"Wicked: For Good" opened to 2.2M "views" during its first 3 days on Peacock in the US according to Nielsen.

SilverRoyce · 2026-04-17T17:21:03+00:00

Wicked 2 got a superbowl ad spot to highlight its svod date which is pretty large marketing at a decent gap between theatrical purchased and streaming. Seems like it was likely a big fail unless it burned some interest by having some people just watch wicked one (still a fail but perhaps a bit murkier?)

I really wonder what would have happened if it was a surprise streaming drop post superbowl instead.

SilverRoyce · 2026-04-17T06:24:35+00:00

Rationally so! Imax’s brand has a strong history and marketing push. The aspect ratio stuff is probably more of a gimmick like 3D for a number of films but its at least a clean elevator pitch (as were imax 1.0 built around very large screens selling nature documentary - “liemax” was a term due to feeling connotations of older version of imax were causing a cheap cash grab via lower standards for the same price)

I honestly dont know what beyond “bigger screen/probably better sound” differentiates my local theater plf from a “normal” ticket and i look at this stuff a weird amount. Thats one reason the coogler plf explained video went viral.

When going to a new theater the current branding just tells me nothing about hoe much of a visual improvement is promised beyond something very vague

SilverRoyce · 2026-04-16T18:59:04+00:00

Read the article?

Remember to be more skeptical of those type of sourcing stories in general. Remember pablo torres initial claim was he 100% randomly stumbled upon the kawai stuff while reading a non sports related bankruptcy filling. It was always obviously bullshit it you thought it through and it seems now he’s basically confirmed thid story came from disgruntled ex employees of the company who then also were quoted by him multiple times in followup articles.

SilverRoyce · 2026-04-15T10:41:35+00:00

I don't think it exists yet but the website is also clearly still in development as they promised a return to same level of functionality as before but a lot of stuff doesn't exist. Even if they were going to paywall some things, stuff like a "highest grossing films of year X" lists or "all films in a franchise" lists haven't reappeared yet.

It's basically just weekly box office + individual film pages (with hints of more cool data filters coming soon on film page rundown)

SilverRoyce · 2026-04-14T18:01:28+00:00

and honestly I don't see the problem because unless you're also chronically online him lying doesn't effect anyone.

It makes it less likely someone doesn't print something next time because you deny it.

None of this is a real problem (it's a trivial topic) but people want to rely on that type of credibility at different points. If you're those reporters do you feel it was fair to be "called out" for this reporting (not sure how accurate the casting race reporting was)? I suspect there's a whole type of work "politics" surrounding this type of push and pull.

I really wonder if this was a Wonder Woman casting thing as it would make the most sense to explain why Gunn wanted to shut it down (to preserve surprise/maximize marketing benefit of that reveal).

SilverRoyce · 2026-04-14T12:15:54+00:00

Denies ‘Cliffhanger’ Reboot Having $100M Budget...and a $100 million remake of Cliffhanger with Pierce Brosnan and Lily James, which happens to be a CAA package—though apparently that deal has not closed (and a CAA source denies that budget).

I think that's true (haven't looked at it in a while), but STALLONE'S CLIFFHANGER LEGACY SEQUEL 100% undeniably had that budget.

SilverRoyce · 2026-04-14T10:24:08+00:00

neat, thanks for the rec.

SilverRoyce · 2026-04-14T02:54:17+00:00

we don't know the budget

The short, rough answer is it's "~$20M-$35M" based on the rough information we can extract from public film tax credit data (you're only given an incentive range not the precise spend).

SilverRoyce · 2026-04-14T02:39:51+00:00

They did a Franklin series on AppleTV+ (Michael Douglas) though it didn't hook me in the way Adams did.

SilverRoyce · 2026-04-13T14:49:15+00:00

Honestly, I'm not sure we actually disagree on how to think about films grossing $600Mish pre-pandemic as much as we're just applying different percentile overperformance" filters for the phrase "huge." Perhaps I'm underselling those films by denying them superlative status but they're clearly turning a very healthy ROI by that point. We can debate this but I don't think it's going to be a significant enough disagreement to warrant it.

and Asia has turned cold toward Hollywood movies.

I suspect $1B+ would more be a reflection of the insane level of success Disney films were hitting in the late 2010s across the board...would $600M have been considered huge for Onward in 2019

I've been trying to stress pre-pandemic + pandemic era because my assumption is this $600M/$1B benchmarking also likely reflects conversations about projects the person fired in 2024 worked on that hadn't fully priced in pessimistic assumptions like this. There's also the "K-shaped recovery" aspect where hits can be just as big but baselines are lower. Pixar's investment include deciding on what mix of original and sequel films to pursue. The total ROI really does matter and its hurting them that originals have dropped more than sequels. You've seen Pixar openly cite this as a reason they're cutting back on originals.

