The Latest Kathleen Kennedy Self-Insert Fanfic Vehicle Phloebiana Jones A "Disaster" with $60 Million Opening

Actually I've heard that that $60 million is an estimate, and a generous one. They're slow-rolling the "actuals." I've heard that the actual tallies will be either $58 or $59 million.

But $60 million was at the bottom of the range of their already lowered-expectations expectations.

This is from the Disney shill site Deadline Hollywood. Even they can't hide the failure any longer.

Even though Disney/Lucasfilm's Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is looking to hit the bottom rung of its tracking projection of $60M Sunday morning, there's no question this is a disastrous result for the finale to a historically beloved franchise film. C'mon, Indiana Jones is one of the reasons why Disney shelled out $4 billion for Lucasfilm. Global start here at $130M, is $10M less than what we were seeing; Nancy will have more. The fan-loathed Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull had a $272.1M global start, unadjusted for inflation/currency swings back in 2008.

A few things to stomach: Not only did Star Wars bomb Solo open higher than Dial of Destiny, with $84.4M 3-day/$103M 4-day, but so did Paramount's seventhquel Transformers: Rise of the Beasts ($61M).

How could Disney and Lucasfilm mess this up?

One shill site reported that the film's opening was $160 million-- but then clarified that this was a projection of the five day box office, through the Fourth of July.

Sounds like someone at Disney really wants the public to think this is making more money than it is.

This is interesting:

Yesterday, I learned from a key source that Indiana Jones and the Dial Destiny, before $100M in estimated P&A, cost a mindboggling $300M-plus. Much higher than the $250M-$295M that's been leaked out there. Disney doesn't comment on budgets, and I'm getting some pushback.

P&A -- prints and advertising, or "marketing" -- is usually budgeted at one half the cost of producing a movie. If this film cost $329 million, the usual P&A budget would be around $165 million.

But they only allocated $100 million for this.

Valliant Renegade speculates that after the terrible Cannes debut, Disney's top executives decided to save money on advertising because they knew they had a dud on their hands. That would also explain the rumored war in the Disney c-suite, with some blaming Kathleen Kennedy for producing yet another huge-budgeted bomb, and others claiming it's all the fault of "the marketing."

Valliant Renegade -- or maybe it was WDW_ Pro -- also wondered why the Cannes reviewers had been allowed to post their reviews the following day. Why was there no embargo period, say delaying the reviews until just before the release?

Could it be that someone lifted the review embargo so that he could make the case that this was another Kathleen Kennedy turd, to give him a good argument for cutting the marketing costs?

It is being estimated that this film will lose $250 million dollars. Even with the reduced ad buy, it will still have to make $800-850 million just to break even, which it will of course not do. (Usually blockbuster movies make 2.5x or at most 3x their opening box office. "Blockbusters" with poor word of mouth, as Phloebiana Jones has, won't even make that much.)

And Phoebiana Jones only has a clear field for nine more days -- Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning opens July 12, and is getting huge buzz.

This movie is on track to lose more money than They/Them Flash.

Speaking of, They/Them Flash suffered one of the worst second-weekend drops of all time. And that's after a low opening.

In its first weekend, The Flash won the domestic box office, though it did so in less-than-stellar fashion, failing to hit the numbers previously predicted for the big superhero movie. Still, if The Flash had continued to put up solid numbers in the following weeks, all would not be lost. Unfortunately, it looks like all is, probably, lost, as The Flash's $15 million domestic box office from this past weekend is a 73% decline from last weekend, which is one of the most significant drops we've seen from a major tentpole release.

...

What makes The Flash's 73% drop even more significant since it's a big fall from a number that wasn't that high to begin with. The Flash's 73% drop, is bigger than that of the much-maligned Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, which saw a 69% drop from an opening weekend of $166 million.

Flash did so poorly in its second weekend that it was fighting Jennifer Lawrence's teen sex comedy No Hard Feelings for third place.

In its third weekend, it suffered another huge drop,falling 67% from its second week box office, which had just fallen 73% from its low opening weekend.

They/Them Flash has been dropped from 1500 theaters and has been fast-tracked to pay-per-view. It will be available for PPV streaming only a month after its opening.

Just ten days into the film's release, the studio was offering what are essentially Bargain Matinee prices to see their Woke Bomb --you can now get two tickets for the price of one to see They/Them Flash.

