Paul Andrew
Master Member
They definitely are the current movie going audience. My local theater, a good size multiplex in north Phoenix, is absolutely crawling with high schoolers, especially on Fridays and weekends.
Indiana Jones 5 officially announced
- Thread starter ghostryder
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I was at the theater today. Good mix of everybody. Happy to see it was busy too. I think some of it was everyone wanted to get out of the heat lol.
Yeah, I'm wondering that too. Well, like Moviefreak mentioned, I think that's why they added Ortega. Smart move and not one simply based on her being popular at the moment. She looks like she would fit right in.
The question is why did a sequel to another movie of that era - Top Gun - do so well? Would that not fall under a "franchise"? Was it the star power of Tom Cruise? Sure, but that didn't help MI:7. I think it simply came down to:
1. It was a genre we rarely see (aviation)
As good as the Mission Impossible movies are, spy action has been a fairly saturated genre over the past 15 years; much like superhero films although to a lesser degree. I'm sure younger people who had never seen Top Gun saw the previews for Maverick and thought it looked awesome.
2. There was a long enough separation from the original
This ties in with franchise fatigue. Announce another Star Wars or Marvel movie and people probably won't think much of it. But there was almost 40 years (can't believe it!) for fans to miss Top Gun.
3. It was a movie made for theaters
This one is self-explanatory.
Beetlejuice 2 will have to offer something fresh for it to work. I think it has potential though. Hopefully Burton is feeling inspired for this one.
Yeah, I'm wondering that too. Well, like Moviefreak mentioned, I think that's why they added Ortega. Smart move and not one simply based on her being popular at the moment. She looks like she would fit right in.
The question is why did a sequel to another movie of that era - Top Gun - do so well? Would that not fall under a "franchise"? Was it the star power of Tom Cruise? Sure, but that didn't help MI:7. I think it simply came down to:
1. It was a genre we rarely see (aviation)
As good as the Mission Impossible movies are, spy action has been a fairly saturated genre over the past 15 years; much like superhero films although to a lesser degree. I'm sure younger people who had never seen Top Gun saw the previews for Maverick and thought it looked awesome.
2. There was a long enough separation from the original
This ties in with franchise fatigue. Announce another Star Wars or Marvel movie and people probably won't think much of it. But there was almost 40 years (can't believe it!) for fans to miss Top Gun.
3. It was a movie made for theaters
This one is self-explanatory.
Beetlejuice 2 will have to offer something fresh for it to work. I think it has potential though. Hopefully Burton is feeling inspired for this one.
$200m is a big increase.
The original BJ was $15m. That was in an era when 'Big' cost $18m, 'Die Hard' cost $24m, and 'Indy/Crusade' cost $48m.
George's prequels used a ton of ILM work to reduce other costs. He was getting it done at a discount because he owned ILM. They were still relatively cheap for what they were though.
Indy#5 was inflated by a bunch of things. Covid restrictions + Ford's pay + Ford's injury + Ford's de-aging + the Kathleen Kennedy re-shoots bill.
I cannot think of any excuse to run a 'BeetleJuice' sequel (as we know it) up to $200m. Keaton & Burton are medium-size names. Nobody else is really critical to it.
Special effects? Whatever. The original was full of corny in-camera practical stuff made of rubber & plywood. You can add an enormous amount of CGI & big action setpieces but that's a choice.
Granted, the original BJ looked kind of small & flimsy even for its time. But that's an $80m issue, not $200m.
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VanPersie
Well-Known Member
Your opinion is based on what to come to decide what is or isn’t too much?
Genuine question because i’d like to know a rough breakdown of costs of the director, actors, extras, the required crews needed to film it etc, the cost of the props and that department’s wages, transport costs, marketing costs……
I'm mostly spitballing based on the budgets of other shows rather than looking at specific cost breakdowns.
I'm calling it "too much" to spend $200m on a BJ movie that is unlikely to sell enough tickets to make that profitable.
The budget for 'Ghostbusters Afterlife' was $75m. That movie didn't look expensive but it looked totally serviceable. Does anybody think a BJ reboot warrants 2-3x as much investment as a GB reboot?