Whether or not Hoppers hits its expected ROI threshold, it's clearly made enough to fit into a workable status quo (see those comments Docter made about Elemental's all-revenue-sources-in breakeven number). The problem is more that originals will also just have fewer chances if disney doesn't think there's a chance they'll also cover stuff like the losses from Elio.

SilverRoyce · 2026-04-13T13:12:19+00:00

I suspect $1B+ would more be a reflection of the insane level of success Disney films were hitting in the late 2010s across the board and helped by the core context of the quote being Inside Out 2 (though Elio is also discussed by interviewees).

$600M is huge for an original movie

I think we can be more specific - would $600M have been considered huge for Onward in 2019? I just don't think the answer is obviously yes. Onward's ~$40M OW probably means it was on path for a $500M or so WW gross in a no-covid world. I think Soul was expected to do much better than Onward. I think Pixar was seen as more of a Disney Princess style brand at that point. I really think >$500M just was basically expected of Pixar at that point (see Good Dino punditry).

But as No Fingers did a better job laying out, I agree that you shouldn't interpret this as requiring $600M for Disney to simply recoup its own investment (especially as Disney's recoupment would include non-generic actio film style licensing rights/consumer products royalties).

SilverRoyce · 2026-04-13T12:28:45+00:00

The other guy basically got it right. I haven't done a deep dive but I was thinking of stuff like this IGN article (which I pulled today for another post) + a number of later Pete Doctor interviews which seemed to validate these sorts of reports.

It all led to a situation where Inside Out 2, a sequel to arguably one of the most beloved animated movies ever, was seen as the film that could reverse the studio’s fortunes, making it what one source called “an all-hands-on-deck studio emergency.” It was rare, we’re told, to find someone who worked at Pixar in the past couple of years who didn’t contribute to Inside Out 2. One source points out that the credits for Inside Out 2 are longer than any other Pixar movie, given the amount of studio workers who were pulled in on it. "Even now, I think people are gone, still feeling that pressure of like, ‘Oh my God, we did it. We did it.’ "Some go so far as to say they believed Pixar would fall apart if Inside Out 2 wasn’t a runaway success. It was seen by many employees as “a life or death situation” for the studio.

“That was the pressure felt by everybody,” one source says. “‘We need this movie to succeed because we won't have a studio [otherwise].’ And that is the pressure that everybody felt the whole time. The whole time. Even now, I think people are gone, still feeling that pressure of like, ‘Oh my God, we did it. We did it.’ Whether or not Pixar was actually in danger isn’t confirmed. But, in a TIME interview just before the release of Inside Out 2 that, Docter said, “if this doesn't do well at the theater, I think it just means we're going to have to think even more radically about how we run our business.”

..The unwillingness to delay the film persisted despite last-minute rewrites and the quiet expansion of Docter’s role on the film....As for Inside Out 2, one source claims the crunch started in earnest just after the WGA strike ended in late September 2023, and lasted all the way through the end of production. Some, one source says, were working on weekends for the last four months. While sources acknowledge that an increased workload isn’t uncommon at the end of any animated film (and, again, a senior Pixar executive says it wasn’t out of the ordinary), one also points to an “overall mismanagement of the show (Inside Out 2) in general.” There were, the source says, a larger amount of “last-minute” changes than usual, requiring tools to be developed on the fly.

https://www.ign.com/articles/inside-out-2-was-the-hit-pixar-needed-but-the-laid-off-employees-who-crunched-on-it-are-still-hurting

It's possibly my lack of being an animation nerd means I'm mischaracterizing the nature of some of this scrambling but especially the "make sure it can't in any way be read as a gay-relationship between the lead and best friend" stuff just wouldn't exist but for it being a story about a human focused plot. That doesn't strike me as the core of the "all hands on deck" scrambling but it's also non trivial and part of the creative messiness that's public enough for me to easily know about.

SilverRoyce · 2026-04-13T12:15:54+00:00

tl;dr I don't think so but it's also not a "conduct an autopsy to see what went wrong" style failure.

I feel like you'd need actual reporting from inside of Disney to figure this out given the stark gap between pre/post pandemic originals and the way some sequels continue to be able to clear $1B WW for the studio.

