Hollywood's Abysmal 2023 in Numbers

It could be in big trouble, in the past they would rely on some big Harry Potter or Avengers EndGame to turn it around with one Blockbuster earning

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Quote:

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Originally posted by JAYNEZTOWN:
It could be in big trouble, in the past they would rely on some big Harry Potter or Avengers EndGame to turn it around with one Blockbuster earning

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Yeah. I think that DC with the example of Barbie vs. all of its Superhero flops this year is a great example of what's going on here. Sure... Unless some unexpected late-comer shows up and takes the top spot in 2023 like the late release of Avatar 2 last year did, Warner Bros. has the bragging rights in 2023 for the highest grossing movie of 2023 by far once Barbie is out of theaters.

But in reality, Barbie just saved their asses and kept them from being Disney, leaving them not much financially to show for it otherwise.


I think once the year is over I'm going to do a breakdown per studio for how much they made or lost using both the 2.0x Rule of Thumb as well as the 2.5x Rule of Thumb.

To my knowledge, that's something that nobody has ever done before and I think it would be a lot more interesting than how much money Hollywood made as a whole in 2023.

Yes... I do expect Hollywood to make money in 2023 overall.

By the end of 2023 I also suspect that there will be so many movies added to the list that we basically cover most the top US movies out of the 120 or so Worldwide.

As you can see from my lists, there are some movies that I can't even track since I haven't been able to even find a production budget figure for them. And then there are other movies that I can't put on all the lists because figure like "worldwide opening weekend" are seemingly impossible to come by. Such is the nature of a lot of indie movies that get included since they ranked higher up the list than a lot of big-budget movies, particularly those that only got a limited release at first but then opened Wide after doing so much better than expected.

I will try to find that info again before these lists are final for the year, as well as go back and see if I missed any lesser-known movies that should be on the list for as deep as we go on the 2023 Top Grossing Worldwide list.


Who knows? If Haken keeps the site going and I haven't lost interest by then, I might do 2024 for comparison. I won't bother if Democrats shut the world down for Covid 20 though, for obvious reasons.

I'd thought about doing prior years as well, but because of Covid 19 I really don't see the point. This is the first year where the Box Office is behaving as it did pre-Covid shutdowns, and although Superhero Movies were doing gangbusters in 2019 before all that happened, there are many who still claim that the only reason Hollywood is failing is because of the change in behavior of theatergoers because of the lockdowns while dismissing any talks of wokeness and lazy storytelling being the actual culprits, and quite frankly I have little interest in undergoing the massive task of putting a similar group of lists together for 2019 when I suspect that it won't do anything to change their minds on that issue.

Although...

It would certainly show a stark contrast between how much money Hollywood USED to make pre-Covid lockdowns and pre-Bidenflation. It would also show that only 4 years ago it made a lot of sense to spend $200 Million or more on movie after movie when you were quite regularly pulling in more than $1 Billion Worldwide.

I would imagine that the amount of money big studios made on their big budget movies dwarfed what smaller studios and/or smaller budget movies made in 2019, when it's quite obvious from the lists I've made this year that the opposite is now the case with very few exceptions.

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Articles giving credence to the Rule of Thumb increasing to 2.5x in 2023:


Disney’s Harsh New Reality: Costly Film Flops, Creative Struggles and a Shrinking Global Box Office

https://variety.com/2023/film/news/disney-box-office-failures-indiana-
jones-elemental-ant-man-1235660409

Archived Link: https://archive.ph/82ZmN


Disney set to lose near $1 billion as Indiana Jones 5 one of biggest box office bombs ever

Disney have faced a summer of box office disasters bringing the studio's total losses to almost $1 billion. This includes Harrison Ford's Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny being set to go down as one of the biggest flops in Hollywood history.

https://www.express.co.uk/entertainment/films/1797909/Disney-box-offic
e-bombs-1-billion-Indiana-Jones-5

Archived Link: https://archive.ph/pH4kp


Disney Is The Big Loser Of Summer 2023 - Examining Its $900 Million Worth Of Box Office Disappointments

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, The Little Mermaid, and Elemental have all been huge box office failures for Disney - so what's going on?

https://screenrant.com/disney-movies-summer-2023-box-office-bombs-disa
ppointments/

Archived Link: https://archive.ph/w2cCK


I will update and elaborate on this issue at a later date. I just wanted to have a place to gather these things here.

If anybody sees any more articles with that message, please let me know and I'll add them here.

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Maybe it's too early to tell still, but I think Sony just released a flop with Tran Tourismo. Fortunately for them, they only spent $60 Million on the production budget. But seeing their first Sub $1 Million day only 7 days into the run has to be extremely disappointing.

It's doing better Internationally than Domestically, so maybe the International numbers will save the movie when they get posted. Right now it hasn't even made its production budget back, and if we're working with the 2.5x Rule of Thumb now, it's going to need $150 Million to break even. It's a long way from the $91 Million it still needs to do that.

