Predicting the Movie Hits & Bombs of 2020

I've heard Birds of Prey's opening weekend is only tracking for $45-55 million.

 

Yeah, I think it is nuts to recycle a movie that was entertaining, but just OK at best, thirty years later.

Back then, there was not really a high bar for movies, you could make an OK movie on a moderate budget and I stood a good chance of succeeding at the box office.

Another factor, other than the usual number of surprises, is that is not the case today. There are so many movies with production costs of 180M, up, that just an average OK movie just has to be a lot more than just OK to successfully compete with the heavy hitters.

Movies like Alita, took in over 400M. So whether it is or is not a box office success, it took that 400+ million away from other movies that were playing at the time.

The only way I see C2A2 having any chance of success is for it to be produced on a very modest budget (which it should be anyway).

 

This business model has to change , somewhere down the road.
Less people are going to movies than a decade ago..
Netflix and Amazon and small independent movie companies are the future.
The idea of big studio making big budget movies and them expecting to succeed
is a 20th century notion.

 

Not necessarily. Theater owners and distributors have said before that when there's a massive hit at the box office, more people wind up going to the theater and all the films there go up perceptibly in overall revenue. So it may not be an "either/or" thing -- it may be "hey, we came here to see X, but let's go see Y instead!"

 

And I'm one-for-one so far this year. Dr. Doolittle -- excuse me, Dolittle -- is not doing much in terms of ticket sales...

Box Office: 'Bad Boys for Life' Banishing 'Dolittle' With Huge $65M-Plus Bow

Universal Faces Second Animal-Film Bomb in Weeks with ‘Dolittle’

Dolittle is getting eviscerated by critics who call it first dud of 2020

Very bad, for a movie that cost $200M+.

I also figured that Bad Boys would do well financially.

 

I talked my way out of going to see Dolittle today with the family, even though I said yesterday that I would go with them. I had no desire to see it.

Instead I went and saw Underwater. That was kind of a stupid movie too. LOL. Unbelievable displays of incorrect science throughout the movie, not to mention the sea monsters. Another poor choice of a film for Kristen Stewart. T.J. Miller was also in it, but mostly wasted. Only there for comic relief early in the movie. There were 2 gimmicky jump scares in the movie (one really did make you jump out of your seat.) By the way, I was the only person at that showing. LOL. It was in the smallest theatre of the entire complex and the furthest away from the entrance, all the way down one of the side hallways. When I bought my ticket and picked my seat, there were 3 seats that were already bought together, but no one showed up to fill those seats. Don't understand why people do that. It happens more times than you think. Tickets are bought to screenings and they don't come. I don't know about any cancellation and refund policies for people who do order ahead of time online.

 

I think that is true when the movie that they intended to see is either sold out or overcrowded so they seek out an alternative.

In doing so, they might not be that aware of the alternative movies reviews and just pick it based on the movie's show times and the posters in the lobby.

That only happened to me once, many years back. We really could not get decent seats for the movie we went to see (an I don't care for overcrowded theaters) so we ended up seeing an espionage movie with Whoopi Goldberg, wasn't bad.

Other than when theaters are overcrowded, I doubt if that happens all that frequently.

Some people make it an outing to go to a movie once a week, usually at the same day and time, they are more apt to pick a movie once the get to the theater, not having gone to the theater with the idea in mind of seeing any particular film.

 

I saw "1917" at a matinee. The theater was as full as I've seen it for anything not a major IP franchise (i.e., Disney/Marvel/Pixar). I would think that bodes well for this film's legs.

 

CGI animals is not remotely an attraction any more than 3D is now days. There have been nothing but movies with CGI animals playing in 2019.

Family movies require a story, a "family" oriented story.

I guess we just can't seem to convey this point to the studios, who seem to take great pleasure in loosing a hundred million dollars or so.

And, tell "Doolittle" that the Polynesia is a red, not a blue parrot.

It sometimes helps when the producers and directors read the book (sometimes it helps conceptually speaking).



Besides, we had a CGI parrot in Aladdin last year, same old, same old... There is such a thing as being Booksmart.

It's probably fortunate for Doolittle, that all the major movies that are in the theaters are ones like Star Wars, Frozen II and such that have been playing for a while now.

Doolittle is not even up against any real competition, it it was, it would be doing far worse than it is going to do. The producers should consider this somewhat of a miracle in itself.

They could have ended up worse, much worse!

Its going to be even more embarrassing when they get beat out by Gretel & Hansel (2020), in a few weeks.

Hope that they are enjoying these few days in the sun.

 

Some additional feedback...

doppio defense gang @ 27 days until #SonicMovie!@doppiophone

I am absolutely losing my MIND knowing cats has a higher score than dolittle on rotten tomatoes


20
2:14 PM - Jan 15, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy

 

Maybe they came to their senses?

 

Really going out on a limb with this prediction?

 

Universal sure knows how to pick their projects....fire everyone involved in green lighting these bombs.

 

I said that six months ago, actually. Go back and check.

I think Universal knew that Dolittle was in big trouble back in April, when they fired the director and hired another guy for extensive reshoots...

