My Posts on the Box Office Performance of The Expend4bles (aka The Expendables 4) (Collected)

During the run-up to and aftermath of the release of The Expendables 4 I tracked the discussion of the movie's box office prospects, and then its actual theatrical performance, as well as the fallout therefrom. For convenience's sake I have gathered together the items (some of them fairly short) on this one page, in order of appearance and dated--while also updating the links from posts referencing them so that they all lead here.

8/27/23
How Will The Expendables 4 Do? A Box Office Prediction
The Expendables 4 (styled The Expend4bles) is due out September 22. Just how is it likely to do?

The consistent underperformance of big franchise action films this year seems ground for pause here--with this going especially for films banking on depleted nostalgia for '80s-era pop culture. (Top Gun 2 was an exception, helped considerably by breathless media cheerleading and weak summer competition--and the contention supported by how the delusions of Indiana Jones 5 playing like Maverick had the cold water of reality thrown on them this summer.)

It does not help that The Expendables franchise, even at its strongest, was a relatively marginal performer--which saw its North American grosses especially erode after the first film. Consider the box office for the first three films in current and inflation-adjusted dollars (the last, adjusted for July 2023 prices and included in the accompanying parentheses).

The Expendables (2010)--Worldwide--$274 million ($384 million); Domestic--$103 million ($144 million).

The Expendables 2 (2012)--Worldwide--$230 million ($305 million); Domestic--$85 million ($113 million).

The Expendables 3 (2014)--Worldwide--$215 million ($276 million); Domestic--$39 million ($50 million).

In inflation-adjusted terms the third movie made just one-third what the first did in North America a mere four years earlier. Now it has been nine years since that movie, with all that means for the franchise's pull waning, as pop culture moved further on from its recollections of the machine gun-packing heroes of the '80s. (Today anyone who really experienced the cultural moment that was Rambo: First Blood, Part II, or saw Commando in theaters, is likely over fifty.) It is even the case that to the extent that nostalgia is part of the sales pitch the pitch is weaker this time around (with, from that viewpoint, the weakest line-up yet, with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis sitting this one out, and no equivalent to the inclusion of Mel Gibson, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Harrison Ford or the others who popped up in the sequels).

The switch of the series back from a PG-13 rating to an R with its promise of an experience somewhat more like those '80s-era films, and the additions to the cast reported in the publicity, seem unlikely to make up for all that very much.

The result is that one could expect the fourth film to do still less well than the third--and this is indeed what Boxoffice Pro projects, anticipating a gross of $31-$45 million over its theatrical run (the low end of the figure less than the first Expendables movie took in on just its opening weekend in current dollars, before inflation). Moreover, unprepossessing as this already is I would not be shocked to see the projection fall in the weeks ahead (as has happened so many times this year with comparable films, like Indiana Jones and Mission: Impossible).

That said, one may wonder if there will not be some relief from overseas--as, after all, the prospect of international ticket sales is likely a significant factor why, after the dismal domestic performance of the third film (a decade ago, failing to break the $40 million barrier), there is a fourth film at all. That movie was saved from being a more obvious disaster by the Chinese box office, the movie grossing in that country almost twice what it did in North America (Expendables 3 pulling in $72 million there, a sum accounting for a third of the worldwide gross, and over two-fifths of the international gross). Alas, the performance of American films in China is not what it was just a few years ago. (Consider, for instance, how the latest Mission: Impossible did in China, long a reliable market for the series. Where the sixth film, Fallout, pulled in $181 million back in the summer of 2018--more like $219 million today--Mission: Impossible--Dead Reckoning had pulled in a little under $49 million there at last count, with not much more to go.)

I see no reason to think Expendables 4 will be some exception to the unhappy pattern, with its domestic/international percentage split more likely to resemble that of the first film (38/62), or at best the second (27/73), than the third (18/82). Assuming the low end of the range projected for the domestic gross (circa $30 million), and a global take of about two-and-a-half times that, we end up with the movie's taking in about $80 million. Assuming the high end of the range ($45 million), and the more robust international response the second film got, one gets a figure in the vicinity of $170 million. The result is that a global gross of $200 million looks like a long shot, while the movie could plausibly fall short of $100 million worldwide--which is what the film's production cost alone has been reported as being, and all of which is likely to make the film a money-loser ruling out any Expendables 5.

Or would have, in normal times. The decisions the supposed "smartest guys in the room" are making these days leave me less and less clear on whether there is actually any thought process going on at all in the executive suites of movieland, even, amid the unceasing Dauriat-like crassness of "the biz," where the matter of expenditure and revenue is concerned.

9/16/23
The Box Office Projection for The Expendables 4: An Update
Last month Boxoffice Pro put out its projection for the likely domestic box office gross of The Expendables 4 (i.e. The Expend4bles)--a rather low $31-$45 million not for its opening night, or weekend, but its whole run. I remarked that,

unprepossessing as this already is I would not be shocked to see the projection fall in the weeks ahead (as has happened so many times this year with comparable films, like Indiana Jones and Mission: Impossible).

In this week's update of the estimate (likely the last "long-range forecast" for the film) that is exactly what has happened. Where their projection had been a paltry $31-$45 million then, now their expectation is in the $24-$37.5 million range.

The result is that not only does the $200 million mark, which I already thought out of reach then, now seem even more remote, but it seems even more likely than before that the $100 million movie will fall short of a $100 million global gross.

Going by the rule of thumb that the reported production budget rarely equals more than 50 percent of the total outlay, (and often much less) given the price of advertising, distribution and interest, and the claims of "residuals and participations" on a film's income stream (likely not trivial in a Big Name-packed sequel like this one); and that the film needs to make at least 50 percent of that back at the box office (from 50 percent of the gross or less); the break-even requirement would be at the very least $200 million. Moreover, one can easily picture a situation where the bill was much higher. (A movie may cost three times its production budget, while the backers may get more like 40 percent of the gross, or even less, and needing the ticket sales to cover much more of the price tag given the upward bound there tends to be on home entertainment income--in which case the backers of a $100 million movie may need something more like $400 million+.)

Accordingly one can expect Expendables 4 to be a significant loss-maker. Still, in the year that saw The Flash and Indiana Jones 5 it will probably not make the Deadline list of the top five money-losers of the year.

9/22/23
What Will The Expendables 4 Make This Weekend?
Boxoffice Pro has put out its last projection for The Expendables 4's debut--anticipating a gross of $10-$15 million in the movie's first three days of North American release, which, of course, is in line with the weak gross they have predicted over the past month (a final take of under $40 million, maybe even under $25 million).

This seems all too predictable, and not just because this is a fourth installment in a never-better-than-second-string action series coming out almost a decade after the poorly received third installment at a time in which franchise films like these just keep crashing and burning (as so many bigger films from more robust franchises did this summer), though it is plenty for this film, or any other, to have against it. There is, too, the shaky foundation for the franchise. The Expendables, like pretty much everything else in Sylvester Stallone career these past two decades (Rocky VI, Creed I-III, Rambo IV and V, etc., etc.) has been about milking the public's nostalgia for his earlier film career, with the nostalgia for the '80s action film that the original The Expendables was all about now that much more remote in the past, that much fainter a draw. (I will say it once more--Top Gun: Maverick was the exception, not the rule, the beneficiary of breathless media cheer-leading amid a summer of very weak competition, as underlined by its failure to deliver much of a boost for Tom Cruise's subsequent Mission: Impossible film , and the way that even bigger '80s phenomenon, Indiana Jones, did this past summer.)

Indeed, The Expendables, which came out in 2010, is now so far behind us that, while sequels invariably trade on nostalgia for those films to which they are follow-ups, the movie is trading on outright nostalgia for yesteryear's nostalgia--nostalgia for back when people were enjoying '80s nostalgia. This seems to me symbolized by the casting of Megan Fox in the film. Megan Fox, basically, got her moment in the spotlight in the piece of '80s nostalgia that was The Transformers--and after many years of not being seen very much by very many people in actual films, here she is, appealing to our nostalgia for when she was participating in a piece of '80s nostalgia. It all feels rather anemic, such that I see no grounds to expect this movie to surprise us with a better-than-expected opening, better-than-expected legs--let alone the very-much-better-than-expected performance required to turn this $100 million movie into a money-maker for its backers.

9/25/23
The Expendables 4 Had its Opening Weekend. How Did it Do? The Expendables 4 made its debut at the North American box office this weekend.

Few seem to have expected it to make much.

It actually made less than that.

