separated the quality of movie from the theater going experience and raked in the big bucks.
Barbie and Oppenheimer have directly stolen from both movies. Going to the theater has always been a special experience. The mistake was thinking that people went to the theaters to watch movies they wanted to see. No, theaters are an experience, and the movie itself is secondary. The advent of the home theater meant that intuitions had been changing for a while. But, the 2010-2020 wisdom was that people went to theaters to see set pieces that home theaters could not do justice to. So 3D, CGI, big explosions and super hero movies dominated the big screen.
As people have tired of 3D explosions, it is now time to leverage another phenomenon that home theaters can't do justice to : "the experience of going to the theater". This paradigm shift means that we will see a flood of mid-budget viral marketting-esque movies soon. Sadly, the new paradigm is yet again divorced from the quality of the movie. Instead of CGI explosions and trailer friendly jibes, directors will pressured to create 'viral and imitable moments'. The king is dead, long live the king!
The "Russo brothers (Avengers) - Rajmouli (RRR)" interview from last year is worth watching. You clearly see the fascination of these Hollywood profit-machines as they struggle to understand how RRR is generating so much enthusiasm for going to the theaters. Looks like Hollywood finally figured it out with Barbie.
Because it's ridiculously, stupidly, over the top fun. Like Honest Trailers said, if you have a warning for "no oxen were harmed in the making of this movie", it's gonna be awesome. It had nothing to do with the concerns about Representation and Gender And Sexual Orientation and Strong Female Characters and Political Commentary (apart from "The Brits are evil", a message we can all get behind) and time round, nationalism and patriotism are good - the guy comes swinging out of the flames wrapped in the flag - and the heroes are uncomplicated, Captain America and Superman good guys, types.
It was clearly made with an agenda, but the agenda was so far from Western concerns that people could ignore that, if they even became aware of it, and just enjoy action, over the top stunts, heroism, male friendship with nobody giving one single flying fig about 'toxic masculinity', spectacle and dance numbers. This was what got people through the Depression who weren't going to see social realist documentaries, they went for escapism and Hollywood glamour far away from the grind of everyday life.
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It really feels like critics have gotten way less punishing on big-budget movies recently. I can't think of a major blockbuster that got panned by critics since Batman v Superman. Even dogshit like The Rise of Skywalker got 52% on Rotten Tomatoes. I have seen multiple very mediocre films in the last 6 or so years which got RT scores in the 80s and 90s. It's quite baffling. I suppose it's indicative of some kind of corruption, but what? Politics is certainly a component, but this seems more pervasive than that.
One of the strangest internet phenomena I've encountered is that of nerds who are so protective of their IP of choice that they will actively harass film critics they deem insufficiently positive towards the IP in question. (Some nerds will do this without having even seen the movie in question.) If you're a film critic for a publication of middling circulation and you didn't love the latest Star Wars, is it really worth the trouble to write a negative review and get immediately inundated with death threats and doxing? It's hard to blame some for taking the easy way out and saying "cinematography was certainly professional, 3/5".
This definitely isn't the whole story but it could well be a contributing factor, but only for those properties known for having a fanbase of rabidly protective nerds.
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Everything is owned by everybody. Your film/TV/games critic gives the latest big release a bad review, you can kiss goodbye to that sweet ad revenue the big companies are buying from you, plus your critic no longer gets access to previews, early releases, etc.
Amazon owns IMDb. Rotten Tomatoes turns off/filters out negative reviews, so you have two sets of reviews: the 'accredited critics' who are generally favourable to Latest Release, or the 'all reviews' which often are much less positive.
It's down to money and control. The studios pump so much money into the productions, they need to be big hits. To do that, the studios need to control the reviews. Negative reviews are written off as review bombing (it's all the racists and sexists!) and pressure put on so that only positive reviews, be it from sites they own, or access media who get a lot of ad revenue from the studios, are publicised (go see this movie which got 89% on Rotten Tomatoes! Of course that 89% was from the eight critics who gave it good reviews because their papers need our ad money, and the general audience gave it 38% but you don't need to know that).
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The problem with Rotten Tomatoes has always been the use of a positive review to create the RT % score. A review that awards a movie 2.5 stars out of 4 is typically considered a good review and adds to the overall tomato meter score. This leads to problems where extremely good movies (think individual critic scores of 3.5 to 4 stars out of 4) earns a similar RT rating as a mediocre superhero movie (which earns 2.5 stars out of 4). I think a lot of blockbuster, big budget movies are not panned appropriately, leading to an inflated RT score. This, coupled with studios attempts to wine and dine movie critics, coupled with an extremely liberal use of the word “verified critic” leads to high RT scores.
