Disney And Netflix In Several Short Tweets (updated)

Disney does the inevitable, launching its own streaming service, given that Netflix is way too pricey. Bigger news for Netflix than Disney.

— David Poland (@DavidPoland) August 8, 2017

Disney breaks the streaming cherry for studios. Look for all the rest to follow by 2020. — David Poland (@DavidPoland) August 8, 2017

Note: Disney isn’t pulling movies from Netflix. Just not extending deal signed in 2012, which now undervalues Disney. Still, Disney leading

— David Poland (@DavidPoland) August 8, 2017

I have no doubt that AT&TW will race Disney to a major stand-alone streaming business. There is a massive library & a wide swath of content — David Poland (@DavidPoland) August 9, 2017

Another HUGE part of the Disney streaming story not yet being discussed… will ESPN stay in the small bundle services currently in place?

— David Poland (@DavidPoland) August 9, 2017

Interesting detail on Marvel movies on the new Disney app… or not on it. https://t.co/iArstXwRom — David Poland (@DavidPoland) August 9, 2017

Silly. They are moving to the actual future. https://t.co/mq3TCZybWp

— David Poland (@DavidPoland) August 9, 2017

Very slim chance Disney will do standalone Lucasfilm or Marvel streaming apps. But $2 a month as an add-on to a $10 a month Dis stream? Yeah

— David Poland (@DavidPoland) August 10, 2017

Add another $5 for ESPN

— David Poland (@DavidPoland) August 10, 2017

“9/11″‘s Back With A Second Trailer, Now With More Charlie Sheen Explanation Than Ever

After the overwhelming response to the trailer for Charlie Sheen’s 9/11, the filmmakers release 9/11! Part Deux. You have been warned.

Weekend Estimates by Numbers in Black Klady

The weekend went from bad to worse, as The Dark Tower turned out to be front-loaded, managing only 2.5x Friday for the weekend and Detroit, great reviews and all, managed only 2.8x Friday. Kidnap did 2.7x Friday, but that was expected, given its genre. Meanwhile, holdovers Dunkirk, The Emoji Movie, and Girls Trip were all over the 3x Friday line. The Weinstein Company had a strong start on four screens for Wind River, delivering over $40k per.

Friday is about expectations, which has not been a good thing for movies or journalism. And 3-day estimates are about gaining perspective over a full launch of a film.

Neither was pleasant this weekend, especially for two of the three newcomers. The Dark Tower, which may have been inexpensive enough not to cost anyone at Sony their job, couldn’t get to a $20 million opening. You have to go all the way back to 1998 to find a first week of August without a $20 million opener. Snake Eyes and Halloween: H2O. Memories light the corners of my mind.

Still, even with the weak weekend, The Dark Tower is the #2 Stephen King opening of all time. A big chunk of that is timing, as 28 of the 41 Stephen King adaptations launched more than 20 years ago, when opening weekend wasn’t the studio-created obsession that it is now. (The hysteria about shortening the windows didn’t come from audience preference. It’s been driven this way for decades now.) Still, 1408 is the only $20 million opener and The Green Mile is the only film to gross over $72m domestic. So dream as we might about the master of thrills, one of the greats of the past two generations, delivering big hit movies, history tells us otherwise. Could this change, in what is really the third wave of King movies? Sure. It might explode. But more likely, The King Fantasy will continue to be fool’s gold. Some really good, memorable films made throughout. But more niche product than mass product for moviegoers.

$10 million for Kidnap is a win for the new distributor. It suggests $25m at minimum for theatrical, which should more than cover the careful marketing and give the film a bigger price tag in post-theatrical. Lots of existing distributors would be happy with this number for a not-so-great film with a star who doesn’t have a ton of opening power.

And Detroit. Just couldn’t close the deal. Part of the failure is the reality of a hard movie. A lot of it is misunderstanding what is hard about the movie. I covered this thoroughly yesterday.

Dunkirk continues to roll. It’s turning out that the closest Nolan comp is Batman Begins, though Interstellar seems close as well. Both suggest high 180s is where the final domestic is headed. There is already another $180m in the bank from international.

Girls Trip is slowing down, but has $100m domestic well within its sights.

Spider-Man: Homecoming is going to crack $300m domestic next weekend. International is well behind the Amazings, but China could make up the difference all by itself.

The two $10k per-screeners this weekend are Wind River and Columbus. With $40k+ per, the door is open for Wind River. But we have to be patient to see how they expand.

Friday Estimates by Excelslinger Klady

This is a crazy weekend.

First, The Dark Tower. With due respect to everyone who wants to kick the guy, this is why Tom Rothman survives and thrives (with thriving at Sony to come). He took a Stephen King book that the King Cult loves and he looked at the numbers. The Green Mile is the massive anomaly. It grossed more than double any other Stephen King-based film ever worldwide. 1408 is the second biggest hit, although it was sold more like a traditional horror/thriller than a Stephen King adaptation. Aside from those two, no other Stephen King-based film has grossed over $62 million domestic or $50 million international (and 1408 “only” did $133m worldwide).

So… would a $150 million effects spectacular based on a Stephen King book have been a smart bet for Sony?

