SOLO: A Star Wars Story - May 25th - "I've Got a Bad Feeling About This"

[Johnmgm]

If Disney only looses 50-80 million, they should consider themselves lucky.

The flop no one wants to talk about is A Wrinkle in Time, which cost over 100 million and grossed 130 million globally. By my calculations after marketing, Disney stands to lose at least 100 million on this sucker alone. Wrinkle’s director is reported to have said “What’s 100 million to Disney.”

[AndyDursin]

Oh yeah, WRINKLE will go alongside TOMORROWLAND as a total bust.

As for SOLO, I don't know how Disney arrives at that number. Seems to me its a much bigger loss than that. Reported $300 mil budget, doesn't include prints/advertising, grosses under $500 mil worldwide? Rule is you need to do at least 2X the production cost, I'd have to think SOLO needed $600-$700 mil at least to break even (theatrically) and it's not going to end up anywhere near that.

Home video etc. will push it into the black, but not by much, and we all know Disney has no interest in making sequels to movies that aren't generating huge profits.

[Eric Paddon]

"Wrinkle's" purposeful jettisoning of religious elements from the book and boasting that it was a sign of how "progressed" we are now guaranteed that a lot of people familiar with the book weren't going to see the movie.

[Monterey Jack]

Oh yeah, WRINKLE will go alongside TOMORROWLAND as a total bust.

Along with John Carter and The Lone Ranger, it's like Disney has totally forgotten how to make non-franchise movies into hits anymore. Granted, John Carter is the only good movie in the bunch (albeit a very flawed "good"), but still, it's sad they're still squeezing out every last drop of audience goodwill for franchises like Star Wars and Pirates Of The Caribbean (which hasn't yielded a good entry since its 2003 debut) instead of trying to generate interest in new franchises. It's like cutting down a rainforest, and not planting any saplings to replenish that natural resource...it's only going to lead to ecological/commercial catatstrophe a few decades down the line. The reason why Star Wars resonated so deeply for audiences in 1977 was because it evoked the simple. pulp charm of the adventure serials of decades past without copying them verbatim. George Lucas might have loved Flash Gordon serials, but he didn't cast the same, now-elderly actors from those 30's cliffhangers and had them go through the same plots again, only with a new cast of youngsters there to take on the mantle for future adventures.

[tjguitar85]

Wasn't John Carter supposed to be a franchise but then considered a failure?

[Monterey Jack]

Wasn't John Carter supposed to be a franchise but then considered a failure?

I'm sure all of these films were supposed to launch franchises.

The thing is, unless a movie makes a billion+ worldwide, Disney doesn't want to make it, and the only way to guarantee a billion worldwide is to have a built-in brand recognition (and Solo proved that even that isn't a guarantee of success). It's like they're deliberately allowing filmmakers to run amok on the studio's dime, just so they can point at the "failure" of their films as an excuse to double-down on more Star Wars, more Pirates Of The Caribbean sequels, and more belated Pixar and Disney sequels (did we need another Wreck-It Ralph, especially one that appears to barely have anything to do with video games?). It used to be a studio would be very happy when they'd spend around $25 million for a $200 million worldwide return, but now they're all rolling the dice with these ABSURD $250 million pricetags, expecting to make a similar amount of profit, which rarely happens, even with home video sales and streaming taken into consideration. And it's not going to change until we start seeing a lot more Solos crashing and burning, and see more modestly-budgeted genre fare making higher profits because people actually want to see them. I remember being astonished reading that Tim Burton's Batman cost $45 million thirty years ago, and yet you don't even see romantic comedies costing that little to make anymore.

[Eric Paddon]

We had a thread once on failed films that were supposed to be franchise series. There should be a whole book on that subject!

[BobaMike]

Don't forget Disney's Prince of Persia and the Sorcerer's Apprentice!

[AndyDursin]

Too many to count!

To piggyback on MJ's comments, which I fully agree with and we've discussed before, Disney's approach isn't good for the long term health of the cinema. Yes it's great for them, they have a near monopoly at the box-office (and take a higher percentage cut than other studios can get away with) -- but they aren't cultivating new series, or IPs. These are easy wins commercially -- remaking animated classics, buying established brands like Lucasfilm and Marvel -- but the well will eventually run out on all of it. 25 years from now that 4th remake of BEAUTY AND THE BEAST will be playing to diminished returns -- and what kind of cinema will there be then? Are the kids of today going to care? That's really the thing, because so many of Disney's hits are built upon pre-installed nostalgia and "brand awareness". I doubt the kids of today will really care about STAR WARS years from now, because these things aren't special anymore, and they've already devalued the brand, to the point where what we saw as kids -- and the ENORMOUS cultural impact those movies had -- isn't at all being replicated here. These movies are making money but I don't walk around hearing anyone reference, discuss, talk about THE FORCE AWAKENS. It's just one more revenue stream for a corporation swimming in cash.

Thing to remember is that STAR WARS itself wasn't just a rehash of the 1930s serials -- it was something that blew people away. The editing. The score. The effects. It brought something old back in a whole new way with a seriousness that wasn't pretentious but still made people buy into the world, and then go back over and over again. It wasn't camp. It wasn't a joke. It had humor, but the humor was generated by the characters. And sure, some people dump on the prequels -- but good or bad, they weren't rehashes, they were organic storylines and all of them were more honest than Disney's corporate recyclings that have no imagination or artistic inspiration to them at all.

None of these modern things are innovative or blowing people away. They have a sameness across them all...they're built for a billion-dollar gross worldwide, but the formulaic nature and anonymity of direction behind them is what's killing the cinema. It's why attendance continues to decline every year. And the only way its going to change is to produce better films, more personalized and fresh -- and that's so NOT what we have now.

Disney's short-sighted approach is gobbling up the competition now -- but it may end up being a Pyrrhic victory in the end for the movies altogether unless they take more chances. God knows they've got the resources to take some risks beyond the blueprint.