Just look at Mission Impossible 7. That movie had a 94% RT score last time I looked. This movie was nowhere near as good as MI4, 5 or 6. Entertaining as hell? Yes. Worth the watch? Absolutely. But they weren’t making No Country For Old Men or Goodfellas here. Rotten tomatoes is an inherently broken tool, one that should only be used as a jumping off point, not the be-all, end-all.
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Justice League? Flash? Black Adam? Those Fantastic Beasts movies? The entire "Monsterverse" (technically started before BvS but I think they all were criticized)? Morbius? Hell, Gods of Egypt was released in the same year.
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I personally am completely sick of franchise movies. It seems like that’s the only thing getting made and they’ve just become so boring to me because they’re utterly predictable in every way.
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Yeah there seems no reason for Barbie and Oppenheimer to be wedded like they are. Somebody put the Barbenheimer idea out there and it took off like wildfire, like some kind of random evolutionary mutation. So here we are.
For a minute there was a focus on their rival soundtracks but as far as I know Barbie has one and Oppenheimer doesn't. I'd seen someone put together a tracklist for Oppenheimer that included Joy Division of The Cure and other gothy groups and thought it was real, I admit.
Ryan Gosling (via characters he has portrayed) is a sigma male zoomer meme, and so is Cillian Murphy in the same sense. This context is at least partly responsible for the unlikely combo popularity.
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I wonder if doing a synchronized launch Oppen Barbie Style was an attempt to repeat the Animal Crossing/Doom Eternal launch date crossover stuff, where two extremely different properties had simultaneous and successful launches.
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This also happened with Doom and Animal Crossing a couple years ago. I thought that was funnier, but this is still good.
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Was there ever a large market of comic book nerds? Superhero movies seemed like a safe family/normie friendly thing until they started to really suck. But the industry somehow managed to poison the whole ecosystem of watching a movie as well.
For starters, the actual quality of the movies became bad. Bad CGI, bad story repeated again and again. Uninteresting characters (wtf is Ant Man?) intertwined with some of the worst aspects of comic book storytelling. And they then pumped these movies out non-stop, moving further and further in some adult nerd direction to a point where staying in the loop became impossible for the family folk. And that's not counting all the TV shows that tied into the 'universe'. Many of which were terrible.
Going to the theater was always an event. But you can't make an event out of something that's been normalized. It seems like the industry cooked the golden goose by releasing too many things in too short a time whilst mixing and matching special with normal.
On top of all of this they decided to move into some pro-ugly anti-white anti-male direction, pissing of a portion of the vocal nerds, as well as the Chinese. So now who is left to enjoy your 'universe'? Half the nerds are in uprising. The family folk have sort of tuned out. Maybe little Johnny really likes the flashing lights and everything but the movies are now something mom and dad really dread seeing. Making them much more likely to tell the kids to wait until its on Netflix.
Worse yet if Johnny just spends his time on Youtube watching his favorite childrens entertainer lambast the movie for being terrible. Being the first kid in class to see something like Captain Marvel can't feel as cool as being one of the first kids to see Iron Man 3 or whatever. I mean, it's about some lady.(again, wtf is Ant Man?)
All in all, it would be easier to blame external factors for why things are going how they are going if the actual product wasn't bad. As a barometer, Guardians of the Galaxy, from what I've seen, is still chugging along just fine.
Back in 2011 I remember hearing someone say something like "if every single person who had ever read a Green Lantern comic book showed up to see the movie, and no one else, the movie would be a catastrophic bomb." This tracks my intuitions regarding film adaptations of novels as well--a million book copies sold is an achievement. A million movie tickets sold is, for anything but the cheapest of indie flicks, a catastrophe.
In the comic world, print runs of 500,000 or more were common in the 1950s and 60s. Today, most print runs are in the 5 figures. Not every comic book nerd buys a copy of every title! But the year-end figures for 2021 (distributors stopped sharing sales numbers in April 2022) suggest that Diamond (the primary distributor of comic books) moved about 84 million books that year. If the average comic purchaser bought 2 books per month (and to be clear, I have no idea how many books the average comic purchaser picks up per month, but my pull list is usually longer than that)--there are only perhaps 3.5 million Americans (North Americans?) in the habit of buying comic books. It would not surprise me at all if the real number is less than a million.
