Don’t be fooled by the bright lights and the glamour, the Hollywood industry is going through a massive overhaul.
Studios are barely able to keep afloat nowadays due to the aggressive expansion of streaming services like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon, which has forced them into mitigating as much risk as possible by reproducing old content. That’s why you get so many remakes and superhero movies.
And Hollywood might have to rethink everything after this movie crashed and burned at the box office.
There’s an old saying in Hollywood, “Nobody knows nothing.” What that means is the second anyone thinks they can predict box office hits and disasters is the second they have no clue what they’re talking about. Or they’ve deluded themselves into naivety.
A great example of this was Stanley Kubrick. You might be surprised to learn that for the most part, Kubrick was box-office poison. By today’s standards, however, Kubrick is one of the most beloved directors of all time because his movies hold up even fifty years later.
“2001: A Space Odyssey” was his biggest box-office success in 1968 and only made a mere $60 million. But decades later, he’s widely considered to be one of the most influential filmmakers of all time; and although his movies didn’t bring the house down when they were in theaters, they make boatloads of cash in the video-on-demand market.
At least it was until recently.
But it was still a complete shock to see how poorly “X-Men: Dark Phoenix” bombed in the box-office over the weekend. Granted, it was a horribly reviewed movie but many superhero, science fiction and action/adventure movies are as well and that didn’t stop them from raking in the cash.
“Dark Phoenix” has a staggeringly low Rotten Tomatoes score at 22% at the time this article was written and it could be the horrible reviews and audience scores or it could be superhero fatigue. The movie could lose over a $100 million when it’s all said and done at the theater.
Deadline noted, “Even though Dark Phoenix is the No. 1 winner around the globe with $140M –down substantially from the worldwide launches of X-Men: Days of Future Past ($262.9M), Logan ($247.4M) and X-Men: Apocalypse ($166.6M), finance experts tell us that the tale of Jean Grey will burn out with an estimated $100M-$120M loss after ancillaries, off a combined production and P&A estimated cost of $350M+ (which includes reshoots). Final global B.O. is projected at $300M-$325M, with one film finance suit telling us ‘If it drops like a stone, $285M. Don’t forget it was a holiday in China, and even that was pretty low ($45.7M).’”
That’s absolutely disastrous and it’s never a good sign when the actual principal photography wrapped nearly two years ago. It’s always a horrible sign.
Disney’s “Aladdin” is doing well and has globally earned $604 million to date but “Godzilla: King of the Monsters” second weekend fell by 67 percent in the North American box-office to a shallow $15.5 million.
The even crazier part is this past weekend was up 37 percent from last year too.
The reasons why are unpredictable but the most obvious is that it’s the same boring unoriginal content Hollywood shoves out over and over again – in hopes they will rekindle a franchise (“X-Men” has 14 different movies).
Nobody really cares about the woes of Hollywood but they know it’s time for a gigantic upheaval because there are a limited amount of ways filmmakers can tell the same story.