fantastic_four

If you're thinking it costs $30 to see this film--it doesn't. It's free for HBO Max subscribers.

Just in terms of likability as measured by their Tomatometer, not overall quality. The RT average critic rating for Dark Knight is 8.6, whereas for this it's 7.9. That's not a small difference.

Supposedly Thursday. But definitely by Friday. HBO sent me an email today saying it will be available on HBO Max on Thursday starting at 7 PM EST.

Iger is one of the most likable CEOs of a large company I've ever encountered. He's also married to the cute anchor Willow Bay from an NBA show on NBC called "Inside Stuff" that aired throughout the 1990s. He almost retired from Disney and ran for president in 2016, urged on by Oprah Winfrey who said she'd be in his cabinet, but when the Fox deal came on the radar he decided to stay on as CEO until the deal went through. I'll accept bringing the X-Men and Fantastic Four back to the Marvel universe as an acceptable reason for not running. He's also the spitting image of Frank Sinatra. I think of Sinatra every time I see a picture of Iger.

I almost posted a few days ago that I'm surprised someone as PR-savvy as Iger let this happen, but then I remembered he's no longer CEO and that I had no idea how much influence he had over Chapek. Looks like he has zero influence, and yea, I'm not surprised he would look at it like this. I've seen well over a dozen examples of Iger being a classy and likable guy, but not once have I thought about Chapek. Not a great look for this to be the first time I'm forced to think about the fact that he exists at all.

I also doubt any of them share streaming stats publicly anytime soon, but they wouldn't have to share them publicly to compensate actors--just with the actors who negotiate profit sharing. But I assume none of them are doing even that. The fact that Warner gave Gal Godot a flat bonus to compensate for box office revenue lost to the HBO Max release of WW84 suggests they didn't want to share streaming statistics with her, either.

Those seem hard to value, but what makes immediate sense is those count for zero. If they pay the $30 for your movie then you get a cut of that, but 30% of a zero subscription cost is still zero, so that's what an actor would get. Disney already knows the answer to ALL of these questions, they just didn't want to share any of it. Why they didn't want to share it I'd love to hear, but I doubt we ever will and will just have to assume it's for the classic studio reason--they wanted to maximize their share of the pie.

It DEFINITELY wouldn't be forever. The easiest math for Disney Plus that almost certainly needs much more refinement is to take some percentage of new subscriptions who watch the movie (maybe 30%, maybe 15%, not really sure) + some smaller percentage of existing subscriptions who watch the movie (probably half of the new subscriber percentage) for ONLY the time period the film is commanding that $30 premium. I doubt any of that combined with the $30 streaming fee plus box office totals adds up to any $50 million bonus that Scarlett is suing for. But who knows, RDJ was getting that kind of money, maybe they gave it to her for her solo film. I'm guessing she just went overboard hoping for a lesser judgement.

Yea I was wondering how that would work also. In a hypothetical world where actors get a cut of the release profits and a film is released in multiple venues subscriptions should factor into that, but not indefinitely, just for some limited number of subscriptions for a limited amount of time. Just the ones that the film helped drive. I don't know how to do that math, but given a few hours or days to think about it the math seems do-able, although I'm sure there are multiple ways to do the math that work out better for the actor versus the studio that are controversial. And I have NO doubt the studios have already done that math and know to a very tight degree how much money a film helps drive streaming subscriptions. Warner Brothers in particular must have a formula figured out extremely well to offer their films for "free" on HBO Max.

Mines not blind, it's based upon decades of tales of studios screwing actors out of income by lying about revenue and/or profits. What I don't get is the support for Disney's point of view, and it's because I haven't heard anyone even try to defend it yet, just to complain about ScarJo or the movie in general. Why WOULDN'T they include Disney Plus revenues in with box office receipts to compute actor compensation? . Rationally and morally that's what makes sense, and since Disney hasn't explained either I'm left assuming they think they can skip it because of their interpretation of what the contract says.

Also--I don't really care about ScarJo losing however many millions she's losing. She's rich beyond avarice, so I could care less, but I absolutely don't begrudge her going after her money in the contract and place most of the blame on Disney based upon my guess as to what the contract probably says. What I care about is Disney ticking off the other actors. I want actors like Hiddleston to keep returning to play Loki, Hemsworth to to keep playing Thor, or Ruffalo to keep playing Hulk. But all three of those guys really like ScarJo, so will this increase the likelihood one or several of the mainstay actors will leave? DEFINITELY, without a doubt. And that's almost certainly Feige's biggest concern, too.

It's worth noting that when ScarJo would have signed her Black Widow contract in 2017 Disney Plus didn't even exist, and I can't remember if it was public knowledge at the time that it was even in the works. So it's not as if Disney choosing to stream content is something they would have ever explicitly mentioned in the contract on either side, although after the last year I have no doubt that EVERY contract will explicitly mention it from now on--particularly for Disney clients now that everyone else's agents have seen how Disney has dealt with ScarJo.

Force majeure typically doesn't void the contract, it's in there to make sure ScarJo (or anyone else) can't sue Disney for not meeting the terms of a contract when an "Act of God" prevents it. The pandemic forced a delayed release, but it didn't force Disney to release the film simultaneously on Disney Plus and decline to share that revenue with the actors. Put more simply--acts of God isn't a blank check for Disney to do whatever they want. I mean, it COULD be, but if ScarJo's agent let her sign a contract with that open-ended a force majeure clause then she needs to find a new agent.

