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 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Let’s also be careful about what “taken down” actually means.

Rise of Skywalker still broke $1,000,000,000 at the box office.

Go on. Look me in the eye and tell me, by any metric, a film with a £275,000,000 estimated budget near quadrupling that investment is a ‘failure’.

because its no longer about some moneys but all the moneys especially compared to Endgame which was 2.8bn on 350m (approx) and id guess Disney expected at least 2bn out of Rise, so maybe below expectations is fairer than failure

but GW would have to repeatedly fup up to be in any danger of the said same expectation crash although they are starting to run low on stuff to pull from the nostalgia cabient, just proper epic and bfg

All, lets leave the politics for blogs, there's zero reason for this thread to be getting into "going woke" and culture wars, it'll almost certainly be more productive without it, thanks!

Going back to the GW’s AR and its future prospects. Is the stock due for a correction, possibly. Are GW’s earnings likely to plateau or even regress this year, I think probably. Even though core manufacturing was shutdown for "only" 6 weeks, we can all see the havoc that COVID has had on GW’s supply chain and retail channels for which the bill probably comes apparent in this year’s earnings. Particularly concerning is that GW is still paying leases on retail space that has been closed for prolonged periods of time or still operating on very limited hours with by antidotal accounts very limited stock. This has been poison for other retailers with similar burdens and inevitably is going to weigh on GW’s earnings until normal retail resumes.

The positive difference between GW and those retailers struggling to maintain their footing is GW’s fundamentals were great pre-COVID and they are a niche business offering an exclusive IP to a very loyal customer base that historically has been elastic in the face of price increases.

So do you go out and buy GW stock? I don’t think so as it is not likely to provide much in short term gains at this point having probably peaked and long term I don’t think it grows much if as GW’s has warned, this constant increase in profits is not going to last.

I also don’t think GW is an acquisition target which would be the only other thing to drive the stock higher IMHO. For the reasons listed, there doesn’t seem to be an obvious or well positioned buyer unless someone was interested in taking them private.

In terms of "buy, sell, or hold" I would lean to sell or hold.

 kodos wrote:

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:

1. Something like Eisenhorn shouldn’t have to worry about political correctness for the setting and internal logic of it, but only from external factors like casting and studio shenanigans. Even social justice types can suspend disbelief. The recent Dredd film didn’t turn off the left with depictions of police brutality because it was obviously part of the premise of the setting .

while Dread is not that old, it still was a different time

and it would not be the first series or movie removed because the political situation changed
like single episodes from famous series are not shown anymore because things are more sensitive now

If Dread or Starship Troopers would be in Cinema in now, the reaction would be very different

You mean that Golden Girls episode? I’m pretty sure there was no actual backlash, just Disney overreacting to be seen doing something.

Starship Troopers is a left-leaning satire of fascism. If anything, it’s more timely now (and since the War on Terror really) than it was when it came out.

Dredd also has its roots in satire, and from the left again. General audiences haven’t changed much in how they approach movies since then, either. Certain sections of the internet have gotten louder, though they only have the power that the mainstream grants them by overreacting. Besides, Disney has always been quick to cut material that offends anyone—Song of the South, “Where they cut off your ear if they don’t like your face”, etc.—but there weren’t clickbait outrage peddlers around back then to make some money off it.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Apologies. Didn’t see the warning.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Let’s also be careful about what “taken down” actually means.

Rise of Skywalker still broke $1,000,000,000 at the box office.

Go on. Look me in the eye and tell me, by any metric, a film with a £275,000,000 estimated budget near quadrupling that investment is a ‘failure’.

Yes, it is a failure in the eyes of Disney. Only 1 billion made (after the first one netted twice as much. Disney has not made their investment back on Star Wars just FYI), practically no toys due to constant chopping and changing of the film. 'member when Matt Smith was playing the villain, yet a massive chunk of the film got reshot and Palpatine inserted as the villain instead? (side note, Matt Smith has made off like a bandit, first Terminator Genisys and then Star Wars. Guy gets paid for not even appearing in a film... ). There is a reason Kathleen Kennedy's contract is not being renewed and John Favereau is the guy that is rumoured to be given the keys to the kingdom.

I suggest you watch a few videos by the channel Midnight's Edge, who have a lot of the inside scoops on this as to why Star Wars is now a tainted brand in the eye's of Disney. Disney will not out and out admit it, but there is enough corroborating evidence to suggest RoTSW is not at all what they hoped for. Even the director dislikes it, with Abram's 192 minute cut being the "proper" version to him.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
Point of order—Star Wars (NOT A New Hope back then) was a smash hit and a household name during its theatrical release. It was never as obscure as Warhammer is now (unless you count the first few weeks of release). Even if there had never been The Empire Strikes Back, Star Wars would be as well known today as Jaws and ET.