The 'Westworld' TV show doesn't exactly look cheap, and they can do a whole SEASON for $100m.
I've got nothing against 'Beetlejuice'. I want the new one to be a hit. But the same movie that is a moderate success at $100m becomes an embarrassing bomb if they had spent $200m on it. And in the case of BJ, I am not at all convinced that a $200m version will be so much better than a $100m version.
Shows have an ideal budget range. Higher budgets come with their own set of compromises & drawbacks. A $60m new sequel to 'JAWS' might stand a chance of being good, but if the budget is $200m then I'm betting it will be crap.
On a project like Indy5/Disney, the marketing costs alone are higher than the production cost of the first 3 films combined.
Marketing has become somewhat of a scam, where studios pay a fortune to advertise their films on networks and outlets they already own.
Trailers used to be cut internally, but now have become their own little productions, costing millions to "produce".
And present-day marketing departments are bloated with backseat drivers and fake-it-'til-you-make-it experts who outsource their own jobs without upper management knowing about it, because upper management don't even know what those jobs are.
I've been in rooms with large marketing teams and their outsourcers, and 100% of the time it's the outsourcers hustling and pitching and problem-solving a marketing strategy, while the company's marketing team have either escaped to their smart phones, pretending something important came up, or using all of their IQ to nod and smile at anything anyone says.
Solo4114
Master Member
Yep. You go through enough of these cycles, you start to figure out that there's usually some thing that comes out of left field, knocks everyone for a loop, and then gets immediately imitated and run into the ground by the very same suits who can't figure out why their last cookie-cutter operation isn't selling like it once did.
And I fully agree that we are in the midst of an epic cultural shift across the board. It's not just entertainment. It's everything. Everything feels like we're waiting for...something. Some massive change. And at the same time, there seem to be forces at play that very much want to prevent that change because it threatens to upset...well, everything.
I wonder if this is what it felt like living through 1848 and its aftermath.
I think there are two forms of fatigue, and it's not simply "franchise fatigue." That's too broad a term to describe what I think is going on.
I think there's a degree of "tentpole" fatigue. Not so much "franchise" but rather THIS IS THE BIG HUGE MOVIE YOU HAVE TO SEE. It feels like every movie that comes out these days is some tentpole. Some mega film that simply must be seen on the big screen and...I think audiences are fatigued by that. Going to the movies is expensive and may be a dicey proposition as far as how good the actual experience is at the theater. And quite simply, not every movie needs to be seen in the theaters. I think audiences recognize this and are simply being choosier in their movie-watching. And you keep ending up with these stretches where, like, 15 different films are opening, each with a budget of $300M, and the whole thing just turns into indistinguishable background noise. M:Indiana Flash and the Furious Beasts blargity blarg blarg. It's all just a nondescript mass of blockbuster, and I think audiences just shrug and say "I'll catch it on streaming." There are specific issues that affect the various films themselves, too, and some global political issues as well at play here, but for the most part, I think this is a major contributing factor to why audiences are just...shrugging at most of this year's blockbusters.
I also think there's a degree to which none of these films feel special, and most of them feel...overdesigned? That's not quite the right word, but they all feel very "safe." You've seen all these movies before. They're formulaic. You can practically write them yourself and make the trailers, too. And that's also contributing to this sense of "Meh. I'll catch the next bus." It's too much top-down exec-driven control, and a desire to produce "predictable" results for the investors rather than take risks. And the end result is films that feel like they were designed by committee...because they were. There's no real artistic voice speaking. I think audiences may not be able to describe their attitude towards films in that language exactly, but I think the end result is they just...don't feel like these movies are all that special. And when we all have HDTVs at home, often 4K quality big-screen pictures with surround sound, well...who cares if you miss the theatrical run? You can catch it on streaming. The home experience is certainly close enough to that for films that are just another cars 'n' sploshuns movie like Fast & the Impossibleformers.
