rjrjr

This movie will not even break into the top 10 movies domestically. Not even for a short time.

This year has been brutal to franchise movies.

On 7/23/2023 at 10:10 AM, namisgr said:

Being concerned with discrimination and inequality has been a social platform for over a half century.

Exactly and it is encapsulated with the term woke:

woke : aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice) 

This is from the Merriam-Webster dictionary.

On 7/23/2023 at 10:08 AM, Gatsby77 said:

Some of the "Barbie is too woke" criticism I've read seemingly misunderstands the character.

For good or ill, Barbie has *always* been about inspiring girls - teaching them they could grow up to become anything they wanted.

Example: The Smithsonian's Air & Space museum this week has added to its Barbie exhibit the first "Astronaut Barbie" - released in 1965, before we even landed on the moon, let alone had female astronauts.

Ditto - arguing there should be more women in board rooms isn't exactly woke or earth-shattering.

Exactly.  Barbie was always woke.  This isn't anything new with this movie.

On 7/23/2023 at 10:04 AM, Dr. Balls said:

Agreed. Stan Lee’s Silver Surfer stories come to mind.

Other examples, the introduction of Black Panther (Fantastic Four #52), the Liberators (Avengers #83), Sue Storm being the strongest members of the FF (which came later in the 1980s), etc.

On 7/23/2023 at 9:56 AM, CAHokie said:

Yeah, those are good points actually.

Of course, one could also argue that it’s ok to make a movie without feeling the need to insert their viewpoints unless its directly related to the movie plot itself.
 

At this point we are all fully aware of Hollywood’s stances on most high profile subjects. Whether I agree or disagree with them is irrelevant because with few exceptions they are not the type I would take life advice from. 
 

And if you think about it, none of this is new to today's movies.  Hollywood has been doing this  for a long, long time.  It can be argued it is more blatant today (although there are examples, like the original Planet of the Apes movies, where I feel it was just as blatant).  If you go into movies looking for it, you can find it in many, many movies.

To make this relevant to comics, Marvel is notorious for doing this in their comics starting in the 1960s which is one of the reasons they are as big as they are today.  Marvel was woke before woke was coined as a term.

If this holds for the weekend, this movie will have earned $15 million less on its second weekend than the previous MI movie Fallout domestically.  The good news is this is the standard 60-65% drop that would be expected for a movie with a big opening weekend and not something worse due to Barbenheimer.  This year has been brutal to franchise movies.

As a Disney stock holder (which I acquired from my purchase of Marvel stock many years ago), I have faith Eiger will fix things. Everything he announced this week are encouraging. 

Scaling back the output from Marvel and Lucasfilm is a step in the right direction.

I feel for the Hollywood writers. They are striking at the worst time with box office disappointment after box office disappointment. I won’t be surprised if this strike goes for a few months.

It will be interesting to see the Marvel roadmap in 6 months.

I like that Legendary Entertainment has reasonable expectations on how these movies will do at theaters and therefore continue to make them and budget accordingly. I wish Universal Studios had the same expectations with their monsterverse. I was looking forward to the Universal Monsters returning to the screen and eventually the crossovers. Oh, well.

On 7/15/2023 at 10:20 AM, drotto said:

If things do not start improving fast, Perlmutter may again try and take over Disney from the outside.  He is still a major stock holder, and a proxy battle almost started earlier this year, but parties were temporarily made happy.  One of the stipulations of not doing this was the stock dividend would restart within about 1 years time. Not sure Disney has the funds to restart it by then.

Drotto, I changed my post because I confused the timeline on his ouster with this year’s attempted takeover. Thanks for jogging my memory.

On 7/15/2023 at 10:07 AM, Cman429 said:

it’s ironic Eiger would champion scaling down budgets when he helped oust Ike Perlmutter from his position in Marvel. Feige has straight out said we would never have gotten Civil War under Perlmutter bc he wanted Marvel to reign in budgets and make cheaper small scale movies like the first Ant Man. 

Ike Perlmutter claimed it was because of his stance on budgets but it was much bigger than that.

