The Marvels , you know that new superhero movie

[Tyndmyr]

Wish has none of that. Asha, the protagonist, doesn't really learn anything throughout the movie. Hell, the big reveal that the bad guy is bad is just restating facts that have already been communicated to the audience three times except it's bad now because the guy everybody gives their wishes to so he can decide if he wants to grant them isn't granting the wish of somebody the protagonist cares about. That's it, thats the big reveal. The villain's diabolical plan is to do exactly what his entire kingdom is explicitly on board with him doing and knows he does, just that it's sad for the protagonist.

They do repeat it frequently...and they make sure to emphasize repeatedly that people choose to give him their wishes. Which...makes it significantly less evil.

Also, when showing the wishes he says are too dangerous to grant, some of them are like...being a pirate captain. Cool dream, but I can absolutely see why the leader of the port city does not want to turn his citizens into pirate captains. That's honestly sort of reasonable, and exactly what he has told people he is doing. Is he cautious in this? Yeah. But...how many stories are there about the dangers of a wish gone awry? The dude is genuinely not evil at this point.

He's portrayed as going evil, sure, but he doesn't actually do anything evil until after he cracks the book of bad.

What you get instead is an empty feel good platitude, just, like, have a wish. It's important, for, uh, reasons. Also apparently you can live a long happy life not knowing what it is. But have one!

There's an entire song and dance number about "wanting something more." There is no metaphor here, they just...say those words a lot. It's remarkably vague, yes. As an idea goes, it's not really an earthshaker. Pretty much everyone already gets the concept of wanting more, and does not need to be inspired to do so.


A big problem with a lot of the failed heroes is that they don't actually have a villain to face, no real challenges, no real danger, not even any real pain or struggle. Look at any hero story that works, and most often they fail at first, or at least bleed for their beliefs. Where's bravery without danger? Where's the story without opposition?

For our first big "conflict" of her trying to find a job, nobody actually opposes here. Literally everyone is on her side. Even when she clumsily messes things up, everyone is 100% kind and understanding at all times. She storms out after yelling at her would-be boss because he won't immediately engage in blatant nepotism for her on day one. This isn't a heroic action, this is blatantly selfish. She doesn't care if it's good for the kingdom, she just really, really wants her family favored.

So, there's no character arc whatsoever. There cannot be. The movie does not recognize that the character needs to change, and instead, the world is portrayed as needing to change to fit the needs of the character. The whole thing's just an anthem to selfishness.

[ecarden]

So for Wish are any of the more...sketchy aspects of wish granting magic addressed? Like, take Aladin, they expressly say 'No making people fall in love and no killing people,' now this is a kid's movie, so I'm not expecting the Buffy 'that was rape' scene, but like, in a kingdom one might expect say a couple of different people to wish to marry the princess? Or for someone they hate to drop dead? Or to be the richest person in town?

[warty goblin]

Disney, in the current climate, is terrified of offending people with this very message though. So they have to water it down to the point where you are expecting it, but it's not there, and you note its absence as a result. Which makes the final product just feel... off.

And that's pretty much the current Disney. So afraid of their own shadow, that they're just spinning in place.

My mind boggles at being offended by the concept that you might fail sometimes. Because, like, people fail.

I don't even think they really had to do that. They just had to have to show the wishes actually have consequences in the story. They don't though. They're stated to be Important, but the city starts out as basically a utopia and aside from some vague ennui everybody seems pretty much fine. "We must overthrow the corrupt system that leaves people living long and happy lives with a slight sense of purposelessness!" is not exactly the strongest rallying cry.

They do repeat it frequently...and they make sure to emphasize repeatedly that people choose to give him their wishes. Which...makes it significantly less evil.

Also, when showing the wishes he says are too dangerous to grant, some of them are like...being a pirate captain. Cool dream, but I can absolutely see why the leader of the port city does not want to turn his citizens into pirate captains. That's honestly sort of reasonable, and exactly what he has told people he is doing. Is he cautious in this? Yeah. But...how many stories are there about the dangers of a wish gone awry? The dude is genuinely not evil at this point.

He's portrayed as going evil, sure, but he doesn't actually do anything evil until after he cracks the book of bad.

The Book of Bad struck me as that annoying thing a lot of modern movies do where the bad guy isn't really bad for half they movie, but they need to be actually bad so the hero is justified in beating them. So quick! Have them do something awful and irredeemable!

There's an entire song and dance number about "wanting something more." There is no metaphor here, they just...say those words a lot. It's remarkably vague, yes. As an idea goes, it's not really an earthshaker. Pretty much everyone already gets the concept of wanting more, and does not need to be inspired to do so.

Yes, exactly. There's a huge amount of telling the audience that wishes are important in a non-specific way, but there's no showing that not having them matters.

For our first big "conflict" of her trying to find a job, nobody actually opposes here. Literally everyone is on her side. Even when she clumsily messes things up, everyone is 100% kind and understanding at all times. She storms out after yelling at her would-be boss because he won't immediately engage in blatant nepotism for her on day one. This isn't a heroic action, this is blatantly selfish. She doesn't care if it's good for the kingdom, she just really, really wants her family favored.