Of course, there are digital comics, too. Web comics. Piracy. But mostly, people just don't read--not even the funny books. The other day I was talking to an engineer and somehow the topic of Batman came up and he said, "oh, I'm a huge Batman fan!" And I said, "hey, me too--do you have a favorite arc?" His response was, "uh, well, I really liked the new movie--the one with Bane, you know." I said, "The Dark Knight Rises? From like ten years ago?" He said, "Yeah, the old movie was pretty good too, with Jack Nicholson, but the new one with Bane was great!"
Most people just don't have the autism required to be a dedicated fan of one thing, never mind a whole universe of main characters. But "I wanna turn my brain off for a couple hours" is something almost everyone experiences, on a fairly regular basis. So having a huge backlist of source material is valuable quite regardless of whether you're going to make something "good" out of it. Adapting novels is tricky because authors get precious about stuff and it's hard to buy a whole universe of main characters in one fell swoop. The stories and characters in the funny books were already corporate-packaged to begin with, so there's a super-convenient well of material to draw from.
It seems to me that the same forces that drove down comic book print runs are what drive down movie sales (when movie sales drop at all). It's not about producing good or bad stuff. It's just that there is way more competition for your time and attention today than there was even ten years ago, never mind 50 years ago. More channels, more websites, more video games, more social media. Once AI gets good enough to do some of the heavy lifting, I expect such trends to be extended even further.
Oh, they do. It's just that niche is already filled with sports and reality TV.
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I'm not convinced they are. First of all, we may think of the modern trend as new, but it's been around for decades by now. If audiences haven't tired of them yet, they won't now. Second, it's never been true that the audience would to go all superhero movies uncritically--they can still flop if they aren't good. The fact that bad superhero movies flop doesn't mean that the audience is tired of the whole genre.
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Just re: the strike. This seems like it has a sort of “Bud light” quality to it. Is the quality of work coming out of holywood really so much greater than other parts of the world that it is irreplaceable? Warner brothers etc really can’t just go to a foreign country to make their TV shows and movies?
It seems like Hollywood actors, in addition to being some of the most unlikeable people on earth, are also some of the most replaceable. If they want to strike, then good for them. But also now they’re going to have to compete Europeans and Canadians. It kind of seems like the audience are the winners here.
This is probably the worst point for the strike, not least because conventional wisdom that Americans can't deal with subtitles is stone dead thanks to Parasite and Squid Game. I still think no one can do what Hollywood does consistently (blockbusters that might as well be large engineering projects), but there are other options for programming.
A lot of the work (VfX especially) is already outsourced. Maybe you can't outsource the rest but you can buy quality foreign media to tide you over.
Meh. Hollywood actors are probably the best off . Especially the stars that people feel lecture them
Writers are probably fucked. Voice actors? Mega-fucked. VFX artists simply never unionized. But stars and the fans they're Pied Pipering to the theater via parasocial connection and promotion are necessary. You also need a ton of people for shows with huge churn like CSI and other procedurals. Are you gonna import them all? CGI them all? Not yet.
Also: American actors are already competing with the world's greatest talent already. The best in the world are already there. I think Peter Dinklage was the only American in the main cast for Game of Thrones?
I'm not sure about this. Making characters you can have parasocial relationships with isn't that hard. See every popular cartoon / animation / Japanese anime; mascot characters like ComparetheMeerkat.com; vocaloid stars like Hatsune Miku.
Whereas at the moment GPT 4 still can't do writing. I've done some experiments and the method described here works pretty well: https://medium.com/@chiaracoetzee/generating-a-full-length-work-of-fiction-with-gpt-4-4052cfeddef3 but it's incredibly generic. Everything happens in the most direct, obvious way possible and there's no spark to it whatsoever. Now, that could just be the finetuning, so we'll see.
Anyone have any tips/tools for ai-assisted writing?
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For that matter, could they just buy the rights to French or Italian films and dub them?
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There are already plenty of Hollywood movies based around existing non-comic book IP - it's just that most of them fail. There was a Dungeons and Dragons movie released this year, and despite scoring well with critics and D&D fans, it failed at the box office. Pokemon is the biggest franchise of all time by some margin, but the Detective Pikachu movie underperformed. The Fantastic Beasts movie likewise sought to cash in on being part of the Harry Potter universe (for which there is still significant commercial interest - see the success of the Hogwarts Legacy video game, despite a media campaign against it), but that wasn't enough to halt declining box office returns for the Beasts movies (probably because they stopped being about magical creatures and switched to being about Dumbledore and Grindelwald shooting agonized glances at each other). There's a Gran Turismo movie coming out next month that will probably flop as well. The most recent Fast and Furious movie is going to lose money. This idea of leveraging existing IP is not new, but there are probably conservatively at least 5 failures for every success.