On 7/15/2023 at 8:49 AM, ADAMANTIUM said:

This is were I was at after the prescreen, yes it is AWESOME! Is it NEW? not really, but rather than sound grumpy  it was still a 9/10 for sure

It is to the point were, in short, you need to "care" about the characters to have any involvement with the film. I hadn't seen one since like #5 cause for #6 I didn't show up early enough to get in to the prescreen, and yet, it has its merits!  

This brings up another thought I was having. Usually, when a movie from a series comes out, I could watch the earlier movies on Netflix or Amazon Prime for free. None of the MI movies are on either service for free.  I know it is on Paramount+, which, unfortunately for Paramount, does not have nearly the subscriber numbers of the bigger streaming services. I do not subscribe to that service. I wonder if that factors into casual viewers going to see a movie like this.

On 7/15/2023 at 7:34 AM, drotto said:

To make $400 to $500 million movies easily profitable they need to be getting budgets down into the $125M to $150M range.  I am not sure the current group of creators is capable or willing to do this.

I agree, but it looks like at least one studio head, Eiger at Disney, realizes the budgets are unsustainable. Disney got bit hard this year by the ballooning budgets.

I saw the movie last night and it was good. None of the action sequences were new but they were well done. They repeated the mission and stakes so many times, I felt they were talking down to the audience by the last one just before the climax. It was almost laughable how many times and this could be turned into a drinking game. Show, do not tell.

As an action movie, I would give it 9/10. Where it failed for me was as a MI movie. For that I will give it a 7/10. The main villain did not click with me. One death was done poorly and one long chase scene was poorly edited.

I will elaborate more once people have time to see it. Definitely worth seeing but it does not live up to the hype.

I would rank this #4 after MI 4-6. Fallout is still my favorite.

On 7/14/2023 at 5:53 PM, drotto said:

I think it is becoming very clear that the MCU made a big mistake looking for gold in lower and lower tier characters, and instead should have pushed much harder to get the Fantastic Four and the X-Men into the MCU.  So with all the strikes and current roadmaps, we are looking at 4 or 5 years, maybe more till we get make to more bankable characters? What will be left of the MCU at that point?

I do not think the problem is necessarily the characters so much as the stories. Give us smaller stories that make us care about the characters. Build to the giant spectacular crossovers. And please, please, stop doing crossovers until we are invested in the characters. Not every movie needs a plethora of other heroes which just dilutes the story and balloons the runtime. And all this should be done with a reasonable budget. A few $400-$500 million dollar movies is what they should be shooting for and they should be budgeted accordingly.

This will be another movie that will probably not make back its money at the theater. The budget is $291 due to covid. Covid ballooned quite a few movie budgets that released this summer. I suspect this movie will do better than some recent big movies however.

With that said, I have tickets for tomorrow night. I cannot wait.

I am very disappointed to hear this Superman solo movie is going to feature other heroes.  <sigh>  It looks like Gunn is going to mess up this opportunity for a clean start right out of the gate.

On 6/27/2023 at 7:53 AM, Cman429 said:

As for the idea Superman Legacy should be a modestly budgeted movie with modest expectations. That’s all well and good except CEO Zaslav says in every investor call that DC is one of their prime assets and it’s potential to be exploited is “enormous” which is corporate speak for “it’s gonna make us A LOT of money.” A $500 million world gross for that movie would likely trigger the end of the DCU and we’d just get a bunch of standalone Bat movies after they dump Swamp Thing. 

Again, expectations are way too high from the studios and fans. A decent budget and return is a success. Anything else is noise. The payoff comes down the line when they earn the audience’s trust and then they can bring the characters together. Both Marvel and DC have this problem right now. I hope Gunn understands this even if other higher ups (and many fans) do not.

We do not have superhero fatigue, we have studios and fans with unreasonable expectations because of the Avengers success. I liked the Flash movie btw, but I thought it would have worked better as a solo movie and they could have had generally the same story without Batman, Supergirl, etc. and accomplished this with a smaller budget and a shorter runtime. They had an easy double or triple, but they swung for the fence and missed.

