Is the Collapse of Disney Something?

The media is still spinning like a top for their favorite Groomer Entertainment Corporation:

On the bright side for Independence Day bomb Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, its first five days at the box office of $82 million aren't as bad as Paramount/Skydance's Terminator Genisys.

That sequel's launch just prior to July 4, 2015 left a lot of methane in the air with $42.4M in its Wednesday-to-Sunday total. The attempted Arnold Schwarzenegger comeback movie ended its domestic run at $89.7M; Dial of Destiny will cross that mark before its first week is up.

Oh well, if it beat Terminator: Genisys, a movie so awful it doesn't know how to spell its own name, it's doing pretty well, really.

Comparing July 4th tentpole hits and bombs can be tricky. Since the holiday skips around -- sometimes studios launch on a Wednesday and sometimes a Friday -- for box office fanatics, everything is apples-to-oranges. The last time July 4th fell on a Tuesday was 2017 and 2006. In 2017, over the Friday-Tuesday frame, Illumination/Universal's Despicable Me 3 led with $99M, followed by Sony/MRC's Baby Driver with $29.97M.

With the $300M+ costing Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny tanking this weekend, it's as though box office history is repeating itself. Back in 2006 over July 4th, there was another expensive, highly anticipated franchise sequel attempt that was also rejected by fans with a B+ CinemaScore: Warner Bros/DC's Superman Returns, from Bryan Singer. The pic cost well in excess of $220M after endless stories of a runaway budget and Singer re-creating corn-filled Smallville, Kansas in Australia. Like Superman Returns, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny clocked in at a way-too-long 2 hours and 34 minutes, thus delivering fewer showtimes for exhibitors (and studio) to gross more.

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For you see, July 4th is a prime launchpad for studios to take their best shot with a questionable franchise tentpole and milk as much money as possible. If it doesn't look like you're going to post some sort of record over three days, go for the 4-day, 5-day, 6-day or 7-day stretch that Independence Day offers. Warners took advantage of that opportunity with Superman Returns, minting a $108M seven-day opening. It's a figure Dial of Destiny won't even touch.

Indiana Jones opened in the UK with a clear field -- no tentpole movies were released last week, and the ones left over from previous weeks were either bombs (The Flash, Elemental) or entering their second month of release (Spider-Man: Across the Universe).

But that didn't stop industry shill Variety for crowing about Indiana Jones' amazing performance in the UK:

At WDW_Pro, Jonas J. Campbell reported that there is an "emergency meeting" taking place at Disney today. People who were on vacation this week were given 12 hours to get back home for this meeting.

The meeting, he reports, was called by Alan Bergman, the co-chair of Disney Entertainment, which oversees all of Disney's six movie studios. The other co-chair, Dana Walden, is a defender of Kathleen Kennedy, and was not summoned to the meeting. (Though she might show up.)

This follows rumors that "Five Horsemen of the Apocalypse" from Disney's Burbank HQ showed up at Lucasfilm to inspect its financial records just after the movie's Thursday night premiere (and failure).

Does this mean Kathleen Kennedy will be fired? Probably not. She only has one year left on her contract; Disney will probably just let her serve that out as a figurehead.

But the people who definitely may be fired are Kathleen Kennedy's leftwing employees, like the idiots of the LucasFilm story group who have produced one woke disaster after another. They infamously filmed themselves brainstorming ideas for what every Star Wars fan would want to see in their new "High Republic" era; they decided what Star Wars fans really wanted was "diversity," "dinosaurs," and "diversity." Yes, diversity, the grift so nice they named it twice.

Many Lucasfilm critics point out that firing Kathleen Kennedy accomplishes nothing because she has the whole place staffed with her Force is Female loyalists. But this may be an opportunity to fire most of these people. Lucasfilm has nothing left to destroy anyway, and Disney is not going to be greenlighting any more Lucasfilm bombs anytime soon, so they might as well shutter the place and run it with a skeleton crew.

And speaking of billion-dollar evil groomer industries:

Is Sound of Freedom something? Commenters who saw it on July 4th say yes!

Dune 2:

Phil Tippet, a stop-motion animator who worked on the Star Wars movies, made Mad God on his own, a few frames at a time, for ten years. It's already on pay per view, and is on Shudder, if you have that.

Meg 2 knows exactly what kind of movie it is. skip to here to see what kind of movie that is, or watch the full trailer.

Regarding Mission: Impossible, I earlier said that, based on the trailers, the plot seemed to be about an AI which was controlling information and either spreading "misinformation" or falsely branding the truth as "misinformation."

Chris Gore saw the film, and confirms that is in fact the plot. Everyone I've seen who saw it says it's really good, though there is a little disappointment that, being a Part 1 of a two-part story, it doesn't fully conclude the story. (That is, the AI remains in charge of the world's information at the end.) I've heard people say it's almost but not quite as good as Mission: Impossible 5 (Rogue Nation) and 6 (Fallout). Those were really good, and 5 is my favorite of the series, so being almost as good as those is a positive thing. Obviously it would be more positive if it were better than those, but, again, this is only Part 1 of the two-movie "Dead Reckoning" story.

They also say that Haley Atwell is great in it. She plays a female trickster type character who is in opposition to Tom Cruise, though not an actual villain. So kind of like the Phloebag character except not stupid and girlbossy.

And also she's one of the hottest women alive, so.

posted by Lamont the Big Dummy at 03:17 PM

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