So, there's no character arc whatsoever. There cannot be. The movie does not recognize that the character needs to change, and instead, the world is portrayed as needing to change to fit the needs of the character. The whole thing's just an anthem to selfishness.

There's something almost interesting there, since there's a solid argument that even under Magnifico's standards, he's too stingy in wish granting, but also Asha is really over the top in asking the guy halfway through the job interview to break his own rules just for her. Two unreasonable people learning to be reasonable is a solid story, but instead they went with making him super ultra evil so of course the heroine ends up pretty much good by default.

So for Wish are any of the more...sketchy aspects of wish granting magic addressed? Like, take Aladin, they expressly say 'No making people fall in love and no killing people,' now this is a kid's movie, so I'm not expecting the Buffy 'that was rape' scene, but like, in a kingdom one might expect say a couple of different people to wish to marry the princess? Or for someone they hate to drop dead? Or to be the richest person in town?

Not really. Firstly because there's like two wishes granted in the entire movie, and secondly because these aren't really Gennie type "I want this" wishes, but more like aspirational life goals. Things like "I want to inspire with my music" or "I want to invent a flying machine," stuff like that. What about people with bad life goals? Shuttup, that obviously can't happen because life goals and dreaming are good nevermind that the villain of the movie is in fact pretty much living his life goal and its a bad thing. Don't think, just dream, generically.

[Ramza00]

Wish has none of that. Asha, the protagonist, doesn't really learn anything throughout the movie. Hell, the big reveal that the bad guy is bad is just restating facts that have already been communicated to the audience three times except it's bad now because the guy everybody gives their wishes to so he can decide if he wants to grant them isn't granting the wish of somebody the protagonist cares about. That's it, thats the big reveal. The villain's diabolical plan is to do exactly what his entire kingdom is explicitly on board with him doing and knows he does, just that it's sad for the protagonist.

you know this is a groundbreaking thought if you are 6

not so if you are 12, or ages older than that

[Trixie_One]

Message repeating how important it is to Have A Dream (preferably of visiting a Disney theme park).

This amused me, cheers.

[Lemmy]

Turns out Disney lost 1.37 billion dollars this years just in movie flops (the biggest one of which was The Marvels, closely followed by Wish)... And that amount is assuming Disney was 100% honest with movies expenses (which is VERY unlikely to be the case).

Amazing...

[BananaPhone]

Turns out Disney lost 1.37 billion dollars this years just in movie flops (the biggest one of which was The Marvels, closely followed by Wish)... And that amount is assuming Disney was 100% honest with movies expenses (which is VERY unlikely to be the case).

Amazing...

I think I read a satirical site that said Disney has been awarded a defence contract because of all the bombs they've produced this year.

[sktarq]

Turns out Disney lost 1.37 billion dollars this years just in movie flops (the biggest one of which was The Marvels, closely followed by Wish)... And that amount is assuming Disney was 100% honest with movies expenses (which is VERY unlikely to be the case).

Amazing...

Okay so Wish
~$200mm claimed budget (likely $250)
~$100mm marketing and prints
~$53mm rentals from the box office (50% gross box office)
so a $250mm loss

Indiana Jones is likely right up there
~$280mm production ($329mm production but will get some sweet UK tax pounds back to help out)
~$100mm marketing etc
~$190mm rentals from the box office (50% gross box office)
so a $190mm loss

and The Marvels
~$280mm production (279 before reshoots+VFX but also will get tax credits so I'll call it a wash)
~$100mm marketing
~$100mm rentals from the box office (50% gross box office)
so a $280mm loss

I would say that is the big three for three of the four Disney pillars.

with and honorable mention to:
Haunted Mansion (budget 158, marketing 50?, box office rentals ~$58) so another $150mm loss (guestimate)

Not great...and with the high drama around the board (proxy fight) and the RCID audit dropping it has been a bad winter

And the RCID audit makes all of Disney's other issues look smaller in comparison (even D+ and hulu)...it is wild.

[warty goblin]

you know this is a groundbreaking thought if you are 6

not so if you are 12, or ages older than that

And if the lesson is sometimes things that make you sad are OK actually, there'd be something there. Instead it turns out that people who make you sad because they don't bump you up the queue are like one nudge away from going irredeemably evil and trying to enslave everyone. Who knew?

[Lemmy]

Okay so Wish
~$200mm claimed budget (likely $250)
~$100mm marketing and prints
~$53mm rentals from the box office (50% gross box office)
so a $250mm loss

Indiana Jones is likely right up there
~$280mm production ($329mm production but will get some sweet UK tax pounds back to help out)
~$100mm marketing etc
~$190mm rentals from the box office (50% gross box office)
so a $190mm loss

and The Marvels
~$280mm production (279 before reshoots+VFX but also will get tax credits so I'll call it a wash)
~$100mm marketing
~$100mm rentals from the box office (50% gross box office)
so a $280mm loss

I would say that is the big three for three of the four Disney pillars.

with and honorable mention to:
Haunted Mansion (budget 158, marketing 50?, box office rentals ~$58) so another $150mm loss (guestimate)

Not great...and with the high drama around the board (proxy fight) and the RCID audit dropping it has been a bad winter

And the RCID audit makes all of Disney's other issues look smaller in comparison (even D+ and hulu)...it is wild.

