Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

This 58% drop thing in 3 days.

Wasn't opening weekend Easter Weekend?

Don't people do family gak like find the eggs and visit grandma on Easter Sunday?

Just a thought.

All I know is that every regular business that I've worked for would not be satisfied with merely breaking even on the money they spent, but rather want to drive a solid profit, the bigger the better.

My understanding is that Hollywood studios are of a similar mind, to spend money to make money. I sorely doubt that they spend 100s of millions of dollars at tremendous risk merely to break even, when they could simply sit on that money at zero risk and end up at the same place they started.

The rule of thumb is that you want a box office 4x your production budget. If DC spent $250M on production (and they did), then they were expecting a $1B global gross. And that doesn't look like it's happening.

As for people's jobs, in many fields, people do get fired for failing to make adequate sales or sufficient profits.

 ScootyPuffJunior wrote:
Seb, what I was saying is that despite your claim that "none of us work in the film industry" so we don't really know what's going on at Warner Brothers, you seem pretty certain that you know exactly what is going on there and everything else is just "noise" or fanboy opinions.

You're not even reading. Sorry if you've got offended or angry or something, but clearly you're not actually reading my posts, just getting bothered.

I never said you were noise, or you were a fanboy. I don't know you from a bar of soap.

I said there was some fanboy nonsense in people trying to compare to Marvel, because there is. Whether it beats Marvel or not doesn't determine whether the movie makes money.

And I said many of the stats being used are noise, because they are. Weekend drops are meaningless when determining profitability, when we have the actual total gross figures for the movie right there.

And finally, yes, I don't work in a studio. That means I have no finely tuned insight in to whether this movie will be finally profitable. But that doesn't mean I'm incapable of seeing junk arguments. Similarly, I bet neither of us can give detailed discussion of the quality of the Space-X rocket, or give a meaningful prediction as to whether it will change space flight. But if someone said Space-X needs more rockets on it because more rockets make things go faster, we'd both know that that person didn't know what they were talking about.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 JohnHwangDD wrote:
All I know is that every regular business that I've worked for would not be satisfied with merely breaking even on the money they spent, but rather want to drive a solid profit, the bigger the better.

Of course they want to exceed what was spent, the question is how much they have to exceed it by to breakeven. That's never been questioned, it's been an accepted part of every single post on the film's financial performance. Raising it now is bizarre.

I sorely doubt that they spend 100s of millions of dollars at tremendous risk merely to break even, when they could simply sit on that money at zero risk and end up at the same place they started.

Sort of. There's the old model, in which 6/10 movies lose money, including a bunch that never even get released. 3/10 break even, or make a little bit of money. 1/10 make money, and make so much money they pay for all the others. This means a movie merely making its money back isn't disastrous. Of course the studio wants a movie to be one of those massive hits, they want every movie they make to be one of those mega hits, but the reality is that you accept breakeven results will happen while chasing massive payoffs.

That model changes somewhat when you get to really big productions. The chances of a complete miss drop massively (but don't disappear - The Lone Ranger for instance). But on the other end of the scale the chances for a crazy payday come down as well, Iron Man 3 making a billion was a sweet payoff, but because it was a much bigger production it had nothing like the profitability of Paranormal Activity.

The rule of thumb is that you want a box office 4x your production budget. If DC spent $250M on production (and they did), then they were expecting a $1B global gross.

That's not a rule of thumb, because it makes zero sense to exclude advertising and look purely at beating a multiple of production costs. Advertising varies wildly from film to film, a 150m movie with a 50m advertising budget needs to make a lot less money than a 250m movie with a 200m advertising budget. With BvS it was a 250m for production, plus 150m for advertising, for 400m total costs... which is what led to the 800m benchmark for break even.

And to complicate things even more you have to remember that a lot of that 250m budget is actually an estimated figure, because a lot of it is actually an estimate of future payments. A lot of the talent involved in front of and behind the camera would have been receiving a fair portion of their remuneration as 'points on gross', ie a % of the films final box office take. The cost of that is estimated by the studio based on its expected box office take - if they thought they'd be getting 1b then maybe points on gross would cost them 100m once everything was paid out. With what is almost certainly a much lower than forecast final box office, the real, final cost of production actually lowers. This can't be enough to turn an average return in to a good one, but it does change the maths on where break even is. And that makes it just one more factor we know little about for this movie, making our speculation even less grounded in reality.

 JohnHwangDD wrote:
All I know is that every regular business

This isn't regular business; this is show-business.

Is it just me or could Wonder Woman have beaten the big bad by herself? Batman is there purely to provide the Mcguffin and Superman is excess to requirements in his own film.

The Mcguffin weapon was even a perfect themeatic weapon for a hoplite-ish (hop-lite ) lady. On that note I wonder if the superhero minis game has a hop-lite Wonder Woman mini, with or without a Mcguffin weapon.

