Movies are dead. Almost. For the most part. There have been three movies released recently that were generally considered to be from okay to pretty good. I haven't seen any of them, because I subscribe to the rule, "Don't give money to people who hate you," and Hollywood hates/despises (almost) everything I believe in.
The three movies are Bad Boys: Ride or Die, The Fall Guy, and Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. Critics that I TRUST (The Critical Drinker, Nerdrotic, Alan Ng, Chris Gore, etc.) mostly liked these movies.
For example, everyone described The Fall Guy as a fun, action movie. People who saw it, liked it; it has an 86% score on Rotten Tomatoes from the verified audience. Despite that, no one went to go see it. After six weekends in release, it has earned $166.3 million at the worldwide box office. The studio gets roughly half of that, with the rest going to the theaters. Which wouldn't be bad, but they spent $125 million making the movie. That is before anything was spent on advertising.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is in worse shape. They had a production budget of $168 million, and have earned $145.7 million at the global box office.
Bad Boys: Ride or Die does have a chance to break even. They did spend $100 million on the movie, but in the 1st week of release it has already earned $118.6 million dollars. The studio behind this won't make a ton of money, but they MIGHT break even.
This is Eric July's video Hollywood has a Hollywood Problem. Eric is many things, a comic creator, and a musician, but mostly I follow Eric July's videos on YouTube because he is a businessman. Something that is sadly lacking in Hollywood. The Fall Guy was mostly a Romantic Comedy with a lot of stunts. You can't make money on a romantic comedy with a production budget of $125 million. I don't make movies, I only watch them, but even I know that. RomComs are something that studios USED to put up an coming, or newly arrived, star in because they are cheap and they generally make a decent return. Think You've Got Mail, or When Harry Met Sally. Do you think those movies were expensive to make?
As I've mentioned before, I used to see a lot of movies. I saw Hollywood blockbusters, even the bad ones. I watched Romantic Comedies. I even dragged friends out to see some independent films that they never would have seen otherwise. A very long time ago, I even saw foreign films. Now I watch movies on DVD from my local library, or occasionally on streaming, or not at all.
The last movie I went to see was LOTR. Nothing of interest in years. I have expanded my collection of movies on DVD, lots of great classics. I watched Blazing Saddles last weekend.
ReplyDeleteI am doing the same thing with DVDs and Blu-ray discs. I even have a few 4k titles even though I don't own a 4K TV or player. Yet.
DeleteI finally got a copy of Blazing Saddles this month, after 2 tries where it was lost in shipping. Going to make some Gen Z heads explode.
Blazing Saddles was on streaming somewhere, a few years back. Edited to death to remove anything offensive. I made my friend turn it off, and promised to get a real copy. That took some doing.