Don't forget Ant-man Quantumania, Elemental, and The Little Mermaid... And I'd say it's VERY optimistic to assume that The Marvel's marketing budget was only 100 million.

I'd bet my life savings that if studios were actually honest about how much they spend on production and marketing, Disney that 1.37 billion in losses would easily rise to over 1.5 billion.

Disney probably isn't going to go under anytime soon... But for the first time in decades, the chance of that happening isn't zero.

[Mechalich]

I think it would be very helpful to compare Disney's figures to that of the other major studios for this year. My expectation is that while Disney's losses are the largest, that Paramount, Sony, and Warner Bros all also lost money this year (and that's despite Warner Bros having Barbie at the #1 spot). Of the big studios only Universal and possibly Lionsgate (though they lost a lot of money on Expend4bles) seems like to have turned a profit at the box office. 2023 has, in general, been a really bad year for Hollywood. I mean, the biggest, clearest winner of the 2023 year at the box office is Taylor Swift, who bypassed them entirely.

Which is not to say Disney didn't make a whole bunch of mistakes, because they did, but it's harder to identify mistakes unique to Disney compared to other studios (at least in the movie space, failures on Disney+ are easier to isolate).

[Lemmy]

Oh, definitely!!

Disney is far from unique in the "absurd overspending" and "studio-wide incompetence" categories... Although they do seem to be the studio most eager to double down on their poor decisions until the whole thing collapses, while other major studios seem to at least be trying to course-correct...

But who knows? Depending on how the proxy war at Disney turns out, they might actually start making money again at some point... Or at least not losing hundreds of millions (or billions) in every single aspect of their business.

[Eldan]

Oh wow. I forgot Indiana Jones V already came out. I even thought about watching that and I completely missed it came out.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by Eldan
I forgot Indiana Jones V already came out. I even thought about watching that and I completely missed it came out.

Trust me, you missed nothing. A vaguely entertaining, mindless action flick that takes a sharp twist into full-on ridiculous nonsense in the final act.

It’s just the latest of so many movies that I’m deeply glad I didn’t pay money to watch.

[Trafalgar]

I think it would be very helpful to compare Disney's figures to that of the other major studios for this year. My expectation is that while Disney's losses are the largest, that Paramount, Sony, and Warner Bros all also lost money this year (and that's despite Warner Bros having Barbie at the #1 spot). Of the big studios only Universal and possibly Lionsgate (though they lost a lot of money on Expend4bles) seems like to have turned a profit at the box office. 2023 has, in general, been a really bad year for Hollywood. I mean, the biggest, clearest winner of the 2023 year at the box office is Taylor Swift, who bypassed them entirely.

Which is not to say Disney didn't make a whole bunch of mistakes, because they did, but it's harder to identify mistakes unique to Disney compared to other studios (at least in the movie space, failures on Disney+ are easier to isolate).

Yeah, if I was Disney, I would try to hire Taylor Swift to be in the next Star Wars or Marvel project. Though I doubt Disney can afford to pay her more than she is making now.

[Ramza00]

Yeah, if I was Disney, I would try to hire Taylor Swift to be in the next Star Wars or Marvel project. Though I doubt Disney can afford to pay her more than she is making now.

if the internet is to be believed (the internet is full of lies and terrors)

she makes roughly 13 million a show, her personally, the exact number does not matter

and the Eras tour is ongoing with a planned 151 tour dates over a period of 3/2023 to 12/2024 aka 21 months.

so not counting time off between tours, we are talking 7 shows a month and thus that lady is rackin’ in the dough

(good for her!)

[DaedalusMkV]

Yeah, if I was Disney, I would try to hire Taylor Swift to be in the next Star Wars or Marvel project. Though I doubt Disney can afford to pay her more than she is making now.

Pretty sure Taylor Swift has no intention of changing her business model at this point, being one of the best-paid people in the entire entertainment industry, and I'm not sure that Disney would be well-served to try to solve their rampant overspending problem by hiring one of the most expensive people in the world to do something for them.

Disney has two big problems right now. Making bad products is the harder one to solve, especially because when it comes to media 'bad' is a subjective measure. Plenty of people in this thread thought that The Marvels was a perfectly fine movie that didn't deserve the criticism it got. So 'make better products' isn't necessarily an easy solution, and it isn't necessarily something that will actually help. Plenty of good movies aren't financial successes for one reason or another, after all.

