Box Office Thread

As if independent theaters weren't already under strain. :(

That is very unfortunate for the workers.

Oh man. COVID 19 really did some serious damage to this year's box office.

It's already halfway through April and yet the highest grossing movie is around $400 mil while a movie grossing less than $110 mil still is in top 5.

Man, I've also never seen a Pixar film (Onward) performing this bad. When I saw the trailers last year, I thought this would gross at least over 500 mil. At least it isn't the movie's fault.

Yeah, closing theaters will do that.

The summer film schedule◊

The movie industry probably won't recover very well either, as streaming is just on the rise more and more thanks to the Virus making everyone social distance and do things at home.

AMC is filing for Chapter 11. That alone speaks to a slow recovery for theatres.

Chapter 7, that's liquidation, is what you have to look out for, Chapter 11 (what Marvel did back in the day) is restructuring of debt this could work and give the company enough of a lifeline till this passes or they will eventually fall into Chapter 7

I guess this might be relevant to this thread but, Trolls World Tour is doing very well in streaming rentals. This begs the question: will this pave the way for more movie studios to move their planned theater releases to VOD? Will we see films like New Mutants finally find a home there?

One critic I watch claimed that Trolls World Tour was a special case that's unlikely to be duplicated. The film already had a strong marketing push and was already released overseas before it was pulled from theaters. The digital release was an attempt to curb piracy, which would've inevitably happened had Universal waited a few extra months for the film to be released in theaters.

And while the film is doing well digitally, studios won't announce how much money they've made off those sources as readily. There's a lack of accountability that can easily mask how much a studio may have lost on a film. According to the article, the film made $30 million in digital sales, but it also had a budget of $100 million. So, that's a pretty steep hill for it to make it's budget back at the moment, even putting aside the records its making right now.

Welp, I'm stupid . But looking at it again, it said it likely made 10 times more on its opening day than Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, which made $2-3 million in digital sales. So, I'm kind of half-right?

Edited by chasemaddigan on Apr 14th 2020 at 2:37:42 PM

Actually the article stated:

"Avengers: Endgame, per sources, had a first digital domestic rental week of $30 million in flash reports, and the extrapolation off first-day numbers is that Trolls World Tour will far exceed the figure amassed by the Russo Brothers-directed sequel."

That "$30 million" number is related to Endgame not Trolls World Tour.

Kinda scary reading replies to IGN tweets about Netflix surpassing Disney in market cap and users bragging about how media conglomerates deserve to die when movie theaters go bankrupt and never reopen.

A few thoughts I have about this (and I don't want to sound like a stooge for conglomerates, but...):

• Media conglomerates and movie theaters employ a lot more people than Netflix can ever hope to employ. To see them all out of work and basically be forced to work at either Netflix, third-party production studios that rely on Netflix for income and jobs or other tech companies or media businesses bought by piss-poor telecoms is just sadism.
• Netflix isn't even a media conglomerate. They only sell two products: DVD rentals and video-on-demand streaming media. To compare Netflix to media conglomerates is a dangerous fallacy.
• Netflix's business and content strategy (along with that of many other streamers like Amazon Prime, Hulu and the like) primarily consists of two concepts: allow complete creative freedom to producers and offer as much of that content as possible and at a cheap price. Excellent strategy for sure (and indeed, the New Hollywood era thrived on this, though there was more emphasis on the former tenet), but it can prove disastrous if most of the content offered is mediocre at best, garbage at worst. There's a reason New Hollywood didn't stick around after '82. Even more startling, the streamers' strategy somewhat resembles that of Atari's strategy during their dominance of the video game console market, and look where that took them.

People who are eager now for where streaming becomes the main norm for all media distribution are soon going to regret wishing for it in the future.

Edited by Mario1995 on Apr 17th 2020 at 7:05:58 AM

Being excited for movie theaters to close and everything go to on demand streaming is like being excited for sports arenas and concert halls to close.

Netflix also has a deceptively high upkeep cost, between funding new content and paying royalties their relatively small staff doesn't mean they are flush with cash.

That's not even getting into the fact that they still rely on conglomerates to offer them content, and one has to wonder how much money they're paying the conglomerates now as more streamers enter the market.

Though one does have to ask, with how many movies and TV shows are already out there, how long would it take without new stuff being produced for you to actually run out of stuff to watch?

Movie theatres have been having problems with their business model for a while (to the point where the big chains no longer have a box office; you can only by in-person tickets at the snack counter, which says a lot about where they’re getting their money from).

A further drop in demand is going to force both studios and theatres to figure out a more sustainable model that’s not dependent on expecting everyone to buy $10 popcorn.

Edited by Galadriel on Apr 18th 2020 at 4:11:53 AM

Hopefully theatre chains will be able to negotiate the studios out of their ludicrous box office splits. Not have to fork over 70-90% of the take would go a long way to saving the theatres.

Out of curiosity I visited Box Office Mojo, and holy crap it's so sad.

The last update was from April 10-12 with two movies that made a bit more of $3000 combined.

Which movies were those?

Swallow and The Other Lamb.

Sucks for them. Did they at least get money from the film festivals?

What's sad about AMC going down the glugger? Have you done any research into the fouled-up stuff that the folks connected with its ownership have been up to? Stuff like murder, skinning flesh off of at least one corpse, and failed attempts to gain political asylum in an U.S. Embassy? As well as all sorts of Chinese government sponsored skulduggery.

The company is cursed and it does go down, it's sad for the workers, but probably squares up things a bit with the universe in general.

Sources?

After missing their Q1 target, WarnerMedia is claiming to be rethinking the “theatrical model”. They also warn of a slow recovery.

Translation: Everything is fubar.