 Ahtman wrote:
There was a documentary about film and one thing that was talked about was how box office receipts didn't get reported until the 70s (I think mid to late) and that was when the trend of using money as a determining factor for the public started being a thing. Before then it wasn't much of an issue.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Frazzled wrote:
Thats same statement was applied against me, too.

The only thing people ever accused you of was being old. And crochety. And cranky. And maybe constipated.

The new Snickers Bars have "Cranky" on them. I finally found my candy bar.

 George Spiggott wrote:
Is it just me or could Wonder Woman have beaten the big bad by herself? Batman is there purely to provide the Mcguffin and Superman is excess to requirements in his own film.

The Mcguffin weapon was even a perfect themeatic weapon for a hoplite-ish (hop-lite ) lady. On that note I wonder if the superhero minis game has a hop-lite Wonder Woman mini, with or without a Mcguffin weapon.

I don't think so, at least as it was presented in the film. Remember that they weren't just trying to take DD down...they were also trying to occupy and contain Doomsday on the island so that Metropolis wasn't wrecked again. One leap and DD is in the city and ready to make the destruction in Man of Steel look tame, with that shockwave thing it had. And DD seemed to be too much for either Supes or WW to contain on their own. Both of them spent a lot of that fight getting knocked around. And Diana was only barely able to hold DD in place with the lasso.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 kronk wrote:
This 58% drop thing in 3 days.

Wasn't opening weekend Easter Weekend?

Don't people do family gak like find the eggs and visit grandma on Easter Sunday?

Just a thought.

Some articles listed that fact in about the 12th graf down. *shrug*

Again, I really don't think there was a conspiracy at work, but I think some folks were motivated to spin things to the bad.

It may be that negative clickbait articles involving BvS were doing very, very good numbers.

 George Spiggott wrote:
Is it just me or could Wonder Woman have beaten the big bad by herself? Batman is there purely to provide the Mcguffin and Superman is excess to requirements in his own film.

The Mcguffin weapon was even a perfect themeatic weapon for a hoplite-ish (hop-lite ) lady. On that note I wonder if the superhero minis game has a hop-lite Wonder Woman mini, with or without a Mcguffin weapon.

She definately kicked serious ass and enjoyed doing it

Nice little article of "5 Misunderstood things in BvS"

http://www.outrightgeekery.com/2016/04/12/top-5-misunderstood-plot-points-batman-v-superman/

 TheMeanDM wrote:
Nice little article of "5 Misunderstood things in BvS"

http://www.outrightgeekery.com/2016/04/12/top-5-misunderstood-plot-points-batman-v-superman/

None of those I had an issue with - there are much much bigger problems with the film.........Mostly Lex related.

I agree...Lex was...a little too spastic for my taste. I mean he wasn't terrible...and the obsessed with taking down superman necause he wasn't a "man" was very clear....but he was a little too....spastic...like I said.

 TheMeanDM wrote:
I agree...Lex was...a little too spastic for my taste. I mean he wasn't terrible...and the obsessed with taking down superman necause he wasn't a "man" was very clear....but he was a little too....spastic...like I said.

I think in a better movie the Lex we were given could have worked well. A large part of the issue is that in amongst a whole bunch of stony faced serious people we had a Lex Luthor just going nuts with the crazy talk and behavioural ticks.

If they'd shown Lex as descending in to madness rather than starting there it probably could have worked better. Especially if it was tied to Lex seeing Darkseid and all the rest early in the movie. Running that theme would fix a lot of the structural issues, I think - just bring Lex's entry in to the ship in to first third of the movie - perhaps instead of scamming entry in to the NY ship, he might access the ship lost in the Pacific. Don't show Darkseid or Steppenwolf, just show their impact on Lex's mind, show him increasingly erratic, and now obsessed with building devices that can kill 'gods'. Have the eccentricities and ticks start to come out as he plans goes from 'we need weapons' to 'lets see if these weapons can kill Superman'.

I know that'd be adding more plot to a movie that's already got way too much plot, but I think the above could actually streamline a lot of the other material. You can pull out large parts of the government cozying up to Lex, strip that back to just Holly Hunter's two key scenes - with Lex in his house and at the senate hearing. You could also drop the white portuguese thing - instead of hunting that Batman could be hunting Lex from the very beginning.

Since box office does seem to be a big topic of conversation about this film, here's a solid article from Forbes about how Marvel didn't have to deal with the same box office expectations as WB.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/scottmendelson/2016/04/15/box-office-as-batman-v-superman-tops-800m-global-a-look-at-one-big-advantage-marvel-had-over-dc/?utm_campaign=yahootix&partner=yahootix#767f17e554f9

I had forgotten how "little" some of the early MCU movies made. Some key points:

Iron Man was the one that started this interconnected universe madness. The Robert Downey Jr. smash hit, which was the first Marvel Comics movie produced by Marvel, earned $318 million domestic in the summer of 2008, but “only” $585m worldwide. The big game-changer, the film that kickstarted the MCU and eventually set all of Hollywood on a path towards interconnected universes made less that summer than Mama Mia! and Hancock.