'The Flash' waves the white flag at the box office by offering 2-for-1 tickets after just 10 days in theaters

Having continued circling the drain in only its second weekend in theaters, there's very little The Flash can do other than hold its hands up and quietly go down in history as one of the biggest box office bombs of all-time.

To put things into perspective, in terms of total money lost, the two largest flops in all of cinema are Disney's John Carter and The Long Ranger, which ended up in the red to the tune of around $200 million each. The Scarlet Speedster's solo debut boasts the same kind of budget as those ignominious failures, and is following a similar trajectory in terms of its day-to-day earnings, so there might be a new kid on the block being welcomed into the seventh circle of financial hell in the very near future.

Some good news for They/Them -- the restraining order against Ezra Miller -- taken out to stop his "inappropriate" behavior towards a "12-year-old nonbinary" child -- just expired. They claim Them were treated "unjustly and unfairly."

A temporary harassment order issued against The Flash star Ezra Miller in Massachusetts after mother of a 12-year-old accused Miller of acting inappropriately around her child was lifted Friday after a court hearing.

The mother, Shannon Guin, accused the Fantastic Beasts star of menacing her family and acting inappropriately toward her nonbinary child in a story that appeared last summer in the Daily Beast.

No criminal charges were ever filed. Miller's attorney said all of the actor's encounters with the child were initiated by the mother. The attorney, Marissa Elkins, said Miller was "never alone with the child and never interacted with the child outside of two brief encounters which occurred in the presence of several other adults."

I think someone should produce a romcom starring Ezra Miller and Phleobag. The pure chemistry between these two would be incendiary.

Woke productions just keep losing Hollywood money, but they keep cranking them out. Paramount just canceled its "Pink Ladies" woke prequel to Grease.

Hollywood keeps deleting woke productions and burning the film and hoping for some tax credits in return.

Maybe just stop making this woke shit that the audience hates?

The proposed "Batgirl" film, reported to be similarly woke, also got shelved before it could even grace then-HBO Max.

The Mouse House erased "Willow," in part, to save cash. Now, that doomed series has some heady company.

Paramount+ just pulled the plug on "Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies." The prequel series to the 1978 musical is no more after a single season, but the news is even more grim for its microscopic fan base.

The streamer is yanking the existing episodes from its content library and may sell it to a competing streamer.

The company will take a content impairment charge and is expected to reveal the financial impact at its next earnings.

So ... how woke was "Rise of the Pink Ladies?"

The Daily Mail offered a sneak peek at the film's messaging before its debut.

"Family favorite tunes will be re-sung alongside new musical numbers including one about white supremacy, while the 1950s student population at Rydell High School will be re-filled with a varied mix of LGBT and black high schoolers unseen in the 1978 hit."

Early reviews confirmed that progressive branding.

The trailer all but screamed this message, underscoring it with its diverse cast and feminist themes.

The series also took the source material to task, according to show runner Annabel Oakes.

"Yeah, there are some lyrics that are problematic. As you see, we reference those in the pilot and other dialogue. You'll see us start to reference ... to try to open up the world of 'Grease' and the lens of 'Grease' through taking a deeper look at those and getting other people's perspectives."

Just what I was looking for in a nostalgia-bait high school musical.

Well, Warner Bros. has figured out a way to avoid the next Flash-level disaster -- take humans out of the decision-making process and let AI choose which films to greenlight.

Warner Bros. has put the peddle to the metal in the Hollywood artificial intelligence race by signing a deal to implement an AI-driven project management system.

The Warner Bros. movie division signed the deal with the company Cinelytic and will reportedly "leverage the system's comprehensive data and predictive analytics to guide decision-making at the greenlight stage," according to The Hollywood Reporter (THR).

The platform reportedly "can assess the value of a star in any territory and how much a film is expected to make in theaters and on other ancillary streams."

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While the platform won't necessarily predict what will be the next $1 billion surprise, like Warners' hit Joker, it will reduce the amount of time executives spend on low-value, repetitive tasks and instead give them better dollar-figure parameters for packaging, marketing and distribution decisions, including release dates.

The AI system could also function as a risk-management strategy by helping the studio avoid spending big money on projects that would perform poorly with audiences.

They need an AI to tell them not to cast Ezra Miller as a superhero?

Analysis: Last weekend was the worst summer weekend since the summer blockbuster was invented in 1975 by Jaws.

Hey Hollywood, you guys are doing great! Do what the media does and give each other a pile of awards!

posted by Lamont the Big Dummy at 04:03 PM

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