I think you're overstating the popularity of Star Wars amongst the general public at large after ANH released. It was a blockbuster hit, sure, but so was Pacific Rim - that doesn't mean everyone has seen Pacific Rim or that everyone would necessarily really even know anything about it other than thats its a movie.

For GW, lets see what Eisenhorn can do, but I fear that classic 40k won't fit the current expectation of the political view (an Inquisitor of a facist Imperium)

Disagreed. 40k was always intended as a satire and a critique, not an aspirational tale. If its written and played the right way, the current zeitgeist is basically perfect for Eisenhorn to blow up bigly.

2. I agree with Sqorgar about demand. We already saw it happen once, during the Kirby price hikes. Once enough customers have have discovered alternatives (Warmahordes back then), it will create an escape valve for all the GW customers who feel dissatisfied with GW’s antics. High prices will drive people to look for alternatives...and there are many maturing product lines and games waiting for them. I personally believe that customers aware of Wargames Atlantic or even Mantic GCPS will have a hard time paying outrageous prices for GW Astra Miliatrum. As 3D printing becomes cheaper and cheaper, and Thingiverse grows and grows, customers will have a harder time justifying paying $35 for a character or $75 for a tank.

Disagreed here too. Mantic and Wargames Atlantic can't really tough GW's sculpt quality and kit quality. Not to say that they don't also produce neat minis, but theres a very noticeable gulf between them and its pretty clear you're getting what you are paying for (and I am far from a GW apologist here, a lot of my minis are third party, but its got to the point I'd rather pay more for a better product instead of spending my time converting, cleaning, repairing, and modifying other peoples kits). And while 3D printing is getting cheaper and cheaper it isn't necessarily getting any faster. I can spend 3 months printing a 2000 pt army, or I can buy it in one shot for $350 bucks and get the dopamine rush associated with feeding my habit.

As for the risks of “get Woke, go broke”, I think there is a perspective in business that it too shall pass and that creative and innovative marketing and/or new products will allow them to win back any business loss due to any current pandering to a vocal segment of population.

Its also worth stating that thus far the political right (at least in the United States) has kind of failed to make any clear or sustained meaningful inroads by way of boycotts, etc. With a couple of exceptions, wokeness has actually paid off big time for the companies that have gone that route, which is why we are seeing a big rush for others to follow suit with the recent resurgence in BLM. Theres been a number of pretty well written articles debunking "Get Woke, Go Broke" as a meme and a mantra unsupported by factual data. I'll leave others to spend the time to find them and research the topic instead of going off on a tangent here.

Fellow Dakka-ites, again, please keep the political commentary elsewhere.

chaos0xomega wrote:

Disagreed here too. Mantic and Wargames Atlantic can't really tough GW's sculpt quality and kit quality. Not to say that they don't also produce neat minis, but theres a very noticeable gulf between them and its pretty clear you're getting what you are paying for (and I am far from a GW apologist here, a lot of my minis are third party, but its got to the point I'd rather pay more for a better product instead of spending my time converting, cleaning, repairing, and modifying other peoples kits).

They don't need to be

we are still talking about Wound Markers for a game
it does not matter if each one if your 100 Guardsmen looks perfect at close distance and hold up to display quality of Resin busts, as it is still just a marker among many others

if the models have a reasonable price and look good enough an arm length away, they are perfect for gaming

and looking at current GW Guard models, Mantic GCPS and the Wargames Atlantic Raumjägers & Grognards look better

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:

You mean that Golden Girls episode? I’m pretty sure there was no actual backlash, just Disney overreacting to be seen doing something.

this one too?
no, talking about european shows and movies, mostly comedy and satirical stuff, but there is also a discussion among people in Germany if a movie should be shown in cinema for the 35th anniversary as it is not clear enough if one scene with a black man is satire or just racist

ChaosOmega, Star Wars was one of the most profitable movies ever made. It literally changed the way movies are made, sold, and merchandised. It spawned a whole sub-genre and countless imitators. Perhaps in China it wasn’t that big, but in the west, especially the US, it was a phenomenon.

Why is monetary value/return always just taken as a given indicator of quality? Should it be? I guess it's because it's the only real way to assert anything on this sort of topic with empirical evidence, but it's surely not going to magically convince people in a fanbase who believe that the canon of a given fictional universe is being destroyed or ruined, that they are mistaken in their thoughts.