Romcoms are dead for reasons Matt Damon laid out in his appearance on Hot Ones - streaming has killed the DVD/Blu-Ray revenue stream that many films that weren't profitable in their theatrical run could use to get a second shot at profitability, which means they now have to make up all of their post-production, post-marketing costs on theatrical release. It simply isn't sustainable for romcoms to have to make $70-100 million at the box office every time in order to be worthwhile investments. Even a recent "success" like No Hard Feelings, which I liked, is probably not going to be profitable just based on its box office returns, since studios don't get all of that money, and will need to get a good licensing deal to make the money back. And the flipside of using a big star like Jennifer Lawrence to pull people into a dead genre is that big stars cost a lot of money - from what I've read, NHF had a budget of $45 million, of which Lawrence's salary alone comprised $25 million.
I have an AMC A-List membership because I watch a lot of movies in theaters, but I'm generally attending these either alone or with one other person at most. The rising costs of tickets and concessions means a family of four is probably going to be shelling out well over $100 at the movies, and unsurprisingly a lot of people have decided to just check out and catch the movie on streaming instead. Most people don't share my big screen autism.
Part of the problem is that these movies are just way too expensive. I enjoyed the D&D movie but did it need to cost $150 million? It seems like the kind of movie where you could even have leaned into less impressive special effects as part of the charm, after all it's based on a game played entirely in your imagination. It made $200 million so with a more reasonable budget it could have been a success. The expectation that every movie needs to make a half a billion dollars is just unrealistic. A romcom shouldn't be a failure if it makes "only" $100 million because it shouldn't cost $50 million in the first place.
Part of it is just the CGI but there's something to be said for COVID protocols over the last few years. It seems like budgets are inflated even relative to usual standards due to safety issues or reshoots.
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I have no idea if this is anyway true, but I watched a Youtube movie review and they claimed that the reason for so much CGI in movies now is that executives interfere more, and if you do practical effects it's way harder to change things. Do it in CGI, shoot from multiple angles, and when the suits tell you "get rid of that vase on the table, we don't like the reaction shot, change the colour of the wallpaper" and so forth, it's easy (or easier) to do it in CGI. Hence why movies are so expensive (they have all the CGI), why so much CGI, and why it's so crappy.
And the reason for the interfering is (1) trimming to suit different markets (China doesn't want to see the gay kiss in the background? no problem, edit it out) and (2) movies are so expensive they have to make the money back so more interference by the studios to make sure that the chopping and changing will appeal to the widest audience and offend nobody. Of course, that means that you are going to end up offending somebody by making it obvious you've taken out/put in some shibboleth, and all the chopping and changing means the movie is unwatchable and ends up appealing to nobody (see the latest Indiana Jones which is not doing the business Disney banked on it doing).
Couldn't some of the interference be down just to execs feeling like they need to change things to justify their own egos/jobs? Im thinking specifically of the old Battle Chess duck story.
Oh yeah. New broom comes in and cans productions greenlighted by predecessor, gives his or her own pet projects the go-ahead and just changes things to show they can because they're in charge now.
Too many cooks, as the proverb goes.
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A friend who made a lot of money in videgame publishing recommended this to me once:
https://www.amazon.com/Blockbusters-Hit-making-Risk-taking-Business-Entertainment-ebook/dp/B00C74OXLO/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
Basically it's a power-law problem. The vast majority of viewers will choose what to watch from the top 5 movies out at the moment because those are the ones they've heard of. From a producer's point of view you pay whatever you have to pay to get into the top 5 because otherwise you're dead in the water. Thus, blockbusters.
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It seems to me that naive economic thinking would be that JLaw's value is the one we should assume right? Since she almost certainly is getting paid via a share of the box office proceeds. If she isn't worth it her pay will drop, either directly or they'll stop offering her high guaranteed pay.
The fact that she's kept up her high pay for years now (off the back of multiple successful films) speaks in her favor.
Meanwhile, her union buddies (despite being less vocal and annoying) are the ones leeching off the SAG minimum that they didn't necessarily earn or make any sort of case for.
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A movie without a big star is risky, making it very difficult to get the right mix of stakeholders on board (director, financing, producers, executive producers, studio execs).