Following Thursday night previews that took in $750,000 (the first time I can remember seeing such numbers for a $100 million franchise sequel come in below seven figures), the movie made about $3 million opening day leading to expectations of an $8 million opening weekend, which were more or less fulfilled. (The movie's take was ultimately $8.3 million.)

I cannot count myself shocked--or even really surprised--by this underperformance given that the expectations were already so close to nothing to begin with (Boxoffice Pro having thought $10-$15 million, and inclining toward the lower end of that range). Still, the number is in, and makes for such a weak start that even Top Gun 2-like legs would give the movie just a $50 million domestic gross that would have to be considered a dismal failure for a movie like this--all as, with very poor reviews from the critics (16 percent from "All Critics," 14 percent from the "Top Critics" on Rotten Tomatoes) and audiences unenthusiastic (the "All Audience" score is just 68 percent), any such prospect seems remote in the extreme, and the film doing relatively well to get to $20 million (less than what Barbie made in Thursday night previews alone) is far more likely. Meanwhile its overseas performance shows little sign of making up for it. (As it did so often in the '10s the Chinese box office came to the rescue of Expendables 3. But Expendables 4 opened with a mere $11 million there last week.) The result is that, again, $200 million looks like a longshot for this movie--which, even more than before, I think could fall short of $100 million worldwide, adding to the lengthening list of 2023's big-budget franchise flops, though, again, the hole this movie puts in the studio books will scarcely be noticed next to the likes of those put in them by The Flash or Indiana Jones 5.

10/14/23
The Expendables 4: The Second and Third Weekend Box Office Gross, and Beyond
I was never bullish about Expendables 4, and after the early tracking data became public I suggested the movie could plausibly fail to make $100 million worldwide--by the standard of a franchise that had to begin with been modest by blockbuster standards, a collapse on par with Solo, The Flash or Indiana Jones 5. The underwhelming opening weekend ($8 million in North America) did not change that expectation, nor did the next two weekends. Dim as the prospect had become by that point, Boxoffice Pro still managed to overestimate its second weekend prospects, anticipating a mere 55 percent weekend-on-weekend drop giving the movie $3.6 million that weekend. Instead the drop was 69 percent, leaving it with just $2.4 million--while there seemed to be no projection for the following weekend, in line with the movie falling out of the "top ten" altogether by its third weekend. (As it happened, it took in another $1 million.)

The result is that after 21 days in release the movie had yet to hit the $16 million mark--while after the next three days seems unlikely to get much above it. The result is that where the low end of Boxoffice Pro's already lowered projection just before the movie came out had it making $24 million in North America, this seemingly puny target for the series looks hopelessly beyond its reach, as the same goes even for $20 million.

Meanwhile there is little sign of succor from overseas. Box Office Mojo currently reports the international gross as $14 million. Curiously China, where the movie had an $11 million opening weekend, is not included in that, but the less-than-stellar opening being tripled would still leave the movie far from $100 million worldwide.

As I often do when making such claims I thought I was being overly pessimistic when I said the movie might not break $100 million. And as has often happened this year after testing my "pessimistic" prediction against the reality, my pessimism seemed like optimism--as, given the massive loss the backers seem certain to take on this movie, another franchise "bites the dust."

10/20/23
The Expendables 4: Where it Stands Now
Ordinarily I go by Box Office Mojo when citing box office grosses, but given the evident incompleteness of their figures in regard to The Expendables 4 (China is left out altogether) it was worthwhile to go elsewhere. Offering an alternative, apparently more complete, figure, is The Numbers, which as of yesterday reported the film's worldwide gross, at last count, as a little under $49 million.

$49 million.

The movie will probably edge past the $50 million mark before it departs theaters entirely, but not by much, which would work out to perhaps $25 million in rentals for the movie's backers--as against the $100 million+ they spent on production, and the at least comparable figure that they probably spent on everything else (promotion, distribution, participations and residuals).

Theatrical flops do sometimes become hits in home entertainment--but there is a very big gap indeed between that $25 million and the $200 million+ laid out for the film, the kind of gap that few movies but blockbusters are able to cover.

The result is that in just about any year but this one the movie would be guaranteed a spot on Deadline's inevitable list of the top money-losers of the year--while even in the year of The Flash and Indiana Jones 5 this one still has a shot at that dubious distinction.

My Posts on Blue Beetle's Box Office Performance (Collected)

During the run-up to and aftermath of the release of Blue Beetle I tracked the discussion of the movie's box office prospects, and then its actual theatrical performance, as well as the fallout therefrom. For convenience's sake I have gathered together the items (some of them fairly short) on this one page, in order of appearance and dated--while also updating the links from posts referencing them so that they all lead here.

7/23/23
How Will Blue Beetle Do? (A Note on the Boxoffice Pro's Tracking)
These days even the biggest movies from the bigger franchises are having a tough time getting audiences to the theaters--and smaller movies having a tougher time still. Thus Guardians of the Galaxy 3 disappoints (finishing up a fifth down from the gross of Guardians of the Galaxy 2 when we adjust for inflation), while Shazam 2 craters (this $100 million+ DCEU superhero movie finishing with $134 million taken in globally).

Blue Beetle was an originally straight-to-streaming release "upgraded" with a bigger budget in the wake of its studio's declining interest in costly streaming projects that saw them decide to bury a nearly complete Batgirl film rather than give it the same treatment.

Still, from the standpoint of resources invested and name recognition the movie was more Shazam than Guardians of the Galaxy (never mind Spider-Man).

All the same, catching Blue Beetle's trailer a while back I thought it at least promised a fast, flashy, fun summer movie. (Indeed, it made a better impression that way than the contemporaneous Captain Marvel 2 trailer.)

Was it possible that Blue Beetle would defy the odds? Not necessarily becoming a billion-dollar hit, but still being a meaningful success on a smaller scale?

Alas, to go by Boxoffice Pro's projection Blue Beetle will be lucky to do as well as Shazam! Fury of the Gods. Their analyst Shawn Robbins anticipates a $12-$17 million opening on the way to a $27-$55 million gross at the end of its domestic run.

Shazam 2, by contrast, opened with $30 million--far above the high end of the range projected for Blue Beetle--on its way to a $58 million gross even after its collapse in the second weekend.

Of course, Blue Beetle will not actually hit theaters for four weeks, and a lot can change in that period. We have seen many a movie's tracking-based prospects wither in that time frame (in fact this has happened again and again this year, perhaps most pointedly The Flash), but sometimes their prospects improve--with this weekend's Barbie an excellent example. (A month ago Boxoffice Pro was thinking the movie's first three days might take in as little as $55 million. Now the range they have in mind is two-and-a-half to three times that, $140-$175 million.) Still, whether or not the film lives up to this promise the more likely outcome is its confirming the impressions so many of superhero fatigue and the commercial pointlessness of putting out smaller films of that kind.

Expect an update on that during the coming weeks.

8/28/23
How is Blue Beetle Doing Ten Days into its Release?
The box office prospects of Blue Beetle from the start were fairly modest--the movie a straight-to-streaming project that, unlike its fellow straight-to-streaming DCEU project Batgirl, was upgraded for theatrical release rather than buried, and even after that no Guardians of the Galaxy 3 or The Flash were competitiveness at the summer box office was concerned. Moreover, to a degree that was almost certainly unanticipated when the decision to give Blue Beetle a theatrical release was made, superhero fatigue, franchise fatigue, and general "blockbuster" fatigue all bit hard in 2023--with Ant-Man 3 and Shazam 2 both proving early losers, and the flops just continuing to come through the summer with the latest installments of the Fast and Furious, Transformers, the DCEU, Indiana Jones and even Mission: Impossible.

The result was that the early tracking numbers for Blue Beetle looked paltry indeed--four weeks in advance of the movie's debut Boxoffice Pro projecting a $12-$17 million opening weekend on the way to a $27-$55 million gross over the fuller domestic run, numbers that would have been disappointing in regard to the mere opening day of a much-awaited superhero blockbuster pre-pandemic. Of course, things did look up after, with Boxoffice Pro's projection for Blue Beetle rising to $20-$27 million for the opening weekend and $45-$87 million for the fuller run by the August 10 reassessment. Proportionately a significant upward revision, it was still from a very low starting point—and even the high end of the range well short of the $100 million mark.

As it happened the film, with a gross in the upper limit of the range Boxoffice Pro envisaged for its opening weekend ($25 million), and displayed decent legs in its second weekend (with a mere 49 percent drop in its second weekend), has justified the improved projection--but not done much more than that. At the same time it has been no great sensation overseas (57 percent of the worldwide box office gross to date accounted for domestically).