As a long time fan of a universe and it's canon, it's premises etc, you gain the right to express distaste if you feel someone might be changing those for the worse. Maybe instead of trying to hand wave those concerns with a blase mention of some financial gain, we should try to be more willing to hear them, and frame the counterargument differently, in order to allay the concerns, or change minds.

At the end of the day, the corporate machine rolls on. Money makers will always be looking to be capitalised on. But the beauty of a fictional universe is you take what you want from it.

'not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.'

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
ChaosOmega, Star Wars was one of the most profitable movies ever made. It literally changed the way movies are made, sold, and merchandised. It spawned a whole sub-genre and countless imitators. Perhaps in China it wasn’t that big, but in the west, especially the US, it was a phenomenon.

Again, you're overestimating its popularity. In 1978 it was a one off movie with no indication of a sequel yet. The whole "empty action figure package" thing is overstated - Kenner only sold 500,000 of them. "Annie Hall" won best picture at the Oscars. A lot of people don't realize this but Star Wars initial box office draw was built over months, not weeks, which is to say that the initial theatrical run didn't end in US theaters until July 1978 (18 months later). Between a third and half of its total box office take occurred in '78 as opposed to '77, and even despite the huge attention it received James Bond was still considered the reigning film franchise and pop culture goliath. In that sense, james Bond is to Star Wars as Star Wars is to GW.

You...you do realize that is how it worked back then, right? That all movie releases were gradual affairs, where a few prints were used in one theater, then the next, then the next, because everything was physical, not digital, and the logistics and shipping revolution hadn’t happened yet? You do realize that selling 500,000 units was a game changed back then, that the whole system we have now didn’t exist then?

Do you think Jaws made all its money in one month? Do you think it was competing against seven other blockbusters? Why would you think Star Wars, which was even bigger and more pervasive in pop culture even then, would have less of an impact on the industry?


In any event, the point is Star Wars was orders of magnitude bigger and more culturally relevant than Warhammer has ever been. As franchises go, they are in different weight classes ...on different planets. GW and Disney have to have different concerns, because they are very much not in the same world.



Automatically Appended Next Post:
Seriously, though, you shot yourself in the foot talking about how Star Wars wasn’t a front-loaded film release like that meant it wasn’t a cinematic phenomenon. “Word of mouth” and “legs” are box office buzzwords for a reason.

In those days, you had studio customers. Mann's main customers were Paramount and Warner Bros. Once in awhile, you'd play a picture from someone else. Fox's general sales manager at the time, the late Peter Myers, called and said George Lucas really wanted the Chinese. We had two weeks available before we had to play William Friedkin's Sorcerer, from Paramount. Fox has such limited expectations for the film he said that two weeks would be all they needed. After opening weekend, we went to Paramount, but they wouldn't budge. They said we had to live up to our commitment, but we wanted to keep control of Star Wars. We owned another theater in Hollywood that wasn't very nice. It stayed open 24 hours so people slept there. We did a crash renovation, put in new seats, painted it and cleaned it up. We moved Star Wars there, where it played for two weeks before coming back to the Chinese.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/star-wars-flashback-no-theater-wanted-show-movie-1977-846864

 kodos wrote:

chaos0xomega wrote:

Disagreed here too. Mantic and Wargames Atlantic can't really tough GW's sculpt quality and kit quality. Not to say that they don't also produce neat minis, but theres a very noticeable gulf between them and its pretty clear you're getting what you are paying for (and I am far from a GW apologist here, a lot of my minis are third party, but its got to the point I'd rather pay more for a better product instead of spending my time converting, cleaning, repairing, and modifying other peoples kits).

They don't need to be

we are still talking about Wound Markers for a game
it does not matter if each one if your 100 Guardsmen looks perfect at close distance and hold up to display quality of Resin busts, as it is still just a marker among many others

if the models have a reasonable price and look good enough an arm length away, they are perfect for gaming

and looking at current GW Guard models, Mantic GCPS and the Wargames Atlantic Raumjägers & Grognards look better

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:

You mean that Golden Girls episode? I’m pretty sure there was no actual backlash, just Disney overreacting to be seen doing something.

this one too?
no, talking about european shows and movies, mostly comedy and satirical stuff, but there is also a discussion among people in Germany if a movie should be shown in cinema for the 35th anniversary as it is not clear enough if one scene with a black man is satire or just racist

Of course they do. But is it useful to point out that models made in the latter half of this decade look better than those made in the early half of the previous decade, especially since we know that given enough time guard will be updated along with everyone else?

