>While BLACK ADAM crossed the $150 million domestic and $350 million global milestones this weekend, that’s not going to be enough to turn a profit on a $195 million blockbuster that was accompanied by an expensive global marketing campaign. Even if the film somehow inched its way to the $400 million worldwide mark, BLACK ADAM will fail to get out of the red.
>The sequel, at least at a $200 million budget, is far less likely to happen now due to the movie's disappointing performance, especially considering how Warner Bros. has been cutting costs left and right following its merger with Discovery. While DC Studios bosses James Gunn and Peter Safran will probably keep Black Adam in the DCU, greenlighting another $200 million sequel with results like these is completely off the table.
https://www.thewrap.com/black-adam-box-office-doomed/
Can anyone give an explanation about global marketing campaigns? Can't they just use their official social media to cut half of it?
The conventional wisdom is that a movie's box office haul needs to double its production budget in order to simply break even. Only after that does it start to actually turn a profit*
Furthermore, this was a big budget tentpole movie starring Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. Simply breaking even is not good enough. If WB does greenlight a sequel it will mean them basically admitting that they have no more cards left to play and are willing to take the L to keep Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson in their corner because they have no other ideas going forward.
*("Hollywood Accounting" is notoriously full of bullshit to the point that there are entire law firms that do nothing but argue over the studio shenanigans but this serves well enough as a general rule)
The 'conventional wisdom' is based on needing to pay off three things
1. the production budget - this is the amount spent to produce the film, including all cast salaries (except when people are on a percentage of the gross, which is common for stars, which further hits the profitability of the film)
2. the marketing budget - this is the amount spent to market the film, including all the ad campaigns, the people who created those campaigns, pushed them (including on socials etc), the trailers (studios sometimes believe they can save money doing trailers in-house, and it is rarely true - cutting a good trailer is a specific skill that most editors don't have)
3. the distribution cost - this is usually eyeballed as around 50% of the gross; it is that high because movie theaters usually stand empty but still need to be paid for by their owners even when they are empty; from ground rent to utilities to staff to maintenance and upgrades, it all has to be paid for somehow, so the distribution companies (who manage the actual sending of movies to theaters as well as arranging the best deals and getting theater chains to take on movies they don't think will be popular, among other stuff) and the theaters take about half the gross ticket price between them. A movie theater over any good month is maybe 10% occupancy during open hours, on average.
Some of it is negotiable - you can make a movie that looks very like a movie that cost $50m more for $125m-$150m if you have the right people; you can make a movie cheaper if you think a smaller star can carry it, you can get a better rate from distribution if your movie is likely to not just open well but pack them in for weeks, you get a worse rate if your movie stinks before it's even released. But it all has to be paid for somehow.
So if you overspend and under-perform, you sink fast. "Hollywood Accounting" also exists but is a whole other thing. This is just business.
very good explanation anon, thanks.
why can't streaming make up the difference?
Having one movie on streaming doesn't make that much of a difference now that HBO Max is established
Good. Movie didn't need to be that ass
Doesn’t help that it was banned in China.
China has been under double-secret Covid lockdown for a while now, not to mention Xi is in full Anti-West mode. It was never going to make bank in China. The Batman DID open in China and made peanuts.
>China has been under double-secret Covid lockdown for a while now
Wht they know that we don't?
Their vaccine is basically water. And even if they were willing to pay out the arse for a real vaccine, nobody has that kind of production capability to supply all of China.
What's the gameplan here? When will they hard reboot? When Aquaman 2 bombs?
it's too late. People are already over superhero films, and by the time they could get a good version of DC going, nobody is going to care any more
They will slightly reset things with The Flash. Then if things still aren’t good, probably reset things with Infinite Crisis on Infinite Earths.
That's implying Flash ever comes out. Furthermore, I'm fricking offended that our first ever Flash movie only serves as a damn reset button
Flash cost 200 mil, it's coming out unless Ezra literally rapes or murders someone on video. Which might happen, but anything short of that it's coming out.
50/50 I would think.
I'm expecting direct to stream quiet mess like New Mutants was after Disney bought FOX. WB clearly wants to distance themselves from Ezra due to his behavior, and the actor has alienated most of social media with bad optics. In any case its not going to make a profit.
They're more likely to just soft-reboot like with Suicide Squad
Do they even have the money to finish production/market more of these? Batgirl never got post-production monies, Black Adam is losing them money, anyone who can look at the Shazam 2 trailer and believe THAT is going to make bank is insane.
I'm still fricking pissed about Shazam 2. First movie was solid, and had a great stinger. Now we're denied Mister Mind and the Monster Society of Evil.
Not sure if general audiences would have bought Mr. Mind....but it would have been a risk worth taking. The preview of what they DID make looks dire.