That isn't at all what she's saying, she's saying that Disney released it to Disney Plus at $30 a pop, and that revenue both isn't counting towards her contract incentives and is directly competing with the box office revenues. If they had included those revenues along with the box office totals for her bonus I'm sure she would have been fine with it, but they chose not to. To side with Disney on this you'd have to think that the actors doing revenue sharing don't deserve any release-related Disney Plus income, a perspective that may have some valid reasoning but one I haven't heard anyone argue yet. And this isn't unique to her or this film--the studios are in this same boat with any stars in any blockbuster doing profit sharing, which is most of them these days. As previously noted Warner Brothers has tried to make it right with their stars, but in this case Disney decided not to.

Blunt and her husband Krasinski already went down this road with Paramount when "A Quiet Place II" had its theatrical release window shortened. https://www.indiewire.com/2021/05/emily-blunt-john-krasinski-money-paramount-quiet-place-2-1234635899/ Big stars have been regularly sharing box office profits for decades so this is an issue for pretty much any blockbuster released within the last year. ScarJo is the first one I've heard of taking it to court. What I don't get is the $50 million she's asking for. Seems high!

None of us have read the contract so we have no idea if ScarJo will win, but it's extraordinarily hard to see anyone but Disney losing by a landslide in the court of public opinion. They're burning bridges with fans and Hollywood for no good reason that I can see. They had a chance to put a good reason out but instead tried to say it was the pandemic's fault that they're not going to count the Disney Plus revenue towards ScarJo's income?

I assume it's a combination. The first thing I did when I saw the BAF was go back and compare it to the Watchers shown in GotG2 and saw it looked different. Then I saw the What If promo poster below and realized yep, they did make the BAF look like it's supposed to look to match his appearance in the show. Then I realized from this poster, wait--he's got dark skin! Then I remembered Wright is playing him, so they must have taken the GotG2 Watchers and made one look like Wright.

Oh, and if you didn't see it the Legends team unveiled a Watcher Build-A-Figure shown below. I thought he looked QUITE strange at first, and I figured out why. I thought the same thing when I saw Thanos in Infinity War where they had modeled his face after Josh Brolin, and below I think we're seeing the actor Jeffrey Wright (best known now for playing Arnold in Westworld) modeled into that of the Watcher since Wright is doing the voice for Uatu.

Byrne established that Galactus grows and shrinks as his hunger grows or is satiated, so really any size works, and you can easily keep the Toy Biz BAF figure, the Marvel Universe figure, or this Haslab figure and have it work in displays. He could also be planet sized, but that sounds hard to fit into a display. I generally agree the bigger, the better, so yea, having him displayed with smaller figures makes complete sense. FYI I think we figured out the first and second stretch goal tiers--first is Silver Surfer with a swirly-twirly cloud display base, and second is Frankie Raye (wish Bryne hadn't named her Nova so people confuse her for Richard Ryder or the Kree Nova Corps, but meh, whatever) also with a flame display base. Beyond that nobody is sure except that one of the team members claimed that it makes the project an "army builder," and the only army-building item anyone has thought of yet is one of the Punisher robots shown in FF #49 below. He only deploys one in that issue and it completely dominates the whole FF team, but in later stories he deploys multiple Punishers.

Did this flexing scene from the trailer make the movie? If so, where? Somehow I missed it.

I guess I could see Disney playing those percentages to incent smaller theaters to run big movies after a few weeks, although it's unclear that's an actual motive for increasing theater share as time goes on as opposed to just maximizing their profits in the first few weeks. Maybe they view both results as contributing to maximize profits. The math on that seems complex, although certainly solvable given enough time and past sales data to work it out.

I'm not sure of the point here. Taking the example in that article of Disney requiring theater owners to run a film in their highest-capacity room for four weeks--are you suggesting that would increase the number of locations who run it? That seems to filter some out, and the article even explicitly lays out how the smallest markets will instead choose not to run the film in a small number of cases. Are you suggesting there are other different contract provisions you've seen which push locations to run a Disney film whereas they otherwise wouldn't? If so, what's an example? I could see them saying something like if you don't run film X with less appeal then we won't let you have film Y with more appeal, but I completely made that example up and have no idea if Disney does stuff like that. For Black Widow I can't imagine why Disney would need to do ANYTHING to boost the number of theaters who carry it. Theaters knew it was likely to be a top five film of the summer, and that seems like enough for almost all locations to run it.

Two things confuse me about the location counts: I used to assume those were screen counts, so that if one theatre is showing a movie on 5 screens that theatre adds 5 to the count. Does each theatre just count once no matter how many screens they're showing a movie on? Don't theatres decide for themselves whether or not to show a movie? The talk about Disney deciding to increase or decrease theatre counts confuses me. What is the implication there--that Disney is lying about the numbers, or that they're bullying theatres into showing their movies?

The reviews on this are creeping in at a weirdly slow rate. RT still only has 65 of them, and the scoring is fluctuating so wildly I have no idea where it will end up. Yesterday morning it was 31%, last night it was 58%, and right now it's 42%. Metacritic only has 10 reviews. Why the heck would reviews be coming in so slowly for this film? Some sort of post-pandemic reviewer slowness? Before Covid reviewers were ready with their reviews on an embargo lift date en masse, but that doesn't seem to be the case for this film. The reviews on "Old" are coming in similarly slowly, so it may be a problem across the board. Either way this film is looking to have at best mixed reviews, but once they're all in it could be a stinker like the last two GI Joe films.

The listings claimed they were "Clone Wars" versions which implies something new since the previous iterations of these three characters didn't mention that. Walmart didn't create those images, did they? It looks like Hasbro did, and it explicitly says in those three images I posted "Entertainment image only. Product not yet final." If they're re-issues of existing figures why not give Walmart promo shots of the previous releases?