And the claim that they're cash strapped after making 1.4 billion on barbie?
I just don't understand this at all. Does anyone?
Alternatively, the cynic in me also has a theory - that this is all a marketing ploy to drum up support for this underdog of a movie. But that seems fairly unlikely given that it depends on the CEO voluntarily acting the cartoon villain...
Zaslav has long had the reputation of a cartoon villain, it would cost him nothing.
So they’d rather have $30M immediately (since 2023 is almost over) than release and have to perform accounting over the life of the film plus supplemental (streaming, other licenses) that they expect would result in less than $30M when all is said and done.
For example, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny failed commercially at the box office:
https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/Indiana-Jones-and-the-Dial...
Disney spent $300 million making it and will have spent at least $100 million promoting it. And it only generated $381 million of revenue at the box office. The studio doesn't get $381 million back, they get a percentage.
Disney may have made up some of the deficit with home video purchases and streaming subscriptions, but seems likely that they've lost $100+ million on that movie for now:
https://variety.com/2023/film/news/indiana-jones-5-mission-i...
The main problem was lack of budget discipline. $381 million at the box office would have been a decent result if the production budget was more like $50 million.
This sounds like a zero-sum game. Someone's raking it in here.
https://stephenfollows.com/how-are-movie-advertising-budgets...
TV got most of it 5 years ago in the UK.
Indiana Jones 4 didn’t need budget discipline.
The main problem was that Indiana Jones 5 was following 4, and both were laughably bad at being quality Indiana Jones-level movies.
The general audience knew in advance what they were getting wasn’t going to be exciting and they didn’t want it.
The hardcore fan audience also knew what they were getting: old-man Indie needs to be replaced by a strong brave female without character flaws, who points out how problematic and useless the old man is, and saves him from himself.
A big chunk of the budget overruns were when the pendulum slightly swung back and the studios did significant rewrites and reshoots (and re-CGI) to tone this type of writing down to something less overt.
This movie would have been a no-brainer home run if it were simply an adventure film starring a crusty Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones, set in more or less the “real world”.
Once you get Indie into space aliens or Representation social politics things dilute until the audience shrugs and stays home to stream The Office for the sixth run-through.
Sad, alienated, lonely, somewhat suicidal Dr. Jones doesn’t put butts in seats. Who could’ve guessed?
It absolutely did. With budget discipline they would have made a better, more Indiana Jones movie. The direct result of having too much money available was that they stuck all manner of pointless garbage in the film and made it worse.
Adjusting for inflation, Indiana Jones 3 had less than half the budget of Indiana Jones 4 and is the better movie with the bigger box office.
I'd bet you're going to see this more often.
Even if they believed they could break even from an accounting and tax perspective, there's still opportunity cost. That is, it might make sense to quit now and move on to something with more upside.
It's pretty unlikely this film will make $30 million, and they would have to spend at least another five to ten million to release it (profit participation from talent, marketing (which is probably contractually obligated), finalising post production, mastering, distribution etc etc.). The effects work is nowhere near done etc.
> And the claim that they're cash strapped after making 1.4 billion on barbie?
Warner has a lot of debt. AT&T dumped all the debt they used to buy the company in with the Warner asset when they sold it to Discovery. That debt is rapidly going to cost a lot to serve interest payments too. Warner needs short term cash, and it needs a lot more than the (good) profits off a single film.
That's very optimistic. P&A (print and advertising, but since movies are now released in digital copies, the print part has become negligible) usually is between half and 100% of the production budget.
I was assuming they would do the absolute bare minimum in advertising tbh, that was mostly print costs and just the basics like providing poster art and standees etc. As you say, if you wanted any effective marketing at all you'd be looking at five to ten times that.
It would easily have made $30 million worldwide. Almost certainly domestic. You could question whether it would have made its budget back (70 million) on domestic, but for a family film with existing IP there aren’t really any blockers to clearing 30 million.
> The effects work is nowhere near done etc.
The film is finished, some critics had already seen it.
That's absolutely not true, especially internationally.
It may help to consider the biggest movie studios at this scale as VCs; they only care about 10x profits, anything less is pocket change, and if it lets them keep actors dependent on them, all the more reason to bin anything that risks becoming a cult classic and has to pay residuals. If you can picture a VC firm shutting down a startup when a union forms, then this is the same mindset.
And the changes are too large to fix easily.
Or the plot is just terrible.
Or hmm. I wonder if the new AI contract or some such, is causing this?