No.
This is number crunching territory. The bean counters can look at the first weekend’s result and get a ball park estimate of how things will turn out. After 2 weeks the ball park is looking fairly small.
Look at columns at places like BoxOfficeMojo and OfficeProphets. They will use “comparables” a lot. Similar types of movies, similar budgets, etc. Once some real numbers come in they know based on these what’s going to happen. (If you’re real gutsy, you can sometimes make a very good prediction based on Thursday night “preview” numbers.)
Once in a while there’s a bit of a surprise. For example when a movie appealing to older audiences gets some real legs. (Only a few do.) But based on the 2nd weekend drop we know that nothing surprising happening here.
I certainly hope that no one thinks there’s anything magical involved in these predictions. It’s just box office history and math.
[Moderating]
Spoilers being displayed when quoted is a known bug with the Sultanthemes skin. There’s not much that can be done about it, beyond switching to the non-buggy skin.
They do on the SultanTheme skin, unless you use my fixer script. And that skin is the default, and the one that works best on mobile.
I personally decided to (try to remember to) avoid quoting the actual spoilers now. Yeah, it takes a bit of extra effort, but it makes it better for some people. I suggest others at least consider doing so, too. It’s easy to just replace it with [spoiler] when quoting.
[Edit: missed Chrono’s post (maybe I left the page open too long), but I’m leaving this for the suggestion of the workaround.]
I thought about starting a category in the “Movie Marathon” thread over in Thread Games. It was going to be “Worst Movie Titles in History”. I was going to start it off with “August: Osage County”, which sounds like an interminable flick about downtrodden characters straight out of a Faulkner knock-off, trying to survive the oppressive heat of late summer in the south. “Ad Astra” is even worse. Who the hell came up with that?
I’m not ignoring your posts, just trying to understand how much money this needs to make by the end of 2019 before you agree this didn’t bomb.
I did not know there was a known bug that unspoilers quoted spoilers for everyone using the default skin and everyone not logged in. Thanks for the explanation.
I used to keep a spreadsheet called “Legs” to track exactly that. If you put aside movies that got an awards bump, like Moonlight or Gravity, and put aside kids’ films (which have amazingly long runs), a multiplier of 3x opening weekend was a good generic average.
Ad Astra’s drop of 47% is better than average, but not crazy good. A finish around $75M domestically is probably about right.
For a while I tried to use CinemaScore to model a multiplier, but it’s hard to get consistently. Ad Astra’s B- isn’t going to help.
I kind of like the title, but I tend to appreciate artsy fartsy type stuff. I agree that it’s probably not great for mass marketing a high budget science fiction film with a big movie star in it.
Let’s see. I’ve said twice in this thread that this will not be a bomb. It will likely lose money but not such a wide margin to be considered a bomb.
The end of 2019 is not a good choice here. Once China sees it, the box office will be fairly settled. There’s not going to be a significant amount of money left to come from theaters by the end of the month.
So the studio will be releasing this on disc well before Christmas and for online video rental around then. Lesser streaming will come soon after.
Do these count as income by the end of 2019? If you only look at box office then it would seem to be a real bomb. But these other sources will bridge some of the gap towards break-even. And if you include these sources you have to look further ahead than the end of 2019. Although by then the numbers folk will have an excellent idea as to the eventual grand total.
While it might be nominated for an Oscar for its effects, I don’t see any major nominations coming. (That crowd is loathe to nominate big budget, poor performance films.) So no Oscar bounce for any source of income.
I know 1939’s Gone With The Wind has made a $100 million on DVD and Blu-ray sales alone in the past ten years, but let’s assume this won’t be the case here 80 years from now, so final guesses on numbers by the end of 2019 for?
U.S. box office?
Foreign box office?
Physical media?
Streaming contracts?
What’s your estimate of a break even point? Apparently David Prowse died without seeing a cent of residuals…
Although, thinking about it, this will undoubtedly continue to make profits much longer than the average movie. Another advantage of investing the unstoppable “Hollywood star in a spacesuit” genre is that they’re either prophetic or hilarious to future generations, so they’re always revisited no matter how moronic.
That might be one of the highest-ranked movies of all time but that seems implausible to me. At a cost of ten bucks per disc, that would mean sales of ten million copies in the past ten years. This and this pages list the top 100 selling DVD and Bluray discs for 2019 and that movie is nowhere to be found on those lists.
The site (cite?) looks familiar, I think I was looking at this page:
https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/Gone-with-the-Wind#tab=video-sales
I’m adding “total spending” for the DVD and Blu-ray sales which seem heavily concentrated around 2013-2015. My idea is that there are a lot of potential future revenue streams for movies we can’t even properly fathom. We’re a long way from melting movies for silver and celluloid for shoe heels after their theatrical runs.
Not sure if you realize that not all that money goes to Time-Warner (who owns Turner Entertainment which bought the the MGM library except for Gone With the Wind TV rights which they had to bargain with CBS to gain back).
The studio might make up to $10 per disc. But old films like this are often sold at discount. There are unsold stock. Etc.
Some info on the specifics of Ad Astra’s video income will eventually come out. So we go based on comparables. The range for those isn’t high enough to put this one over the top. We’re talking about a $20+M loss here with the “+” looking bigger and bigger.
To say that GWtW is not a comparable to Ad Astra is an understatement of epic proportions.
BTW: Ad Astra’s box office was down 58% from last Friday. That’s Yet Another Bad Sign.
Gone With the Wind may even be in the public domain, that wasn’t my point. Once we elide towards “Is Ad Astra an artistic bomb?” or “Did Return of the Jedi ever really turn a profit?” there’s no convincing some people.
So I’m forced to settle for a vast majority being reasonably satisfied this vacuous movie that was purposely crafted as a risk-free empty shell has turned a profit even before interest is spiked yet again by a second wave of “Keep Calm” memes featuring Brad Pitt in a spacesuit, before the controversial unpopular original cut “leaks”, before the final cut, before all these are put in a boxset and re-released on a heretofore unknown formats, before Brad Pitt’s Oscar meltdown or surprise gay May-December romance with Prince George of Cambridge, or before a human actually goes to Mars. It’s a shame the click-baity thread title will persist to be bumped through all of this though.
Friday is the first day they cut the theater count by 500 screens. That’s neither a bad sign or a good sign.
Here’s a clarifying way to frame it:
If the executives who greenlight projects had some way to know in advance that it would do exactly as well as it has at this point (but their crystal ball would become cloudy after the first five weeks), would they still pull the trigger? Or would they look for something else to invest the studio’s resources in?
A lot of those executives are Chinese, and the movie hasn’t yet opened in China so might it be a tad early to ask?
I thought the movie was good. There was one moment when I realized it was moving kind of slow, but I was neither sleepy or bored.