The result is that it will have a tough time just making its money back--even after taking into account post-theatrical income. With $25 million collected on opening weekend and $46 million in the first ten days one can, given reasonable optimism about the pattern seen to date continuing, picture the movie tripling its opening weekend gross, or making two-thirds more money than it already has--which works out to a final domestic tally of $75 million or so by either calculation. Continuing to account for 57 percent of the global gross this suggests a worldwide take in the $130 million range. Should the film do a little better than this--actually make the $87 million Boxoffice Pro anticipated, and eventually match its domestic gross overseas--it would still have only $175 million collected.

Now consider the formula I have presented here on the basis of Deadline's recent data. The share of the gross that goes to the production comes to, perhaps, half--which works out to $65-$90 million in rentals. For a lower-grossing film like this it is not inconceivable that the home entertainment, TV, streaming income will match or even slightly exceed the theatrical rentals, so let us say generously that counting this in the movie better than doubles its theatrical rentals with a $140-$200 million take from all those sources.

Now consider what we know of what was spent--the reported production budget of $120 million. Counting in the costs of publicity, distribution and the rest of what is not strictly "production" we tend to get 2-3 times the outlay for the production, which works out to, let us say, $240-$360 million (unless the backers really skimped). The result is that even should the film do well within the parameters discussed here the project could be tens of millions in the hole--while the less bullish scenarios have the movie losing its backers a good deal more than tens of millions. Still, even in the worst-case scenario this movie is unlikely to be accounted a major flop in the year that has also seen The Flash and Indiana Jones 5.

9/25/23
How Has Blue Beetle Done?
Alongside the DCEU film The Flash Warner Bros. Discovery had another superhero film coming out this summer, Blue Beetle. It hit theaters in North America in August 18--and six weeks on has collected some $70 million. It has taken in an additional $53 million internationally at last check.

This works out to a grand total of $123 million.

This is, admittedly, a bit better than may have been anticipated for it--the North American component of the gross, indeed, exceeding the high end of Boxoffice Pro's mid-July expectations ($55 million). However, it is a long way from making the $100 million+ film profitable, even if one assumes commensurately strong earnings in streaming and other post-theatrical distribution--and thus also a long way from justifying the decision to "upgrade" what had originally been a straight-to-streaming project to a bigger budget and a theatrical release.

Notably this is in spite of the film seeming to be actually well-liked--rather better-liked, in fact, than the far more expensive and heavily promoted The Flash, to go by the Rotten Tomatoes scores (a critics' score of 79 vs. 63 for The Flash, an audience score of 92 vs. 83 for the other movie).

It seems at the very least more evidence of the difficulty of getting audiences to buy tickets generally--and the difficulty of getting them to do so in particular for superhero movies, especially as those features of a superhero film that may make it stand out are, alas, not the kind of thing that tidily fits into high concept marketing schemes.

10/25/23
The Decision to Go With a Theatrical Release for Blue Beetle, in Hindsight
Amid the collapse of the delusions about the profitability of streaming Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) found itself shifting course dramatically with two DC Comics-based superhero films it had originally intended to release to its MAX service, Batgirl and Blue Beetle. On the grounds that it was too costly to make economic sense anymore as a streaming project, and too "small" for theatrical release, the company's bosses decided to simply bury Batgirl, while "upgrading" Blue Beetle to a theatrical release with a bigger production budget and the associated backing. As it happened the movie seems to have got a decent reception from critics--and the few who saw it (such that it has a 92 percent Audience score on Rotten Tomatoes). However, the latter were not very numerous, with the movie's worldwide gross now standing below the $130 million mark.

Given what has been heard of the film's budget ($100 million+), what might be expected of the fuller expenditure (at least as much to distribute and promote it, and other claims on the revenue stream), between theatrical rentals and what the movie might make after its theatrical run from home entertainment, etc. (perhaps not doing more than matching that share of the ticket sales of $60 million or so), the backers could be out tens of millions.

As losses go this can seem trivial next to the hundreds of millions in losses the WBD may have suffered with The Flash. Still, it does raise the question of whether the company has done better putting the film out in theaters than simply finishing the movie on a lower budget and putting it out on streaming per the original plan.

Any thoughts on that, readers?

My Posts on the DCEU's The Flash's Box Office Performance (Collected)

During the run-up to and aftermath of the release of the DCEU's feature film The Flash I tracked the discussion of the movie's box office prospects, and then its actual theatrical performance, as well as the fallout therefrom. For convenience's sake I have gathered together the items (some of them fairly short) on this one page, in order of appearance and dated--while also updating the links from posts referencing them so that they all lead here.

May 5, 2023
How Will The Flash Do at the Box Office?
Until recently I have not discussed box office predictions much here, and when I have done so (especially when addressing predictions made in advance of the film's hitting theaters), have usually offered comment on other people's predictions rather than trying to come up with my own predictions from scratch.

The main reason that I have been offering more predictions lately is that the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), and its component series', have run for so long by this point as to give us lots and lots of data in which even those of us who are not Hollywood insiders privy to test screenings and other such information can look for patterns.

We have less of that to go on in the case of the later, less prolific DC Extended Universe (DCEU), which has also been less consistent--and is already slated for a much-publicized overhaul, meaning we will not get very much more to work with before having to rethink our assumptions. Still, prior to that we will get a few more films, notably a Blue Beetle movie "upgraded" from the original plan for a streaming release; a sequel to the DCEU's sole billion dollar-hit, Aquaman; and of course, The Flash.

The buzz for Aquaman 2 has been surprisingly bad recently; the buzz for The Flash, surprisingly good, spectacular even, such that one may wonder just how it will do at the box office when it comes out six weeks from now in mid-June.

Considering this my first thought is that the Barry Allen/Flash character simply does not have the cachet of the other members of the Justice League, while there is no special angle that would make this "more" than just "another superhero" movie (the way Wonder Woman was, for example) in a market where there has been a super-abundance of the super-hero stuff for as long as most of us can remember (perhaps not irrelevantly including another incarnation of the Flash himself on the small screen in the Arrowverse for nine seasons), and "fatigue" possibly setting in. Meanwhile star Ezra Miller's current public image is . . . unhelpful, enough so as to probably put off some of the audience.

Moreover, The Flash will be going out into the most crowded summer box office season since before the pandemic. People will have lots of other options--so many that if it happens that the movie gets good press late in the game and has the advantage of positive word-of-mouth the crowding will limit its "legs," as they will any other movie we get this year. (I will say it again: Top Gun 2 had a lot of advantages, but in the cheer-leading mood surrounding it just about no one wanted to admit that one of the most important was that it had very little competition compared with releases in most summers.)

The result is that there is some room for the movie to "overperform," but from relatively low expectations. Screen Rant's Cooper Hood, for example, predicted $700 million as the movie's gross back in January, before the press became more bullish. Just going by my gut (on which I am more reliant here, again, because there is less to compare this movie to) I can picture the movie making that, or even more than that--but the billion-dollar mark seems to me beyond its reach. Will I have occasion to change my mind? I suppose I will find out in the coming weeks.

May 5, 2023
What Will The Flash Make on its Opening Weekend? And Over its Longer Run? (A Box Office Prediction)
Seeing the way the buzz for The Flash turned so positive--the way the media has got behind the movie--I wondered whether the audience was actually responsive, and looked forward to Boxoffice Pro's long-range forecast accordingly.

Out today, it predicts an opening weekend in the $115-$140 million range for The Flash, on the way to the film eventually taking in $280-$375 million domestically. In short, there are expectations that--domestically at least--the film will do at least as well as Guardians of the Galaxy 3, and perhaps considerably better, especially over its fuller run. (Yesterday I predicted here that even fairly strong week-to-week holds from here on out would get Guardians 3 to just $330 million or so, about the middle of the range predicted for The Flash.)

What would that imply for the global gross? The bigger pre-pandemic DCEU movies (namely Man of Steel, Superman vs. Batman, Suicide Squad, Wonder Woman, Justice League and Aquaman--all better analogies with The Flash today than smaller productions like Shazam and the pandemic release The Suicide Squad, especially as the box office continues to normalize and the biggest movies are as strong a draw as ever they were), made from 50 to 70 percent of their money internationally.

Between Boxoffice Pro's domestic range, and that figure, we get a very wide range for the possible global gross of from $550 million to almost $1.3 billion.