I think with MI:7, it might be worth digging into how much of that was foreign vs. domestic box office. Frankly, I've never really understood the appeal of the MI franchise. The first movie was...eh...fine. Had some cool sequences. Interesting subversion of the TV show. I don't remember the 2nd one that well except for some patented John Woo slow-mo scenes and dueling motorcycles. The third one felt...underwhelming, and I couldn't tell you the plot or what happened in hardly any of the others. There's one where he climbs a skyscraper and drives in a sandstorm. That may be the same one where Rebecca Ferguson proves she's part fish by being able to hold her breath for an "impossible" amount of time doing some swimming thing. Jeremy Renner was in one of them? I think? I dunno. They've always been "Wait for home media" for me. They're action set-pieces looking for a story to pull them together and that just bores me.
I think Ford's age is part of it for the old schoolers like us. But I think Paul's right here that the real issue is...the brand just isn't actually all that strong. It's 1 transcendent film, two pretty good ones, uh....that other one and now Grandpa Indy. The people who go to theaters the most have no connection with the character or the IP. As noted, they know of it, they just don't care. And a big part of that ties back into my comment about how blockbuster films and blockbuster franchises just aren't special anymore. There's so damn many of them, and there's always another one coming out, so it's hard to connect really with any of them anymore. I think kids these days like what they like in the moment, and then they move on, because everything's transitory and there's something else coming down the content pipe in the next 30 seconds anyway. There's never a "next big thing" because it's ALL "big things." All the time.
Aside from that, I honestly do not get Maverick's success. I watched the film. It was...meh. Fine. Visually spectacular. Boring story. And I've seen a Trench Run done before and done better. More than once, even. Hell, freakin' Iron Eagle 2 used that approach. But whatever, audiences ate it up.
Maybe that's the big takeaway from all of this: you can't actually predict audiences, and just cranking out more of the last thing they liked isn't gonna get you anywhere anymore. Maybe, instead, you should have a real vision and stick to that, or let the ARTISTS do that instead of the suits.
I think DC is dragging around a massive albatross that was the general disregard for the Snyderverse (which is actually kind of a shame because, on a rewatch of the whole thing...it's actually kind of interesting). And Ezra Miller's behavior made me damn sure I wasn't gonna spend a dime on that film. Not in the theaters, not on digital. When it hits Max, I'll watch it then, but only because it's part of my subscription fee already.
Eh, home release ain't enough to save "disappointing" results for a lot of these films. It may help shrink the loss, but I don't think anyone's counting on home release to carry the day when they greenlight a $200M film.
Yup. That plus the perpetual content machine that is modern cultural existence. It's a neverending firehose of stuff coming at you, and I think a lot of kids just "whatever" the bulk of it because there's no way to distinguish any of it for them. Plus, most of them have not experienced "old" movies. Most people don't grow up watching old films these days.
Yeah, again, this is a film where I DO NOT get the greenlighting of it, other than the typical idiot exec thing of "WE NEED TO GREENLIGHT OUR OWN LEGACY SEQUELS!! EVERYTHING HAS TO BE LEGACY SEQUELS NOW!!!" reaction from Maverick's success.
And in 2-3 years, it'll be "toy franchise" movies in the wake of Barbie's success. And then that won't work either, because it'll just be hollow cash grabs and audiences are savvy to it.
See, I don't think it's that clear-cut. I do think your "movie made for theaters" thing has merit. It's why Oppenheimer did well. I mean, good lord, it's an historical biopic. Not exactly what you expect to draw crowds, right? Not in this era, anyway.
But beyond that...yeah, I don't get Maverick's appeal. The film just felt generic to me. Same with the M:I films.
I think Beetlejuice 2 could end up being a lot like Indy 5: looks good and profitable on paper, but the audience just doesn't show up for it. Maybe Gen-X and the Xennials (or whatever we're called...) just...don't show up for films these days. At least, not reliably, not predictably, not in a way that you can control for and design for.
Hunting for a kid-birthday present, I noticed that all of the Indy toys that were released before the movie as part of the promotional run-up were pretty aggressively discounted at Target this weekend. Granted, this isn't something I often pay attention to (department store toys) but I was a little surprised to see they were already being given the clearance treatment while the film is still in theaters and before the Blu-Ray and digital download release.
