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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.
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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