DC Movies- if at first you don't succeed...

[Pattern Ghost]

5 minutes ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

and the box office was very poor for Black Widow.

 

You keep beating this drum, but the box office was very poor for everything in 2021. Black Widow is the top earner in domestic box office. There is no way to paint that as a failure of the movie.

 

To me, it simply looks like an average Marvel movie, which is still a good thing, just not something I'm excited enough for to drop $30 on for just me and my wife to see. It honestly has the same vibe for me as all the Disney Plus shows, as a set up for some character (Yelena) for the next phase. Which doesn't make it bad, but makes it less of its own thing in my opinion. (The Disney Plus shows have all been OK, but just a little lacking IMO.)

[Christopher R Taylor]

Quote

Black Widow is the top earner in domestic box office.

 

No, its not, but it is up there.  It doesn't matter.  The took a bath on this thing, no matter how you try to spin it.  It earned tens of millions instead of a billion or more, which is their standard.  It doesn't matter how well other movies were doing this year, it matters how well they expected, planned, and needed this movie to do.  Its the first marvel superhero film in this era to crater like this, and blaming Covid doesn't somehow make that go away.

Covid didn't make their streaming numbers so bad.  I know you really want this to be a big movie and do well but it simply was not, and did not.

[Greywind]

They should have released it last year as originally planned.

[csyphrett]

1 hour ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

 

No, its not, but it is up there.  It doesn't matter.  The took a bath on this thing, no matter how you try to spin it.  It earned tens of millions instead of a billion or more, which is their standard.  It doesn't matter how well other movies were doing this year, it matters how well they expected, planned, and needed this movie to do.  Its the first marvel superhero film in this era to crater like this, and blaming Covid doesn't somehow make that go away.

Covid didn't make their streaming numbers so bad.  I know you really want this to be a big movie and do well but it simply was not, and did not.

But it didn't crater. It made almost 400k just in the theaters. It's the number five movie of the year. Who knows how much it made on the streaming service? The only real financial problem with the black widow is how much more it could have made if it hadn't been put on a streaming service the first day. There is also a possibility that the people shafted the movie for the streaming service which we will see if all of this goes to court

CES

[Pattern Ghost]

4 hours ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

No, its not, but it is up there.

 

Seriously, just googled it before I posted.

4 hours ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

  I know you really want this to be a big movie and do well but it simply was not, and did not.

Don't put words in my mouth. I said everyone took a hit during COVID, and this did better than most.  You can't spin it as a failure under the circumstances.

[Christopher R Taylor]

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Who knows how much it made on the streaming service?

 

Variety Magazine posted its first week's earnings, and they were a quarter what Mulan made in that time.

 

And no, that wasn't Chinese money.  Mulan didn't do very well in China and as I've noted, China isn't as big a market as people keep thinking it is.  Disney has had a really tight hand trying to keep the streaming numbers from being known, but they're glad to release them when a product does really well.

 

You know how we know this did badly?  Disney and Marvel Comics movie guys both are both making public and background statements that it did badly.  They're changing what they have planned and working on how to do better next time.  You know who doesn't do that?  Companies that are pleased with how their film did.

 

Quote

Don't put words in my mouth.

 

You didn't want it to do well and be a big movie?  I did.

[Dr.Device]

25 minutes ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

Variety Magazine posted its first week's earnings, and they were a quarter what Mulan made in that time.

 

Mulan did not make $240M on its opening weekend. There was some messed up analysis going on shortly after its release that said that, but no one in the industry believes that now. It may have made 80-90 million dollars (citation) in its first week of streaming, but keep in mind, it was streaming only. Black Widow made $60M streaming on opening weekend, plus $80M in theaters. So Black Widow easily outperformed Mulan.

 

 

[csyphrett]

5 minutes ago, Dr.Device said:

 

Mulan did not make $240M on its opening weekend. There was some messed up analysis going on shortly after its release that said that, but no one in the industry believes that now. It may have made 80-90 million dollars (citation) in its first week of streaming, but keep in mind, it was streaming only. Black Widow made $60M streaming on opening weekend, plus $80M in theaters. So Black Widow easily outperformed Mulan.

