Doesn’t matter if it’s the worst movie ever made, what Disney are doing is shitty. If nothing else, for the cast and crew who now have essentially no record of what they probably spent months if not years working on.

The tax break thing has been over reported. In a lot of cases that is not what is happening at all. What is more likely is they are packaging up these cancelled properties and licensing them out to other streamers to make some money.

You can make a movie, show it for a couple of months, and then... claim tax back?

I’m sure this is the point to the anonymous Disney suit, but if only the movie’s target audience suddenly had a couple months free time they might use to watch something like this.

It plays ads a lot on FX, FXX, Disney XD, Comedy Central and Logo.

If this movie had only cost $150m to make, this wouldn’t even be a disappointing opener. It wouldn’t have been a wild success, but probably would have coasted to profitability eventually. It seems a decent chunk was spent on the de-aging process. They should have just hired Alden Ehrenreich to do the flashback scene.

That might be true but no for-profit company is OK just making some profit. They’re all forecasting what they expect to make from every revenue stream and measuring performance based on that. And it would be hard to believe that Disney is OK with a potential nine-figure loss at the theaters from Indiana Jones, even if…

Those MCU is dying pieces have to be written whether they are relevant or not

It’s kind of crazy to me that someone can write about box office results every week and seemingly have no idea how movie financials work. The amount a movie grosses in theaters on its own doesn’t matter at all - these movies are disappointments because studios are spending absurd amounts of money to make them.

This is funny, but it’s also almost exactly what Zaslav actually says out loud. “Why don’t we make more of the stuff that makes money, and stop making the stuff that doesn’t make money?”

Guardians still being in the top ten is a testamate to the fact that maybe movies do need a bit of space before home release. I’m sure it disappears after next Friday when you can rent it at home 

In fairness, I’d watch a movie about how Rudy Giuliani is really a teenage kraken so maybe it was a missed opportunity...

Every time I see the name “Ruby Gillman,” I momentarily see “Rudy Giuliani.”

The real solution is to make movie attendance mandatory. You want your precious “social services”? Well, you better have your ticket stub to ‘Pirates of the Caribbean: The Next Generation’ on you, or you don’t get squat!

Or you diversify where you are releasing movies to meet your audience where they are. Ruby Gillman would probably be having a much better weekend if it had been a PVOD release.

Guardians of the Galaxy is still in the Top 10, and yet we just had at least one article today talking about how that was a disappointment.

I’ll probably go see it on $5 Tuesday. I’m not expecting a lot, though. I like Harrison Ford, and I like Indiana Jones....but it is the 5th movie. I’m not expecting anything new and we all know the 4th one sucked. That’s why this movie won’t be a huge success. It’s kind of a nostalgia piece for seniors.

Good god, Wikipedia says the Indy 5 budget was $295 million. That’s insane. Has to make like 700 million internationally to break even (unless it was heavily tipped toward domestic then maybe 600M, which it isn’t so far)

Clearly the solution here is to create even bigger, more expensive movies and release them fifteen-to-twenty at a time. Audiences will be so bewildered by the sheer number of releases that they’ll have no choice but to watch them all, multiple times over.

Movie economics used to be that you made ten movies, and some of them would inevitably flop, but the rest would make enough to pay for everything. Then someone had the bright idea to only make the ones that make money, which works great until it doesn’t.