Disney's other problem is rampant overspending, and that is something they can do something about. Especially because it's often hard to see where all that money went. Yeah, The Marvels is by all measures so stuffed full of CGI that it was never going to be cheap, but it's still far more expensive than similar movies put out by other studios. And why on earth did they spend $200 million on Wish? How did they spend $200 million on Wish? Across the Spider-Verse had half that budget, is stuffed with big name voice actors, looks gorgeous and is both longer and far more intricately designed. Puss in Boots 2 went in at $90 million! Yes, both of these are good movies (almost universally well-regarded) while Wish is a bad movie, but it's a hell of a lot easier to make a profit when you spent half as much money. And this is where Disney has a clear problem; they spend far more money on their offerings without any clear difference in the outcome. Disney needs to reign in the spending first and foremost, and while they're at it maybe try to cut back on the sheer amount of stuff they're producing (well, nothing wrong with putting out a few B-movies to fill in the gaps, but the fact that they seem to think they can produce 8-10 mega-blockbusters per year is absurd).

As far as I'm concerned if the movie isn't made by James Cameron (who at this point has thoroughly proven that no matter how impossible it seems you can just throw money at him and he'll make you a massive profit) or riding a hype-train so large that anything less than The Biggest Movie Ever would be incredibly disappointing (The Avengers movies in general, and Endgame in particular), even thinking of spending $300 million on it is a terrible idea. If your movie needs to break $1 billion worldwide at the box office to break even you're taking an outrageous risk.

[warty goblin]

I don't think the Marvels failed because it was bad exactly. Far more damaging is the string of meh before it, and the overwhelming degree of "oh look another one" inherent in a project that's the 33rd movie in a franchise, and the fourth in 12 months, not counting two TV shows each adding up to another roughly two movies each. Particularly since all of this has done a very bad job of establishing and developing characters and ongoing plot and conflict.

Wish failed because it was just bad. I was perplexed as an adult, as a child I think I'd have just been bored.

[Ramza00]

Disney's other problem is rampant overspending, and that is something they can do something about. Especially because it's often hard to see where all that money went. Yeah, The Marvels is by all measures so stuffed full of CGI that it was never going to be cheap, but it's still far more expensive than similar movies put out by other studios. And why on earth did they spend $200 million on Wish? How did they spend $200 million on Wish? Across the Spider-Verse had half that budget, is stuffed with big name voice actors, looks gorgeous and is both longer and far more intricately designed. Puss in Boots 2 went in at $90 million! Yes, both of these are good movies (almost universally well-regarded) while Wish is a bad movie, but it's a hell of a lot easier to make a profit when you spent half as much money. And this is where Disney has a clear problem; they spend far more money on their offerings without any clear difference in the outcome. Disney needs to reign in the spending first and foremost, and while they're at it maybe try to cut back on the sheer amount of stuff they're producing (well, nothing wrong with putting out a few B-movies to fill in the gaps, but the fact that they seem to think they can produce 8-10 mega-blockbusters per year is absurd).

agreed it is not technically money laundering but the extravagant spending on some parts of the gestalt process to make a movie, while not spending on other parts

it is excess, lust, leisure, intensity … whatever fancy word one wants to use. If Disney is hurting (something I doubt, but this is language games) then rebalancing both budget sizes, and who gets paid with the gestalt … would be a good thing.

Certain movies and tv shows should be funded with a 10 to 100 million dollar budget, and not a 100 to 300 budget. The excessive budgets are about bragging rights.

[Lemmy]

Disney itself admits they are "hurting" (and pretty bad) (remember that not only they lost over 1.3 billion dollar just this year, just with movies... Just this month they spent 14 billion dollars to their biggest rival as PART OF their payment for Hulu... And that's less than 5 years since they paid 60~70 billion for Fox (not to mention they had to take over 24 billion dollars in loans during the pandemic).

So, yeah... Disney is indeed "hurting".

And that is in no small part due to their overspending, but even more so due to releasing bad product after bad product, seemingly turning studios who were almost incapable of failure into ones almost incapable of success (Lucasfilm has to be the worst managed studio in modern day).... Which resulted in the general public simply losing interest in Disney products.

Disney literally paid billions of dollars for big franchises because of their in-built fandom... And then spent most of the last 10 years gleefully disregarding, insulting and gas-lighting those fans. until they too lost interest in those franchises...

It's such a stupid business plan, I'd doubt it was actually real if I didn't see it happen.

[warty goblin]

Disney literally paid billions of dollars for big franchises because of their in-built fandom... And then spent most of the last 10 years gleefully disregarding, insulting and gas-lighting those fans. until they too lost interest in those franchises...

It's such a stupid business plan, I'd doubt it was actually real if I didn't see it happen.

I have a pet theory that entertainment company CEOs don't actually understand or care about entertainment. What they want to do is to make money by producing what's essentially a monopolized commodity. By which I mean entertainment products that only they can make - not due to talent or specialization but through simple legal ownership ergo the emphasis on brands and franchises - and be something that can be produced essentially serially, where the individual assets of any given product don't matter*. Marvel is as close as anybody has ever come to obtaining this status in the movie universe.

