hollywood box office "woes" this year

Also, I stole that "did it work?" line from The West Wing, AND DID NOT PAY FOR IT! SO COME ON!

WITH SOMEONE ELSE'S DICK PLEASE

When you stop putting Ashton Kutcher in EVERY second movie, I'll come back to you.

I know I've gotten tired of paying $10+ to see a movie only to have it ruined by screaming babies and endless commercials. Even when I went to see Sin City some fuckwit brought a fussy baby with them! If theatre owners really cared about retaining customers they would do something about this.

amen to that, although i like watching the commercials and previews.

Box-office-wise, I am disappointed at how steep Land of the Dead's second weekend dropoff was.

oh, so now you don't LIKE it when we'd laugh whenever Natalie Portman showed up on-screen?

also, both _Shaun of the Dead_ and _Land of the Dead_ were vastly improved by a theater full of such misfits, including the ultra-hot goth chick with pink hair sitting next to me, and the guy who yelled 'fuck yeah! Tom Savini!' to a chorus of cheers.

xpost

"The Twenty" is what Regal/UA Theaters branded as the block of pepsi & TV adverts that air before the actual trailers start. So now only are you paying to see more commercials, they're actually celebrating it.

I usually go to afternoon matinees or real late at night to avoid stupid people, but it doesn't always work. Three older women spent My Summer of Love expressing disapproval (ladies, if Sapphic teen love bothers you, why come to the movie?) and two women talked through War of the Worlds - all the rude people end up within ten feet of me.

I blame DVDs - people are used to watching movies in their living rooms (even moreso than the VHS era) and think nothing of chatting their way through. Or else people just get more rude by the year.

something about the movie-going audience going down by two-thirds even tho the U.S. population has doubled since then.

i like it when i've watched so many good trailers that i forget what movie i'm there to see.

Actual woes this summer!

Really surprising that this summer's multiplex slate of cynical, lazy, shoddily-made garbage failed to connect with audiences.

— BANDZ STACKHAGE (@NickPinkerton) September 3, 2017

RIP roughly-two-hour stories

idgi, they're going to 85 minutes, or 185?

I would not have been able to name any summer studio releases besides Dunkirk and Apes, probably.

http://www.joblo.com/movie-news/summer-2017-box-office-wrap-up-310

hey but the decent Wind River's in the top three.

measured how? We're talkin' BUX, Arthouse Boy!

Was listening to a podcast about this topic recently and all they kept saying, in effect, was "blame China."

I'm mostly putting these here to read later - this can become the "rolling hollywood studio machine into the shitbin" thread

http://variety.com/2017/film/box-office/summer-box-office-4-billion-1202541885/

http://variety.com/2017/film/news/summer-movie-business-1202519863/

it's true, we should blame china for developing an appetite for lazy cynical hollywood pablum and thus encouraging america to deepen further its worst cinematic habits

Here's the top ten
1. WONDER WOMAN $409 M
2. GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 2 $389 M
3. SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING $324 M
4. DESPICABLE ME 3 $258 M
5. DUNKIRK $179 M
6. PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES $172 M
7. CARS 3 $151 M
8. WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES $144 M
9. TRANSFORMERS: THE LAST KNIGHT $130 M
10. GIRLS TRIP $112 M

Prob not a coincidence that 4 of the top 5 had strong reviews and word of mouth--same goes for 8 and 10--and the unwanted sequels all disappointed

JoBlo link has the worldwide gross too, and it's helpful to keep in mind how much it costs to market this shit.

New Planet of the Apes has earned a bit more than half the preceding one.

If I regularly plunked quarters into a snack vending machine down the hall and the last five times I did it the merchandise was stale, I'd probably start to get my snacks somewhere else until they freshened up the contents of the vending machine.

unwanted sequels

That's a comforting way to see it.

from the second of those variety.com stories

It would be easy to pin the blame for Hollywood’s hard times purely on the movies. But the issues go beyond mere quality control. One thing that the industry has been particularly skilled at in recent years has been unearthing new sources of funding; from Germany to China to Texas, studio suits have scoured the globe using the soft power of red carpet invites and selfies with movie stars to separate wealthy investors from their cash. But the dumb money has smartened up.

Variety may be right about dumb money getting smarter, but while investment money gets movies made and released, it has no connection to how much revenue a movie generates in release. Hollywood has been coasting on audience fascination with new 3D and CGI special effects packed around a comic book script that has a two sentence plot and paper thin characters. They've ridden this formula so hard it has become as threadbare as hell, which is just another old Hollywood tradition of beating their horse to death. They'll eventually find another fresher formula for delivering spectacle and escapism and their audiences will return.

Back then, though, 80 percent of the grosses didn't come from foreign markets.

xpost Which is why the top three movies are based on comic book characters?

Here's the top 20 so far this year:

1	Beauty and the Beast (2017)	BV	$504,014,165	4,210	$174,750,616	4,210	3/17	7/13
2	Wonder Woman	WB	$409,499,021	4,165	$103,251,471	4,165	6/2	-
3	Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2	BV	$389,678,205	4,347	$146,510,104	4,347	5/5	-
4	Spider-Man: Homecoming	Sony	$325,116,546	4,348	$117,027,503	4,348	7/7	-
5	Despicable Me 3	Uni.	$258,843,180	4,535	$72,434,025	4,529	6/30	-
6	Logan	Fox	$226,277,068	4,071	$88,411,916	4,071	3/3	7/13
7	The Fate of the Furious	Uni.	$225,764,765	4,329	$98,786,705	4,310	4/14	7/13
8	Dunkirk	WB	$180,254,545	4,014	$50,513,488	3,720	7/21	-
9	The LEGO Batman Movie	WB	$175,750,384	4,088	$53,003,468	4,088	2/10	6/8
10	Get Out	Uni.	$175,484,140	3,143	$33,377,060	2,781	2/24	6/11
11	The Boss Baby	Fox	$174,952,304	3,829	$50,198,902	3,773	3/31	-
12	Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales	BV	$172,333,066	4,276	$62,983,253	4,276	5/26	-
13	Kong: Skull Island	WB	$168,052,812	3,846	$61,025,472	3,846	3/10	6/15
14	Cars 3	BV	$151,484,869	4,256	$53,688,680	4,256	6/16	-
15	War for the Planet of the Apes	Fox	$144,654,763	4,100	$56,262,929	4,022	7/14	-
16	Split	Uni.	$138,141,585	3,373	$40,010,975	3,038	1/20	5/4
17	Transformers: The Last Knight	Par.	$130,168,683	4,132	$44,680,073	4,069	6/21	8/24
18	Fifty Shades Darker	Uni.	$114,434,010	3,714	$46,607,250	3,710	2/10	3/30
19	Girls Trip	Uni.	$112,072,500	2,648	$31,201,920	2,591	7/21	-
20	Baby Driver	TriS	$105,930,256	3,226	$20,553,320	3,226	6/28	-

By a pretty conservative count, only five of those aren't franchise propositions or highly-templated movies that could easily be turned into franchises pending box-office success (though I would put money down on a Girls Trip 2).

B&tB must be over a billion globally, right? Despicable 3 nearly is.

Those three comic book movies are the top grossers for several ancillary reasons, such as... comic book movies now attract by far the biggest budgets, they are being made in greater numbers than ever in preference to other types of big budget spectacles, and they get shown on far more screens than smaller budget films. Consequently, when audiences seeking big spectacular escapist fare are presented with a buffet that consists of 90% comic book movies, they are going to buy a ticket for a comic book movie, or else choose to see fewer movies. Audeinces making that last choice is what the hand-wringing is all about.

xpost $1,260,914,165, $756,900,000 outside the US.

Despicable Me 3, just fell short at $994,461,501. http://www.the-numbers.com/movie/Despicable-Me-3#tab=summary

i am firmly in the "don't give a fuck about comic book movies" camp but i think it's pretty wrong to characterise the current crop as being badly made or written tbf

if you believe they are inherently bad to make, they are badly made perhaps.

I think the highest grossing current film I saw in the summer months might've been Good Time ($1.6m and counting).

i think it's pretty wrong to characterise the current crop as being badly made or written

imo, Hollywood is full of amazingly smart and talented people who understand their business right down to the ground. It is rare that a big budget movie is badly made or written, because most of them hew closely to formulas that have been studied and refined over a long period of time and their makers show tremendous discipline in sticking to what works and exceptional skill at creating variations within those established standards.

My hypothesis is not so much that the Hollywood factory is failing to deliver movies that meet its own high standards, but that the appetite for those particular standardized products is getting a bit jaded. I could broadly analogize it to the explosion of recipes for "death by chocolate" cakes back in the 90s. Chocolate cake is still very popular and most of them are well made, but the flood of new recipes using that peculiar "death by chocolate" formula has stopped. Comic book movies won't disappear, but they are probably a couple of years past their high water mark and whatever new sensation will replace them has not yet appeared.

whatever new sensation will replace them has not yet appeared

Binge watching episodic TV shows has been around for a number of years now iirc.

And somehow, the "factory method" (movies made by committee) somehow worked occasionally/regularly in the Studio Era but now seems to turn out flavorless chum with hardly an exception. (The director on these things is generally a traffic controller from what I gather.)

Things aren't perfect now, but I still remember how bad the Disaster Movie-late '90s era was. This ain't so bad.

Whatever, I'd watch a dozen more Dante's Peaks than a single 'nother Marvel romp.

Ha! I feel totally the opposite. They've all been pretty watchable after Iron Man 2 imo

More about the era, tho. As mentioned upthread, the templates are so freeze dried and test marketed that they've zapped all personality from these things. The new disaster movies (San Andreas) are no exception.

so freeze dried and test marketed that they've zapped all personality from these things

For similar reasons you can always tell which soldier will buy the farm in a war movie. They may as well be wearing a dog tag that reads "dead meat".

I'm not sure that e.g. Westerns fell out of favour just because people were sick of the genre, it feels like there are broader cultural changes that drive popular taste. Not saying you're wrong about "comic book" (in a broad sense) movies falling out of fashion at some point please god but I don't think it will primarily be because of over-saturation

the endless "summer movie" season is pretty wearying, at the expense of other films which either get drowned out or simply never get made. i have no real issue with superhero flicks, i like a lot of 'em, but their prevalence leaves little room for a lot of other films to have any breathing room.

Something that's slightly different about nerd movies is that the characters aren't just cliches like the soldier about to buy the farm or the standard types that turn up in disaster movies. The nerd movies are buried under the idea of canonicity and a fanbase that gets vocally defensive about how these characters MUST be portrayed

does anyone outside of the internet really care though? i mean it seems to make as much difference to something like Batman vs Superman which only made a half-a-bajlillion dollars instead of a whole bajillion dollars

also i find it hard to connect all these garbage fires/studio failures with like, Cop Car or Hunt for the Wilderpeople not getting more asses in seats, as much as I love those movies

the endless "summer movie" season is pretty wearying, at the expense of other films which either get drowned out or simply never get made. i have no real issue with superhero flicks, i like a lot of 'em, but their prevalence leaves little room for a lot of other films to have any breathing room.

Those other films are on your television now.

or if you live in NYC, about 10 of 'em open every Friday on theater screens and last 1-4 weeks.

and the ones designed to win awards, many as bad as the comic-book crap, show up November-February.