Tbf I thought the same when Shazam's first teaser came out but the actual movie turned out decent.
Yes, but the trailer for Shazam is part of what killed it. It seemed like it was selling itself as a genre parody.
Let me paint you a picture.
>Mister Mind hitches a ride inside Doctor Sivana and tasks him to find an ancient spellbook.
>They get it, and break down the barriers between magic worlds
>Form Monster Society of Evil
>Shit is going crazy in each realm
>Billy takes his foster parents to the Rock of Eternity to keep them safe until shit is under control
>Turns out Mister Mind hijacked one of his folks at one point, and wanted to get to the Rock of Eternity for the endgame
>Using each of the monster members to complete a grand spell, Mister Mind feeds off the Rock of Eternity's magic
>Get giant Mister Mind with godlike powers fricking up Earth
I don't care for Johns' Shazam family
I don't care for "Magic Luthor" Sivana
I'm not a big fan of dorky Shazam.
I mentioned none of those things....
I'm not going to be enthusiastic about MORE Magic Luthor right away, a Superman movie can barely be made without Luthor as it is.
And I just don't care for the overall irreverent tone of Johns'-derived Shazam.
Sorry. You pretty well lost me with "ride inside Doctor Sivana".
>You pretty well lost me with "ride inside Doctor Sivana".
Because that's how fricking Shazam 1 ends, teaming up with Sivana. Furthermore, Sivana doesn't have magic powers anymore, so we'd be getting more science shit
They already finished the movie, and it looks terrible. It does not look to reach Shazam/Black Adam box office, and it looks considerably more expensive.
And Eminem? Really?
>They already finished the movie, and it looks terrible.
No shit Sherlock, I we were talking about the sequel with Mister Mind that won't ever happen. We know the sequel coming out looks awful. Did you just lose track of the conversation?
Weirdly even normies were hyped for Mr. Mind
I'm sure Sandberg is saving him for the third film
No it won't. Batgirl was direct to streaming and they destroyed it. Flash is theaters or nothing.
You have to take into account there's still Anons who think the lead actor kidnapped a bunch of orphans or whatever Rolling Stone said.
Ezra is a huge schizo butthole but what he actually did was so overblown it's kind of unprecedented. The actor for Homelander disfigured another guy with a piece of glass at a bar and that somehow got less attention on social media than what Ezra did which amounted to a bunch of he said, she said mentally ill behavior but nothing overtly malicious
It's gonna be pretty easy for WB to clear up since only the burglary has actual legal backing and even that will most likely get tried down to a misdemeanor given the circumstances
Not defending the gay btw, just kind of shocked how a bunch of entertainment trades were able to manipulate people online so easily without actual evidence behind the headlines.
>Defend actor against exaggerated accusations by leveling exaggerated accusations against a different actor
Bold move, let's see if it pays off for you.
It's not accusations when there was pictures and a 12 month prison sentence Anon.
If a slash on the forehead (for which he was actually punished, it seems) is a disfigurement, then Ezra manhandling women and stealing booze is qualified assault and burglary.
>Ezra is a huge schizo butthole but what he actually did was so overblown it's kind of unprecedented. The actor for Homelander disfigured another guy with a piece of glass at a bar and that somehow got less attention on social media than what Ezra did which amounted to a bunch of he said,
Because Ezra did way more. He got arrested twice, a burglary charge, had multiple restraining orders and accusations against him in less than 3 months and Ezra didn’t even deny any of it.
>It's gonna be pretty easy for WB to clear up since only the burglary has actual legal backing and even that will most likely get tried down to a misdemeanor given the circumstances
Doesn’t matter. They’ll kick his ass to the curb after Flash comes out.
>Not defending the gay btw
Yes you are. Don’t try to hide Ezragay
So? No arrest led to a guilty conviction because of circumstances, the restraining orders were thrown out in court because they were baseless, and all the "accusations" were insane shit about running a cult out of an AirBNB or whatever the frick.
Listen think whatever you want, but you're delusional if you think the media didn't play all that stuff up for outrage clicks. And that Miller's situation has way more nuance and context that is missing and that there was uncontrollable factors trying to leverage or spin the situation.
Like I said, it's unprecedented and all the stories have tons of holes that can be filled in to assuage people who are upset on social media.
It's insane how this happened so long ago and people are still seething about it because MSM didn't bother to update the public on any of the cases.
By the way, where in the statement WBD/Miller gave is a confession to anything other than erratic behavior and mental illness, which again is what obviously occurred?
Not denying something doesn't mean it happened, someone who is quick to deny everything strikes me as more guilty than someone who has reality on their side and is therefore more afforded the luxury of staying quiet.