I think not.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Vaktathi wrote:
Fellow Dakka-ites, again, please keep the political commentary elsewhere.

it's sort of important to the discussion at hand. What is with Dakka all of a sudden wanting to be the thought police, it wasn't like that when I first joined up.

When the IG minis are updated, they’ll probably look a bit better than WGA and Mantic’s best minis, probably. But $60 for 10 better than $35 for 20? I doubt it.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
You...you do realize that is how it worked back then, right? That all movie releases were gradual affairs, where a few prints were used in one theater, then the next, then the next, because everything was physical, not digital, and the logistics and shipping revolution hadn’t happened yet?

Thats not really true. While theatrical runs were really long by comparison to today, that model was already on its way out by the time Star Wars released - Jaws in large part changed that being one of the first, if not *the* first, major film to have a wide simultaneous theatrical release on day 1 with over 400+ theaters on opening week - after being cut down from 900 theaters for marketing hype reasons - and reached 900 theaters within a month, and left theaters after 6 months. By the following year films were opening in hundreds of theaters simultaneously. Star Wars was a comparative slow-roll because nobody wanted to screen it at first, thus it opened on only 40 or so screens - it took almost 5 months for it to reach ~1000 screens, and - again - stayed in theaters for significantly longer. Another useful datapoint - the average run per theater for Jaws was 4.2 weeks. The average run per theater for Star Wars was 18.4 weeks. In case you were wondering, Star Wars only made about 40% more than Jaws did during its initial run, even though it was in theaters almost 3x longer.

You do realize that selling 500,000 units was a game changed back then, that the whole system we have now didn’t exist then?

In 1978 Kenner sold 40 million Star Wars toys over the course of the year. I'm not really sure you can say that 500,000 units was a "game changer" (keeping in mind that the first Star Wars toys didn't actually hit shelves until almost April of 78).

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
When the IG minis are updated, they’ll probably look a bit better than WGA and Mantic’s best minis, probably. But $60 for 10 better than $35 for 20? I doubt it.

Depends what you want them for. I dont play, I just paint. And a cohesive good looking army is way more valuable to me than more bodies.

 Turnip Jedi wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Interesting breakdown as to sales by channel.

GW Stores generated 29% of sales. Third Party sales accounted for 52%, and GW’s online 19%

Their store sales are down 5% from 2019, and seem to have gone to FLGS, as that’s up 5% from 2019.

Go FLGS, I guess!

still a bit baffled by online remaining that high as besides GW only items the vast number of other online retailers offering cheaper deals it really baffles me as to who goes GW direct

Ill be curious to see if the FLGS trend continues post Event as these numbers show GW will survive but without player support smaller concerns may not

I think most people go direct because all the online retailers sell a ton of copies yet for the last several sets... of both AOS and 40k GW has turned around and told the retailers they are only getting X amount of product when they already sold 2or 3 x the amount they are now getting. This means online retailers have to tell the preorder customers that their orders are now cancelled. And forces the people who now can't preorder through anyone else because of the same issue and now being so far behind the 8 ball to have to buy direct to guarantee they get it. GW makes more money this way.. and seems to be yet another shady thing they have been doing since atleast Looncurse.

This scares the consumer into preordering from elsewhere when their preorders get cancelled a week before due to GW they panic and then gotta buy direct. Definately a sales ploy GW has been doing but it really burns their online retailers who provide a good portion of their sales. I hope it bites GW in the ass.

Made to Order has for sure done the job to get more people ordering directly from GW
And just looking at what happened with the Indominus Box, direct Order from GW because it is "limited" in addition with "Made to Order" that sold out on pre-order and shops without online store are reporting to have plenty on stock not able to sell them all on launch day

I am not really surprised that GW Online store is that high, with their current way of handling things it is more the other way around, I would have expected much more

Koveras wrote:

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
When the IG minis are updated, they’ll probably look a bit better than WGA and Mantic’s best minis, probably. But $60 for 10 better than $35 for 20? I doubt it.

Depends what you want them for. I dont play, I just paint. And a cohesive good looking army is way more valuable to me than more bodies.

display models is a different story

 Togusa wrote:

Of course they do. But is it useful to point out that models made in the latter half of this decade look better than those made in the early half of the previous decade, especially since we know that given enough time guard will be updated along with everyone else?

and you can wait until that happens or meanwhile play the game for cheap
if you just collect and care more about the look than playing the game there are other options as well but they won't be cheaper (just better looking)