It is interesting that other mediums (eg TV, music) have gone somewhat the opposite direction. Reality TV is cheap to make. You just find some randos who are willing to whore themselves out for some fame and broadcast it. Sure, your audience might be less compared to a good TV show BUT the cost is so low you still come out ahead.
Streaming has allowed musicians to more easily “publish” their music. The labels are much less important.
One wonders why Hollywood has remained insulated from the above? Is the nature of movies just different? Is it union rules?
From what I understand there are two caveats to this so large as to destroy the point:
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The sound of freedom had a $15 million dollar budget, which is still very expensive even if not by movie standards. It’s probably just a medium that it’s hard to do cheap enough to be worth trying.
Counterpoints: The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity are two of the most profitable films ever made because their production costs were in the five to six figure range. These are particularly pronounced examples of the general tendency for horror films to be cheap as chips to make (audiences don't expect big stars, casts tend to be small, geographic isolation is usually a necessity for story reasons which limits the amount of locations you need to use etc.) - the most beloved slasher films from the 70s and 80s were made for small budgets. More recently, Unfriended was made for $1 million and shot entirely in the director's house. Blumhouse's entire business model is "find directors who seem creative and enthusiastic, give them $1-4 million, almost all of the resulting projects will break even and a few will be whales".
See also Kevin Smith, who launched a successful directing career by making an indie comedy, Clerks, for $27,000 (half of which went to licensing the soundtrack) which he funded by selling off his comic book collection. Or Shane Carruth, who created one of the most critically acclaimed sci-fi movies of this century (Primer) for $7,000. Or just take a look at this list: you may be surprised to find that at least one film you love cost less than a house (or even a new car) to make.
"Yeah, making a movie used to be cheap but now it's more expensive."
Bullshit. Digital cameras are the norm now, so you don't even need to pay for film stock (as at least 3 of the 5 examples above did). Non-specialist consumer electronics are good enough that at least two critically acclaimed and profitable movies that I know of (Tangerine and Unsane) were entirely shot on iPhones, and editing an entire feature film on a standard laptop is perfectly feasible (and you'll probably be using the exact same NLE that the editor for Marvel 36: Electric Boogaloo used).
Sound of Freedom is a poor example of how cheap movies can get insofar as a) it was filmed in two countries and b) it features a bankable movie star who probably was unwilling to work for scale. It would not surprise me one iota if Jim Caviezel's fee cost more than the rest of the production combined. This has precedent: Glass was a nominally $20 million film that looked like it cost one-tenth of that because it had Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson.
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I do wonder if a winning strategy is filming 10 movies with budgets if 15m hoping to find one hit. If 9 make 10m but one makes 100m you have a net profit of 40m.
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This is the received wisdom, but it seems like adding tens of millions to your budget in the hopes of drawing in JLaw fans is the bigger risk. Maybe it's a smaller risk only in the 'nobody gets fired for buying IBM' sense
It seems like JLaw adds some value. Query whether the marginal benefit is worth the marginal cost.
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How is the censorship of Japanese media in China? I know that South Korea practises it devotely, and if China, a state even more anti-free speech, is the same, Mario lacks brand recognition among the Middle Kingdom masses.
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Is there really a point to cinemas when massive televisions with stunning visuals are affordable? Cinemas are expensive and the need to see the film on a large screen isn't as important with modern televisions.
Most likely. It will upset hardcore fans as these movies will shoehorn the IP into a plot. Write a movie and call it "Catan" in order to get people who have played the game to watch it.
Electronics here, including TVs and home theaters, cost 50% more than you're used to in the West, and movie tickets about an OOM less.
I'd have to buy a lot of movie tickets for it to be remotely comparable in expense.
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I mean, if i recall the Battleship movie got panned horribly, but I do kmow that someone has the movie rights to Asteroids and Risk...
I enjoyed Battleship, a fascinating B-movie with A-movie production and Navy cooperation.
It got me thinking about a screenplay for Yahtzee. You see, once a year the world’s richest criminals get together on a megayacht in the Pacific, hire the world’s best poker players, and bet their shares in the world’s biggest cartels. The CIA springs a down-on-his-luck poker genius (played by Ryan Reynolds) from prison…
I will defend Battleship to the death. That movie is more entertaining than it has any right to be, even with the moronic aliens and their questionable capabilities.
One of the most impressive things I've ever seen in cinema: torturing into existence the sequence of events that evoked the experience depicted on the cover of board games of Battleship. With aliens.
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I’m holding out for Hangman.
You're in luck
Well crap. That was meant to be a joke.
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