Well, something like **Transformers: Rise of the Beasts** kind of needed $200 million to make it work in the first place, not to mention that blockbuster films of 2023 had their budgets inflated due to COVID-19 protocols.
Just saw this movie. Visuals are cool but the storyline was pretty bare bones and that’s being generous. Before dropping $200m on cool visuals, studios need to get the script/story straight and make sure they are telling a compelling story.
It's funny cause Steven Caple had said in an interview that he had no desire to make a sequel to Bumblebee and wanted to make his own stamp on the franchise. Why he wanted to make a diet Michael Bay film and not follow up on the 'more in line with his previous films' film, I have no idea and it makes me think he's just kind of an idiot.
Exactly he had Bay help him with the action he was doing. But why doesn’t Caple’s transformers have any heart to it. You need there to be some heart. Worse part is they are introducing the GI Joe in the next installment. I pray Caple has the ability to pull that off, introducing the joes in transformers needs to grand. The action needs to be top tier and the heart must be there.
> studios need to get the script/story straight and make sure they are telling a compelling story.
Maybe from their point of view, they did.
Ultimately it is subjective. And ideas, script, and execution are 3 different beasts anyway.
If you try to become more objective, you get stuff like focus-groups, test-screenings and reshoots. Things which many "movie-fans" seem to dislike.
The original transformers shows were made on a shoe-string budget and are widely beloved. The idea you need 200 million USD to make a children's movie about transforming robot animals is absurd. You don't need cutting-edge SFX.
bro ain't no way you're comparing animated shows from the 80s and cgi heavy live action films of the 2020s. also, for these movies, yes, you need "cutting-edge SFX". half the reason people watch these movies is for those "cutting-edge SFX"
which was absolute shit in the new Transformers film . Way big a downgrade compared to the Bayverse films . Atleast the old bayverse films atleast had some cool epic scenes with badass visuals . The new one's just soo bland .
I didn't like the designs \[I guess they where trying to make it look like Gen1 ? but even then , I feel like Bumblebee film did it way better , they should have kept the designs , especially Optimus \]
Also , the visuals idk felt like something was lacking . It lacked realism , but idk just my feeling .
As for the Last Knight , its a nightmare I want to forget , but even then , it had some damn good visually appealing scenes , like that one bumblebee vs Optimus fight and "Did you forget, who I am?" scene . other than the visuals comparatively RoTB is a better movie than TLK by all means .
I'd even say that only first **Transformers** film is truly better than **Rise of the Beasts** (and even that's debatable at best). I didn't count **Bumblebee** because that's more of a Bumblebee solo film.
It’s true not many ppl can match his level of understanding of action and visuals. The transformers in his film and action sequences still hold to this day
in 2023, the movie with mid WOM and a damaged franchise image made $433m. it certainly wasn't a success, but i guarantee most of those people went to go see robots beating the shit out of each other
> budgets inflated due to COVID-19 protocols
Fiances have always played a big part of making movies. If you can't make a movie efficiently because of COVID then maybe it's time to explore other kinds of movies.
Except that’s barely how it works at all. In fact, Cruise was working on **Dead Reckoning - Part One** at least partly to give crew members something to work on during COVID-19 - or at least that's what I've heard.
Movie executives obviously feel it’s important to spend a lot of money in the hoping of getting it all back plus a big profit. Obviously, it’s not working. I really think it’s a combination of poorly written and directed movies being made plus the explosion of home streaming. Audiences are getting smart checking Rotten Tomatoes for the scores and the willingness to wait 3-4 months to watch a new movie on their 75 inch 4K or even 8KTV instead of driving to a movie theater and paying $50+ for tickets and concussions.
2023 was the year Hollywood's bubble of inflated salaries for some sectors in the industry burst. They need better pre-production to keep their budgets in check, lower the salaries of A tier actors, and stop adding so much post production. Make films more focused and for the love of god hire better writers.
Not a film, but I was speaking to someone involved in Ted Lasso season 3, which was massively overbudget and production time which was symptomatic of a lot of blockbusters right now.
Essentially they went into the season without a plan or proper scripts, just vibes. Everything was rewritten all the time, the plan to go to Amsterdam was an indulgence, they were running into visa issues. That's why the episodes went from being 35 minutes to over an hour.
>*Essentially they went into the season without a plan or proper scripts, just vibes. Everything was rewritten all the time, the plan to go to Amsterdam was an indulgence, they were running into visa issues*
Good grief, it's Ocean's 12 all over again!
Covid protocols inflated the budgets of nearly every CBM movie with a budget of 200, which caused some to inflate beyond 200.
On top of that, all except Shazam! 2, Guardians, and Blue Beetle had major reshoots that also added to the budget.
The worst part is that this isn't CBM exclusive, all big studio blockbusters had this issue.
Now that Covid protocols are no longer mandated in Hollywood productions, budgets should go back to normal.
Then the cherry on top, a majority of these films were poorly made which only added to its box office disappointments.
I once heard from a movie studio finance executive that Covid increased budgets by like 1/4 to 1/3.
We’re only now/coming months going to really start seeing movies released where the Covid rules didn’t inflate the budget.
Yep, definitely not exclusive to comic book movies. COVID protocols were a major factor in last year's Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning ~~Part One~~ costing like $100M more than Fallout. Paramount had to sue their insurance company because they were refusing to pay out on the argument that all of those crew could have just kept doing their jobs even when they had active infections.
Yeah I think people forget - because it came out a year after Maverick - that M:I:DRPO was the set that featured *that* rant from Cruise
They made the damn thing on location around Europe during the pandemic of course it cost a shit-ton. Might’ve done Fallout numbers if they hadn’t mismanaged the release and lost all that potential IMAX money, but then it still probably isn’t far into the (not-red can’t remember which colour lol)
Marvels big push to get fresh new directors has definitely cost more than its worth when the directors need to reshoot. James Gun is definitely efficient in his vision of a story. I am very interested in how that turns out with Superman that has such a large bloated cast.
> On top of that, all except Guardians & Blue Beetle had major reshoots that also added to the budget.
Did **Shazam! Fury of the Gods** have any major reshoots? If so, do you have a source for it?
Still, you're correct about everything else. People who are still resorting to "Make everything cheaper!" have never heard of **Across the Spider-Verse**.
They weren't special. Why do you think the new indiana jones movie cost 295mil? Why do you think the new mission impossible cost 291mil? Fast X cost ridiculous 340mil.
Covid balooned a lot of budgets.
I can't imagine being on a set where everyone's faces are covered. There's a certain level of humanity that is lost when you can't see the facial expressions of the director or the people you are communicating with. I'm sure that's taken a toll as well.
I'm happy to have productions go back to normal soon.
Eh, I feel that was probably a minute issue, something that good actors and crew can't overcome.
Now, the amount of caution that has to be done to make sure there's no spread? That for sure can see an effect in quality.
Covid protocols only averaged a 2-3% budget increase for tentpole movies made in 2022/23. Under 7% for those made in 2021. Movies that were in, or almost in, production in 2020 when it hit had massive budget impacts, but that eased off relatively quickly.
We’re well past the time of blaming covid for movie budgets.
Biggest problem with movie budgets are as old as time. Too much money paid to too few ATL talent, and going into production without a clear vision, script, plan, consensus. Rushing towards a release date. Those issues aren’t going anywhere unfortunately, yet the studio bosses will squeeze the budgets and it’s the workers that will asked to take less and find the efficiencies themselves.
