Disney assumed the same thing with Marvel and Star Wars — that consumer dedication to the brands were so strong that characters and story didn’t matter. Put brand name on entertainment and they will flock to see it. Marvel, at least, has a bunch of character and stories they can mine to try and win back consumers; Star Wars, as a mass market brand, is just a single story told from the prequels to the OT. But if you asked a 10 year old what was Star Wars about now and they probably couldn’t tell you. They will probably mention Jedi and Mandalorians but they could t tell you what the brand story actually is, and it’s not about a galaxy where strange characters live out adventures and you can just tell any random story you can imagine has taken place in it. now all you are left with, for audiences that didn’t grow up with the original story, is a generic sci-fi brand that they know was hugely popular 30 years ago but is now just bad shows about different characters every series. That is not a recipe for longevity. Star Wars now is what Flash Gordon was when Star Wars first came out.
Money is money. Pretty sure Endgame made over $2 billion. Say you lose half your audience, you still make over $1 billion.
But Endgame had a $365 million budget; following typical studio practices of the marketing budget equaling the film budget, that’s a total cost to produce and market the film of $730 million. With the average studio to theatre split of 50%, making only $1billion for an Avengers movie is losing money if they only capture $500 million from that box office. They need to make $2 billion for a meaningful return on investment. and with Disney cannibalizing it’s DTC business with Disney + and declining home video sales, they don’t actually make money after the theatre. They simply switch their cash from one pocket to the other.
Yeah watched it on NF recently. I had trouble getting going on this one. But in the end thought it was pretty good. Jake Gyllenhaal, however, was great as that weird cop and really put it over the top for me.
Has anyone seen Dave Bautista lately? Dude went on the Alan Faneca weight loss plan and his muscles are gone. I guess them roids were giving him health issues.
I watched Rebel Ridge on Netflix saving everyone else the time. Same old retread story, good guy enters town, immediately grabbed up by the local corrupt sheriff, gets released by promising to leave but decides to stay, finds local insider to help, takes down the whole corrupt crew and rides off into the sunset. Not sure why I watched the whole thing.
