- Joined
- Apr 16, 2019
Usually the reliable numbers don't start coming in until mid-week. So far basically everyone seems to agree it's on track to hit the 95-100mil mark. That's not catastrophic flop territory ala The Marvels or the Eternals, but still in likely-gonna-lose a-shit-ton-overall ala Antman 3, which did similar opening numbers. As @el bandito loco says the real issue is this is likely to have a massive second week drop off. While the film is not as egregiously bad as some of it's predecessors were, it's also not great. The general review consensus of it is so-so. Imo, it's likely the vast majority of people who want to see it at the cinema still will have, and the rest will wait for it to show up on Disney+ in a month or two.
The long accepted rule of thumb is that to cover all the non production costs (marketing, interest on financing, theater cuts, residuals etc) you basically double the production budget. That rule however was coined long before the era of regular 200mil+ budgets. At a certain point I figure marketing (which is by far the main non production cost) has diminishing returns so there's probably a cap, but I also believe that they're cooking the books even harder on budgets (see this film and it's laughable claim of only costing 190mil despite re-shoots so extensive they literally introduced new characters) so the 2x rule still seems reasonable as a yardstick.
Personally I think this thing probably needs at least $500mil, maybe even closer to 600 to break even, and I think it'll be lucky to break 350-400 at the box office, so the question then is does this somehow bring 100-200mil value to streaming/Disney+, and I don't see it. I think it'll have surprisingly decent enough streaming numbers as a lot of people who didn't want to shell out for the cinema still wanna watch it, but I doubt many are going out of their way to get Disney+ because of it.