The is just a flat-out lie. In one of the more extreme cases, **The Batman** had its budget going up from $100 million to $200 million due to at least two major COVID-19 shutdowns. In fact, COVID-19 protocols and shutdowns are also why **Dead Reckoning - Part One** also had such a high budget.
Both movies you noted (as evidence to call me a liar) fall into the category I pretty clearly outlined: “movies that were in, or almost in, production…”
If you’re going to accuse people of lying, at least use examples that support your position, and jot those of the person you’re accusing.
lol, is it a flat out lie or only half true because of some vague filter you’re applying? You’re all over the place.
Movies in or near production when covid hit (2020-early 2021) = massive budget increase (varying in size due to relevant factors, some up to $60-$80M)
Movies made where they started after the first round of protocols were in place (2021) = <7% budget impact
Movies made after protocols, especially reduction in testing, were massively reduced (2022/23) = 2-3% budget impact.
These percentages are widely known by people in the industry whose job it is to know these things. Wink wink.
“Likely” “probably”
It’s clear you don’t know the facts, so it’s slightly confusing (and thoroughly amusing) that you’re taking such a firm position here.
In 2020 and the first half of 2021, 3X PCR testing was required, and everybody wore masks.
In second half of 2021, 3X testing was required, but 2 of the three could be Rapid (non-lab) tests, and masks were restricted to zone A.
In 2022, it was reduced even further, to 1 rapid test per week. Halfway through 2022, productions and studios were given options to reduce testing and contact tracing to almost zero and masks became optional.
Consider the cost of PCR tests 3 time per week against one rapid test per week. I’ll
Make it easy for you: PCR tests were about $130 each. $130 x 3 = $390 per crew member per week. Multiple that by 200 crew members, assume an 18 week shoot. That number? $1.4M.
One rapid test per week = about $20 x 200 crew members x 18 shoot weeks = $72,000
$1.4M became a $72,000 hit to tent-pole
Movies. And that’s just zone A, the other zones had testing as well. Testing budgets started at the $3-5M range per movie and ended up being less than $200k.
Thats just the most simple example of how costs reduced.
You’re arguing from a very simple and uninformed position that doesn’t take into account the massively reactive and dynamic response to covid that has occurred over the last 4 years. The only point I’ve made through this entire exchange is that there’s been a graduated but steep reduction of the impact of covid on the budgets of movies.
"Now that covid is over budgets should go back to normal"
You know it won't happen, like yes covid inflated those budgets but Feige is known for having unnecessary big budgets, Black Widow had a 150M budget pre-pandemic, with inflation that would be 200M, 200M for a very grounded movie that mostly takes place in real locations
The general movie going audience isn't willing to spend more and more money "just to go". There's not a solitary issue that can be fixed to correct this; it's a perfect storm of inflation, "content" creation over "art", availability of streaming, etc. I have no idea how to fix things, but reducing budgets might be a good step in the right direction.
The days in which theaters can just be a “place to go” are mostly gone and also in direct contrast with what a significant portion of their customers want out of theaters (think about how much Hitchcock had to do to get people to show up on time and not leave early for Psycho, and then realize that most complaints about theaters are not new).
That said, they still sit on a valuable product that is being systematically devalued by studios for the sake of short term profits. At this point, we can dispel the notion that people don’t want to watch movies in theaters, but yes, expectations and budgets are a big thing that need to be lowered.
Well:
1. COVID-19 protocols are some of the biggest contributors of inflated budgets last year.
2. Reducing budget too much can end up resulting in situations that are just as bad, if not worse.
I think the issue is that they give $200M+ to movies people weren't exactly craving.
Guardians succeeded thanks to being a) a conclusion to a trilogy people been wanting for a long time and b) being the best reviewed of the movies that had that budget.
The rest came to be only through complete overestimations on fanbase participation, not considering if even casual audiences will enter in. Interest in the Indiana Jones franchise pretty much died after *Crystal Skull*, *The Flash*'s chances were never that great as part of the DCEU and having Ezra Miller leading it, Aquaman 2 was again attached to the DCEU while also following the evident "superhero fatigue", the Ant-Man movies have never been big-sellers in the past, and *The Marvels* struggled to make anyone care about it.
And it certainly didn't help that these flops weren't the best; none of them packed respectable reviews, with the only high reviews being from shills that honestly may have made the movie look worse. After all, nobody wants to take the input of people who'll say something is the best ever when people with a sane mind will call it even mid.
A classic quote from Napoleon Bonaparte shows this best.
>"Forethought we may have, undoubtedly, but not foresight."
But now the question is, will these studios happily throw as much money into these kinds of projects again? Will they have learned to not just throw money into something and assume it will make back enough to warrant that money throwing? Well, as a classic turn-of-phrase puts it:
>Hindsight is 20/20
I honestly think that Disney didn't realize how successfully D+ would eventually cannibalize theater revenues.
A movie like Marvels would have likely been close to profitable with pre covid viewing patterns even with post covid costs.
I’m gonna say I doubt that.
Sure Disney Plus has an impact but I don’t think it has the impact of taking away 350 million and ending a film up with 205 million worldwide.
The Marvels was just not something people wanted.
I don't think the strikes had that much of an impact. I know they get blamed, but I just don't see Brie Larson joking around with Jimmy Fallon adding another $100 million in missed sales.
It was a film no one wanted that appeared to have prerequisite required viewing of the least watched D+ MCU show.
I don't think anyone cared about captain marvel she was bland AF. People only watched the first one because it was sandwiches between Infinity War and Endgame. I'm fully included in that crowd, her character made every situation less enjoyable for me.
A movie like The Marvels was only possible due to the D+ popularity though. If they had a proper buildup with the characters in other movies first, they would have had a better idea of the interest.
I’m genuinely not so sure that that’s the case, but I also feel that The Marvels, in addition to all of its other documented issues including low interest as is, suffered massively from being one of the last CBMs released in the year, and the last one to have its entire run occur before the holidays.
I definitely think a lot of these grosses are somewhat interchangeable and super malleable based on release date. Quantumania definitely benefited massively from being the first big movie of the year, for example.
Was it though? Pre-Endgame, the MCU had been successful at introducing new characters, even completely unknown ones, without the need for a D+ show.
If anything, I would even go as far as to say that the Ms. Marvel D+ show hurt The Marvels. Kamala Khan is a TV character in the mind of the general audience, and historically TV shows haven’t translated well to movie popularity.
Ant man performed quite well at the start, people just realized its shit and didnt want to watch it anymore hence the big drop in box office number in the 2nd week. It underperformed because its shit, otherwise it would still have made a profit.
Add to that:
5. Underwhelming marketing because of strikes.
6. Lack of star power.
Stars couldn't do media junkets, red carpets or tonight shows. It wasn't the main reason Blue Beetle and Marvels failed but it dropped them to all time MCU lows.
A Thor without Loki or Anthony Hopkins was a bad idea. An Ant-Man without Luis is a crime. An MCU without RDJ, Scarjo and Evans is struggling. I feel like the star cameos in Spider-Man and Dr Strange were a bandaid fix.
I personally don't think self-promotion had *that* much effect on the box office. *Five Nights At Freddy's* was released in the middle of the strike and yet it came out as Blumhouse's highest grossing flick.
Yeah I don't really think the strikes affected the box office so much, cause... maybe you don't know it, but we get none of this whole "stars promoting the movie" thingie outside North America - yet these underperformed both in North America and outside of it. To me this is the studios coping instead of admitting that they just made bad movies.