You see this throughout the Disney line up this year. They own franchises people like, so they make movies in those franchises - Wish is entirely a Disney Animation franchise movie without even needing to be a sequel - people should show up. I think at some very deep level the problem isn't that they've made some bad movies, it's that the machine they've created is no longer capable of discriminating based on a movie's quality.

The fundamental and inevitable Achilles Heel of this approach is that audience tastes change, I suspect more or less at random, and occasionally very fast and very hard. Just look at how radically Smells Like Teen Spirit shifted music. If your production system is "another one of that ASAP" you will inevitably get hammered by this sort of thing, and I rather suspect we're going through another sea change in taste right now. I don't know what the next 'it' thing in movies will be, but this year has made it overwhelmingly clear that it isn't the big franchises from the last decade and a half, because in the last year they've all cratered**. What makes this particularly perilous is that audiences also have 15 years of training to only really show up for big $200 million dollar films, and $200 million is not a budget where you can try a bunch of somewhat experimental new stuff and see what sticks. It's gotta stick the landing, which means playing it safe, which mean franchises - right up until those don't work anymore.

I think this is a genuine problem. Not necessarily an insolvable problem, the summer clearly demonstrated that people still like to go to the movies, they just won't turn up for "another one of those" anymore, at least not in the numbers needed to pay for another one of those.


*Besides the huge amount of money you can make, I think this explains a lot of the corporate appeal of free-to-play/microtransaction powered games. Making a good game is hard and unpredictable and sometimes you release a balance patch and now the entire fan base hates you. Releasing skins is a predictable commodity monopoly that sidesteps all this.

**What about Avatar 2? That's not meaningfully a franchise, that's a very long delayed sequel. Also James Cameron, to whom normal movie rules do not apply.

[Mechalich]

Disney's other problem is rampant overspending, and that is something they can do something about. Especially because it's often hard to see where all that money went. Yeah, The Marvels is by all measures so stuffed full of CGI that it was never going to be cheap, but it's still far more expensive than similar movies put out by other studios. And why on earth did they spend $200 million on Wish? How did they spend $200 million on Wish? Across the Spider-Verse had half that budget, is stuffed with big name voice actors, looks gorgeous and is both longer and far more intricately designed. Puss in Boots 2 went in at $90 million! Yes, both of these are good movies (almost universally well-regarded) while Wish is a bad movie, but it's a hell of a lot easier to make a profit when you spent half as much money. And this is where Disney has a clear problem; they spend far more money on their offerings without any clear difference in the outcome. Disney needs to reign in the spending first and foremost, and while they're at it maybe try to cut back on the sheer amount of stuff they're producing (well, nothing wrong with putting out a few B-movies to fill in the gaps, but the fact that they seem to think they can produce 8-10 mega-blockbusters per year is absurd).

Another useful example is that Elemental and Puss in Boots 2 have almost exactly the same global gross (487 to 485 million), but Elemental cost 200 million to Puss in Boots' 90 million. The former is a modest loser while the later is a huge win, and it's down entirely to budgetary differences. The critical question is why did it somehow cost Pixar more than twice as much as Dreamworks to make an animated film of exactly the same length (both movies are 102 minutes)?

Disney released 8 major blockbusters in 2023. If they'd spent 100 million less on each one, then while they wouldn't be having an awesome year, there would be no doom and gloom at all.

[Ramza00]

Disney itself admits they are "hurting" (and pretty bad) (remember that not only they lost over 1.3 billion dollar just this year, just with movies... Just this month they spent 14 billion dollars to their biggest rival as PART OF their payment for Hulu... And that's less than 5 years since they paid 60~70 billion for Fox (not to mention they had to take over 24 billion dollars in loans during the pandemic).

So, yeah... Disney is indeed "hurting".

i am not saying that Disney is or is not hurting. But how loud one speaks (and also how quiet), and which direction of valence (it is very good or very bad)

has almost no relation to the actual events. Some personality types, some personas, some brands are more loud and bravado, it is bragging rights where they feel the need to fill up conversation space.

Disney feels the need to do this, how about comparing Disney to 9 other media companies that are similar yet not the same, to help figure out what is wheat and what is fiber / chaffe.

The fundamental and inevitable Achilles Heel of this approach is that audience tastes change, I suspect more or less at random, and occasionally very fast and very hard. Just look at how radically Smells Like Teen Spirit shifted music.

Didn’t Chris Evan’s become famous via Not Another Teen Movie? Google says 2001 so he would have been 20 when it aired, and perhaps 19 when filmed.

Did Evan’s have a hit or something that put him on peoples radar before that? i am asking but also underlining warty’s point.

[Trixie_One]

Disney's other problem is rampant overspending, and that is something they can do something about. Especially because it's often hard to see where all that money went

This is it to me especially when you compare how much they spent on Secret Invasion compared to s3 of Picard. I forget the exact figures but Picard was like 10% of the other show's budget or something mad like that. A show that significantly better looking cgi (some of the ship shots were just incredible) and didn't have an incredibly crappy cost saving AI intro.