Indiana Jones as a toyline has a long history of flops. As popular as the character and films are with Gen X, the toys just never sold all that well, with adult collectors only getting into the vintage Kenner line decades after the fact. Add in the mixed reception of Indy 5 at the box office and that's the reason you're seeing product heavily discounted. I'm of the opinion that even kids of the 1980's would have responded better to role play toys rather than action figures of Indy.
Laspector
Master Member
I think most people just don't care to go to the movies anymore. Okay, your movie theater may be packed at times, but that doesn't mean all are anymore. And as far as movies that they advertise as "must see in the theater", oh baloney, I can do without it. I remember here on this forum when Maverick came out 'you have to see this in a theater, you have to see this in a theater, you HAVE to see this in a theater, you HAVE to see this in a theater!!!'.....Well, guess what, I didn't see it in a theater, I watched it at home and I am just fine with that. Personally, unless I am on a date I will never step foot into another theater for as long as I live. They could be showing actual footage of the return of ****** and I'd still just wait to stream it.
yeah... cramped bus-station style seats with a conspicuously sticky floor, $20 popcorn to watch 30 minutes worth of perfectly-well-color corrected and perfectly framed commercials only for the feature to start and find the projection or sound is just "off" or maybe that's just the glare from the person two rows down constantly checking their phone. Meanwhile, a perfectly respectable Dolby Digital / Dolby Vision experience can be had within the comfort of your own home.
Though, I live in a cultural desert, we don't have any of the chain theaters with premium seating, visuals, sound and full menu of food. That might alter the calculus but only a little. Not to mention my teenagers watch full series on their phones, so they could care less about a giant screen.
obrienizer
New Member
You might be seeing kids are not buying toys, as they prefer to play on their phones. Adults buying toys are very selective.
My young nephews don’t buy any toys, outside of the occasional Lego toy. They are more into buying video games and texting. Lol
I don't think kids have ever been as much into miniature-type toy lines (as opposed to costume-type toys) when the setting of the show is old. Star Wars had futuristic spaceships and robots and stuff. With Indy you just have a guy with a bullwhip and some generic henchmen. I don't see Indy toys being very thrilling to kids unless they had an ancient temple playset or something with booby traps and stuff.
I haven't experienced either in almost 30 years.
Slightly off topic, but not really. The Disney hits just keep NOT coming...
https://startefacts.com/news/5-main-reasons-why-150m-haunted-mansion-bombed-at-the-box-office_a132
https://startefacts.com/news/5-main-reasons-why-150m-haunted-mansion-bombed-at-the-box-office_a132
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Paul Andrew
Master Member
For me and my family, when COVID hit we basically stopped going to the theater except for films we really cared about. There weren't any more "bored on Saturday morning let's just go see a movie" days. So when something came out that we really felt deserved seeing in a theater, we masked up and went.
Nowadays we're still in the same habit, just without masks.
Hell, we didn't even make it to Guardians of the Galaxy this year because we just couldn't muster the drive to make it a priority.
I know everyone isn't in the same boat, but I do wonder if overall theater attendance is still down post-plague.
Lately films that I'm only passingly interested in barely even get a chance when they hit streaming.
Nowadays we're still in the same habit, just without masks.
Hell, we didn't even make it to Guardians of the Galaxy this year because we just couldn't muster the drive to make it a priority.
I know everyone isn't in the same boat, but I do wonder if overall theater attendance is still down post-plague.
Lately films that I'm only passingly interested in barely even get a chance when they hit streaming.
asalaw
Master Member
I'm in pretty much the same boat. We went to see MI:7, and that's our first trip to a theater in a year. We're planning on seeing Oppenheimer and Dune, and that's it for the year. It has to be a pretty compelling movie event to bring us out. Otherwise, that's what streaming is for. You don't even have to wait that long anymore. I just caught the latest Transformers movie on Paramount+. I watched it because in the 90's I was a Beast Wars fan. Otherwise I wouldn't have bothered; the Transformers movies are incredibly dumb, though the robot fights are fun.
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