The real question will be international. Can the film do $100 million or more elsewhere? If so, it’s a hero. But even if it does $50 million, the budget on this film keeps Sony safe from significant loss. And if you are harboring a fantasy that they could Mummy it, which is to say, have Tom Cruise draw $300 million-plus internationally… well… Passengers.

The punchline is that this opening suggests that Tom Rothman will survive The Dark Tower and while it will not make him super-hot, it will get him to Jumanji after a summer with two hits, a breakeven or better (TDT), and a small loser (Rough Night).

And when It opens to this number or worse, watch it get celebrated as succeeding over its head. (Truth is, It should open better than this… but we’ll see.)

Kidnap is a direct-to-video movie if ever there was one. Yet here it is, David Dinerstein’s Aviron Picture’s first theatrical release, opening to around $10 million and likely to gross at least $25 million domestic on minimal marketing spend. This follows Entertainment Studio’s 47 Meters Down, which somehow grossed $43 million domestic.

With A24 and the launch of Neon getting all the (deserved) media love, there is a new strain of distributor emerging. (Worth noting that four of the six $10m+ domestic grossers for A24 were genre films.)

Detroit!

Another new distributor, as Annapurna puts it out there. Great team of industry veterans. Strong movie. Strong reviews. Dud opening.

If the rest of the weekend goes well, they will open to about the same as Girls Night.

Some have argued that the date is wrong. I would agree that was a miscalculation if they thought they could be the Hell or High Water of this summer. However, World Trade Center ($19m), The Butler ($25m), and a lot of black-audience-targeted movies suggest the opportunity is there. But the argument, which I consider absurd, that Kathryn Bigelow was an inappropriate director for this film because she is white, held back any momentum in selling to the black audience, without enough time for more than a few selected mea culpas by Bigelow. And I think the marketing was ambivalent about race as a focus in the sell of this movie.

Detroit – which was never going to be an easy sell, released to huge numbers – needed a longer runway. The excitement of “Kathryn Bigelow’s next movie” isn’t that of Christopher Nolan… but it does exist in a very real way. And that is what carried anticipation through the summer. It was seen as The Closer.

First problem… the movie turned out not be about the riots. Team Annapurna knew this. Like any other audience, critics don’t like to think they know what they are getting and then being surprised. And although the Rotten Tomatoes scores suggest otherwise, many writers I spoke to said the film gave them whiplash.

Second problem… when the actual movie came into focus, it was hard as nails. You have to let people – even professionals, if not especially professionals – know that this is coming. Moreover, you need to set the table for the emotional response. Non-horror movies do not do well when the word-of-mouth is, “It’s painful to watch.” You need to turn that to, “It hurts because we are still going through this today in America and across the globe.” That takes time.

Third problem… the “white writer, white director problem” is one I hadn’t anticipated. (Maybe that is a reflection of white privilege, but while I understand that some stories are so steeped in black culture as to make a white reflection of them off-putting, this doesn’t seem to be one of those stories.) But as it started to show, the film needed champions in the black culture… champions who should have been lined up for months, even before the issue was brought up in the press. Kathryn Bigelow has been an earnest supporter of more diversity in the directing ranks for years. Where were the people who she fought for when she needed some support? And if they were signaling a problem a month ago, the team should have taken very different, more transparent actions to save the commercial release of the film.

Fourth problem… what the hell was up with that last second exclusive release last weekend? I’m sure there were plenty of good arguments for it, but it was almost assured to fail because it wasn’t really marketed and the 50,000 people who saw the film aren’t enough to create the kind of word of mouth that will push wide release numbers. What it does is muddy the waters. I would have felt a lot better about them pushing the wide by two weeks, to go to 100 screens this weekend, then 200 next weekend, then wide, rather than to throw a tiny amount of chum in the water early that won’t attract a big fish.

Fifth problem… the movie and its public face. I love the movie. But who did the opening animation? I bet it was a black artist. Perhaps a prominent black artist. Why don’t I know that? Why doesn’t everyone know that? And if it is am imitation of some black artists, Bigelow screwed up. It draws attention to itself as ethnic art… so either do it right and talk about it openly or don’t do it.

I’m glad the marketing shifted to “What happened at The Algiers” 10 days ago… but that was 10 days ago. Until then, you would have thought it was a series of stories taking place during the frenzy of the riot.

It is one of the most basic ideas of movie marketing that you need to have a clear sell. I have seen very few campaigns over these last 20 years that switch focus or tone and work out well.

And the truth is, we will never know if the movie would have opened or done better if the push was clearer and more aggressive, as I have suggested here. Hindsight isn’t really 20/20. We all just want to believe that something is 20/20.

But Detroit deserved better than an $8 million opening.

Nice limited per-screens for Wind River and Columbus.

Review-ish: The Dark Tower (spoiler-free)

It’s not as bad as people made it out to be.

You’re going to read that a lot.

And it’s not. But it is bad. And I am not going to do the normal work of reviewing to explain why. It’s the choices made before they rolled a frame of film that killed this thing, not the choices of the film itself. (And God knows, not the f-ing budget… another hundred million would have made it worse, not better.)