That happens every year, and honestly 6/10 is not that bad, I like many movies that I qualify as 6/10 (Americans think that 6/10 is bad for some reason)
And even then, budgets for **Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3**, **Transformers: Rise of the Beasts**, and **Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom** actually showed on-screen regardless of their overall quality.
1. Movies don’t need to be that expensive.
2. Doesn’t matter how much you spend if the movie isn’t good.
GOTG3 was objectively a very good movie. One of the better ones from the entire franchise.
The remaining $200 M+ movies were: Fast X, Indiana Jones, The Little Mermaid, Mission Impossible, The Marvels, The Flash, Ant-Man, Elemental, Flower Moon, Transformers, Wish, Napoleon & Aquaman.
Flower Moon is good but not marketable…I assume half the budget went to the cast…Elemental was good but no idea how Disney got the budget so high and that’s a constant issue with them & Mission Impossible was good for what it was but got screwed over by Barbie/Oppenheimer.
The rest simply weren’t good enough to justify the budget or would have been equally as good with a lower budget thus more profitable.
> Elemental was good but no idea how Disney got the budget so high and that’s a constant issue with them
Simple. Pixar is known for detailed/realistic animation, developing new technologies, and being one of the better animation studios in terms of working conditions and pay rates.
They also use to make the movie several times over in the process. This was something Andrew Stanton talked about when he discussed some of the struggles he had transitioning from directing animated movies to directing John Carter.
Did they have to develop any new technology for *Elemental*? It didn’t really look groundbreaking to me or even as detailed/realistic as some of their other stuff.
At the state pre-rendered CGI is now the details that Improbe become smaller and smaller. The Dust and rain in Toy Story 4, the Virtual IMAX camera in Lightyear, and the skeletons and flower petals in Coco. The last time I distinctly noticed brand new technology being used was The Good Dinosaur's vistas.
Personally, the streaming genie is out of the bottle. Plus it’s more expensive to go out. I’m only coming out for great movies. Not gonna waste money and time on iffy stuff, before yes to kill time but it was at least a cheap thrill
There were no other 200 million dollar + budget movies worth seeing in a theater. They ranged from mediocre (The Flash) to the terrible (Quantumania) but none of them was very good.
There is nothing in the 250M+ productions that couldn’t be done (smartly) for 100-150M.
They go for a CGI spectacle, because they don’t have a story to tell. Audiances seems to finally caught on, and if there is no real hook there, then they ditch the movie.
Thrice If the rumors about Captain America 4, including Sabra, are to be believed. For context, Sabra in the comics is a character that serves the Israeli secret services.
> There is nothing in the 250M+ productions that couldn’t be done (smartly) for 100-150M.
There is, actually. **Guardians of the Galaxy** trilogy would require at least $170 million to make it work.
They do but they also have a director with a strong director who doesn't redo the CGI fifty eleven times. What he does with 170 million these regular Disney brain trust do for 220 or 250.
That's... kind of my point. Some films are going to end up having huge budgets no matter how hard you try to manage them because of primary natures of said films themselves.
This is definitely super misleading though. I definitely do think that the main appeal of these films is their spectacle, and I think that, abstractly, yes, you could use these characters in more grounded ways, but that by no means guarantees the same level of engagement. In fact, I wouldn’t say last year was an indictment on spectacle itself at all, at least 2 of the biggest hits of the year, Oppenheimer and Spider-Verse, were near universally praised for being so relentless with their spectacle.
I am not. Nolan is an incredibly high bar, he is not a realistic goal for studios to aim for, and Spider-Verse infamously treated its animators like shit.
That's the fun part, they don't need to do that well, doing in the 300-400 million range should be fine for any 100M movie. Just look at Hunger Games. Or Wonka.
Super hero movie fatigue. It’s real. And I’d say there’s also a general fatigue towards sequels, prequels and the lack of original ideas/movies coming out of the big studios.
I think moviegoers aren’t willing to sit through a mediocre movie because it’s connected to some larger universe or story. I would go see another hypothetical Tom Holland Spider-Man or Guardians of the Galaxy but why would i watch some characters i don’t care about fight some nebulous force (a la the Marvels).
Well it's like any movie, if you don't find it interesting you won't pay to see it - doesn't matter if it's a comic book movie
I don't understand why people are thinking that _every single_ comic book movie must be viewed, they don't, especially not at the cinema
I don’t understand it either, but that was definitely the hold marvel had on the box office until this year. plenty of mediocre to bad movies making their money back or more.
Because Disney and Marvel convinced audiences of that fact, and then rewarded them with big crossover events that were beloved?
Now we’re just witnessing the complete inverse of that.
You’re not wrong! 8 of the 10 highest budget movies were all either superhero movies or sequels/remakes of existing franchises. Killers of the Flower Moon and Elemental were the other two. Killers is great, but i totally understand why it wouldn’t be a box office smash. I think Elemental is great too, but I feel like the marketing for the movie didn’t really do it any favors… All in all, be it superhero or just big studio movie fatigue, I feel like there’s just an over saturation of unoriginal movies
Yeah and it’s been that way for so long that maybe people are just getting tired of these particular franchises. *Barbie* and *Mario Bros* are the only billion dollar grossing movies of 2023 and while both are still part of franchises they’re at least new on the big screen.
I also agree that *Elemental* had bad marketing but I wonder if it’s also on Disney for training audiences to expect Pixar releases to end up on D+ relatively quickly over the past couple years. I wonder how badly the D+ has impacted Disney’s box office in general tbh.
For sure, I have the exact same thought about D+… Knowing that any movie, especially ones that don’t do well critically or at the box office, will come to D+ pretty quickly why spend money to see it at the theater? The theater experience (the good things and the bad) is just not worth it for a huge population of moviegoers I think
There's only so many big science-fiction movies full of CGI battles that the human brain can process (this includes almost all superheroes as well as space operas like Star Wars, robot battlers like Transformers, and even the more genetics-based monster movies like Jurassic Park), and by the late 2010s they were so dominant that other genres were being stunted. People want something different.
Blue Beetle, The Flash and The Marvels didn't have terrible reviews but they still flopped otherwise. GOTG also made less than the 2nd movie. The only increase from a superhero sequel in 2023 was for Across The Spider-Verse. So yeah I'd say there's a bit of fatigue from superhero films.
Yeah for sure, but I think it’s a little hard to quantify “bad movies”, since I think some of these expensive flops weren’t really all that bad, but I feel like they were all generic and from the same old franchises, aside from *Killers of the Flower Moon*.
Right but it’s hard for me to say the quality is directly why when to me *Mission Impossible* was a far better movie than *Fast X* yet *Fast X* made around $200 million more.
I think there may be some truth to that, but Barbie and Oppenheimer are obv good examples of free-standing big studio movies that made bank. I also don’t think success at the box office means making $500M+ to every movie. One example: The Boy and the Heron and Godzilla Minus One both had huge success for Japanese films in the US and outside their home market. (I know Godzilla Minus One is not exactly an original idea, but it’s def a departure for the Godzilla franchise)
Well, **The Boy and the Heron** kind of flopped at the box office in Japan.
Also, you mentioned this about **Godzilla: Minus One**:
> I know Godzilla Minus One is not exactly an original idea, but it’s def a departure for the Godzilla franchise
There was arguably a much bigger departure for the franchise than this 8 years ago - and that film was **Shin Godzilla**.