Of course, until recently the predictions I saw hewed closer to the bottom end of that range than the top--circa $700 million, which would not be far off the mark were the movie to do reasonably well in North America and simply match that abroad (e.g. take in a near-top-of-the-Boxoffice Pro-range $350 million, and make the same overseas; or do a bottom-of-the-range $280 million but make one-and-a-half times that internationally). Still, in the past DCEU movies have, if often seen as disappointments relative to the "Marvel envy" expectations laid on them, still done better than that in real, inflation-adjusted terms. In fact, even in current dollars only two of the six first-rank DCEU movies failed to break the $700 million mark, while all of them blew past it by a considerable way in real terms. Even the lowest earner here, Justice League, grossed almost $800 million when we adjust the dollar values of their year's release to April 2023 dollars, while in the same terms not one but three of the movies broke the billion-dollar barrier (alongside Aquaman, Superman vs. Batman and Wonder Woman doing so), as another came pretty close (Suicide Squad, with its $940 million+ gross back in 2016).

Selected DCEU Films, 2013-2018 (Current and Consumer Price Index-Adjusted April 2023 U.S. Dollars, Adjusted Figures in Parentheses)*

Man of Steel (2013)--Worldwide--$668 Million ($869 Million); Domestic--$291 Million ($378 Million)

Superman vs. Batman: Dawn of Justice (2016)--Worldwide--$871 Million ($1.1 Billion); Domestic--$330 Million ($416 Million)

Suicide Squad (2016)--Worldwide--$747 Million ($943 Million); Domestic--$325 Million ($410 Million)

Wonder Woman (2017)--Worldwide--$822 Million ($1.02 Billion); Domestic--$413 Million ($510 Million)

Justice League (2017)--Worldwide--$658 Million ($794 Million); Domestic--$229 Million ($276 Million)

Aquaman (2018)--Worldwide--$1.15 Billion ($1.39 Billion); Domestic--$335 Million ($404 Million)

Might The Flash then not do better--perhaps much better?--than $700 million. Alas, the DCEU universe is not just in decline, but on its way out, so that there is no build-up toward anything bigger and better such as likely helped some of the earlier films. It may also suffer the effects of bad press about the star, while facing a lot of summer competition.

I might add that good as its press is lately it falls short of the kind of cheer-leading I remember for Wonder Woman back in 2017.

All of this gives it more obstacles to overcome than the preceding films had, less with which to overcome them, and less to gain if it does accomplish the feat (such that even if a pleasantly surprised audience supplies good word-of-mouth it may only count for so much).

So let us let us play it safe and focus on the middle of the relevant ranges with regard to The Flash's domestic gross, and that gross' share of the global total--about $330 million domestic, with somewhere around 60 percent of the revenue foreign, working out to a global gross the vicinity of $800-$850 million. Recognizing $550 million as the absolute rock bottom, and allowing some room for error at the high end (rounding up from 8.5 to 9), $900 million would seem a reasonable high end to the range--so that $600-$900 million is the broader range I have in mind for the time being, with $700-$850 million the more plausible range within that, the movie breaking the billion-dollar barrier still a long shot.

All the same, I do not doubt I will have more to say about this in the coming weeks as more information comes in--with, in fact, one angle on a possible long shot already germinating into its own post as I write this.

* I took the film's gross and adjusted from the prices of the film's year of release (e.g. 2013) to the prices of April 2023 (the latest now available).

May 19, 2023
Is The Flash Going to Be the DCEU's Skyfall?
There is a tedious predictability to the marketing of reboots--aspects of which tend to be fairly distasteful. One is the denigration of the old version of the franchise for the sake of talking up the new one.

"Didn't you just hate that?" the publicists say in that wheedling way.

Maybe some people didn't care for it. But not all of us. The whole point of the reboot, after all, is to capitalize on that earlier thing's success--which means the affection people had for it, which is also why they are taking this line. Their affection is why the brand name they are cashing in on means something, but their affection for the old version may be a barrier to their accepting a new one. The result is that to effectively exploit that affection they have to divert it--from the old thing to the new one.

Of course, this is not a permanent stance on their part. Because after all this nonsense has been used to establish the new version the franchise-runners go back to mining the old for more coin, the value of nostalgia for the old is too great a thing for them to ignore permanently.

Indeed, just a short time after trying to bury the old version to make way for the new they are apt to use the fondness people still have for the old version to prop up the new, especially when it is not doing so well.

The James Bond franchise, which as the pioneer of the high-concept mode of filmmaking generally, and the action-adventure franchise as we know it in particular, has been on the cutting edge of movie-making and marketing in the past, remains so--pioneering this particular practice.

"Didn't you just hate that?" they said about the original EON Bond films as they tried selling people on the reboot. No, we didn't all hate it. But that was the line they used in promoting the new Daniel Craig versions, and the claqueurs of the entertainment press helped sustain that narrative.

As it happened Casino Royale ended up a hit. But the response to Quantum of Solace, at least to go by the prevailing narrative, was less ebullient. Meanwhile, with MGM in financial trouble (for the umpteenth time, but not the last), the next film was put on hold as people wondered about the survival of the franchise itself. ("Is James Bond dead?" Entertainment Weekly actually asked.)

The franchise-runners were shaken--while the 50th anniversary of the Bond series was coming up fast. And so they made the most of it, making of Skyfall a 50th anniversary movie in an even bigger way than they made of the Easter egg hunt that was the 40th anniversary movie, Die Another Day. They made a big deal about evocations of Bond's past--shifting away from Bond as practically a dude who came "from the street" to go by what Vesper Lynd said in the 2006 film to making him a Scottish blueblood with baggage about his past, and more baggage from the "family dynamics" of the present. ("This time, it's personal.") They brought back the machine gun-packing Aston Martin from the '60s-era films that one would have previously thought simply did not exist in this timeline. And they had the film run with a latterday version of Q and Moneypenny and even an M who is not Sir Miles Messervy, but is at least Miles Messervy-ish, so that as the film closes the office, at least, looks a little more like the one we remember.

Basically they had gone from "Didn't you just hate that?" to "Didn't you just love that?" And if your answer was "No," their answer was "Shut up, of course you did!"

All this is inconsistent, incoherent, insulting to the intelligence--and therefore, I would think, risky. And even where the audience was accepting of the manipulation I would think such comparative minutiae would, at most, matter more to the hardcore fans of the series, not the broad moviegoing public that watches the movies casually, especially the younger members with less memory of the older films, who probably would not know Geoffrey Keen from Robert Brown from Bernard Lee (especially given how, I think, people actually watch action movies). Still, it got people talking, brought the new film a lot of positive press--and when it hit theaters, for whatever reason (correlation is not causation, but all the same, the correlation is pretty striking), the movie overperformed, and massively. The prior two Bond films had made about $600 million each globally--Skyfall over $1.1 billion, which is to say almost as much as the prior two films combined. Indeed, averaging the grosses of the other three pre-pandemic films, or even those three films with No Time to Die, and getting an average gross for a Bond film of about $900 million (adjusted for April 2023 prices), one sees Skyfall's gross approaching an astonishing $1.5 billion instead--suggestive of an overperformance of 50-70 percent.

Selected James Bond Films, 2006-2021 (Current and Consumer Price Index-Adjusted April 2023 U.S. Dollars, Adjusted Figures in Parentheses)

Casino Royale (2006)--Worldwide--$606 Million ($911 Million); North America-$167 Million ($252 Million)

Quantum of Solace (2008)--Worldwide--$590 Million ($830 Million); North America--$168 Million ($237 Million)

Skyfall (2012)--Worldwide--$1.11 Billion ($1.46 Billion); North America--$304 Million ($402 Million)

Spectre (2015)--Worldwide--$881 Million ($1.13 Billion); North America--$200 Million ($256 Million)

No Time to Die (2021)--Worldwide--$774 Million ($865 Million); North America--$161 Million ($180 Million)

Unsurprisingly the franchise-runners stuck with the nostalgic approach, having 007 (once more) battle Ernst Stavro Blofeld and his SPECTRE organization in the sequel. As the numbers cited above indicate, Spectre was not as successful as Skyfall--but got a boost coming right after that film, and perhaps, from its evocation of 007 Past.

