DC Comics Multimedia General - A crisis of infinite fuck ups

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Apparently The Batman is confirmed to be its own thing, which makes me think WB's lost faith in Gunn
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Or David Zaslav was pissed they put Gaza and anti-Israel shit in Superman. Gal Gadot confirming, James Gunn dropped her as Wonder Woman without a heads up. James Gunn also teasing Henry Cavill rerunning. Superman budget was almost $400 million.
 
Luca Guadagnino has dropped out of Sgt Rock. Things are looking bleak for Gunn (although frankly idgaf I don't need more Jewish anti-Nazi propaganda, learning about Hitler ruined Indiana Jones for me)
 
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Or David Zaslav was pissed they put Gaza and anti-Israel shit in Superman. Gal Gadot confirming, James Gunn dropped her as Wonder Woman without a heads up. James Gunn also teasing Henry Cavill rerunning. Superman budget was almost $400 million.
You know? When capeshit is officially dead, I make you a bet that James Gunn will hang out with Todd Philips and other directors who scammed the studios for millions.

Also, with the budget being $363 million then that means that this HAS to make 1 billion at the box office in order to be profitable.
 
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Also someone needs to get Gunn a PR guy to vet everything he says because goddamn he shoots himself in the foot every time he opens his mouth.
We're at that point one PR guy with questionable non existing authority vetting anything is going cut it. Need to bring back that part of the old studio system which manages all of the "talent" so no one says anything without multiple PR managers, lawyers and tard wranglers having pre-approved the scripts.
 
The completely over done stuff with the kid with the flag chanting "Superman!" in the face of Borovia's invading army (incidentally one of the worst military deployments ever depicted on film - it's just half a dozen tanks and some soldiers standing out in the open walking about).
I don't know if that is better or worse then in Netflix Gundam which had Zeon forces marching in parade formation in hostile territory and right into ambush.
 
I had no idea that was even a thing. The Shard is 72 stories high. The statue will be a speck from ground level and how many people will go there specifically with binoculars to look at it? 10 million? Really?

I'm quite interested in the financial success side of this movie but from the industry side and it's shills they make it sound a success. From the other side you hear joyful doomcasting because they know what's what their viewers want. As I know so little about the industry or who is a reputable analyst on this stuff, I'm kind of left without a clue.

apparently
Yeah, I checked a clip. She's lounging around on a chaise longue with no wings in sight. So either they magically appear or disappear as needed or more likely, it's a costume she wears. But the look in flight is organic with real feathers.

We're at that point one PR guy with questionable non existing authority vetting anything is going cut it. Need to bring back that part of the old studio system which manages all of the "talent" so no one says anything without multiple PR managers, lawyers and tard wranglers having pre-approved the scripts.
Need from the studio's point of view - absolutely. But as a member of the public, I kind of like knowing what these people really think of us.

Having slept on it overnight, I have decided that my favourite part of the movie is Guy Gardner's haircut. It's great.
 
lol $363 million production budget? yes yes and then add marketing and remember the theaters' cut of ticket sales. this thing's been out 9 days and has made $273 million box office. i'm sure superman 2025 merch is flying off the shelves! this thing is gonna end up struggling to break $400 million. i can't wait for the new DCU coming 2030
 
I had no idea that was even a thing. The Shard is 72 stories high. The statue will be a speck from ground level and how many people will go there specifically with binoculars to look at it? 10 million? Really?

10 million is a ridiculous sum for a statue. Jurassic World had fibreglass dinosaurs put up all over London to promote the film, and I bet all of those combined wouldn't even cost 10 million.

I mean, maybe the cost of the statue, plus the labour, risk assessment and the insurance for putting it up... 72 stories is very, very high, and potentially dangerous... But even then? 10 million?

Hang on. Who owns the Shard?

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Ah. Money laundering. That explains it. Warner Bros just gave 10 million to the Qatari government.

Aren't movies MAGICAL?! You'll believe a man can fly... but you won't believe how much money we gave to a hostile foreign government.
 
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I had no idea that was even a thing. The Shard is 72 stories high. The statue will be a speck from ground level and how many people will go there specifically with binoculars to look at it? 10 million? Really?

I'm quite interested in the financial success side of this movie but from the industry side and it's shills they make it sound a success. From the other side you hear joyful doomcasting because they know what's what their viewers want. As I know so little about the industry or who is a reputable analyst on this stuff, I'm kind of left without a clue.
I suspect that the justification for the Shard stunt was the indirect PR from articles about the event rather that the event itself. For the reason you state, the direct impact of the event itself is inconsequential. Of course it may just have been really bad decision making.

We'll never get the full truth about the financials, something that always amazes me with these publicly traded companies, but we already have enough to know it's in trouble. Dire trouble.

That $463m comes from a state tax incentive/rebate filing from WB. That led to the first big lie with Gunn claiming that was just some low level employee's error (if true this would be a public admission of tax fraud so can be discounted)and tried to draw attention to the net production budget figure of $225m. The very purpose of the tax filing discloses that a proportion of the tax expenditure went back to WB but to get from the disclosed cost to Gunn's net budget would require a state taxation rate in excess of 105% every penny of which gets refunded. It's obvious nonsense and far more credible to assume that the tax breaks amount to a few tens of millions.