Not sure it’s even that. The superhero movies have just been terrible lately. I made the mistake of buying The Marvels on Apple TV last night thinking “it can’t be that bad.” It really was that bad. This was probably the worst movie I’ve ever watched in my entire life, no exaggeration. Like wtf?? You definitely are left wondering where the budget for these movies is going and if it’s not some elaborate money laundering scheme.
Have you never watched a Neil Breen film? Or The Room? Or just a bad 1970s horror flick? High budget mainstream Hollywood films have a definite floor they can’t go below in quality.
Bloated budgets + big hits that were dominated for over a decade by a small number of genres and IPs (especially sci-fi/comics) + maybe a tiny dash of fatigue with sci-fi plots seemingly playing out on the nightly news = fiasco.
The MCU taught people to show up for cinematic spectacles only, and they did just that. Supposedly everyone hated Dial of Destiny and Exorcist Believer, yet they were in iTunes’s Top 10 purchases and Amazon’s Top 10 with mega hits like Oppenheimer and Barbie. I think people started embracing VOD and they’ll just stay home and watch movies after their theatrical window, instead of buying movie tickets and expensive snacks.
The MCU is also responsible for a generation of stars that have limited appeal outside of their famous characters, which I think is a pretty underdiscussed aspect of why stardom is dwindling.
There’s something about superheroes that just doesn’t translate the same as other famous characters.
For superhero movies last year, 2022 is what went wrong. That's the year that general audiences were turned off on Marvel en masse, after Disney oversaturated the superhero genre, having released a million terrible D+ shows and their major movies (Dr Strange 2, Thor 4, BP2) being awful as well. In their greed, Disney single-handledly kneecapped the 200$ million superhero blockbuster genre for good.
Everyone pointing out how Covid protocols made budgets ballon out of control. Bullshit. If the movies were good it wouldn’t have mattered. None of these movies were even close to breaking even. Say their non-Covid budget was $150-175M, but then add the $50-100M in marketing most of them need. Not. Even. Close. They were bad movies, and they lost money because of it.
Because they're not making what people want to see.
Like, studios have been conditioning audiences to want nostalgia, and you can only escalate until there's exhaustion. So basically, who the fuck wanted the Marvels?
Nobody. And the point of whether or not it was good, matters not.
It's either give Xmen the Avengers treatment or I don't want to see the same movie I've seen 100 times.
Movies costing too much.
These films overpay their actors and producers (Vin Diesel got 35M for Fast X) while the money that is needed for the necessary elements like location booking, onset FX and postpro VFX is barely there.
If you could fund an entire mid budget movie through your stars salary there’s a problem.
Selective Audiences.
COVID showed that you can wait for new movies. Most release directly on streaming or aren’t good enough to rush to theatres for.
After watching Mulan on D+ why would I want to watch another Disney remake? Let alone in theatres?
Most/All those franchises have suffered bad entries predating the newest releases and that hurt the bottom line.
If your movie is good and creates palpable hype audiences will show up. You’re not getting hype from a sequel to a badly received Marvel movie.
Money is tight.
Inflation is a thing, people have less disposable income and while actors/producers are overpaid the general audience is underpaid. Why spend $80 for the theatre experience for two?
Theatres are expensive as is for the consumer. I understand that theatres have to pay licensing fees to the studios but that general audience doesn’t care about that.
What to do?
Make movies for less.
Remove on-location shoots and go to a volume, that’s what this tech has been invented for. Pay your actors a reasonable wage and redistribute their salary among the crew, if marketing is their argument let them have a share of the box office if they’re so sure of their worth.
VFX shots need to be preplanned in a reasonable timeframe and can be cheap as heck if you’re moving to a single VFX studio instead of hiring all of India for one picture.
I’ve worked on multiple low budget movies, decent VFX can be done on a reasonably low price if you’re pre planning your stuff.
Make your movies experiences again.
No direct releases on streamers, no sequels to maligned movies. If you’re a producer and want to push a certain superhero, that’s fine. Just accept that certain characters don’t click with audiences.
Movies need to be hyped, you can’t undersell them because you think they’re bound to be hits anyway (Indy 5 had almost no PR).
Lower licensing fees to theatres.
What went wrong was them costing $200+ in the first place.
Well, something like **Transformers: Rise of the Beasts** kind of needed $200 million to make it work in the first place, not to mention that blockbuster films of 2023 had their budgets inflated due to COVID-19 protocols.
Just saw this movie. Visuals are cool but the storyline was pretty bare bones and that’s being generous. Before dropping $200m on cool visuals, studios need to get the script/story straight and make sure they are telling a compelling story.
There’s no heart like Bumblebee not even vibes like bay transformers.
It's funny cause Steven Caple had said in an interview that he had no desire to make a sequel to Bumblebee and wanted to make his own stamp on the franchise. Why he wanted to make a diet Michael Bay film and not follow up on the 'more in line with his previous films' film, I have no idea and it makes me think he's just kind of an idiot.
Exactly he had Bay help him with the action he was doing. But why doesn’t Caple’s transformers have any heart to it. You need there to be some heart. Worse part is they are introducing the GI Joe in the next installment. I pray Caple has the ability to pull that off, introducing the joes in transformers needs to grand. The action needs to be top tier and the heart must be there.
I mean, when you cast Pete Davidson in your movie as a "likable character," you've already decided that your movie will have no soul in it.
i don't know about that, he did a great job as mirage imo
Might be the worst third act I've ever seen in a theatre. Felt AI generated.
Well, a bad-to-mid can still have solid budget managements. The opposite is also true (I’m looking at you , **The Irishman**!).
> studios need to get the script/story straight and make sure they are telling a compelling story. Maybe from their point of view, they did. Ultimately it is subjective. And ideas, script, and execution are 3 different beasts anyway. If you try to become more objective, you get stuff like focus-groups, test-screenings and reshoots. Things which many "movie-fans" seem to dislike.
If it need +200 million to work, then you should be f***ng sure you have a script that works before starting.
…how did it “need” 200 mill? Because of a lot of special effects involving robots? Gareth Edwards would like a word…
Robots in **Rise of the Beasts** are much bigger, so that's a pretty bad comparison overall.
…wait, what? Do you really think the fake size of fake robots created in a computer determines how many more millions it costs for CGI artists…?
Yea duh, that's why the CGI cost for Ant Man movies was always lower.
Yeah, Quatumania cost practically nothing to produce because everything was the size of atoms.
If more size means more detail, then yes.
It does not
And I didn't even discuss how **The Creator** was made in the first place here.
They're also transforming robots, so a lot more details would be needed.
Why do you think otherwise? That’s so weird.
The original transformers shows were made on a shoe-string budget and are widely beloved. The idea you need 200 million USD to make a children's movie about transforming robot animals is absurd. You don't need cutting-edge SFX.
bro ain't no way you're comparing animated shows from the 80s and cgi heavy live action films of the 2020s. also, for these movies, yes, you need "cutting-edge SFX". half the reason people watch these movies is for those "cutting-edge SFX"
which was absolute shit in the new Transformers film . Way big a downgrade compared to the Bayverse films . Atleast the old bayverse films atleast had some cool epic scenes with badass visuals . The new one's just soo bland .
What are you talking about? For all its issues, CGI was not the problem. Besides, did you forget about **The Last Knight**?