Right now the DCEU seems to be following a similar trajectory. When Warner Bros. put out Man of Steel, and still more, revealed the developing outlines of the DCEU in Superman vs. Batman: Dawn of Justice, there seemed no interest on its part in the earlier incarnations of the characters whatsoever. The whole idea was establishing the new universe, without audiences being distracted, or encouraged to draw comparisons that might be unfavorable, perhaps the more in as they went in a controversy-stoking direction (Ben Affleck is probably no one's favorite Batman--and whatever the claqueurs say a lot of people were probably not thrilled with the fascist wacko incarnation of the character he was given to play that time around); and frankly, because the stakes seemed very high, Warner hoping that this would be its very own equivalent of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Of course, it did not all go as planned, by a long shot, the DCEU never approaching Marvel's fecundity with films, with those films it did get to put out there failing to achieve its billion dollar hit-regularizing success.

Indeed, Warner decided to give these reboots . . . yet another reboot (because studios no longer give up on franchises, or even let them lie fallow, they rush to reboot them because in this day and age nothing is more repugnant to a Hollywood Suit than a New Idea).

Prior to this all becoming official the struggling DCEU Universe's runners, like the runners of the Bond franchise, started seeing nostalgia less as a threat to their new wares and more as a prop to them. Thus did the decision to have Michael Keaton play Bruce Wayne/Batman as part of the last DCEU films, a Skyfall-like evocation of franchise past to aid it in the present. Indeed, such nostalgic evocation seems to be the best thing The Flash has going for it, just as it was the best thing Skyfall had going for it, as the press buzzes over it.

Again, this seems to me something more relevant to fans than the broader audience. It also seems more relevant to American fans than their foreign counterparts--for whom there may be no nostalgia to exploit, with the result that the gesture will fall flat. (Consider how the deeply nostalgia-dependent effort to sell Star Wars in China, which missed out on the original release of the trilogy, fell flat in another reminder of Disney's inability to understand and market its own product--"smartest guys in the room" indeed.) This is all the more the case given that, in contrast with the longstanding, vast, global audience for the Bond films there is probably less nostalgia for anything so specific as, say, the Tim Burton Batman films. Still, this is a possible source of surprises here--and if it (or anything else) ends up working in favor of The Flash becoming a blockbuster, expect the entertainment press to get more bullish still in its predictions about what the movie will make in its opening weekend.

May 27, 2023
Is The Flash Already Looking Like a Flop? (An Update on the Projected Opening Weekend Gross for DCEU's The Flash)
A little over a week ago Boxoffice Pro reported that, based on its tracking, the upcoming DC Extended Universe (DCEU) film The Flash (due out June 16) was headed for a $115-$140 million domestic gross on its opening weekend.

Yesterday, when the publication released its next long-range tracking forecast it appeared the range had been revised downward. The top end of the range has not shifted by much--down only to $135 million--but the forecasters shifted the bottom end of the range downward by a rough quarter ($30 million), to a "mere" $85 million.

The revision predictably extends to the film's overall run, with the bottom end of the range falling from $280 million to $208 million (even as the high end of the range slipped only slightly, from $375 to $362 million).

In short, the floor fell dramatically.

Meanwhile The Hollywood Reporter has reported that the movie could now be expected to take in just $70 million on opening weekend.

This is far from consistent with the media's recent bullishness about the movie--and it would seem to indicate that the press is a lot more excited about the movie than he public is, its breathless hyping of the movie failing to catch on.

Of course, one may imagine that the weak debut will be followed by a positive reaction, and more robust ticket sales, in the following weeks. After all, good holds have partially saved Guardians of the Galaxy 3 from the fate some feared just a little while ago. Still, it is not a good sign, and I find myself looking again at the prediction I made in response to the first Boxoffice Pro projection, suggesting $700-$850 million as the plausible range for the film's global gross. If the movie opens to $70 million, if it does better than that but fails to interest the broader audience that stayed home opening weekend, we might see the movie fall far short of the $200 million Boxoffice Pro over its domestic run. Should the movie, like Aquaman, make 70 percent of its money overseas, that would leave it well short of the $700 million mark, while if it merely matched its domestic take internationally it might even end up under $400 million.

This would mean that the highly touted "best superhero movie ever" (a very, very big claim to make in superhero-saturated 2023) would make Ant-Man 3 look like a winner by comparison.

The result is that the film's trajectory in the weeks ahead will be interesting--though hopefully not more interesting than the movie itself (in which case this movie really will be in trouble).

May 28, 2023
The Flash, The Claqueurs of the Media, and the Audience's Response
The latest reports indicate that, even as the media has turned very bullish on the chances of The Flash at the box office, the evidences of the public's interest in the film remain weak--by summer blockbuster standards, at least. This movie starring a member of the Justice League's old core that is being touted as one of the greatest superhero movies ever--if not the absolute greatest superhero movie ever--may be looking at an opening weekend in the mere $70 million range, just half of what might have been hoped for just a short time earlier.

Why such a disconnect?

One possibility worth considering is that if the last three years have been hard on Marvel, they have been much harder still on Marvel's consistently much less successful rival, the DC Extended Universe, which was in nowhere near so strong a position to endure the disappointment, with their respective positions in the spring of 2023 showing it, when each had a movie out--Ant-Man 3, and Shazam 2. There was much hand-wringing over Ant-Man 3 failing to break the half-billion dollar barrier. By contrast Shazam 2's global take stands at $133 million at last report--the DCEU's flop making less than a third (indeed, not much more than a quarter) what Marvel's apparent disaster did.

I might add that, while Guardians of the Galaxy 3's relatively decent legs have had attitudes toward the film's performance considerably more positive recently, the reality remains a movie that had a weak opening weekend, and will end up with a good deal less money than its predecessors when we think in real terms rather than just inflated dollars--continuing, if in lesser degree than some of its predecessors, the downward trend in the take of Marvel sequels relative to the preceding installments in their series'.

While the DCEU's less prolific character leaves us with less basis for making such judgments, it does not seem unreasonable to think its movies are also suffering in the same way--and that this would not implausibly be more severe in the case of the weaker franchise. Consider the worst installment-to-installment performance the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) has seen in the post-pandemic period--Black Panther 2, which saw its real-terms global box office gross drop by about half as compared with the original (from over $1.6 billion to $859 million in November 2022 dollars). One may add that this at least partly reflected the extremely high domestic gross of 2018's Black Panther ($700 million, it beat out even Avengers 3 because of the unrepeatable event the first movie had been made out to be), and the loss of the star of the first film.

By contrast Shazam 2 fell 70 percent from a much lower height (the original's take about $430 million in early 2023 dollars).

Moreover The Flash has no shortage of headwinds against it even without any such trend as that. Popularity-wise the character is no Batman--and even his movie fell short of $800 million last year (notably, in spite of the media also being bullish on that one). Meanwhile the current Flash movie is, in relation to its associated universe, not part of a build-up to something bigger and better (of the kind that worked so well for Marvel up through Phase Three), but the equivalent of a previously unaired episode of a canceled TV show being "burned off." In contrast with the usual expectations the star is not out promoting the film (we are actually hearing from Michael Shannon instead, to go by what I have seen in the press), diminishing that boost, precisely because Ezra Miller's profile is these days rather low in light of personal scandal (itself, perhaps, off-putting to audiences).

It may also the case that the DCEU's playing the "nostalgia card" is unlikely to work so well as the franchise-runners think. (What worked for James Bond will not necessarily work here--any more than the DCEU was able to replicate the MCU's success.)

Does that entirely rule out the movie's making $850 million as I recently thought not entirely outside the realm of the possible? No. But I find myself thinking a good deal more about the floor on the film's gross, which seems to me to be falling, and hard. Yesterday I speculated about a scenario in which (assuming the $70 million opening, ordinary legs, and not much more interest abroad than domestically) the movie ends up with under $400 million--or as little as $350 million. Right now the movie's doing no better than that would not be a very great shock--while even a good deal better than that would seem to me to still be a reminder that, indispensable as the claqueurs of the media may (sadly) be in what one might call the "theater of theater" for making a movie a hit, their powers have limits. And those limits may be far short of what is needed to get moviegoers excited enough about the movie DCEU will have coming to a theater near you in June to make it the first-rank hit the studio so clearly needs.

June 2, 2023
The Prospects of The Flash Get Grimmer . . . Again
Last week we heard a great deal about how Boxoffice Pro's forecasts for The Flash (and Elemental) underwent some downgrading.

After that--and with the disappointing prediction for Indiana Jones (a Solo-like performance is well within the range of their expectations) one could easily miss that they revised the film's prospects again, and not upwards. Where last week the "floor" for the film's projected performance of The Flash dropped significantly, now the same has happened with the ceiling too, this falling from $362 million last week to $308 million now--continued erosion amounting to a near one-fifth drop in the two weeks since the first ($375 million) forecast.