Thor opened the summer (give-or-take whether Fast Five and its $523 million global gross counts as the kick-off movie), but Captain America: The First Avenger helped close out the season. Joe Johnston’s World War II adventure is still the best MCU movie ever, and it was the one that made me finally believe in this interconnected universe madness. Everyone was so relieved that a film with the word “America” in the title could make more overseas than it did in the U.S. that they were all-too-willing to look at the film’s $374m worldwide gross (on a $140m budget) as an unqualified success.

And now Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is being viewed as a disappointment because it will only make $850-$900 million worldwide. Now, you can make the case that Warner Bros. brought this on themselves by basically going all-in first with their would-be Justice League before doing the legwork of the smaller films. But, we should acknowledge that Man of Steel was that “smaller film” and that, with the understanding that Superman has never been as big of a cinematic superstar as we all like to pretend he is, that $668m worldwide gross was a pretty solid foundation.

Will we all be cheering if Suicide Squad “only” earns $375 million worldwide this summer? Will a Wonder Woman that makes $450m worldwide next year be seen as a big hit? One of the core differences between MCU and the DCEU was that the former came about when the would-be bar for success was much lower. Of course, the same applies to Batman Begins, which was considered a clean hit at $371m on a $150m budget back in 2005. It’s a good thing, too, since otherwise we may never have gotten The Dark Knight.

Because a $371 million worldwide gross for The First Avenger was considered just fine in 2011, a $714m worldwide gross for The Winter Soldier was considered remarkable in 2014. Because Thor was considered a triumph at $449m in 2011, Thor: The Dark World was an unmitigated win at $642m in 2013. But because Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice came about in a post-Avengers era where $1 billion worldwide was all-but-expected for the would-be big superhero franchises, it finds itself on the defensive with “just” $800m worldwide.

Those returns and global box office numbers need to be in context of the production and marketing budgets.

The game-changer was Disney taking notice of the early Marvel franchise building and going "all in" on marketing the Avengers for an incredible $1.5M global total. Over $1B, people sit up and take notice.

What really sets Disney and Marvel apart is the follow-on experimenting to see what they can do with Television on ABC, what they can do with the very obscure Guardians of the Galaxy, the patently silly Ant-Man, along with low-powered Jessica Jones. That kind of curiosity is something that DC flat out lacks as DC keeps trying to copy success, without understanding why the success occurred.

So we look at BvS. Had BvS been a $140M movie, their $800M gross would have been an unqualified success. But that's not what happened. With a $250M budget that exceeds every Marvel Studios film bar Avengers 2, and almost certain not to break the $1B bar. You just don't spend that kind of money on production and marketing if you're expecting a smaller total return.

 kronk wrote:
This 58% drop thing in 3 days.

Wasn't opening weekend Easter Weekend?

Don't people do family gak like find the eggs and visit grandma on Easter Sunday?

Just a thought.

No, not really.

Believe it, or not, the US is not a christian nation. There are a lot of people who couldn't care less about easter. This is also the reason movies get released on christmas day.

On a fun side note, apparently Ben did such a great job as batman, he's going to write, star in, and direct the next batman movie

sirlynchmob wrote:

 kronk wrote:
This 58% drop thing in 3 days.

Wasn't opening weekend Easter Weekend?

Don't people do family gak like find the eggs and visit grandma on Easter Sunday?

Just a thought.

No, not really.

Believe it, or not, the US is not a christian nation. There are a lot of people who couldn't care less about easter. This is also the reason movies get released on christmas day.

On a fun side note, apparently Ben did such a great job as batman, he's going to write, star in, and direct the next batman movie

Ok - for me the various problems with the film were noting to do with him...............in fact he was great. Has he directed or wrtten before?

 sebster wrote:

 TheMeanDM wrote:
I agree...Lex was...a little too spastic for my taste. I mean he wasn't terrible...and the obsessed with taking down superman necause he wasn't a "man" was very clear....but he was a little too....spastic...like I said.

I think in a better movie the Lex we were given could have worked well. A large part of the issue is that in amongst a whole bunch of stony faced serious people we had a Lex Luthor just going nuts with the crazy talk and behavioural ticks.

If they'd shown Lex as descending in to madness rather than starting there it probably could have worked better. Especially if it was tied to Lex seeing Darkseid and all the rest early in the movie. Running that theme would fix a lot of the structural issues, I think - just bring Lex's entry in to the ship in to first third of the movie - perhaps instead of scamming entry in to the NY ship, he might access the ship lost in the Pacific. Don't show Darkseid or Steppenwolf, just show their impact on Lex's mind, show him increasingly erratic, and now obsessed with building devices that can kill 'gods'. Have the eccentricities and ticks start to come out as he plans goes from 'we need weapons' to 'lets see if these weapons can kill Superman'.