As for the marketing, last month The Hollywood Reporter was citing $200m ("according to sources") as opposed to the usual $150m for an "all-audience summer tentpole" and we can see (it's kind of inherent in marketing that it's public!) that abnormal marketing expenses have been incurred.

So between production and marketing we can safely say that WB is in the hole for somewhere between $600m and $650. We know that about 55% of the domestic box office, 45% of the overseas (exc China) and 20-25% of the Chinese goes back to WB. So in broad terms if WB gained all of their box office from the domestic they would need a $1.1bn box office to recover $605m. This film's box office does favour the domestic but not to that extent!

The first weekend (4 days) was $125m domestic with $95m overseas. i.e. it would need a multiple of more than 5 to get $1.1bn. As of yesterday morning THR was reporting domestic box office of $177m and global (domestic and overseas) passing $300m after stronger than usual midweek receipts and predictions are floating around of a predicted second week figure as high as 50% of the first weekend as opposed to the generally higher drop offs of capeshit. This is rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic though. Stronger than usual retention is trivial if the baseline you're trying to retain was low in the first place.

There's merch to consider and licensing to a streamer as unlike Disney, WB licenses its stuff to a third party so the money received is real, not just passed from one part of the same corporation to another. Merch costs and there doesn't seem to be runaway demand despite the merch-bait pooch and whilst licensing to a streamer has minimal direct costs the real cost here was the destruction of the DVD/blu ray market which formerly saved many a box office underperformer.

We've had WB head honcho Zaslav announce it as a success immediately after the first weekend and comical suggestions that a $500m box office would be a success. The current cope doing the rounds is that it doesn't have to make money itself as it's establishing the universe for subsequent films to make money.

TLDR - it's flunking and flunking hard.
 
All these Hollywood blockbusters have such ridiculously bloated budgets. What the fuck are they even spending that much money on? The japs somehow made Godzilla Minus One for less than $15 million and it looks much better than anything Hollywood shits out.
 
All these Hollywood blockbusters have such ridiculously bloated budgets. What the fuck are they even spending that much money on?
I think "Hollywood Accounting" (money laundering) has gotten worse over the past twenty years, for a variety of reasons. In particular, I think things like hoarding cash before the economy breaks permanently, doomsday shelters, and even money embezzled to support human trafficking operations are all listed as bullshit line items in budgets. Drugs were commonly purchased with Hollywood budgets and listed as "catering" or "party favors" in the 1980's. I think it's gotten exponentially worse since then.
 
Yes. I know alot of people enjoyed the Snyderverse
I don’t understand how people can defend this.

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But somehow, Snyder guys just mentally redact those moments. The discourse is entirely centered on Snyder himself: he’s out there in the trenches, bravely fighting the Disney shills and woke mind virus.
I'm curious to see how Supergirl goes. Ngl she's a bitch but Faye Dunaway should return as Selena in some form. Not as the main villain obviously.
They’ll absolutely jam Helen Slater into a cameo because she’s the only reason anyone even remembers that film.

But Faye is completely unusable. Polanski was apparently the only one who could get her to shut her mouth and hit her mark, now she’s just feral.
 
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All these Hollywood blockbusters have such ridiculously bloated budgets. What the fuck are they even spending that much money on? The japs somehow made Godzilla Minus One for less than $15 million and it looks much better than anything Hollywood shits out.

I think "Hollywood Accounting" (money laundering) has gotten worse over the past twenty years, for a variety of reasons. In particular, I think things like hoarding cash before the economy breaks permanently, doomsday shelters, and even money embezzled to support human trafficking operations are all listed as bullshit line items in budgets. Drugs were commonly purchased with Hollywood budgets and listed as "catering" or "party favors" in the 1980's. I think it's gotten exponentially worse since then.

I don't recall the source now but someone asked why there weren't more films with low budgets that generated perfectly respectable returns, rather than so many colossal budget things that didn't necessarily make that much more but for far more risk. It was a question I'd often wondered myself and the answer was quite obvious afterwards. The interviewee replied: "You can't hide two-million misused funds in a fifteen-million dollar movie. But you can in a hundred-and-five million movie". Or words to that effect.
 
I simply do not have the ego required to make a movie about Superman, of all characters, that's a thinly veiled exercise in trying to work through my feelings about people trying to cancel me online one time, but I guess that's why James Gunn is the big Hollywood director and not me.
 
I simply do not have the ego required to make a movie about Superman, of all characters, that's a thinly veiled exercise in trying to work through my feelings about people trying to cancel me online one time, but I guess that's why James Gunn is the big Hollywood director and not me.
There’s this line from that LBJ biographer documentary where the editor straight-up says he has a massive, delusional ego and that’s exactly why they keep letting him edit other people’s writing. And I think about that all the time now, especially when people start fucking with these properties that have been around since Prohibition. No matter what you do, someone’s gonna get their ass chapped.

Then there’s the opposite problem, when the director goes so far up their own ass, they think they're saving it from the person who created it. and we’re all just prisoners. It’s a tightrope walk.
 
Yeah, I checked a clip. She's lounging around on a chaise longue with no wings in sight. So either they magically appear or disappear as needed or more likely, it's a costume she wears. But the look in flight is organic with real feathers.
Hawkman in the JL cartoon was a guy with clip-on wings. They were made of space technology feathers that looked real or something. I think it's better that way. Organic wings raise a lot of questions about how characters manage to wear shirts or travel on public transportation.
 
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