The movie's prospects could recover in the next two weeks--though I do not see how. By contrast I can very easily picture interest in the movie continuing to erode, in the process turning the highly touted "best superhero film ever made" into another failure, and reminding us all that Disney's executives have no monopoly on whatever fashionable corporate buzzword refers to the "skill set" of making for financially ruinous flops.

June 9, 2023
The Flash: One Week to Go Before it Hits Theaters--as its Box Office Gross Forecast Keeps on Falling
Not too long ago the hype for The Flash was extreme in what was truly a grand display of the operation of the entertainment press in full claqueur mode.

One may have wondered, however, whether the public was actually responding to all of the claquing on the movie's behalf.

The early box office tracking suggested that they did not. Still, the $280-$375 million Boxoffice Pro predicted as the film's final gross back in the middle of May, while not earth-shattering, at least looked respectable by the standards of a DC Extended Universe (DCEU) "burning off its final episodes."

And things could get better. After all, the critics might get behind the film, and help push it back on the road to box office glory.

Alas, things didn't get better, the projection slipping pretty quickly in the following weeks, and, in contrast with what might have been expected from the breathless hype of earlier, the critics not coming to the movie's rescue. Getting their say in recent days the Rotten Tomatoes score for the film stands at 72 percent--not exactly an overwhelming vote of confidence from those folks paid to "rate movies from good to excellent," with "good" what the critics rate movies when they don't like them.

Perhaps unsurprisingly the Boxoffice Pro forecast made one week before the film's release, with the range of the film's overall run now down to $176-$282 million, works out to the floor and ceiling for the film's run in North America alone having fallen by $100 million in a mere three weeks, over a quarter of the take discussed just three weeks ago that some already regarded as a disappointment.

Putting this into terms of other movies, the film's doing well would, far from making it the crowning glory of the DCEU and the Epoch of Superhero Films in which we live that the hype promised, have it doing just a little bit better than Ant-Man 2 (about $260 million in April 2023 dollars), while at the low end its backers would be left wishing it only did as well as Ant-Man 3 (its $214 million standing about a fifth higher than the floor now predicted for the movie).

Going by what is said about the film itself, rather than the tracking data, I expect that the movie will find a fan base--relatively hardcore superhero movie fans responsive to the "trippy" premise, the brisk and action-packed narrative, the nostalgic button-pushing. But the general audience will be less impressed, finding it to be rather than the greatest of superhero films, at best an interesting one, or just passable, or maybe annoying and wearying, as the case might be--the kind of situation that leaves a movie a commercial disappointment, even as it, perhaps, wins a cult following over time.

June 14, 2023
The Flash: Reassessing the Box Office Predictions
Back in May Boxoffice Pro predicted an opening weekend for The Flash in the $115-$140 million range.

After all the hype about the movie's being the greatest superhero film ever people said "That's it? A measly $140 million is the best it can do?" (The figure, after all, would land it only the 35th place on the "All Time Biggest" list--and this even before we consider inflation.)

As if that were not bad enough afterwards the figure kept falling. And hard. Just last week Boxoffice Pro predicted an opening for The Flash in the $72-$105 million range--which meant that the "floor" anticipated for the film's debut back in May was higher than the new "ceiling" as its release approached.

Now the floor has fallen again as even the already much-lowered ceiling has receded out of sight. Boxoffice Pro's prediction for the film's opening weekend is not $105 million, or the circa $90 million that would have been the middle of last week's predicted range, or even the $72 million that looked like a "worst-case" scenario, but $69 million--not much better than half of what was thought possible less than four weeks ago.

It seems worth spelling out the (for the producers) disquieting implications. Specifically, even with fairly good legs the film, following such a debut, could easily fall short of the $200 million mark domestically that Guardians of the Galaxy 3 and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse each blew past in their first ten days--and strong legs are by no means guaranteed here, with something in the $170-$185 million or so range easier to foresee going by Boxoffice Pro's apparent "multipliers." (Indeed, should the response to the film look like Ant-Man 3's--or even that of the last DC superhero film, Shazam 2--$150 million might be beyond its reach.)

Consider, too, the global prospects for the film. DC's larger films have tended to make 50 to 70 percent of their money abroad, which would translate to $700 million looking as high as it will go, and a lower gross much more likely--especially when we remember that the high end of that range was mainly a product of Aquaman doing very, very well in China.* The Flash movie will have a China release, but there was never any guarantee that The Flash would go above and beyond the way Aquaman did (indeed, the nostalgia that is such a big selling point for the movie seems a much weaker draw there than Aquaman's lavish undersea world), while Hollywood movies are simply picking up less in that market these days. (Indeed, Ant-Man 3's box office numbers would not have been nearly so bad were it not for an especially severe shortfall at the Chinese box office.) Therefore 60 percent seems a more plausible high.

Should the movie make $200 million domestically and 60 percent of its money abroad it would end up with a half billion dollar take. Should it make more like $170 million domestically, and just match that abroad, it could end up south of $350 million global--about what the first Shazam movie made at pre-pandemic prices. The result is that, building in a decent (+/- $50 million) margin of error I am thinking of $300-$550 million as the plausible range for the film's performance. By contrast the $700-$850 million I was prepared to consider a month ago on the basis of prior DC films and the stronger numbers then provided would seem to require a good part of the public to decide the film really is "the greatest superhero film of all time" and make it a Top Gun 2-like phenomenon.

I don't think very many people are holding their breaths for that now.

* With $210 million in the till due to a tripling of the opening weekend's gross, and 70 percent made abroad, one gets $490 million internationally, for a global total of $700 million.

June 18, 2023
The Flash's Opening Weekend Box Office Gross: How Did it Do?
In its first three days in domestic release The Flash has taken in $55 million.

Considering this, remember that Boxoffice Pro's projection just this past week was that it would make $69 million--almost a quarter more than what it actually did make--and that the $69 million figure was way down from its initial projection of $115-$140 million a month ago, which was itself received as a significant disappointment in the wake of some very loud claquing on the film's behalf, given that more than that had been expected.

So basically the movie's gross was less than half of what was projected in a worst-case scenario a month ago that was considered a major letdown.

Consider also what this means. Simply to get up to the $300 million mark the movie would need the legs of a Top Gun 2--which are probably not to be had by any movie this summer given the season's sheer crowdedness. Even with decent legs it might not break $150 million.

The film pulled in a little more abroad, it seems, with the domestic/international gross at the end of the Friday-to-Sunday period expected to be along the lines of 46/54 percent going by Box Office Mojo's data. Still, where even restrained, pre-claquing expectations had projected some $700 million for the film at the global box office (a figure I thought plausible enough) the movie's making so much as $400 million looks a long way off.

The result is that what was touted as the "greatest superhero film ever made" makes Ant-Man 3 look like a hit by comparison. (That one made almost $215 million domestic, and $476 million global.)

All this being the case I would say that I expect The Flash to be prominent in Deadline's list of the year's biggest "box office bombs"--but, alas, know it will have a lot of competition. There is Indiana Jones 5, which seems to be on track to be another Solo--or worse. And, later this year, there is the bad buzz-plagued conclusion to this phase in the DCEU's existence, Aquaman 2 which seems unlikely to benefit from the preceding DCEU film failing so badly. Indeed, this is shaping up to be one exceptional year for megaflops--so much so that by year's end we may, with this coming on top of Hollywood's other troubles, see its commitment to its current way of doing things more sorely tested than at any time since the New Hollywood era.

June 28, 2023
The Flash's Second Weekend Box Office Gross: Worse Than Ant-Man 3, Again
The opening weekend gross of the much-hyped DCEU film The Flash is a now notorious disappointment. Where a month earlier the projection that it would make no more than a "mere" $140 million in its opening weekend was received with dismay it actually picked up just $55 million in its first three days in release--just two-fifths of that "disappointing" figure.

Meanwhile it seems there were few expectations that the film would prove to have the kind of legs that would ameliorate the disappointment. Before the weekend Boxoffice Pro projected the film's seeing a severe 69 percent weekend-to-weekend drop. The reality was actually worse--73 percent, which left the film with a mere $15 million added and $87.5 million grossed overall (as against the $90 million+ Boxoffice Pro expected).