Sure Samuel L Jackson has to wet his beak but unless he's actually getting paid 80-90% of the total spend, then the overspend must have been astronomcal.

[Mechalich]

This is it to me especially when you compare how much they spent on Secret Invasion compared to s3 of Picard. I forget the exact figures but Picard was like 10% of the other show's budget or something mad like that. A show that significantly better looking cgi (some of the ship shots were just incredible) and didn't have an incredibly crappy cost saving AI intro.

S3 of Picard is apparently a special case and not a good comp. However, Secret Invasion cost $212 million for 6 episodes, or ~35 million per episode, which is nuts. Even the Star Wars Disney+ shows only cost something like half of that and those shows are already generally perceived as costing more than they should. S1 and S2 of Star Trek: Picard apparently cost around 8-10 million per episode, which is a useful number though anything made today as opposed to in 2020 will cost more because of both inflation and changed labor agreements.

Sci-fi and Fantasy have always been expensive genres to put on TV, but Disney should probably be trying to get their series to come in at the 10-15 million per episode range for the big shows and significantly less for smaller shows. Marvel has been a notably huge overspend on Disney+. I can't think of a reason why any Marvel show should cost more than a Star Wars one, but that's consistently been the case. I mean, seriously they apparently spent more money on Moon Knight than Ahsoka and that's with only 6 episodes compared to 8. I don't understand how anyone could agree to such a move.

There seems to be something fundamentally off about Disney's budget process in recent years. They're spending more money than everyone else for at best comparable results, and often worse.

Sure Samuel L Jackson has to wet his beak but unless he's actually getting paid 80-90% of the total spend, then the overspend must have been astronomcal.

Sources say Jackson took home ~$20 million for Secret Invasion as a whole, or about 3.3 million per episode, and the rest of the main cast pulled in only around half that combined, for around 5 million per episode on the principals in total. And while that's a lot, it's only a fraction of the total cost. I mean, assuming the principals were collectively paid 15 million for the series instead of 30 million (which could have been accomplished by re-casting Jackson), that would still only drop the cost from 35 million to 32.5 million per episode. The money pit would appear to be somewhere else.

[Trixie_One]

The money pit would appear to be somewhere else.

Certainly wasn't on the screen, or at least not that I saw. The two big fights in the attack on the president and the final super powered one and one had glaring issues visually, were poorly thought out in terms of who is where speaking of some shoddy directing, and even the editing felt off.

Also cheers for the additional info. Much appreciated.

[Tyndmyr]

So for Wish are any of the more...sketchy aspects of wish granting magic addressed? Like, take Aladin, they expressly say 'No making people fall in love and no killing people,' now this is a kid's movie, so I'm not expecting the Buffy 'that was rape' scene, but like, in a kingdom one might expect say a couple of different people to wish to marry the princess? Or for someone they hate to drop dead? Or to be the richest person in town?

This concept is brought up by the "villain" as the reason for why he doesn't grant every wish. Nobody else addresses this whatsoever.

Now, obviously, we see that plenty of wishes are not particularly evil, and perhaps his specific standards are overly cautious. However, there's definitely at least some wishes that would be a problem, and it is strange that once it's brought up, the end solution just...ignores all this. I'm not expecting any deep philosophy from an animated kids movie, mind you, but at least some kind of token way to address this would have been good.

After all, everyone chose to move here specifically because they liked the way it was run, it's literally a nation of immigrants, and it generally seems pretty functional and happy at the start. The idea that they all suddenly want the opposite, and nothing really changes is kinda weird.

I think it would be very helpful to compare Disney's figures to that of the other major studios for this year. My expectation is that while Disney's losses are the largest, that Paramount, Sony, and Warner Bros all also lost money this year (and that's despite Warner Bros having Barbie at the #1 spot). Of the big studios only Universal and possibly Lionsgate (though they lost a lot of money on Expend4bles) seems like to have turned a profit at the box office. 2023 has, in general, been a really bad year for Hollywood. I mean, the biggest, clearest winner of the 2023 year at the box office is Taylor Swift, who bypassed them entirely.

Warner Bros Discovery gross profit for the twelve months ending September 30, 2023 was $16.461B, a 43.88% increase year-over-year.

Sony is projecting $761.6 million profit for the complete year of 2023. Not quite done yet, but it's been within about 1% of forecasts thus far, so that doesn't seem terrible.

Paramount Global gross profit for the twelve months ending September 30, 2023 was $9.790B, a 4.1% decline year-over-year.

Yes, Lionsgate and Universal did the best, but nobody else major appeals to be at Disney levels of losses. The state of the industry does not suffice to explain their fate, as they're an outlier...just so large of one that them doing bad drags the whole industry down. Disney is *huge.*

Disney has two big problems right now. Making bad products is the harder one to solve, especially because when it comes to media 'bad' is a subjective measure. Plenty of people in this thread thought that The Marvels was a perfectly fine movie that didn't deserve the criticism it got.