I know that'd be adding more plot to a movie that's already got way too much plot, but I think the above could actually streamline a lot of the other material. You can pull out large parts of the government cozying up to Lex, strip that back to just Holly Hunter's two key scenes - with Lex in his house and at the senate hearing. You could also drop the white portuguese thing - instead of hunting that Batman could be hunting Lex from the very beginning.

Hmm a Cthulhu Mythos descent into insanity might have been fun........that might have been what they were trying for (and failed)

Or make him a decent character rather than a Joker wannabe which is what he came across in this film - a cut rate loser version of the Joker.

 Mr Morden wrote:

sirlynchmob wrote:

 kronk wrote:
This 58% drop thing in 3 days.

Wasn't opening weekend Easter Weekend?

Don't people do family gak like find the eggs and visit grandma on Easter Sunday?

Just a thought.

No, not really.

Believe it, or not, the US is not a christian nation. There are a lot of people who couldn't care less about easter. This is also the reason movies get released on christmas day.

On a fun side note, apparently Ben did such a great job as batman, he's going to write, star in, and direct the next batman movie

Ok - for me the various problems with the film were noting to do with him...............in fact he was great. Has he directed or wrtten before?

Well he directed: I Killed My Lesbian Wife, Hung Her on a Meathook, and Now I Have a Three Picture Deal at Disney (Short)

I never heard of it, but love the title

he wrote and directed 'gone baby gone'

so he has written and directed some stuff, but so far IMO nothing amazing has come from it.

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000255/?ref_=nv_sr_1

sirlynchmob wrote:


On a fun side note, apparently Ben did such a great job as batman, he's going to write, star in, and direct the next batman movie

I saw that too - and I am psyched for this!

I hope it is set a bit before BvS too, so we can get Angry Batman too!

 Mr Morden wrote:

Ok - for me the various problems with the film were noting to do with him...............in fact he was great. Has he directed or wrtten before?

He directed the 3 time Oscar winning film, Argo - Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Editing.
- He both acted in, and directed the film.
His other big recent film was "Gone Girl" but I think his main involvement with that was just acting.

Still, it's a far cry from his 'Daredevil' and 'Gigli' days.

I'm just wondering if it's Ben as Batman in the SS movie. I wonder if Ben will be their RDJ.

Not their RDJ, but he is their Batman, they're not going to cast someone else as the same character in a film set in the same universe. There's no reason to, and no need to.

The wife and I watched it today. I half liked it and half didn't. Loved Batman. Superman seemed bland. Wonder woman was awesome. Lex didn't feel like Lex. Movie felt really dragged out at times.


Question though....

 KingCracker wrote:
The wife and I watched it today. I half liked it and half didn't. Loved Batman. Superman seemed bland. Wonder woman was awesome. Lex didn't feel like Lex. Movie felt really dragged out at times.


Question though....

Spoiler:

Who was the guy in red during Batman's dream? I'm guessing that was Flash? But I'm not sure it was.

And I don't think he was in Bruce's dream - I think he actually woke Bruce up!

 Alpharius wrote:
And I don't think he was in Bruce's dream - I think he actually woke Bruce up!

That was my impression too.

I'm going to see it again to see if it holds up well on the 2nd viewing...

Watch the papers right after the Flash's appearance.

There were a lot of little things I caught the second time, and I'm sure there are lots left. For an Easter egg, check out the column that passes close to the camera when Bruce is hauling Clark and about to throw him down the stairwell. Dunno how I missed that in the first viewing.

Heard but couldn't quite see on my 2nd viewing :

Was Lois' neighbour's name "Dibny" ?

 reds8n wrote:
Heard but couldn't quite see on my 2nd viewing :

Was Lois' neighbour's name "Dibny" ?

While there are a lot of Easter Eggs in the movie, that one seems like a stretch.

Ta-dum.

Great catch.

Excuse me while I interrupt;

except God's Not Dead 2, which come on... really?

They made a sequel? I honestly think at this point that the only thing worse than the endless string of Step it Up films and rip offs is a Christian film industry willing to put out "panderings" no matter how horrible they are on the big screen and I'm a believer XD

Box office numbers are out:
1. $104M - Jungle Book
2. $20.2M - Barbershop 2
3. $10.2M - the Boss (-57%)
4. $9.0M - BvS (-61%)
5. $8.2M - Zootopia

BvS is still losing to, and dropping faster than, the Boss. Zootopia is going to break $900M globally, so it's a 6X blockbuster success for Disney, something that BvS won't likely do.