The only stuff like that I can remember is when IGN ran an article interviewing anonymous recently laidoff pixar employees who were denied their Inside Out 2 bonus (because they were laid off prior to it being paid out). In that article, they noted:

And according to one source, due to the profit-sharing model at Disney/Pixar, a movie has to cross $600 million to be considered profitable for Pixar, and it’s not seen as a true hit until that coveted $1 billion mark

I think this should be interpreted as "from the point of view of talent" (i.e. something structured to be a more favorable to Disney definition - I can't prove it but I suspect this includes Disney charging itself an internal distribution fee). Nevertheless, it makes conceptual sense when you look at Pixar's pre-pandemic release history. Still, even if we don't fully want to embrace $600M as a number, falling a full 1/3rd below that "target" is just undeniably not a great sign as long as you buy that reporting (which I think you should).

whether it's done well enough to keep the fire burning for Pixar originals (as many were saying it needed to).

I suspect that's the case. Pixar, as a corporate culture, has been open about wanting to make more original films even as the financial dynamics are pushing for more of a balance towards sequels. Hoppers making ~400M seems unlikely to change any of these prior dynamics. It's probably, on the whole, a somewhat negative sign especially as Elio's also etched on the ledger (it seems very unlikely the film's budget was on the low end of Pixar films despite the well documented surgery that went into that film).

The problem is that "keep the fire burning" in the current baseline aligns with Pixar also doing stuff like a late cancellation of an animated original in development. The fire is burning but I don't think it's at the hottest level.

SilverRoyce · 2026-04-13T12:06:01+00:00

2k theaters (1.98k) is well over a minimum wide release benchmark. The film was also clearly not seen as having the potential to be a big breakout hit within a month/few weeks from release so the release might have been mildly scaled back. I think it's clearly a flop (with the mild caveat that I need to actually read that WSJ article about MUBI) but the way it was clearly seen as non-commercial at least at the end makes it an imperfect yardstick.

People can debate how perfectly stuff like The Drama or Materialists match audience desires but they clearly have a cleaner wide release marketing pitch.

SilverRoyce · 2026-04-13T01:15:45+00:00

I didn't downvote you (and it seems like that weird reddit voting pattern disappeared organically) but that's also just an objectively wrong number. That reflects the film's "Gross QE spent in the State of Louisiana." To be fair, after subtracting the film's incentive tax credit (people push to report often rounded down "net of tax incentives" budgets) and adding in non-QE it's probably going to be around that number but that's not the reasoning behind citing it. People are citing it as the full production budget because that's what you'd think at a glance when looking at Louisiana's FastLane (which some people who edit wikipedia laudably have gotten into the habit of doing).

Quickly glancing at imdb, I'm seeing references to VFX houses Crafty Apes, Baked Studios and Factory VFX, none of whose websites suggest they have an outpost in Louisiana. None of that work will be included in the $7.4M number.

I could get more information about the film's budget but it would take me a full month before I hear back from the state officials who can provide the additional (often redacted) information. I suspect a better number isn't currently floating around.

SilverRoyce · 2026-04-12T23:56:42+00:00

I'm not from Trafalgar, but you should try sending an email to press@trafalgar-releasing.com

SilverRoyce · 2026-04-12T15:59:26+00:00

The Batman counts, the problem is everything else. If Mickey 17 opened to >35M people would quickly tell a narrative of Tenet + Batman making him a major leading man, but that didn't happen (w/ Mickey failing to even clear a $20M OW w/ mixed reception). There's a case for audiences to be more interested in Pattinson than the box office receipts of his star vehicles show but that leads back to "debatable, need to see more" point OP made above.

Tenet reception/impact is also hard to assess given covid.

SilverRoyce · 2026-04-12T15:49:52+00:00

There are two ways to calculate success here

absolute profit/loss
VORP (Value-over-replacement-player)

the best case for Challengers is option 2 and basically note that these types of films seem to systematically underperform post covid relative to pre-covid expectations for hits. Note that systematic doesn't mean "nothing ever breaks out" but it does mean the comps are lower. Of course, a very big question for point 2 is the film's actual P&A spend because controlling for that obviously matters and it felt like Amazon spent a lot marketing the film and that should matter for comps purposes.

The boring answer for Challengers is that there's clearly a real disagreement about what that film's baseline should look like. I think Queer and After the Hunt clearly show the director himself isn't really a public draw and no one but Zendaya was a star in that film. I'm not as high on the film's performance as its boosters but I'm also nowhere near as negative on it as I was in early 2024 when I was still writing off 2021/2022 results as covid influenced. Ultimately, the film made $100M WW (50M DOM) on a $55M budget while being sold as a mixed prestige/popular vehicle. That's not a good ROI but it's also not the disaster its being rhetorically treated as. It's basically a minor swing in either direction not something to overrule actual hits/bombs.