By contrast Ant-Man 3, which had a $106 million take in its first three days, saw a drop of just 70 percent (leaving it with $32 million added in the second weekend for a total of $167 million). The result is that The Flash not only opened with about half of what Ant-Man 3 did, but is also fading faster. Given that Ant-Man 3 did not do much more than double its opening weekend take over the course of its run (finishing up with $214.5 million), The Flash may be thought likely to do no better. The result would be the film's finishing with not just under $150 million over the entire run, but perhaps even under $110 million--less than what Ant-Man 3 made over the long holiday weekend of its release, and what, in view of the hype about The Flash, would have been regarded as, again, a disappointing opening weekend (never mind overall run). Meanwhile there is little sign of extraordinary success for the film in the international market. Thus far the film, which came out or had come out in all the major overseas markets (the big Asian and European markets--China, Japan, South Korea, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, etc.) by the week that it did in the U.S., has made 58.5 percent of its income abroad (taking in $123 million internationally). Should that remain the case with the movie having pulled in $110 million domestically, not just the $400 million mark, but even the $300 million mark, will be beyond it. The result is that the movie, which has for weeks seemed likely to lose money for its studio, is likely to leave that much bigger a hole in their books--quite plausibly in the vicinity of $150 million or more even after taking in revenue from video, TV, streaming to go by the pattern seen in recent years.**

* Ant-Man 3's $167 million after ten days worked out to 78 percent of its total gross. Should The Flash (which, again, is fading faster) do no better, it will have $112 million at the end of its run.
** Assume, given the reported $200 million budget, final outlays of $400-$600 million on production, distribution and promotion. With $270 million grossed globally and rentals equal to half of that the movie would end up with $130 million or so banked, while perhaps matching this from the other, later revenue streams--working out to $250 million taken in a pessimistic scenario, against the bigger outlays.

July 2, 2023
How Much Money Will The Flash Lose?
In a little over a month the media has gone from claquing for The Flash as the "greatest superhero movie ever" to accepting that it is a flop of historic proportions (reflected in its, in its third weekend, having just $99 million collected in North America, less than might have been hoped for in its first two days of release).

Now the question seems to be just how much money will be lost on this proposition.

Well, the formula is familiar enough.

Consider the reported budget--something on the order of $200 million. Double and triple that to get the range of the final bill for production, distribution, promotion.

You get $400 million to $600 million this way.

Now consider what the film seems likely to make at the box office. The prospect of $400 million seems to be receding in the distance, even $300 million. I personally can see it (given its possibly finishing around $110 million domestically and the current 40/60 domestic/international split) topping out somewhere around $275 million. Assume a fairly typical 48 percent goes in the till and you have $130 million or so in worldwide theatrical rentals.

Now what about home entertainment, etc.?

Big movies usually make somewhat less here than they do from theatrical revenues. Even 90 percent (which would work out to just under $120 million) is high. But given how poorly this one did at the box office it may make relatively more than usual there. Assume that it matches its theatrical take from those other sources. Or even does better--that it betters that by 50 percent (the way some small movies do).

You end up with maybe $250 million, at best something in the neighborhood of $300 million.

Against that you have the outlay of $400 million+ (and maybe much more).

The result is that even if the movie is a spectacular home entertainment performer (relative to its theatrical income) it will work out to a nine figure loss for the studio--$100 million, maybe $200 million. I would not even be shocked by a $300 million loss on this one movie.

This would guarantee it the top spot in Deadline's "biggest box office bombs" competition in just about any year but this one.

September 25, 2023
The Flash's Rotten Tomatoes Scores
In a year in which big-budget franchise action films kept crashing and burning the flopping of The Flash still stands out as an extreme case. The movie made a mere $108 million in its entire North American run (when for such a highly anticipated movie $108 million would have been regarded as a disappointing opening weekend), and not much more overseas--a mere $160 million that left it with just under $269 million in total. Especially given the film's hefty price tag--which in yet another revelation of a major film's budget being considerably larger than was originally announced, seems to have been in the $300 million range--the loss to the studio may end up in the range of several hundred million.

Interestingly, this was in spite of the film apparently not being hated. The critics' score was 63 percent, the audience score 83 percent--not spectacular, but other films with much, much worse have done much, much better, and there is room to think that the scores would have been higher had it not been for the unhinged overhyping of the movie as the greatest superhero film ever made at a moment when the standard is extremely high, the audience showing signs of becoming jaded. (Indeed, I think there is still room for the movie, given its oddities, to become a cult success.)

All of that seems to underline just how much the film market may be changing--and, much as they are evidently resisting it, forcing change on the Hollywood system of a kind not seen in a half century.

September 25, 2023
"How Much Money Did The Flash Lose?" Again (The Budget Was Even Bigger Than We Heard)
These days we seem to be constantly hearing that some big-budget movie actually cost a lot more than was reported. Most of the stories I am aware of have had to do with the Marvel Cinematic Universe but this seems to have happened with The Flash as well--the circa $200 million movie actually a $300 million movie.

Given that production budgets tend to represent one-half to one-third of a studio's outlay on a big movie (there are also distribution, promotion, participations and residuals, interest) one may guess from this a total outlay on the movie of $600-$900 million.

As it happened the movie grossed about $269 million worldwide, which one might guess worked out to not much more than $130 million in theatrical rentals. It tends to be the case that big movies like these make the equivalent of two-thirds of their rentals from those post-theatrical distribution methods, like streaming and TV, but given how weak the theatrical gross was this time one could picture the movie making relatively more. So I could see the movie making $250 million when those proceeds are in--while if the theatrical flop becomes a surprise hit here, we might think $300 million.

$600 million in expenses minus $300 million in revenues is . . . still a loss of $300 million.

And $900 million minus $300 million is . . .

Well, you get the picture. Basically, this movie might, even with those later revenues counted in, easily put a $300 million hole in its backer's budgets, and possibly much more--a half billion or more not out of the question. Such is the insane gamble that a film like this has become these days . . . and time and again this year the studios are losing. Still, to go by the remarks of David Zaslav, who--in a display of the surreal disconnect between what studio executives "think" and what EVERYONE ELSE ON EARTH think, claimed that Warner Bros. franchises like the world of DC Comics, Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings are "underused"--I do not see the studios changing course very readily.

May 11, 2024
Is The Flash Really the Biggest Box Office Flop of 2023?
Previously considering the numbers Deadline presented in the course of its "Most Valuable Blockbusters" tournament I mentioned that I was surprised that the figures for the film that was ranked the biggest money-loser of the year, Captain Marvel 2 (aka The Marvels), did not include the reported subsidy that cut the net production cost from $270 million+ to $220 million.

I also noticed that the budget for The Flash last year was reported as over $200 million, and then $300 million later, in a tone of scandal.

Had Deadline gone with the net production cost of $220 million for Captain Marvel 2 they would have shaved $50 million off the loss--and had they gone with the $300 million figure for The Flash's production budget they would have added an extra $100 million to its loss. The result of these two changes would have been to lower the loss on Captain Marvel 2 from $237 million to $187 million--and raise the loss on The Flash from $155 million to $255 million. The number would still be terrible for Captain Marvel 2, but even worse than it is now for The Flash, with the result the two movies still being at the top of the "biggest" flops list, but switching places to make The Flash #1 in this unenviable category (all as a fuller accounting could easily translate to an even worse picture for The Flash).

May 11, 2024
How Much Money Did The Flash Really Lose?
Back in June 2023 when the promised "greatest superhero movie ever!" instead crashed and burned at the box office, the reports were that the lousy gross for The Flash meant the movie possibly losing the studio $200 million.

However, that was back when people thought the production budget was in the vicinity of $200 million. A little while later we were told that it was $300 million--implying the possibility of much more than $200 million being lost.

Yet, even as the budget appeared larger than first reported, Deadline reported a mere $155 million studio loss on the film during its "Most Valuable Blockbusters" tournament.

Odd, isn't it?

Well, when you take a closer look at the numbers you see that Deadline went with the $200 million production budget figure, not what we heard later.

At the same time, where in June we heard the marketing campaign was running $150 million, Deadline claims just $120 million were spent on prints and ads.

All of this allows the number to make sense--all as one could find still more room for it to do so if these were gross rather than net figures (if subsidies and the like offered offsets to the numbers then being thrown about).

However, if we go with those higher numbers things move in the other direction. A $300 million production budget, a $150 million marketing campaign, work out to an addition of $130 million+ in extra expenses. Tacked onto the $155 million loss Deadline reported, in fact, the loss nearly doubles, approaching $300 million.

It may well be that the lower numbers Deadline used are the correct ones. Still, given what we previously heard, doubt seems far from implausible here--and I would not be shocked by later revelations calling the Deadline numbers into question.

January 25, 2025
Andy Muschietti Gets in his Two Cents on The Flash's Failure
Apparently the press is still talking about the colossal failure of Andy Muschietti's DC superhero film The Flash.