Right now there’s a lot of tension between sunk cost and the law of diminishing returns.
If enough stuff flops, they may just wash their hands of it all completely, and cancel remaining unreleased projects like Flash
How about resetting things with a press release saying they won't move forward with the DCEU continuity and the next project will be its own thing instead of making a whole-ass expensive blockbuster to justify something that's almost 10 years past due?
gameplan?
Do they really need a Black Adam sequel? He could appear in any team movie or the Shazam series.
Rock considers himself too big for Shazam. He wants to fight Superman.
Too bad, Black Adam fights Shazam.
If he fights Supes, it's an event comic and not for long.
>If he fights Supes, it's an event comic
Superman fought a guy on his level with electric powers before. It was Superman IV. Black Adam may as well be Nuclear man with how many normies give a shit j
Wanting Black Adam to fight Superman doesn't mean he hates Shazam. He just rightfully recognizes that movie Shazam is lame as frick.
Too bad for him, Black Adam is Shazam's archnemesis/rival. Should have picked Braniac if he wanted to go up against Superman.
He could have been a fine Kalibak, I think Mongul would be a bit of an ask though, given his limited talents in acting.
He really should have played a one-off kinda role.
Black Adam is somewhat relevant to the overarching DC universe, so hiring one of the most expensive, overrated and hard to work with actors to play as him, was a really bad move from Warner.
>hard to work with
The Rock is notoriously one of the nicest actors to work with, though.
To work as an actor with yes, he has insane demands that drag movies down though
> He just rightfully recognizes that movie Shazam is lame as frick.
And yet Shazam was better than Black Adam. Was even praised by critics.
>Was even praised by critics.
Not that I disagree that Shazam! was better than Black Adam (though personally I really enjoyed both), but you can't trust the critics on Black Adam, they've had their minds warped by the MCU.
>Marvel bought the critics
I think it's less that Marvel bought the critics, and more that Marvel films used to be really good, and they were praised, and all the critics got used to the idea that MCU=quality, and then the quality has been slowly degrading over the years and the critics haven't noticed because they've been slow boiled like frogs. So now if a superhero film does fit the MCU mould (tons of shitty CGI, constant quippy dialogue under-mining every scene, and so woke it has insomnia) they call it shit. The MCU is a high fructose and sugar diet and critics are type 2.
>tons of shitty CGI, constant quippy dialogue under-mining every scene, and so woke it has insomnia
Just like Black Adam?
None of that was in Black Adam, there were jokes, but it was a lot more physical comedy, and the serious scenes were allowed to be serious without someone needing to immediately break the tension. And the closest it got to being woke was race-swapping a couple characters, and making reference to shitty U.S. world police self-serving foreign policy. It didn't have shit tons of gay or BLM pandering throughout the whole film, like basically every Marvel film has now.
>the marvel formula doesn’t really work for anyone but Marvel.
It barely works for Marvel anymore.
>What DC should be doing is more stand alone films that are more creator/character driven
I agree and they seem to be doing that with films like Joker and The Batman, I think Black Adam got screwed over by all the behind-the-scenes shit going on with WB right now. I'd love to see the cut with the more emotionally weighty stuff added back in that apparently got cut out.
I think part of it is that the marvel formula doesn’t really work for anyone but Marvel. What DC should be doing is more stand alone films that are more creator/character driven
Dwayne Johnson fricking hates Shazam, that's why he kept pushing for and hyping up a Superman confrontation instead.
The entire point, in Johnson's own words, is to fight Shazam. By fighting Superman first, given Superman's vulnerability to magic, it establishes Black Adam as a threat to the DC universe. It makes Shazam's fight with him carry much more narrative weight.
Oh please, anon. Dwayne just hated Shazam and doesn’t want to be associated with him. He wants himself to fight and defeat Black Adam.
>He wants himself to fight and defeat Black Adam.
I fricking hate multiverse stories.
It's like wanting to build up Reverse Flash as a wonder woman rival before the Flash or having Sinestro as a superman rogue before having him meet Hal
Why play a character with a blatant connection to a hero you don't want to share screen time with?
that doesn't really make sense unless superman loses, which would be moronic. Who the frick would go to the movies to see superman lose to someone that punches harder than him. Superman's the underdog.
>Who the frick would go to the movies to see The Avengers lose to someone that punches harder than them.
This is you.
>Cavill-Man = The Avengers.
Even the most delusional Cavill fanbois can't be this delusional.
Are you genuinely moronic? I'm not saying that DCEU Superman is as good as the Avengers, I'm pointing out the moronation of the other guy claiming that nobody would go to see a movie where the hero loses to the stronger villain.
We had that movie, it was called Batman vs Superman, and it did not light the world on fire.