Robert Downey Jr.'s 'Doctor Dolittle' Reboot Getting Major Reshoots From 'Ninja Turtles' Director

It did not take a lot of imagination on my part to guess that Dolittle would most likely bomb, especially when the release was shifted from the fall to January.

 

But, that's not how corporate America works, you shift the blame to those below you and fire them instead.

 

OK, I believe you and was just kidding anyway.

Anytime they fire the director and get involved in extensive reshoots, the movie is already destined to sink like the Titanic.

Time shifting does occur frequently in this business, but it is usually a good indicator that there is serious trouble brewing.

A 200M CGI intensive Dr. Doolittle is a project that is doomed from the start.

The franchise had already been ruined by the previous two movies bearing the same title subject.

Young audiences rarely read novels like we did back in the old days.

Where I might say, if I was 10 and they announced a Dr. Doolittle movie, I would have read the novels (note, plural) and would be all amped up to see the movie, without having to be coerced by ad campaigns costing many millions of dollars.

To a typical video game playing ten year old today, Dr. Dolittle means very little, it that much.

 

I can see myself checking them out...but I can imagine what they will do to them! so I may not...LOL...

 

THREE movies. The 1967 Rex Harrison movie also tanked, to the extent that it financially damaged 20th Century-Fox' stock. This 1967 film, plus Star and Cleopatra, pretty much killed the studio and forced them to sell off the massive Fox backlot, which allowed developers to create Century City in West LA, kind of a mini-downtown of dozens of high-res office buildings and condos. Planet of the Apes is one of the movies that brought Fox back from the verge of bankruptcy.

I'm baffled by the Rotten Tomatoes score...

 

I fervently hope this will usher in a new era like the 67-76 period of American films where young directors get a chance to make interesting films on under $5M budgets. Think of how many of those could have been funded with the $200M thrown away on Dolittle or the $100M on Cats.

 

It "only" cost $97M, so my guess is that it will need to make north of $170M-$200M worldwide to break even for WB. I actually think that's doable, even if it sucks. Bear in mind it's a violent R-rated comic book/action film, and The Joker proved there's an audience that will pay for movies like this (if they're well-written, well-acted, and well-directed). We'll see how good, bad, or ugly this is in a couple of weeks.

 

I dragged some friends to see Cats (we were all curious) and while it was bad, it was bad in a fun kind of way. We could all laugh at it. From the first preview Dolittle looked bad in an agonizing way that you can’t laugh at but would have to endure. I may be wrong, maybe other people feel that way about Cats, but I have no desire to see Dolittle. It looks like one long cringe to me.

 

Anyway you look at it, adapting Cats from the play into a musical movie, was destined to be problematic, to begin with. The play its characters and songs were hard to get a hold of and I think impossible. While I am eternally fond of the play now, it is after owning the double audio cassette tape and watching the DVD of the play, a number of times.

Perhaps I'm slow in the uptake, but that's what it took for me.

From the beginning, casting a lot of big names to insure the movie being a success, is never a good idea to begin with.

What the ended up with is not a play, nor a conventional musical, from an audience's perspective.

But, Dr. Dolittle, was a known disaster, why repeat something that was a massive box office failure in the first place?

I'm agreeing with you on this one. While I did not have much hope for Cats, at least knowing, the play, the characters, the songs and music, I went in, knowing that there were changes that I already did not approve of, but, given my history with the play, I did figure that I would get through it, reasonably unscathed, and finding at least some redeeming qualities, that I could come away with, which I at least did.

I find nothing any way redeeming about Dolittle, from everything so far.

As a child who read many books, I was almost always disappointed in how unlike the book(s), that the movie adaptions turned out to be.

 

You could apply this to any year, but what an underwhelming list of lousy sequels, reboots and remakes. Just looks very uninspiring. Only ones I'm planning to see at the moment are Birds Of Prey and Wonder Woman 1984. Interesting that we are getting a big dump of sci-fi at the end of the year (Dune, The Tomorrow War and The Last Duel).

The only dud here I'm almost sure of The New Mutants. Wasn't it filmed years ago and kept getting pushed back by both Fox and now Disney?

 

Yeah, that's true. Wikipedia says

Filming took place in Boston from July to September 2017, primarily at Medfield State Hospital, with an April 2018 release in mind. The film was then delayed for several years while reshoots were planned, though comments by Boone in 2019 were interpreted as indicating these never happened.

The fact that it's only coming out now in 2020 is not good. In fact, I'm hard pressed to think of a film that was delayed 6-12 months for release because of endless reshoots. The lone exception might be 1997's Titanic, which beat all the odds to become a massive hit.

 

It didn't help having the corporate shakeup of Disney buying out Fox's movie division in 2018-2019 or so. I've also heard both The New Mutants and the DOA Dark Phoenix both got pushed back because James Cameron wanted Alita: Battle Angel to have the spotlight all to itself last February.

Rumor was that The New Mutants was going to get a streaming-only release if it got one at all. I'm surprised they're even releasing it to theaters.