 

 

Can you find any other streaming numbers, Doc. The only numbers I could find were theater only

CES 

[zslane]

IMO, Black Widow was never destined to be a huge earner for Marvel even without a pandemic throwing a wrench into the works. That's not because Marvel has lost its way, but because some Marvel movies are simply not going to click with a massive audience. And while Disney loves making gobs of money like all studios do, there is actually room in the Marvel line-up for characters that deliver only moderate box office performance, like Ant-Man and Black Widow.

 

The Disney+ MCU streaming shows seem to be doing extremely well, which says to me that Marvel is still on top of their game. I think Shang Chi will only do moderately well, not unlike Black Widow, but mostly because I think there is a smaller audience for the martial arts corner of the superhero genre, not because Marvel has hit some proverbial iceberg. It's hard to say how well Eternals will do because when it is released we will still be under the thumb of a pandemic and we don't yet know how hard Disney is going to push it in terms of advertising. Disney will need to push pretty hard, I feel, because it is just like the Guardians of the Galaxy in that the Eternals is a team of heroes who are completely unknown to the public, and so the public needs to be shown/convinced why they should be excited to see a movie about them.

[Iuz the Evil]

The Suicide Squad was really entertaining, I watched it on HBO Max last night with my teens and very much enjoyed it. Funny movie. I loved the fan service, and the opening sequence was hilarious.

 

Have not had the interest to watch Black Widow. It’s a prequel on a character I don’t find that interesting, and I thought they did a nice job closing her story arc in Infinity War. I may get around to seeing it at some point because of Taskmaster, but otherwise it doesn’t really feature any characters I care much about from the trailer. Red Guardian? Other trainees from the Red Room program?

 

I’m clearly not what they’re looking for in an audience, it doesn’t look that fun to me.

[csyphrett]

1 hour ago, Iuz the Evil said:

 

 

I’m clearly not what they’re looking for in an audience, it doesn’t look that fun to me.

All the funny parts and angst were the pretend family getting together and trying to sort their issues. The villain was doing the same thing as Telefon or Jason Bourne, so there is no new ground there except his choice of assets. The taskmaster was a whole new profile given his name, but he was more like Deathlok

CES 

[archer]

15 hours ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

The Chinese Market is hugely overstated, it is smaller than domestic.  Time will tell if Marvel's fortunes or vision for films is on the decline or not, but this is not a good sign.  The streaming numbers were a disaster and the box office was very poor for Black Widow.  If that's their vision for the future, its not promising.

 

Personally, I don't think killing the main character before her movie was released helped anything. 

 

It's hard to get emotionally invested in the life of a character AFTER you get emotionally invested in her death scene.

[csyphrett]

17 hours ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

The Chinese Market is hugely overstated, it is smaller than domestic.  Time will tell if Marvel's fortunes or vision for films is on the decline or not, but this is not a good sign.  The streaming numbers were a disaster and the box office was very poor for Black Widow.  If that's their vision for the future, its not promising.

Almost fifty percent of the movies in the top 100 are Chinese, most of which did not get a theatrical release in America as far as I know

CES

[Dr.Device]

6 hours ago, csyphrett said:

Can you find any other streaming numbers, Doc. The only numbers I could find were theater only

 

I haven't had any luck with that. Apparently Disney actually announcing the Black Widow numbers was highly unusual.

[csyphrett]

8 minutes ago, Dr.Device said:

 

I haven't had any luck with that. Apparently Disney actually announcing the Black Widow numbers was highly unusual.

They did it because Iger and Capicek made money off the numbers being big. It's probably buried in some financial report somewhere

CES

[Pattern Ghost]

6 hours ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

You didn't want it to do well and be a big movie?  I did.

 

I'm indifferent. It looks OK, but just OK to me. Medium box office would be fine, IMO. I think it's a lot lower than it would be without COVID, and that the streaming numbers would have been better without the price gouging.

 

If this were a Black Widow movie done during the place in the timeline that it deserved, where we could expect future movies, then I'd be hoping for its success, as I like the actress in the role. She's a good actress, good fit for the role and seems like an intelligent and reasonably decent human. She's not made any really polarizing comments that I can see. I saw one interview where she mentioned that she wished that she hadn't let the character be so sexualized early on, which I thought a bit silly given the character. However, it echoes far earlier statements she's made of wanting to just be a character actress, not cast as an ingenue due to her looks. That's all pretty reasonable. If she's making more woke-speak noises, then I'm not aware of them.