I will even make a list, so editors at entertainment journals can understand it. (You know who you aren’t if you aren’t one of those.)

In order:

1. Not R-rated – This is a movie about absolute evil vs the last stragglers, who hope to save everything. Sorry. McConaughey walking around saying “Stop breathing” in his most deadpan voice is not EVIL. Hundreds of people die in this movie, from central characters to faceless bodies, and you feel nothing. Why? Because they played it PG-safe.

It’s not Peckinpah, Verhoeven or even early Schwarzenegger where the body count had a scent of irony. This piece is as earnest as earnest gets. And every body that falls needs to be unpleasant for the audience.

1a. McConaughey miscast for the PG-13 version – I imagine McCanaughey would be great as an R-rated devil. At some point he (and the movie) reminded me of The Devil’s Advocate, where another great scenery chewer fucked, literally and figuratively, with Charlize Theron’s mind and body. McConaughey could make that fly. But taken down into a low-key register, he is the stiff that he was in his early movie star career, before they released the “alright, alright, alright” in him again and made him someone you love to watch. (Ironically, one of the performances of his that I love in a film that wasn’t beloved was EdTV, where Ron Howard – producer of this film – released Matthew’s goofball as well as Harrelson’s.)

So… they deballed the material. They copied the mediocrity of the Indulgent… Indigent… Indigestion… whatever it is called and that Fox thing with Logan Lerman… neither of which had burned up the box office… and then they cast seriously dark and interesting actors who would never be allowed to deliver on what they really can do… and then they put the script in the hands of…

2. Akiva Goldsman – I was tempted to make him #1. Goldsman’s career has been on the same timeline as my journalistic career and I have tried… God knows I’ve tried… to figure out why anyone has hired him in the past decade. He must be SO great in the room. Also, he is a professional. He knows where the i’s get dotted and the t’s get crossed.

But he is an epic mediocritician. (Coining that word. Send me a dime when you use it.) A Beautiful Mind and Cinderella Man were lovely movies… both of which probably would have been better with a more passionate writer. But awards and money and Ron Howard and God bless. But since 2005? Not only bad movies, bur bland as the day is long. You want to protest white male privilege in Hollywood? Start there.

I’m sure he’s a great guy. But this year has brought us, as a writer and producer, Rings, Transformers 5, King Arthur, and now The Dark Tower. No career should survive this. He has made tens of millions of dollars in the last 15 years. Retire him. It was beyond over five years ago. I love Fringe, so maybe he’s able to do TV. But his name on your movie is the first sign of creative failure on an imdb page.

And I hate writing artists off. It’s a horrible thing to do. You never know when magic will rise from the dust of defeat and with a writer, you never know how much to blame they really are. But Goldsman was on Poseidon, Jonah Hex, both terrible Da Vinci Code movies, and now this year of epic mediocrity. Enough already. It’s not like he fails from trying to be interesting. His movies are all like watching DogTV in the late night “make your dog sleep” slots.

And again.. nothing personal. Sure you’re a great guy. You have been very successful. Please, go do something else.

3. There really is no #3 – The failure of The Dark Tower is a failure of imagination… not a failure of finance… not a failure of casting… not a lack of effects… not the idea they took from Stephen King (and I haven’t read the book).

It’s GOOD versus EVIL and a teenager is going to be drawn into the multi-dimensional battle because he is special. We have seen in a million times in a million variations. So how do you make this fresh? How do you make it fun?

What was Nikolaj Arcel’s vision? No idea. And I’m not reading any of those trade stories, giddy with the prospect of embarrassing people. But knowing some of his other work, I bet he had a vision. And I bet it wasn’t a PG-13 movie.

On the other hand, it seems Arcel has made this movie before. It was called Island of Lost Souls and here is the synopsis:

14-year-old Lulu moves to a small provincial town with her mother and younger brother. One night, her brother is struck by a beam of white light – actually the spirit of Herman Hartmann from the 19th-century. To her despair, Lulu realizes that Herman has possessed her brother, and the two of them are whirled into a fevered adventure. Joined by Oliver, a rich kid, and Richard, a disillusioned clairvoyant and inventor, they take on the dark, supernatural forces gathering over the town – evil from deep in the land of the dead, determined to take over the world and see them die.

Do I want to watch this to see if it is as mediocre as The Dark Tower? No. I want to believe it is better (on 20% of the budget or less).

So maybe he is #3. I am being kind. (Met him. Like him. Liked A Royal Affair. But….)

That’s pretty much it. I am completely open to a good new version of the same-old same-old. I’d rather have some serious originality, but if you do “expected” well, okay. This movie just made every wrong decision about what it wanted to be when it grew up. And maybe they will be thrilled with another Percy Jackson… which was a Tom Rothman creation at Fox.

Not me.

(P.S. Someone please give Katheryn Winnick a role where she can be beautiful and funny and super-smart and tough. I was really hoping that she would get to act in this film… but no. Shame is a powerful emotion that we never got to see her play. She is stuck being blonde and pretty. Someone please give her a role as rich as Lagertha while still allowing her to be all the other things she is.)

BYODucats

Are you spending any cold cash at the box office this weekend? A/C is nice in August.