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Comment by aaronbrethorst | Hacker News Reader

Congrats to Tenet for hitting break-even last week, despite tanking at the U.S. box office.

https://variety.com/2020/film/box-office/tenet-box-office-ch...

There's no way that $200 million is break even for that movie.

The budget alone was $200 million, which doesn't factor in marketing...which will probably be higher than normal since they had to run a marketing campaign multiple times as it was pushed back throughout the months. Often times that alone can be as much as the movie budget.

With Hollywood Accounting they would have inflated the costs as much as legally possible.

But the marketing isn’t done by the studio, it’s undertaken by the distributor. Different pockets, right? You can’t reconcile line items across different accounts (although I hear Hollywood is very creative with accounting).

It didn't break even yet. Looks like's its maybe half way.

The ticket price is split with the theater, so the movie only gets part. You need the box office receipts to be larger (usually 2x+) than the production + marketing costs.

From the article "Given its $200 million production budget, the movie needs to reach approximately $400 million worldwide to break even and closer to $450 million to get out of the red and into the black."

There's no basis for calling it a failure (or success) since many theaters aren't open and the ones that are have a limited capacity. And there's no covid box office precedent.

They clearly didn't release it thinking it might perform up to pre-covid standards. They knew they were sacrificing a big opening and they obviously figured they'd take a hit but make most of it up with a longer run, bluray, rerelease, etc.

> the ones that are have a limited capacity

I got to see it at a local theater capable of showing the 70mm version, and they had sectioned off two seats between any person or couples. So effectively they had less than half of the normal capacity.

On the bright side for them, it's been sold out 4+ weeks in advance for quite a while now.

Goes to show how 80+% of countries have basically solved Covid.

The US seems intent on not reopening even in places that clearly have covid under control.

For example, NYC. Just what exactly are they waiting on? Has the curve not been profoundly flattened? How many cases per day until they feel safe reopening?

Viruses spread exponentially. It only takes one case to start a massive outbreak. No matter how many cases there are today, anywhere that 'reopens' will have unacceptably high case numbers sooner rather than later.

Nowhere can return to what used to be normal ('reopen') until enough people have been vaccinated--with a truly effective vaccine--to prevent new outbreaks from spreading. This will take years or decades.

Also with hospital beds and an exponentially spreading virus, once you're at 50% capacity (sounds like you've got a lot of headroom right?) you're actually out of beds and over flowing by the next wave (2-3 weeks later with this disease).

Okay so if cases start going back up, shut things back down.

There's unfortunately a pretty fine line between "oh good, we shut down in time" and "oh shit, there's an out of control growth of infections" that makes that somewhat difficult.

Recovering from a destroyed local economy is also somewhat difficult. Economic despair and anxiety is not without its own health consequences, either.

NYC has had about the same number of daily cases for 3 months.

> NYC has had about the same number of daily cases for 3 months.

Given exponential growth, that’s a “stay the course” indicator, not “loosen up”.

Meanwhile, the city is dying. MTA debt is up to $18 billion, population is shrinking rapidly, and stores and restaurants are closing at record rates.

We’ve gone from everything is closed to most things are partially open, and the rates are the same. Time to stop burning the local economy to the ground.

You're under the impression that'll be all better with an out-of-control pandemic raging through the city again?

Here's the thing, even if testing was instant, people are likely to get tests only after they have symptoms and symptoms appear after people are contagious. Basically the test numbers we get today show us what the spread was like two weeks ago. And it takes time to shut things back down.

This makes it really hard to open up, unless the situation is really good, because there's a good chance of overwhelmimg system again before you have a chance to lockdown.

Even when the system was “overwhelmed” it didn’t cause complete systemic breakdown. There was no superlinear mortality.

This was absolutely not the case in Italy, where many people died because no ICU spaces were available for them.

If it didn't happen elsewhere, it didn't happen because lockdowns, and other physical distancing measures, worked.

Arguing against taking defensive measures because they worked is like arguing that Y2K was a non-event without taking into consideration the hundreds of millions of dollars that were put into making sure it was a non-event.

Localize lockdown may make sense in some places and in the beginning. It definitely doesn't make sense to sill have lockdown now, even in italy. We have better data and better treatment method compare to back in March.

There's latency in identifying the spike. And people are not going to deal well with yoyoing lockdowns. They'll become less effective each time.

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