[Dr.Device]

1 minute ago, csyphrett said:

They did it because Iger and Capicek made money off the numbers being big. It's probably buried in some financial report somewhere

 

Sounds likely, but also for the PR push that a big open gives a movie.

[zslane]

And ironically, Disney may be secretly hoping that Shang Chi underperforms next month so that it can serve as evidence that a Theater-Only MCU release does not yield more revenue than a Day-and-Date Theater+PVOD MCU release.

[Ninja-Bear]

4 minutes ago, zslane said:

And ironically, Disney may be secretly hoping that Shang Chi underperforms next month so that it can serve as evidence that a Theater-Only MCU release does not yield more revenue than a Day-and-Date Theater+PVOD MCU release.

Nah, if they’re secretly hoping for anything, it’s that fans would blow out both theatrical and streaming services. 

[unclevlad]

1 hour ago, Dr.Device said:

 

Sounds likely, but also for the PR push that a big open gives a movie.

 

Can't agree.  Big push for the streaming service?  Couldn't disagree.  But right now, streaming is the opportunity, not the theaters, until proven otherwise.

Also as evidence, here are the box office numbers:

https://www.boxofficemojo.com/release/rl2122089985/

 

But, as has been pointed out, I really don't think Black Widow is representative, given how out of place the movie is after Infinity War.  The timing was also unfortunate as the delta wave started rolling in.  This had to scare some people out of theaters, and the alarm was growing significant by the second mid-week (the 20th).

[Scott Ruggels]

Can we please move the Black Widow Discussions back to the Marvel Thread, please?

 

So I watched The Suicide Squad on HBO Max. I enjoyed it. It was a satisfying movie from 2014, and I thought the large Ensemble cast was handled well. Good effects, great stunts. and was definitely a Comic Book movie.  The gore did not bother me, but i definitely enjoyed the darkly comic tone.  

IT's not doing well in the box office, but then all this Delta Variant talk in the media is making my neighbors and the guy i usually go to the movies with fearful and paranoid. (even though most of my neighbors are vaccinated.  I am also of the opinion that "Day and Date" releases on streaming services may not be such a good idea.  Still it may be, that the habit of going to theaters in crowds has been broken by this plague, and that Hollywood is going to have to think about moving back to 1960's and 70's level budgets, because the problem with the movies as released now, is that they were greenlit with budgets, not expecting COVID, and those budgets are doubles if you figure in the marketing Budget.  So they are making money, but they are not making "Enough" money to "tentpole" the studios. IT's not just superheroes, but maybe all theatrical genre entertainment may fade away to nearly nothing (With some moving to TV if it is a popular enough property, and if they don't ruin it with intersectionalism.

 

[Scott Ruggels]

Numbers for The Suicide Squad. 
https://apple.news/A06tBsSVHRei4CpWQq7isDw

 

[Bazza]

9 hours ago, Pattern Ghost said:

 

I'm indifferent. It looks OK, but just OK to me. Medium box office would be fine, IMO. I think it's a lot lower than it would be without COVID, and that the streaming numbers would have been better without the price gouging.

 

If this were a Black Widow movie done during the place in the timeline that it deserved, where we could expect future movies, then I'd be hoping for its success, as I like the actress in the role. She's a good actress, good fit for the role and seems like an intelligent and reasonably decent human. She's not made any really polarizing comments that I can see. I saw one interview where she mentioned that she wished that she hadn't let the character be so sexualized early on, which I thought a bit silly given the character. However, it echoes far earlier statements she's made of wanting to just be a character actress, not cast as an ingenue due to her looks. That's all pretty reasonable. If she's making more woke-speak noises, then I'm not aware of them.

 

She has mentioned MeToo in relation to the film. 

[csyphrett]

10 hours ago, Dr.Device said:

 

Sounds likely, but also for the PR push that a big open gives a movie.

One of the stories I looked said Capicek (I'm not sure of the spelling, but the head of the streaming service) made I think 7 million dollars as a bonus. Iger got options worth Scarlet Johanssen's salary for that movie on top of his yearly which is almost the same as Johanssan's take for that one movie

CES

[Scott Ruggels]

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/suicide-squad-james-gunn-harley-quinn-dc-1234996289/

 

James Gunn on the future of DC movies.