The director of the movie, explaining the matter in Hollywood insider terms in a story from Variety, talked about The Flash not being the "four quadrant movie" that supposedly any movie financed at that level has to be in order to turn a profit.

Getting a little more substantive than this tossing about of buzzwords he remarked "that a lot of people just don’t care about the Flash as a character."

Of course, anyone could have told Mr. Muschietti that--and indeed, before the breathless hyping of the movie as "the greatest superhero movie ever made" completely confused things back in the spring of 2023 the more astute box office analysts had less buoyant expectations for the film than they would have for, for example, a Batman or Superman film. (Thus did the comparatively optimistic folks at Screen Rant who thought Ant-Man 3 would be a billion-dollar hit, Guardians of the Galaxy do better and The Marvels fall just short of a billion expected just $700 million for The Flash.)

However, this mattered the more for a host of reasons Mr. Muschietti did not raise. Yes, there is the "Ezra Miller problem," and yes, there is the way the "greatest superhero movie ever made" hype probably backfired, but there are also the more structural matters--not least the audience's longtime lukewarmness toward the DC Extended Universe, all as The Flash had the misfortune of hitting theaters in a much tighter market than before (again, moviegoing down by a third relative to the pre-pandemic period) in which even more promising material was underperforming badly (as those three Marvel Cinematic Universe films did relative to the expectations for them), with the reality of superhero fatigue not helping.

Of course, just as Mr. Muschietti did not raise these aspects of the issue, neither did the writers at Variety, nor those other media outlets retailing the remarks--who as courtiers to the industry's kings cannot be expected to be very attentive to these inconvenient facts.

The Media's Insistence on the U.S. Presidential Election of 2024 as a Turning Point in the Culture War

The election of November 2024 saw Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump beat Democratic Party candidate Kamala Harris with a 49.8 percent share of the vote to her 48.3 percent according to the official final count from the Federal Election Commission, a mere 1.5 percent margin of victory. If a shock to many it was not a landslide by any means--with all that implies about reading into it some tectonic shift in American electoral politics, or even reason to rethink what is really salable to the broad public (for instance, as compared with New Deal standard-bearer Lyndon Johnson's 61 to 39 percent margin of victory over far-right candidate Barry Goldwater back in 1964). This is all the more the case in that the election was in many respects unusual, with the Democratic Party, on top of facing an anti-incumbent mood inflamed by outrage over the exacerbation of working people's long-worsening troubles by the post-pandemic surge of inflation, coping with a switch of candidates late in the race without the sanction of a proper primary process that put on the ticket a candidate little-known and of uncertain salability to voters in blatantly undemocratic fashion; the comparatively bungled handling of the belatedly and hastily organized campaign that followed; and the candidate and the party's refusal to break with the Democratic Party's decades-long display of utter contempt for the working-class voters without which it does not win elections; which all went together to make 2024 a "greatest hits" edition of the campaign failures of the Democratic Party (and even the Republican Party) from the preceding half century.

However, if Trump enjoyed a narrow win over an exceptionally vulnerable opponent, and the margin of victory almost certainly a matter of material discontents, in the wake of the election the media was and remains insistent that the election was decided on the basis of "the culture war," and indeed marks an historic turning point in them in favor of the right.

Why is that?

Alas, this question, if not asked nearly enough, is easily enough answered. After all, the media gravitates toward politics just as much as it gravitates away from policy, is utterly obsessed with personalities and campaign horse race stupidity, fixated on the very short term as against a long that is beyond its feeble faculties, and in line with its centrism makes a fetish of "consensus," holding that everything which happens in the political arena must somehow represent the generality of opinion, if only in a lowest common denominator fashion, with all that means for its reading of elections. At the same time the "political class," the media included, has devoted itself to playing up the culture wars, consistently exaggerating their importance decade in, decade out down to its recent inversion of the mantra of '92 that "It's the Economy, Stupid" to the point of making "It's Not the Economy, Stupid" a cliché of its reporting on the election of '24--not simply because of its prejudices that have it more comfortable considering politics from the standpoint of culture rather than class, but its cynical eagerness to divert attention from such matters as the economy or foreign policy and the combination of elite agreement and public discontent with them, the more in as such discontents may be harder to ignore. Indeed, the "It's Not the Economy, Stupid" idiocies went hand in hand with their telling the public that their hardships are "all in your mind," simple-minded or irrational reactions to price increases, or manipulation by purveyors of "fake news." At the same time there is perhaps no issue where a supposedly "both sides"-minded media is more likely to "one side" the matter in practice than foreign policy, and especially war, such that any discontents here among the public at large were even less likely to be acknowledged as a factor in the outcome. Having eliminated the other explanations, the victory of Trump thus seemed like it could be the triumph of the culture war right, while it did not hurt this tendency at all that claiming such a shift in sentiment among the public goes along nicely with the mainstream media's own shift in such a direction. In line with the evolution of the centrism toward which it inclines into its present embrace of neoliberal-neoconservative politics, the culture wars were really the sole point of dissonance between itself and the avowed right, and even that difference, always less substantial than it was made out to be, is now disappearing as, like so many other pretenses of another era, it falls away.

What a War Economy Really Means for Those Living in It

While the online world is a cesspool of contrarianism at its most vile and stupid I suspect comparatively few who are not stupidly and loathsomely trolling the speaker would flatly deny the dangers, and wrongs, of romanticizing war.

This is not only the case with regard to the hard reality of physical destruction of bodies and minds and property, and the moral effects of organized violence for those who participate in it or otherwise suffer it personally, but what war means for people far removed from the scene of the overt, direct, violence, like those on the "home front"--even in a supposedly "good" war. Yes, a war economy has many a time meant the end of unemployment--but it also meant a combination of higher demand for production with eagerness to keep the demand for labor in check, inflation as governments show less concern for holding down prices than they do for holding down wages, wartime taxes that tend to weigh much more heavily on workers rather than bosses, "moral suasion" to buy war bonds, and much, much else, translating to longer hours at higher and more dangerous work intensity under more severe discipline and often outright state compulsion in return for lower real in-their-pockets wages, all as "production for the front" meant there was less for workers to buy with what money they did have. All of this went hand in hand with their experiencing the alienation of having the labor organizations supposed to represent them in at a minimum their struggle for better pay and conditions, etc. turned into another instrument of the bosses for disciplining them in line with the program delineated from above (not least, with the threat of yanking them out of the job and sending them to the front along with the goods they were making or paying for), the more thoroughly in as what civil liberties had ever been allowed them were in abeyance--the right to strike, even the right to speak, taken away as they were not just gulled but shamed and bullied by those who browbeat them with a thousand-times-outworn "Don't you know there's a war on?" clichés of "sacrifice." Never mind that "making a sacrifice" means being subject not object, and choosing to give up what one has, while here others who do not speak for them are in fact making the decisions to take--by and large, take what little the have-nots have (given that not only must one give what is one's own for one to speak of sacrificing it, but one must also regard it as of value, this, again, no sacrifice given their lack of regard for the poorer members of the community), as they pretend the process is ennobling and any reluctance about it ignoble on the part of people who have "had it too good for too long" and selfishly "forgotten what really matters in life"--in contrast with the haves who get coddled, their right to reap colossal war profits and enjoy all the comforts of prosperity in peace treated as sacrosanct, with all this extending to an indulgent attitude toward outright criminality on their part ("Prosecute them? But Don't you know there's a war on?").

Naturally those in power find much to like about the war economy, whereas the population at large tends to have a rather different experience of the phenomenon. The disparity puts me in mind of George Orwell, an author who got a lot wrong (I have always found his anti-intellectualism lazy and cheap, long wondered if as toward the end he cowered before the irrational he was not losing his grip, and seen it as evidence of his failings that it is the enemies of what he professed to stand for who have been so successful in wielding his name and his writing as a club against what he did stand for) but also got some very important things right, not least that all through history War has been " waged by the ruling group against its own subjects" first and foremost "to keep the very structure of society intact," such that "continuous" War is an end in itself--and any intelligent person expect that even the most just and necessary War that ever was or ever could be will, in anything remotely resembling civilization as we have hitherto known it, become something far less noble in purpose sooner than later, the more in as the people wax in vigilance of those menaces to freedom of which Orwell, even nearing the end, remained thoroughly alert, so much so that many of those who would rush to claim him for their side in political argument ought to be very wary indeed of referring the public to what he actually wrote, rather than what they illiterately fancy he did.