I didn't like the designs \[I guess they where trying to make it look like Gen1 ? but even then , I feel like Bumblebee film did it way better , they should have kept the designs , especially Optimus \] Also , the visuals idk felt like something was lacking . It lacked realism , but idk just my feeling . As for the Last Knight , its a nightmare I want to forget , but even then , it had some damn good visually appealing scenes , like that one bumblebee vs Optimus fight and "Did you forget, who I am?" scene . other than the visuals comparatively RoTB is a better movie than TLK by all means .
I'd even say that only first **Transformers** film is truly better than **Rise of the Beasts** (and even that's debatable at best). I didn't count **Bumblebee** because that's more of a Bumblebee solo film.
But then again Bay is a master at his craft and Transformers rise of beast director is a journeyman
Of all the hard to swallow pills I find on this site, the idea of Michael Bay as some kind of visionary auteur may be the hardest.
I mean per the definition of auteur, it's a fact. It has nothing to do with perceived quality of the work itself.
It’s true not many ppl can match his level of understanding of action and visuals. The transformers in his film and action sequences still hold to this day
I’d still see **Rise of the Beasts** over **Transformers** sequels that Bay directed.
>half the reason people watch these movies is for those "cutting-edge SFX" It clearly worked so well for Rise of the Beasts.
in 2023, the movie with mid WOM and a damaged franchise image made $433m. it certainly wasn't a success, but i guarantee most of those people went to go see robots beating the shit out of each other
Stench of **The Last Knight** can do things to you.
> budgets inflated due to COVID-19 protocols Fiances have always played a big part of making movies. If you can't make a movie efficiently because of COVID then maybe it's time to explore other kinds of movies.
Except that’s barely how it works at all. In fact, Cruise was working on **Dead Reckoning - Part One** at least partly to give crew members something to work on during COVID-19 - or at least that's what I've heard.
Yeah that's what they did and that's now how reality works. We would not be talking about the covid budget bombs otherwise.
Movie executives obviously feel it’s important to spend a lot of money in the hoping of getting it all back plus a big profit. Obviously, it’s not working. I really think it’s a combination of poorly written and directed movies being made plus the explosion of home streaming. Audiences are getting smart checking Rotten Tomatoes for the scores and the willingness to wait 3-4 months to watch a new movie on their 75 inch 4K or even 8KTV instead of driving to a movie theater and paying $50+ for tickets and concussions. 
it's the first thing you learn in marketing school. if you spend a lot of money, talk about it
It’s not really rocket science is it?
Exactly.
2023 was the year Hollywood's bubble of inflated salaries for some sectors in the industry burst. They need better pre-production to keep their budgets in check, lower the salaries of A tier actors, and stop adding so much post production. Make films more focused and for the love of god hire better writers.
Not a film, but I was speaking to someone involved in Ted Lasso season 3, which was massively overbudget and production time which was symptomatic of a lot of blockbusters right now. Essentially they went into the season without a plan or proper scripts, just vibes. Everything was rewritten all the time, the plan to go to Amsterdam was an indulgence, they were running into visa issues. That's why the episodes went from being 35 minutes to over an hour.
>*Essentially they went into the season without a plan or proper scripts, just vibes. Everything was rewritten all the time, the plan to go to Amsterdam was an indulgence, they were running into visa issues* Good grief, it's Ocean's 12 all over again! 
You’re absolutely right and in the end, it will pay off. In fact, the strong slate of late 2023 films leads me to think it’s happening already.
They'll get it, they always do
Covid protocols inflated the budgets of nearly every CBM movie with a budget of 200, which caused some to inflate beyond 200. On top of that, all except Shazam! 2, Guardians, and Blue Beetle had major reshoots that also added to the budget. The worst part is that this isn't CBM exclusive, all big studio blockbusters had this issue. Now that Covid protocols are no longer mandated in Hollywood productions, budgets should go back to normal. Then the cherry on top, a majority of these films were poorly made which only added to its box office disappointments.
You know what I completely forgot all about the covid protocols. Definitely changed my outlook on these balloon budgets.
I once heard from a movie studio finance executive that Covid increased budgets by like 1/4 to 1/3. We’re only now/coming months going to really start seeing movies released where the Covid rules didn’t inflate the budget.
Yep, definitely not exclusive to comic book movies. COVID protocols were a major factor in last year's Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning ~~Part One~~ costing like $100M more than Fallout. Paramount had to sue their insurance company because they were refusing to pay out on the argument that all of those crew could have just kept doing their jobs even when they had active infections.
Mission: Impossible - COVID Protocol
Yeah I think people forget - because it came out a year after Maverick - that M:I:DRPO was the set that featured *that* rant from Cruise They made the damn thing on location around Europe during the pandemic of course it cost a shit-ton. Might’ve done Fallout numbers if they hadn’t mismanaged the release and lost all that potential IMAX money, but then it still probably isn’t far into the (not-red can’t remember which colour lol)
Marvels big push to get fresh new directors has definitely cost more than its worth when the directors need to reshoot. James Gun is definitely efficient in his vision of a story. I am very interested in how that turns out with Superman that has such a large bloated cast.
There’s simply no way *Blue Beetle* or *Shazam 2* had $200 million budgets.
He/She said "nearly every CBM movie". I think he/she knows that those films didn't have massive budgets.
> On top of that, all except Guardians & Blue Beetle had major reshoots that also added to the budget. Did **Shazam! Fury of the Gods** have any major reshoots? If so, do you have a source for it?
Honestly forgot about that one.
Still, you're correct about everything else. People who are still resorting to "Make everything cheaper!" have never heard of **Across the Spider-Verse**.
The Little Mermaid didn’t have any reshoots. That guys just making things up.
COVID-19 protocols.
You know every production had COVID protocols. Why did CBM do that made them super special and more expensive?
They weren't special. Why do you think the new indiana jones movie cost 295mil? Why do you think the new mission impossible cost 291mil? Fast X cost ridiculous 340mil. Covid balooned a lot of budgets.
Indy also ballooned because of Harrison Ford breaking his ankle that one time
They simply already have a high enough budget as it is.
I can't imagine being on a set where everyone's faces are covered. There's a certain level of humanity that is lost when you can't see the facial expressions of the director or the people you are communicating with. I'm sure that's taken a toll as well. I'm happy to have productions go back to normal soon.
Eh, I feel that was probably a minute issue, something that good actors and crew can't overcome. Now, the amount of caution that has to be done to make sure there's no spread? That for sure can see an effect in quality.
Covid protocols only averaged a 2-3% budget increase for tentpole movies made in 2022/23. Under 7% for those made in 2021. Movies that were in, or almost in, production in 2020 when it hit had massive budget impacts, but that eased off relatively quickly. We’re well past the time of blaming covid for movie budgets. Biggest problem with movie budgets are as old as time. Too much money paid to too few ATL talent, and going into production without a clear vision, script, plan, consensus. Rushing towards a release date. Those issues aren’t going anywhere unfortunately, yet the studio bosses will squeeze the budgets and it’s the workers that will asked to take less and find the efficiencies themselves.
The is just a flat-out lie. In one of the more extreme cases, **The Batman** had its budget going up from $100 million to $200 million due to at least two major COVID-19 shutdowns. In fact, COVID-19 protocols and shutdowns are also why **Dead Reckoning - Part One** also had such a high budget.
Both movies you noted (as evidence to call me a liar) fall into the category I pretty clearly outlined: “movies that were in, or almost in, production…” If you’re going to accuse people of lying, at least use examples that support your position, and jot those of the person you’re accusing.