In fact it massively underperformed "Steve and Tony get upset and have a breakup".
>What if big dumb le muscleman villain beats up Supes, and actually WINS?!
Might as well sign Snyder and have him rape Superman while you are at it.
They already KILLED Superman by giant muscle beast, and audiences yawned.
DCEU Superman would easily solo the MCU Avengers, though.
>superman losing
black adam bros... are we delusional?
Dwayne a delusional narcissist? It's more likely than you think!
There's already some narrative weight because Billy is essentially Black Adam's son but as a zoomer.
>Who the frick would go to the movies to see superman lose
There's nothing wrong with having Superman lose, especially if it acts as a cliffhanger to Shazam! 3 where Superman and Shazam team up to take on Black Adam. The only issue is that they already blew the whole "Superman loses and dies" thing with BvS, which makes Superman losing be far less impactful.
that makes no sense and is just cope
It should be the other way around
Makes sense that Rock would fall for terrible wrestling booking logic and ruin a cinematic universe behind it
>Dwayne Johnson
Who hired that guy?
If Black Adam doesn't get a sequel and is the villain of Shazam 3 the Rock might just break his fricking contract.
Rock was offered the part of Bluto in the Popeye movie
Wanted to make a Bluto solo movie instead
Didn't want to fight Popeye in the sequel
Wanted to fight Flash Gordon for some reason
Best post. Truly enlightened.
Maybe if Hollywood learned how to make decent films without insane cost over-runs and then relying on fricking China to make their money they wouldn't keep having this issue.
the STACYcu always wins
that she-hulk ain't a Stacy.
Im glad it flopped
The rock was full on ego tripping and thinking he was above a shazam cameo and that will likely end up being a detriment to both films now
Nobody cares about black adam he is not DC's thanos
He needed to come back down to earth maybe doing cameos going forward will humble him
WBD's stock will hit single-digits before the month is out, I don't think this whole thing is going to survive the year.
zaslavs goal was always to gain stock price and valuation and then sell to another entity
I doubt he can manage that when the company keeps tanking and they keep cutting more and more to compensate
its just a series of maneuvers to plug up holes and stop the losses vs actually making money lol
what emotion is this expression supposed to convey
A new Superman movie trilogy is their only hope to save this mess. and who knows if that can even do it at this point with how much they've fricked the character over.
Cavill still got hype. And if they allow him more input than the witcher writers did, we might get some good will going.
Not with the normies needed to make a big budget film successful. His fanboys are too small an audience to matter.
I’d argue he’s more popular with normies than fanboys
>I’d argue he’s more popular with normies than fanboys
If that were true, Batman vs Superman would have easily been WB's highest grossing film ever (at the time), eclipsing the Nolan films.
Films still have to be good to be successful and BvS (both versions) are complete garbage.
The movie clearly failed because he didn't hit the People's Eyebrow even one time throughout the whole film.
We could've got a good Shazam sequel instead of this weird situation where Billy is just gonna ignore this guy till Superman jobs to him
Audiences don't care about Shazam. So it made perfect sense for the Rock to not want to have his character anchored to a smaller hero and obviously would want to set his eyes on Superman, but when your entire movie universe is build around characters like Shazam, Black Adam, Harley Quinn you are kind of fricked. I guess there is a Flash movie coming too but that is going to make things even more of a mess apparently.
Audiences don't care about Black Adam either, literally the only reason he's entered the mainstream consciousness is because of Dwayne Johnson and that's all they see, not Black Adam.
I think Rock Weariness kicked in well before Cape Fatigue.
It would be like Deathstroke becoming a Batman villain over a Titans one... oh wait... that already happened...
People will see it once just because it has THE ROCK!
Everybody LOVES THE ROCK!
I don't get it, fricking Jumanji movies get 900 and 800 millions in the boxoffice and a superhero movie with the Rock can't even reach 400? even awful Venom 2 did 500
Jumanji is an ensemble movie with funnier people than the Rock in it. Dwayne isn't responsible for the Fast and Furious' huge hauls either.
The rock needed other talent to carry him to there and in FF, Brosnan wasn't enough I guess
Also, this is The Rock's third "badass from the sandal and toga era" character, and he just doesn't have the acting chops to make Teth Adam distinct from Hercules and Scorpion King.
Also, none of these three movies are particularly good.
DC will never win
Good.
Frick the Rock and the raping/squandering of the JSA.
It's out on YTS
6/10, I'd give Shazam a 7
Kind of bold to have an Israeli main villain
I read comments by anons about the heroes not realizing you have to read the crown inscription upside down. Still kind of dumb but it's not as bad as they made it sound, Just to clarify, the inscription can't be read normally when upside down, they have to flip the letters around themselves.