After only 7 days it's not pulling in much more money that Blue Beetle.

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It appears I'm still not going to be able to update the list of movies that ended their run much this weekend.

According to The-Numbers, Miles Morales 2 finally exit theaters. That's it.

Super Mario Bros, The Little Mermaid, Asteroid City, Indy 5 and Elemental still stubbornly hold on, with Elemental inexplicably adding 1,925 new theaters this weekend for a total of 2,160 theaters! (That's a big mistake).



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Some films made big profit but 2023 might be worse than other years

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Looks like Warner Bros new hero James Gunn just deleted all his facebook social media?


James Gunn's 11-Year-Old Facebook Comments On Previous Batman Films Resurface
https://gamerant.com/james-gunn-batman-comments-the-dark-knight-tim-bu
rton/

?
https://twitter.com/bluboy43/status/1695928958116589971

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Quote:

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Originally posted by JAYNEZTOWN:
Looks like Warner Bros new hero James Gunn just deleted all his facebook social media?


James Gunn's 11-Year-Old Facebook Comments On Previous Batman Films Resurface
https://gamerant.com/james-gunn-batman-comments-the-dark-knight-tim-bu
rton/

?
https://twitter.com/bluboy43/status/1695928958116589971

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I'll say this up front. I don't like James Gunn. Dude has always rubbed me the wrong way.

But getting cancelled for that is kind of stupid. He didn't have a wokified opinion in there. He just didn't care for the Tim Burton movies and thought the Nolan movies were overrated.

I disagree and agree with that assessment. The Nolan movies were fine. Obviously number two was better with Heath Leger as Joker. I didn't even bother watching the 3rd one. I think that Nolan's take on Batman was highly overrated.

I loved Burton's Batman though, and Michael Keaton will always be my Batman. Elfman's sountrack was epic, so I don't know what the hell Gunn was talking about there.

And though nobody has replied to it, I wrote my review on The Flash here:

http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=65730

It's not the "Greatest Superhero Movie Ever Made", but it does rank high on the list.




And here's the thing...

Recently I heard a joke that somebody said if you want to make a reboot of a franchise, the only thing you need to do is have a bunch of actors sit in a room and quote lines from the original movies, because that is all fans want and they'll be angry if you don't give them that.

Yeah... Sadly, that's kind of true.

And getting Gunn to disappear off social media for saying over a decade ago that he didn't like something is just feeding into that.

We shouldn't conflate dislike for the craft behind a previous film with HATE for a film like we got recently with Rachel Ziegler's comments about the original Snow White. One is coming from the mind of a seasoned director who has their own take on Batman that is different than what came before him, and the other is the opinions of a young, unproven, self-hating half-white actress shitting all over the entire story of the cartoon that put Disney on the map 100 years ago, which itself was taken from a story written in the early 1800s.

Batman in comics and in media has gone through many, many transformations in the 80+ years since the character was conceived. And as it branched out into different forms of media, all of these iterations have had influences on the others. Tim Burton's Gotham lead to what might arguably be the greatest children's cartoon ever made with Batman: The Animated Series. And that series created Harley Quinn from the ether, who has since gone on to appear in the comics and movies.


The only Diversity that matters is Diversity of Thought.

If you hate James Gunn for hating your favorite comic book movies, then just do what I do with all the woke bullshit and don't watch whatever is coming out next. How many Indiana Jones movies were there? Three. How many Terminator movies were there? Two. How many Star Wars movies were there? Three.

If somebody like James Cameron can come out and wipe all the Terminator movies out of the universe by saying they're not canon after T2 and releasing his own series-destroying take on a third movie, well... we as the paying customer can decide for ourselves what is and what is not canon when it comes to our favorite franchises too. An even better example of this would be Kathleen Kennedy coming out and telling everybody that the vast Lucas-Approved Extended Star Wars Universe consisting of hundreds of books and thousands of new characters were no longer going to be canon after Disney bought the rights and then trying to claim there was no source material to work from when their horrible woke trilogy was horrible. That will probably go down in history as the best example of this phenomena.


But to

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I can't remember if Hollywood and the number crunchers take holiday Mondays off or not. I might not be able to update any of the lists until tomorrow.

If that's the case, I might just update the numbers with Monday included rather than go through the insanely stupid task of looking up each movie individually and subtracting the Monday take from the total and just make a note on the new lists that this was a holiday weekend and Monday was included because that's how the industry does things.


To note, it's interesting how the Monday projections work on a holiday weekend. A lot of the projections are up, but some notable movies are not. It's fully expected to find that Sound of Freedom is lagging behind with updated numbers after 3 weeks of this already happening, but you won't find projections from Warner Bros. for Barbie or Blue Beetle on Monday's projection list either.

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