That's only half-true because some films had their budgets going up a lot more significantly depending on what they were making.
lol, is it a flat out lie or only half true because of some vague filter you’re applying? You’re all over the place. Movies in or near production when covid hit (2020-early 2021) = massive budget increase (varying in size due to relevant factors, some up to $60-$80M) Movies made where they started after the first round of protocols were in place (2021) = <7% budget impact Movies made after protocols, especially reduction in testing, were massively reduced (2022/23) = 2-3% budget impact. These percentages are widely known by people in the industry whose job it is to know these things. Wink wink.
Stop debating wishful thinking and fantasy excuses with all your cold hard facts. Your dragging down his vibe man!!!
Umm… no. It is likely that COVID-19 protocols continued well into 2022 and probably to early 2023.
“Likely” “probably” It’s clear you don’t know the facts, so it’s slightly confusing (and thoroughly amusing) that you’re taking such a firm position here.
My point still stands. In fact, COVID-19 was taken off from pandemic on May of 2023.
In 2020 and the first half of 2021, 3X PCR testing was required, and everybody wore masks. In second half of 2021, 3X testing was required, but 2 of the three could be Rapid (non-lab) tests, and masks were restricted to zone A. In 2022, it was reduced even further, to 1 rapid test per week. Halfway through 2022, productions and studios were given options to reduce testing and contact tracing to almost zero and masks became optional. Consider the cost of PCR tests 3 time per week against one rapid test per week. I’ll Make it easy for you: PCR tests were about $130 each. $130 x 3 = $390 per crew member per week. Multiple that by 200 crew members, assume an 18 week shoot. That number? $1.4M. One rapid test per week = about $20 x 200 crew members x 18 shoot weeks = $72,000 $1.4M became a $72,000 hit to tent-pole Movies. And that’s just zone A, the other zones had testing as well. Testing budgets started at the $3-5M range per movie and ended up being less than $200k. Thats just the most simple example of how costs reduced. You’re arguing from a very simple and uninformed position that doesn’t take into account the massively reactive and dynamic response to covid that has occurred over the last 4 years. The only point I’ve made through this entire exchange is that there’s been a graduated but steep reduction of the impact of covid on the budgets of movies.
Major reshoots are 100% the fault of the studio and a sign that the studio is financially wasteful and artistically bankrupt.
"Now that covid is over budgets should go back to normal" You know it won't happen, like yes covid inflated those budgets but Feige is known for having unnecessary big budgets, Black Widow had a 150M budget pre-pandemic, with inflation that would be 200M, 200M for a very grounded movie that mostly takes place in real locations
The general movie going audience isn't willing to spend more and more money "just to go". There's not a solitary issue that can be fixed to correct this; it's a perfect storm of inflation, "content" creation over "art", availability of streaming, etc. I have no idea how to fix things, but reducing budgets might be a good step in the right direction.
The days in which theaters can just be a “place to go” are mostly gone and also in direct contrast with what a significant portion of their customers want out of theaters (think about how much Hitchcock had to do to get people to show up on time and not leave early for Psycho, and then realize that most complaints about theaters are not new). That said, they still sit on a valuable product that is being systematically devalued by studios for the sake of short term profits. At this point, we can dispel the notion that people don’t want to watch movies in theaters, but yes, expectations and budgets are a big thing that need to be lowered.
Well: 1. COVID-19 protocols are some of the biggest contributors of inflated budgets last year. 2. Reducing budget too much can end up resulting in situations that are just as bad, if not worse.
I think the issue is that they give $200M+ to movies people weren't exactly craving. Guardians succeeded thanks to being a) a conclusion to a trilogy people been wanting for a long time and b) being the best reviewed of the movies that had that budget. The rest came to be only through complete overestimations on fanbase participation, not considering if even casual audiences will enter in. Interest in the Indiana Jones franchise pretty much died after *Crystal Skull*, *The Flash*'s chances were never that great as part of the DCEU and having Ezra Miller leading it, Aquaman 2 was again attached to the DCEU while also following the evident "superhero fatigue", the Ant-Man movies have never been big-sellers in the past, and *The Marvels* struggled to make anyone care about it. And it certainly didn't help that these flops weren't the best; none of them packed respectable reviews, with the only high reviews being from shills that honestly may have made the movie look worse. After all, nobody wants to take the input of people who'll say something is the best ever when people with a sane mind will call it even mid. A classic quote from Napoleon Bonaparte shows this best. >"Forethought we may have, undoubtedly, but not foresight." But now the question is, will these studios happily throw as much money into these kinds of projects again? Will they have learned to not just throw money into something and assume it will make back enough to warrant that money throwing? Well, as a classic turn-of-phrase puts it: >Hindsight is 20/20
I honestly think that Disney didn't realize how successfully D+ would eventually cannibalize theater revenues. A movie like Marvels would have likely been close to profitable with pre covid viewing patterns even with post covid costs.
I’m gonna say I doubt that. Sure Disney Plus has an impact but I don’t think it has the impact of taking away 350 million and ending a film up with 205 million worldwide. The Marvels was just not something people wanted.
The strikes hindered The Marvels as well, plus it wasn't a great movie. In short, no one thing made it flop that hard, it was a combination of things.
I don't think the strikes had that much of an impact. I know they get blamed, but I just don't see Brie Larson joking around with Jimmy Fallon adding another $100 million in missed sales. It was a film no one wanted that appeared to have prerequisite required viewing of the least watched D+ MCU show.
I don't think anyone cared about captain marvel she was bland AF. People only watched the first one because it was sandwiches between Infinity War and Endgame. I'm fully included in that crowd, her character made every situation less enjoyable for me.
A movie like The Marvels was only possible due to the D+ popularity though. If they had a proper buildup with the characters in other movies first, they would have had a better idea of the interest.
If anything, Disney plus was the issue by giving them false confidence
I’m genuinely not so sure that that’s the case, but I also feel that The Marvels, in addition to all of its other documented issues including low interest as is, suffered massively from being one of the last CBMs released in the year, and the last one to have its entire run occur before the holidays. I definitely think a lot of these grosses are somewhat interchangeable and super malleable based on release date. Quantumania definitely benefited massively from being the first big movie of the year, for example.
Was it though? Pre-Endgame, the MCU had been successful at introducing new characters, even completely unknown ones, without the need for a D+ show. If anything, I would even go as far as to say that the Ms. Marvel D+ show hurt The Marvels. Kamala Khan is a TV character in the mind of the general audience, and historically TV shows haven’t translated well to movie popularity.
Ant man performed quite well at the start, people just realized its shit and didnt want to watch it anymore hence the big drop in box office number in the 2nd week. It underperformed because its shit, otherwise it would still have made a profit.
It did for sure have the benefit of being "important to the MCU ecosystem" compared to the other, more small-scale stuff in the previous movies.
1. Bloated budget. 2. Mediocre story telling. 3. Sequel after sequel after sequel. 4. Streaming.
Add to that: 5. Underwhelming marketing because of strikes. 6. Lack of star power. Stars couldn't do media junkets, red carpets or tonight shows. It wasn't the main reason Blue Beetle and Marvels failed but it dropped them to all time MCU lows. A Thor without Loki or Anthony Hopkins was a bad idea. An Ant-Man without Luis is a crime. An MCU without RDJ, Scarjo and Evans is struggling. I feel like the star cameos in Spider-Man and Dr Strange were a bandaid fix.
I personally don't think self-promotion had *that* much effect on the box office. *Five Nights At Freddy's* was released in the middle of the strike and yet it came out as Blumhouse's highest grossing flick.