On 6/26/2023 at 4:39 AM, Cman429 said:

The future of DC comes down to Gunn’s Superman. If that doesn’t hit and hit HUGE then they’ll scale down his remaining projects before dumping him and scrapping everything. A company $50 billion in debt can’t keep throwing good money after bad. 

I disagree this movie has to be huge. This movie needs a reasonable budget and characters the audience cares for. As long as it is a good Superman movie and it makes money, it will be a fine start. They should not be expecting $1 billion and they should budget accordingly.

The problem with the DCU and the MCU is they are swinging for home runs every outing. The MCU did not start this way and it cannot expect every movie to bring in big money.  The early Marvel movies did this. But almost every movie since Civil War has been an attempt to be more than they should be. None of the recent movies, Flash included, earned the crossovers we are seeing. We did not see the Flash earn the hero title so why would his first solo outing not be an actual solo movie?  Ditto for many of the recent Marvel superhero intros.

Reduce budgets. Use practical effects. Give us compelling characters. The rest will take care of itself.

9 hours ago, masterlogan2000 said:

That's really interesting!  I'm also not seeing any difference here.  If that's the case, then this would be the very first Walmart 3-pack that didn't contain an exclusive and was simply just a repack of three already printed books.  Then again, all the other books that have been released should be reviewed to see if we've missed anything.  (If we pool all our info, maybe we could/should start a master list of sorts).

I wonder if this was intentional on the Star Wars book, or if something got mixed up or a deadline missed to commission/modify the cover.

It's also of note that this particular Star Wars comic seemed to be only 1 per case (whereas all the other packs were a minimum of 2).

A lot of copies of this particular Star Wars #1 were shipped to Disney parks for the opening of Star Wars Galaxy's Edge.  I wonder if they printed so many they decided to forgo a Walmart exclusive for this issue and just let Walmart use what they had lying around.

https://wdwnt.com/2019/05/photos-star-wars-galaxys-edge-1-comic-book-debuts-at-shops-around-walt-disney-world/

On 7/2/2019 at 11:23 PM, masterlogan2000 said:

 

 

 

 

 

Unless I'm missing something, there is nothing different about the Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge #1 cover in the Walmart 3 pack than the one shipped to comic shops.  The UPC symbol, logo color, issue # size, etc. are identical.

Are we sure all these comics are Walmart exclusives?  Because this one does not appear to be.

On 5/8/2019 at 11:00 AM, Hawkman said:

Yes, we lap up change and yes, we lap up entertainment. You should try it sometime.

I guess the change is the Iron Man tech is now inside the Spider-Man costume?  So this different direction is ... Iron Boy?  How about a different direction that resembles the character in the comic book?

You didn't need to add Tony Stark and his tech (although we know why they did it, Iron Man is popular so ... more of the same which makes this different direction ironic), just tell new stories that include the myriad of characters that have appeared over the years.  Chameleon, Kraven, Kingpin, Scorpion, Jackal, Tombstone, John Jameson, Black Cat, etc.  There is still a lot of ground to cover IMHO.

I hope the new movie jettison's the Iron Man connection and we actually see Spider-Man and not Iron Boy II.  <fingers crossed>

8 hours ago, 234wallst said:

IW from day 33 to the end made roughly $51m North America.  EG seems to be losing steam faster than IW.   Also the NA gross is now higher than international and that likely won't get better with EG out of China.  Unless there is a push by the fans it seems Avatar is getting out of reach.  For a movie that's only been out little over a month it does seem it's be out there for quite some time.  I suppose the cliffhanger effect really made the numbers heavily front loaded.

If it finished domestically at $850m (it is looking like it will come up short of that with it now starting to trailing IW at the same point) the total box office take domestically will be about 2.4x opening weekend.

It is looking likely Avengers End Game will finish #2 domestically behind The Force Awakens. I am surprised at how quickly it has fallen off domestically as I was sure it would be #1. There is really no competition for another week, so maybe it can make up lost ground this week.

It is too early to call if it will get #1 internationally. It has a good shot at it though.

If it finishes at #2 all time on both charts, that is still a great showing. Hard to see anything coming even close to this in the superhero genre for some time.