Copium: A Rare Drug Used by Hollywood to Deal With Failure

It would seem to be in short supply at Disney, and at its captive media outlets this summer. In short, the Box Office has not been kind to Disney.

Politics is downstream of culture, and for too long, people on the Right have turned their noses up at the culture. Movies. TV. Comics. Gaming. Even novels. They don't care about these things, they are sober, serious captains of industry, or something. They only want to read corporate reports, and watch their investments grow. They just can't understand why everyone disagrees with them about everything when it comes to policy and politics.

Fortune, who I don't normally associate as a media outlet that would review movies, is up first with the following: ‘Indiana Jones’ tops box office but it isn’t enough for Disney: ‘There were higher hopes for the debut of this movie’. If the person writing that headline was bending over backward any farther, they would break their spine. What it should read is something like, "Indiana Jones and the Insufferable Feminist is the best of a shit box office weekend." Still they are talking about the business side of show business. (It's not "show friends.")

Indiana Jones, and executives at the Walt Disney Co. and Lucasfilm, made a somewhat dispiriting discovery this weekend. Moviegoers didn’t rush to the theater in significant numbers to see “ Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” and say goodbye to Harrison Ford as the iconic archaeologist.

The film, reportedly budgeted north of $250 million, came in on the lower end of projections with $60 million in ticket sales from 4,600 North American theaters, according to studio estimates Sunday.

Still, you have to give Fortune props for trying to spin the data. Not that you can spin the data enough to polish that turd. Still they seem to have a small stash of Copium on hand.

Those box office "estimates" were revised down at least on 2 separate occasions, and Disney could barely hit the low end of those revised numbers. So far, Disney/Lucasfilm have admitted to a production budget of $295 million. That number comes from a tax filing in the UK in December. Or that's why they cited that number. Rumors have it being MUCH higher, as much as 30 or 50 million dollars higher. (See below for more on production costs.) Then there is the advertising budget. But if you take the $295 million budget, Disney/Lucasfilm needed this movie to achieve more than double what it did over the 3 day weekend, of Friday thru Sunday, with Thursday's previews added in. With that opening and good word of mouth, they might have been able to make back their investment. But they have no word of mouth because people didn't even go to see the movie.

Variety, on the other hand, doesn't even try to pull punches. Disney’s Harsh New Reality: Costly Film Flops, Creative Struggles and a Shrinking Global Box Office.

They started talking about how Disney could put out anything before the pandemic and be pretty sure of making money. But they were busy destroying that by putting out BAD movies. The original Iron Man movie was great. The original Avengers movie was first rate. Captain America: The First Avenger was good, but suffered from pacing and being too long. Some of the follow on movies were better. But all that was before Disney bought Marvel, and decided that they didn't need to worry about storytelling. Any old content would do. And they produced a bunch of mediocre movies, and a few really bad movies.

And now those bad-movie chickens, have come home to roost. It turns out that storytelling is more important than spectacle. It is really more important than their DEI message. It also seems that if you produce crap long enough, eventually everyone figures that out, and ignores what you create.

But this year, the long-reigning titan of the box office has shown cracks as four of its biggest releases from those brands and others have struggled in theaters. There was the dispiriting release of “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania,” a rare Marvel movie to likely lose tens of millions in its theatrical run; “The Little Mermaid,” a remake of the 1989 animated classic that fell drastically short of expectations; “Elemental,” an original story that tried and failed to recapture Pixar’s magic; and most recently “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” a nearly $300 million investment in one of cinemas’ most venerable franchises, which no longer appears to have the same hold on today’s audiences. On paper, these films seemed like they had all of the makings of huge hits, but somehow the Disney sparkle was lacking this time, in terms of filling movie theater seats.

They mention Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 which made money for Disney/Marvel. Too bad the filmmaker went to work for the competition. I expect that to be the LAST Disney/Marvel movie that treats the source material with any amount of respect.

One of the things that none of the Hollywood shill media discuss is the number of tickets sold. They compare the box office revenue numbers of these films with films from before the pandemic, but don't address one crucial issue. Ticket price inflation. Hollywood stopped reporting tickets sold even before the pandemic, because the numbers were not good. But when you consider that the average ticket price is 25 or 30 percent higher today, than it was even 4 years ago, the number of people seeing these movies is falling off a cliff.

This is the Disparu video Indiana Jones FLOPS Media COPE As Truth Revealed.

For too long Hollywood in general and Disney in particular has been able to put out crap movies and be reasonably certain of making their money back. But as more time went by, and they put out more crap movies, that has stopped being the case. Solo: A Star Wars Movie lost money. There is some debate about Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker because no one believes the budget numbers Disney/Lucasfilm provided. But what is clear is that it had about half of the box office that the the first entry in the trilogy had. That is what's known as diminishing returns. And then there is the reaction to how The Rise of Skywalker ended, which was not what the studio was hoping for.

As for the true cost of movie production, Disney/Marvel doesn't like to let those bits of data free. But thanks to Forbes, we have some info on Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness from 2022. Disney Reveals Doctor Strange 2 Cost $100 Million More Than Its Estimated Budget.

If you check The Numbers, you will see that this movie had an admitted budget of $200 million. (I don't know if that will change now that this data is available.) It seems that doesn't reflect reality.

As with all UK companies, its financial statements are released in stages long after the period they relate to. The latest set was released earlier this week and covers the year to May 8, 2022 which was two days after Doctor Strange 2 was released. During the year, $135.3 million (£106.5 million) was spent on making the movie with the majority of it going on post-production. When this is combined with the $213.7 million that had already been incurred during pre-production and filming it gives the movie total costs of $349 million.

They then got a tax credit from the United Kingdom to the tune £42.9 million, or $54.5 million. That brings "the net production cost of the picture to $294.5 million." That changes, drastically, the amount of money this movie needed to make at the box office to break even. In fact, it means that instead of making a couple of hundred million dollars for Disney, it probably made between 30 and 50 million, or a bit more, or less, depending on how much they spent on marketing.

I don't see how a publicly traded company in the US can get away with hiding so much info about, what in a more typical business, might be termed "the cost of goods sold." Either Disney/Marvel, or Disney/Lucasfilm, is making hundreds of millions of dollars on these movies, or it isn't. What happened to reporting requirements? (Hat tip for the Forbes article goes to Ryan Kinel at RK Outpost: Marvel Just Got EXPOSED | MCU Box Office A Bigger DISASTER Than We Thought, Disney Is PANICKING)