The Marvels was not really perfectly fine. It was mediocre. Not horrible, but certainly not fine. If you go to a resteraunt that has been really bad lately, and you get an experience that is mediocre, that's...not a great deal of redemption. The sales are down because the brand as a whole no longer represents the quality people expected early on, and you can't redeem that reputation with one vaguely acceptable entry. If anything, GotG is a stronger case for redemption, but unfortunately, Love and Thunder was a strong counterbalancing failure.

Whatever else they do, they need to provide a good product at a price people want to pay. This isn't specific to movies, that's just how life works.

Part of their business model is spending a great deal of money on IPs that they apparently have no real plan for using. That's...wild. Starting the Star Wars sequel trilogy without any coherent plan for it is just not a reasonable path. The MCU is also now devolving into incoherence, has been for a while, and they've been trying to mine every possible IP for yet more sequels and remakes....but have absolutely no idea what to do with them.

The fundamental and inevitable Achilles Heel of this approach is that audience tastes change, I suspect more or less at random, and occasionally very fast and very hard. Just look at how radically Smells Like Teen Spirit shifted music.

I've wondered from time to time if it was just this. I got older, my tastes changed, and the movies were essentially the same. So, I went back, and watched a bunch of older movies. Not just former MCU movies that I greatly enjoyed(Age of Ultron still holds up), but older films that are well regarded that I'd not seen before. They Live, Escape from New York, etc. And yknow...they're fun. Yeah, yeah, some of the older stuff has technical limitations, but a coherent story is still told, and it's at least a little different. Iron Man had a very different vibe than, say, Winter Soldier, or the first Ant Man...but all of them had a story to tell, and characters had meaningful motivations and what not.

There are likewise occasional exceptions even among new releases that break the mold. Godzilla -one is glorious. Go watch it, it's actually a good film. It's just that most modern stuff is genuinely bad. It leans on IP, it leans on formula. We've always had this class of movie, but they used to be direct to dvd. You didn't actually watch Donnie Darko Two in theaters, yknow? And studios didn't spend money on that crap. The schlocky sequels were a known thing, and treated as such, but for some reason, Disney has forgotten this.

I theorize that Disney has become bloated, and something of a corporate middle management nightmare. It has so many divisions and so many things going on, that it's sort of difficult to even categorize everything. How much of this failure is associated with streaming? Eh, some, but it's difficult to pin a hard number on it. How many people are working specifically on movies? No idea. There's 225,000 people in total, but there are parks, cruise ships, etc, and divisions are not wholly separate in all cases. When films or shows are literally filming scenes at a Disney Park, does that incorporate at least some of that number of workers into the film industry, kind of? It's possible that Disney itself isn't good at managing this, and the typical hollywood accounting that all studios indulge in to at least some degree has made any real accountability somewhat opaque. There's always somewhere else to shunt the blame, and certainly the fans are not present to defend themselves. It seems farcial that a company could believe that its own fans...the ones buying its products, rather than the ones not buying....could be its largest problem, yet here we are.

[gbaji]

My mind boggles at being offended by the concept that you might fail sometimes. Because, like, people fail.

Yeah. But that's the problem. There's two concepts here: "People's actions and choices succeed or fail naturally, and as a feedback effect, those successes and failures influence their future actions and choices to (hopefully) allow them to make betters ones over time and achieve their hopes and dreams" versus "A powerful authority chooses which people's hopes and dreams should be granted, not based on the individuals themselves, but which ones will better the whole of society if granted". Hopefully I don't need to spell out the socio-econmic concepts those two represent. Not expressing an opinion on them here, nor even how the film presents them, but merely pointing out that these concepts are front and center to the core theme of the film.

Thus, Disney is walking into a mine field with this film from day one. But instead of picking a firm position, they kinda meander through, being very vague, and downplaying anything which might directly be viewed as an endorsement of either position. Which may be smart from a "we don't want to get angry feedback" point of view, but the result is "meh" in terms of actual reception of the film. In their pursuit of offending no one, they have pleased no one.

We can also see how past films from Disney in recent years have similarly skirted a variety of different real world issues, and done poorly as a result. The specific themes vary, but they are present, and also presented in very "meh" ways that ultimately please no one (well, or very few I suppose). And as Disney builds up a track record of doing this sort of thing, each time parents come out of the theater thinking "I'm not sure if that was a message I really wanted my kid to get from this film" (or even just being unsure what the message actually was), it's going to make it successively harder to get those parents to pay money to put their kids in seats in the next one.

I don't even think they really had to do that. They just had to have to show the wishes actually have consequences in the story. They don't though. They're stated to be Important, but the city starts out as basically a utopia and aside from some vague ennui everybody seems pretty much fine. "We must overthrow the corrupt system that leaves people living long and happy lives with a slight sense of purposelessness!" is not exactly the strongest rallying cry.