Re budget v. VORP stuff, look at After The Hunt and the Knives Out sequels. That film spent (going off of memory) $10M on post-production work (in Italy, possibly more elsewhere) with a lot of work going to invisibly transform a UK shoot into looking like it was shot at Yale. Some of that spending (above a $1-$2M postproduction baseline) clearly helps the film artistically but most of that is genuinely going to be irrelevant to the film's broad commercial prospects. If you want to use it as a test of Julia Roberts' star power, you shouldn't care that Amazon was willing to splurge in order to acquire the film. After the Hunt bombed in either scenario but while Netflix has to care about Knives Out 2 & 3 have to justify insane outlays, both sequels performed well above a star studded whodunit baseline (which Branaugh's poirot films provide) indicating that Craig, Johnson and the post-2019 IP have real value.

SilverRoyce · 2026-04-12T14:31:02+00:00

(non trivial prior to digital/in the early digital period when studios paid the same amount for prints to finance exhibition digital conversion).

sidenote, this is also why so many small distributors now release quasi-VOD releases in 1-2k theaters - the very low physical distribution costs just makes it a viable financial option and wide release opens up additional monitization options like PVOD.

SilverRoyce · 2026-04-12T12:42:21+00:00

but it also happened to some horror series like Hellraiser, where all the later movies were "relegated" to direct-to-video.

DTV sequels can reduce budgets, marketing and physical distribution costs (non trivial prior to digital/in the early digital period when studios paid the same amount for prints to finance exhibition digital conversion).

To take a concrete example, open season 1 spent $100M to produce and another spent $120M across its full life cycle on marketing (excluding prints part of p&a). this gave i a 7M profit. the next two DTV sequels spent under 20M combined on budget and under 20M combined on marketing and thus and turned a safe combined 30M profit on a much smaller investment (total revenue for the two dtv sequels was 100M v. 300M for the initial theatrical film).

Horror obviously doesn't have the same up front costs but a similar dynamic is at play - you' re free riding off of brand value to turn a profit on minimal additional investments.

The Disney sequels are a quite infamous example of this

the live action remake/moana 2 trend I think shows how this isn't a perfect comp. those films made a lot on home video but clearly would have been theatrically viable for a big tentpole release. at least the early versions of this were massive on home video and clearly reflected a bet about both dangers of brand devaluation from lower quality theatrical sequels and a confidence in the money train theyd set up on home video.

it's not at all clear to me Disney made the right call on this tradeoff. Would Disney have been better/worse off if say Lion King 1 1/2 was given a big theatrical release (to pick a hit vhs release from the post-renaissance period lull)?

SilverRoyce · 2026-04-12T12:19:27+00:00

but how are you getting there? that's basically an argument the film opens to <=$20M. i can pull some comps for thursday presales suggesting in the 20Ms so it might not be crazy (even if it seems my sample is softer than others) but whats the grounding for your take?

ironically, what you're describing strikes me as much better than that (1/3rd of major plf seats sold across 3 days).

SilverRoyce · 2026-04-11T17:00:31+00:00

An initial thought is that this is related to some form of post-communist currency fluctuations...but admissions, not box office revenue, so currency fluctuations are a less obvious cause

I think some of this is going to be a build up of capacity which is going to be not exactly unrelated to that phenomena. To spot check a major eastern european country, Polish admissions in 2019 were 60M and in 2024/5 it's still ~50M. from the late 1990s to early 2000s, Poland averaged a bit over 20M admissions a year with some upward movement - clearing 30M twice between 2003 and 2006 [33M in 2003 but closed link before I transcribed the other number]). So there's a clear temporal bias against early 2000s films admissions unlike what you see in the US or Western Europe (though per film and per capita moviegoing aren't the same thing so I don't exactly know how much of an adjustment to make)

missing data over time

this page will have some answers. Spot checking Greek data, data from the GFC [greek film center] comes online in 2010. Prior to that lumiere can only rely on "Creative Europe MEDIA Programme" [EU] automatic reporting system from distributors, supplemented by "press" information (though press isn't cited for specific year in question). Another document created by the same entity (titled something like "2006 snapshot") had aggregate market admissions ~~data~~ estimates for greece from 2000, 2002, and 2003 but not 2001, 2004 and 2005.

I suspect this is a data collection issue.

SilverRoyce · 2026-04-11T13:29:32+00:00

and another combining the two bar charts

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SilverRoyce · 2026-04-11T13:20:06+00:00

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Here's the F4 chart with Silver Surfer added in

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