WCat2000 wrote: ↑April 7th, 2022, 12:55 am So are the numbers that are available out of date or something?
I looked at that website too. thought GB’16 home sales were all-time. They have Afterlife’s at $5m (I could have sworn it was 3, guess I was looking at Blu Rays). Makes sense to me since it’s only been a few months.
Home video numbers are not reported as consistently as theatrical. I believe you can go back to TheNumbers and click on the home video stats to see the dates they're pulling the tallies from. As far as I know, that number is several years out of date, and I don't think there's any way to get better numbers.
RichardLess wrote: ↑April 7th, 2022, 4:40 amYeah I 100% think Ghostbusters has a ceiling on it. But I think that’s only the case because of mistakes Sony made. You release a 3rd movie in 2008 with the original cast and some new members and I think that movie is HUGE.
I think the movie is bigger than the 2016 movie or
Afterlife, but I'm guessing that one only does $250m-300m in 2008 money, and it probably comes with a price tag of $150m in 2008 money to go with it.
Anything after 1999, I think a good portion of the audience outside of the fans stops expecting it. They might be open to it should it get made, but that's not the same thing -- the moment the audience stops expecting it, then they have to be sold on it deserving to exist again. By the time you cross the threshold into the 2000s, you run into the additional factor of the cast being old. Murray is getting a second wind doing Wes Anderson movies, but Ramis is almost exclusively behind the camera, Aykroyd is no longer a movie star, and even Hudson is in a comparatively quieter period of his career. I just don't see the fan enthusiasm actually translating into a
Star Wars-level blockbuster at that point. This is not
Indiana Jones, where Harrison Ford and Steven Spielberg remained bulletproof household names (even with Ford starring in plenty of stinkers!), and 2008 was their big return to this beloved thing.
The closest thing we might be able to agree on is that I'd have said there was at least a possibility it could be pretty big in the early 2010s, when the "legacy sequel" trend was taking off. So, I guess we're on the same page in thinking the reboot was a turning point.
RichardLess wrote: ↑April 7th, 2022, 4:40 amAlso. We’ve been thru this before but Marvel is the creative lead on the last 3 Spider-Man movies. This time Sony was instrumental in getting the original Spidey actors back but Marvel hires the writers, the director, the cast.
I just can't stress enough that you have it backward here, and that Sony chooses the director, writer, and cast, and Marvel approves it. Pascal has more power on the
Spider-Man movies than Feige, because the movies are still made at Sony and Feige works at Disney. You are correct to cite the negotiations, but they pretty strongly illustrate my point: it's public knowledge that Sony is the one who initially decided to walk away. If they're kicking back and doing nothing, that makes no sense. That's the move of a company that has confidence that they're doing most of the work already, and they think they deserve to keep the chunk they're sharing with someone else. You can call it arrogant if you want to, and I know you think the people running Sony are complete morons, but I would be more inclined to say the arrogance in question was that they were stupid to think the fans wouldn't revolt if Spider-Man suddenly exited the MCU than it was that they were successfully producing these movies mostly on their own. I have said this before, but I can't help but cite
Spider-Verse again here, which is, in my opinion, still the best
Spider-Man movie by a country mile and unquestionably done without Feige.
(Also, I haven't read Espinosa's interview, so I could be wrong, but the fact that
Spider-Verse came out in 2018 suggests it was probably not the concept of the multi-verse they were confused about, but either what characters they had the legal right to use where, or just where events and characters were all meant to be in relation to each other, especially since Marvel themselves had to juggle and rewrite their whole timeline after
Black Widow,
Shang-Chi, and
Eternals ended up having to come out after "WandaVision," "Falcon and the Winter Soldier," and "Loki.")
RichardLess wrote: ↑April 7th, 2022, 4:40 amLook..Yes Venom is a success. But so what? Those movies are hot garbage...
When a studio releases a bad movie that is financially successful, looking at that as if to say “See they must be doing something right” kind of misses the point.
But that's actually my point. I'm not talking about the art here, I'm strictly talking about business. It's not like the two things are inherently connected anyway -- plenty of great movies bomb at the box office, and plenty of terrible movies are huge hits. You and I may look at this stuff as art, but the industry looks at it like a business, so, whether we like it or not, it
doesn't miss the point to say "they must be doing something right" when something is successful even if it isn't good. That
is the point.