Yup. Because they seemed to be downplaying the actual effects of either ideological approach, so as to not seem to be making an endorsement. And yeah, the result is an unclear "evil" to be fought (well, until later in the film), and a very unclear "what does winning look like" outcome. Are wishes good or bad? Is granting them good or bad? Obviously, the answer is "it depends on the wish", which is somewhat expressed in the film, but then not really explored in the actual action/conflict in the film at all (hence the whole "Book of Bad makes the ruler evil" bit). They raise the issue, and then rapidly move away from it.


They would have been better off not raising it in the first place IMO. But it's that "halfway there, but then we pull away" approach that makes the film feel "off".


And yes, overspending on these projects isn't helping them either. But at the end of the day, I'm not sure if "spend less money making crappy films" is the best approach here. Figure out why your films aren't attracting viewers and address it, might be the better one.

[warty goblin]

I've wondered from time to time if it was just this. I got older, my tastes changed, and the movies were essentially the same. So, I went back, and watched a bunch of older movies. Not just former MCU movies that I greatly enjoyed(Age of Ultron still holds up), but older films that are well regarded that I'd not seen before. They Live, Escape from New York, etc. And yknow...they're fun. Yeah, yeah, some of the older stuff has technical limitations, but a coherent story is still told, and it's at least a little different. Iron Man had a very different vibe than, say, Winter Soldier, or the first Ant Man...but all of them had a story to tell, and characters had meaningful motivations and what not.

I rewatched Iron Man a couple weeks ago, and it was tonally about a thousand miles away from the more recent Marvel stuff. I'm not gonna it was super gritty, but for a super hero movie it was super gritty. Like, this was a universe where bad things actually could and did happen and holy cow was that refreshing.

This is also what I've found watching older movies. They're slower paced (honestly not a bad thing) and sometimes the effects are clearly not good by modern standards. But it isn't like modern effects don't look pretty fake a lot of the time, they just look fake in a modern way, like they didn't spend enough on VFX artists to get the CG thing to not move in a weird fake way. Older effects look fake in that you can tell the prop is a prop, but honestly I prefer that to modern fake. At least a doorknob standing in for a mystical crystal is still, you know, an actual physical doorknob in the scene.

But more broadly, tastes just change. Pop culture is enormously driven by young people, and there's a very real impulse for young people to seek out stuff that's illegible to their parents precisely because it's illegible to their parents*. There's also I think a limited amount that can be expressed within any genre, let alone any franchise. Marvel movies all have the same narrative structure, tonally they vary from comedy with action to action with comedy, and there's always gonna be some big stupid villain who needs punched to save the world. That's a good formula, you can do a lot with it, but you can't do everything with it. Eventually it's just retreads running on fumes, where even if you want that specific formula there's probably already a better version of it available. It's like trying to write romantic poetry; sure you can do it, but you're competing with Shelley and Lord Byron and you aren't as good as them. The artists who want to do something inventive and era defining are going to move on to something else not because it's better than the old thing but because it's different from the old thing. The ones that don't are by selection sticks in the mud who probably already did the best version of those ideas back when those ideas were hot and new and they were young and driven.

So something hangs on as utterly dominant for 5 or 8 or 10 years, and then it runs outa creative steam and the kids are into some new thing, and it's just kinda done. This doesn't mean it goes extinct necessarily, but it loses ubiquity. And if you need to gross a billion dollars worldwide, you need extreme ubiquity.

*This is why any given social media network has a built-in expiration date for extreme cultural relevance. Your kids will by necessity use whatever network you aren't on because you aren't on it.

There are likewise occasional exceptions even among new releases that break the mold. Godzilla -one is glorious. Go watch it, it's actually a good film. It's just that most modern stuff is genuinely bad. It leans on IP, it leans on formula. We've always had this class of movie, but they used to be direct to dvd. You didn't actually watch Donnie Darko Two in theaters, yknow? And studios didn't spend money on that crap. The schlocky sequels were a known thing, and treated as such, but for some reason, Disney has forgotten this.

I mean you can make a perfectly good career out of making low quality drek, see Roger Corman and the decades of celluloid trash he gifted us with, for which we are eternally grateful, amen. But Corman did that by building sets out of McDonald's takeout boxes, which isn't really how Disney does things. Also Corman basically taught an entire generation of filmmakers to make film. Disney seems to take a talented person who made one or two indie successes, jam them into the Marvel Machine, then hang them out to dry when the result is bad and fails. I theorize that this is not a great way to foster the next generation.

[Lemmy]

The fundamental and inevitable Achilles Heel of this approach is that audience tastes change, I suspect more or less at random, and occasionally very fast and very hard. (...)

There's definitely a "randomness" factor... But making lots of crappy products also helps. SW, ST, Pixar and the MCU wouldn't fail to the degree they are failing because of randomness or one or two mistakes... It's because of their owners *consistently* producing crap.

That's what happens when you give these franchises to people who don't understand, like or even care about them as anything more than means to make money and/or spread propaganda.