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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:
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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