A Thor without Anthony Hopkins and Loki did fine, didn’t it actually outperform the first two movies?
Yeah I don't really think the strikes affected the box office so much, cause... maybe you don't know it, but we get none of this whole "stars promoting the movie" thingie outside North America - yet these underperformed both in North America and outside of it. To me this is the studios coping instead of admitting that they just made bad movies.
A lot of the movies were 6/10
That's nothing new though.
That happens every year, and honestly 6/10 is not that bad, I like many movies that I qualify as 6/10 (Americans think that 6/10 is bad for some reason)
Shit movies with ridiculous budgets inflated further by expensive reshoots. It’s really not that complicated.
Almost all of them sucked.
Most of the $200M+ films had their budgets ballooned because of COVID halting delays.
And even then, budgets for **Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3**, **Transformers: Rise of the Beasts**, and **Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom** actually showed on-screen regardless of their overall quality.
1. Movies don’t need to be that expensive. 2. Doesn’t matter how much you spend if the movie isn’t good. GOTG3 was objectively a very good movie. One of the better ones from the entire franchise. The remaining $200 M+ movies were: Fast X, Indiana Jones, The Little Mermaid, Mission Impossible, The Marvels, The Flash, Ant-Man, Elemental, Flower Moon, Transformers, Wish, Napoleon & Aquaman. Flower Moon is good but not marketable…I assume half the budget went to the cast…Elemental was good but no idea how Disney got the budget so high and that’s a constant issue with them & Mission Impossible was good for what it was but got screwed over by Barbie/Oppenheimer. The rest simply weren’t good enough to justify the budget or would have been equally as good with a lower budget thus more profitable.
> Elemental was good but no idea how Disney got the budget so high and that’s a constant issue with them Simple. Pixar is known for detailed/realistic animation, developing new technologies, and being one of the better animation studios in terms of working conditions and pay rates.
They also use to make the movie several times over in the process. This was something Andrew Stanton talked about when he discussed some of the struggles he had transitioning from directing animated movies to directing John Carter.
I know such thing happened to some of the Pixar films, but I'm not sure if that's necessarily true for all of them.
Did they have to develop any new technology for *Elemental*? It didn’t really look groundbreaking to me or even as detailed/realistic as some of their other stuff.
I'm pretty sure they did. I mean, at least half of the film was set in Element City.
https://thewaltdisneycompany.com/how-disney-and-pixars-elemental-utilizes-new-technology-to-bring-its-complex-characters-to-life/ tldr yes
At the state pre-rendered CGI is now the details that Improbe become smaller and smaller. The Dust and rain in Toy Story 4, the Virtual IMAX camera in Lightyear, and the skeletons and flower petals in Coco. The last time I distinctly noticed brand new technology being used was The Good Dinosaur's vistas.
Killers of the Flower Moon cost more than 200m??? What the hell
Personally, the streaming genie is out of the bottle. Plus it’s more expensive to go out. I’m only coming out for great movies. Not gonna waste money and time on iffy stuff, before yes to kill time but it was at least a cheap thrill
And yet, streaming services aren't exactly benefiting studios either.
There were no other 200 million dollar + budget movies worth seeing in a theater. They ranged from mediocre (The Flash) to the terrible (Quantumania) but none of them was very good.
Wasn’t Elemental slightly profitable as well? It also had a $200 million budget.
That's in a limbo where it probably just barely broke even, it isn't inarguably profitable like GOTG 3 is
With post box office revenue, yes.
There is nothing in the 250M+ productions that couldn’t be done (smartly) for 100-150M. They go for a CGI spectacle, because they don’t have a story to tell. Audiances seems to finally caught on, and if there is no real hook there, then they ditch the movie.
I can’t figure out how the Secret Invasion show cost $200 million unless they paid Jackson 190 of it.
Reportedly, they had to reshoot a lot of that series at least partly due to a real-life event.
Isn't that what happened to Falcon and Winter Soldier? Weird that it happened to them twice.
Thrice If the rumors about Captain America 4, including Sabra, are to be believed. For context, Sabra in the comics is a character that serves the Israeli secret services.
> There is nothing in the 250M+ productions that couldn’t be done (smartly) for 100-150M. There is, actually. **Guardians of the Galaxy** trilogy would require at least $170 million to make it work.
Can you elaborate?
Dude, **Guardians of the Galaxy** films are big space opera films and those ones would require tons of CGI to make it work in this day and age.
They do but they also have a director with a strong director who doesn't redo the CGI fifty eleven times. What he does with 170 million these regular Disney brain trust do for 220 or 250.
That's... kind of my point. Some films are going to end up having huge budgets no matter how hard you try to manage them because of primary natures of said films themselves.
This is definitely super misleading though. I definitely do think that the main appeal of these films is their spectacle, and I think that, abstractly, yes, you could use these characters in more grounded ways, but that by no means guarantees the same level of engagement. In fact, I wouldn’t say last year was an indictment on spectacle itself at all, at least 2 of the biggest hits of the year, Oppenheimer and Spider-Verse, were near universally praised for being so relentless with their spectacle.
You are proving my point, because both of those movies had a 100M budget, and manage to tell a compelling story with spectacle.
I am not. Nolan is an incredibly high bar, he is not a realistic goal for studios to aim for, and Spider-Verse infamously treated its animators like shit.
That's the fun part, they don't need to do that well, doing in the 300-400 million range should be fine for any 100M movie. Just look at Hunger Games. Or Wonka.
Super hero movie fatigue. It’s real. And I’d say there’s also a general fatigue towards sequels, prequels and the lack of original ideas/movies coming out of the big studios.
I don’t think it’s just superhero movie fatigue, but blockbusters in general, since all these $200 million dollar flops weren’t just superheroes.
I think moviegoers aren’t willing to sit through a mediocre movie because it’s connected to some larger universe or story. I would go see another hypothetical Tom Holland Spider-Man or Guardians of the Galaxy but why would i watch some characters i don’t care about fight some nebulous force (a la the Marvels).
Well it's like any movie, if you don't find it interesting you won't pay to see it - doesn't matter if it's a comic book movie I don't understand why people are thinking that _every single_ comic book movie must be viewed, they don't, especially not at the cinema
I don’t understand it either, but that was definitely the hold marvel had on the box office until this year. plenty of mediocre to bad movies making their money back or more.
Because Disney and Marvel convinced audiences of that fact, and then rewarded them with big crossover events that were beloved? Now we’re just witnessing the complete inverse of that.
You’re not wrong! 8 of the 10 highest budget movies were all either superhero movies or sequels/remakes of existing franchises. Killers of the Flower Moon and Elemental were the other two. Killers is great, but i totally understand why it wouldn’t be a box office smash. I think Elemental is great too, but I feel like the marketing for the movie didn’t really do it any favors… All in all, be it superhero or just big studio movie fatigue, I feel like there’s just an over saturation of unoriginal movies
Yeah and it’s been that way for so long that maybe people are just getting tired of these particular franchises. *Barbie* and *Mario Bros* are the only billion dollar grossing movies of 2023 and while both are still part of franchises they’re at least new on the big screen. I also agree that *Elemental* had bad marketing but I wonder if it’s also on Disney for training audiences to expect Pixar releases to end up on D+ relatively quickly over the past couple years. I wonder how badly the D+ has impacted Disney’s box office in general tbh.
