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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:
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.
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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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