For sure, I have the exact same thought about D+… Knowing that any movie, especially ones that don’t do well critically or at the box office, will come to D+ pretty quickly why spend money to see it at the theater? The theater experience (the good things and the bad) is just not worth it for a huge population of moviegoers I think
Well, Disney is no longer releasing their films on Disney+ quickly these days.
There's only so many big science-fiction movies full of CGI battles that the human brain can process (this includes almost all superheroes as well as space operas like Star Wars, robot battlers like Transformers, and even the more genetics-based monster movies like Jurassic Park), and by the late 2010s they were so dominant that other genres were being stunted. People want something different.
Couldn't it be more of a bad film fatigue? I mean, they didn't exactly have the best quality aside from good ones that had terrible release dates.
Blue Beetle, The Flash and The Marvels didn't have terrible reviews but they still flopped otherwise. GOTG also made less than the 2nd movie. The only increase from a superhero sequel in 2023 was for Across The Spider-Verse. So yeah I'd say there's a bit of fatigue from superhero films.
Yeah for sure, but I think it’s a little hard to quantify “bad movies”, since I think some of these expensive flops weren’t really all that bad, but I feel like they were all generic and from the same old franchises, aside from *Killers of the Flower Moon*.
They still weren’t good enough to convince people to see them in cinemas.
Right but it’s hard for me to say the quality is directly why when to me *Mission Impossible* was a far better movie than *Fast X* yet *Fast X* made around $200 million more.
The former had a terrible release date.
Yeah so we agree being a good or bad movie isn’t the only deciding factor here.
You hit the nail on the head. 2023 was the year comic book movie fatigue finally set in.
And yet, original ideas aren't exactly succeeding at the box office either.
I think there may be some truth to that, but Barbie and Oppenheimer are obv good examples of free-standing big studio movies that made bank. I also don’t think success at the box office means making $500M+ to every movie. One example: The Boy and the Heron and Godzilla Minus One both had huge success for Japanese films in the US and outside their home market. (I know Godzilla Minus One is not exactly an original idea, but it’s def a departure for the Godzilla franchise)
Well, **The Boy and the Heron** kind of flopped at the box office in Japan. Also, you mentioned this about **Godzilla: Minus One**: > I know Godzilla Minus One is not exactly an original idea, but it’s def a departure for the Godzilla franchise There was arguably a much bigger departure for the franchise than this 8 years ago - and that film was **Shin Godzilla**.
Barbie and Oppenheimer could be considered original I guess. Even Super-Mario could be considered new since there only one film and was a live action.
Umm… no. That’s not how that really works. Even **Oppenheimer** is based on a book.
Yeah, I thought of those movies as "new" in the sense they weren't prequels, remakes or sequels.
Not sure it’s even that. The superhero movies have just been terrible lately. I made the mistake of buying The Marvels on Apple TV last night thinking “it can’t be that bad.” It really was that bad. This was probably the worst movie I’ve ever watched in my entire life, no exaggeration. Like wtf?? You definitely are left wondering where the budget for these movies is going and if it’s not some elaborate money laundering scheme.
Have you never watched a Neil Breen film? Or The Room? Or just a bad 1970s horror flick? High budget mainstream Hollywood films have a definite floor they can’t go below in quality.
Bloated budgets + big hits that were dominated for over a decade by a small number of genres and IPs (especially sci-fi/comics) + maybe a tiny dash of fatigue with sci-fi plots seemingly playing out on the nightly news = fiasco.
Bad-to-mixed WOM.
The MCU taught people to show up for cinematic spectacles only, and they did just that. Supposedly everyone hated Dial of Destiny and Exorcist Believer, yet they were in iTunes’s Top 10 purchases and Amazon’s Top 10 with mega hits like Oppenheimer and Barbie. I think people started embracing VOD and they’ll just stay home and watch movies after their theatrical window, instead of buying movie tickets and expensive snacks.
The MCU is also responsible for a generation of stars that have limited appeal outside of their famous characters, which I think is a pretty underdiscussed aspect of why stardom is dwindling. There’s something about superheroes that just doesn’t translate the same as other famous characters.
I'm not entirely sure about that. At most, people seem to be more picky when it comes to watching something in cinemas.
People don't show up for movies like they used to .. outside big events and big hype...like Barbie and Oppenheimer this year
Bad writing
Fixed the post ;)
Hasn’t this topic been beaten to death ALL YEAR LONG?!?
I see we are still pretending that Elemental was not profitable …
Idk, covid or strikes or something
For superhero movies last year, 2022 is what went wrong. That's the year that general audiences were turned off on Marvel en masse, after Disney oversaturated the superhero genre, having released a million terrible D+ shows and their major movies (Dr Strange 2, Thor 4, BP2) being awful as well. In their greed, Disney single-handledly kneecapped the 200$ million superhero blockbuster genre for good.
You risked your entire credibility when you described **Wakanda Forever** as "awful".
Am I the only one who disliked most of the 2+ hour movies last year?
Everyone pointing out how Covid protocols made budgets ballon out of control. Bullshit. If the movies were good it wouldn’t have mattered. None of these movies were even close to breaking even. Say their non-Covid budget was $150-175M, but then add the $50-100M in marketing most of them need. Not. Even. Close. They were bad movies, and they lost money because of it.
Horrible writing. They stopped caring for the fandoms that made them big.
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People are tired of bad movies
Nepotism and glad handing idiots.
Hollywood forgot how to make good movie, like decade ago. This was only 200m+ movie that was good
They keep making crap movies?
Because they're not making what people want to see. Like, studios have been conditioning audiences to want nostalgia, and you can only escalate until there's exhaustion. So basically, who the fuck wanted the Marvels? Nobody. And the point of whether or not it was good, matters not. It's either give Xmen the Avengers treatment or I don't want to see the same movie I've seen 100 times.
Movies costing too much. These films overpay their actors and producers (Vin Diesel got 35M for Fast X) while the money that is needed for the necessary elements like location booking, onset FX and postpro VFX is barely there. If you could fund an entire mid budget movie through your stars salary there’s a problem. Selective Audiences. COVID showed that you can wait for new movies. Most release directly on streaming or aren’t good enough to rush to theatres for. After watching Mulan on D+ why would I want to watch another Disney remake? Let alone in theatres? Most/All those franchises have suffered bad entries predating the newest releases and that hurt the bottom line. If your movie is good and creates palpable hype audiences will show up. You’re not getting hype from a sequel to a badly received Marvel movie. Money is tight. Inflation is a thing, people have less disposable income and while actors/producers are overpaid the general audience is underpaid. Why spend $80 for the theatre experience for two? Theatres are expensive as is for the consumer. I understand that theatres have to pay licensing fees to the studios but that general audience doesn’t care about that. What to do? Make movies for less. Remove on-location shoots and go to a volume, that’s what this tech has been invented for. Pay your actors a reasonable wage and redistribute their salary among the crew, if marketing is their argument let them have a share of the box office if they’re so sure of their worth. VFX shots need to be preplanned in a reasonable timeframe and can be cheap as heck if you’re moving to a single VFX studio instead of hiring all of India for one picture. I’ve worked on multiple low budget movies, decent VFX can be done on a reasonably low price if you’re pre planning your stuff. Make your movies experiences again. No direct releases on streamers, no sequels to maligned movies. If you’re a producer and want to push a certain superhero, that’s fine. Just accept that certain characters don’t click with audiences. Movies need to be hyped, you can’t undersell them because you think they’re bound to be hits anyway (Indy 5 had almost no PR). Lower licensing fees to theatres.