Predicting the Movie Hits & Bombs of 2020

Doh, so the industry insiders are saying that Dolittle could lose Universal a whopping $100 million bucks...

Robert Downey Jr's 'Dolittle' Could Lose $100 Million at Box Office

But judging by IMDB, Robert Downey has another 20 projects in development, and I think they're gonna jump on Sherlock Holmes 3 pretty quickly in order to get back to making a big "audience" blockbuster.

 

Oh. My. God. This list - with one or two might-catch-on-video exceptions - looks AWFUL.

Can't see myself going to the cinema much this year!

The problem for the majors will be the budgets on these things - many will be north of $150m, and several north of $200m. With marketing on top of that....2020 looks BAD already

 

The Brothers Grimm get gender-swapped.

 

I am very excited by Christopher Nolan's next film Tenet--he always does something interesting and worth watching. Will be going to see that for sure.

 

They have been doing that a lot lately.

 

And continued reports confirm that Dolittle was an absolute disaster for Universal and Robert Downey Jr. ...

Why Dolittle Is Going To Lose Money, Despite Making Nearly $100 Million So Far

 

I'm surprise that it even got close to the 100M mark.

At least Cats made 2/3 of its production budget back. Dolittle has yet to do that much.

Of course, we don't really know what Cats did cost to produce. But we can deduce that it might be somewhere in the neighborhood of half the cost of Dolittle, though, probably more than half, but still...

 

I think the reported $95 million production budget for CATS doesn't tell the whole story, wasn't this film in development for years? the use of CGI is very extensive and it's not cheap regardless of who is doing it.

So far it's grossed $27 million domestic and $38.3 internationally, that translates to about $30.7 to the studio or 32% of reported production budget. Add in marketing and this movie is losing a TON.

 

No doubt that is is loosing a ton.

As we have both commented.

Still, it has managed to gross about 2/3 of its published production budget.

Dolittle has yet to do that and has a published production budget of close to twice that of Cats, at $175M.

At the end of the day, Dolittle might loose twice as much as Cats.

 

$5.6 million for 30 seconds of ad time on the Super Bowl, I guess we'll find out which movies the studios really believe in.

Super Bowl LIV: Most Movie Ads Sitting Out the Big Game as Prices Soar

 

Put it on a plate, son. You’ll enjoy it more.

 

I saw trailers for some of the coming attractions with 4 grand-kids, ages 6-11, 3 are girls. They all gave Doolittle and Mulan the thumbs up; Sonic, Jungle Cruise and (I think) Trolls got the thumbs down.

 

Also, the $175 million number for Doolittle was published before the extensive reshoots took place, so the official number can’t really be trusted there either.

 

Yeah, I heard from a Universal insider that there was $20 million in costs hanging over Cats just from many years of development with Spielberg, who wanted to do an animated version 20 years ago. In hindsight, maybe that would've been a better idea. I think the real budget was a lot higher, particularly with the redos and the accelerated schedule. Note there were nine credited producers on this film, including Spielberg and Andrew Lloyd Webber, so my guess is that they all got paid off the top.

But I don't think another year and $50 million could have made Cats a hit. It was still a weird, weird idea that wasn't going to be a commercial hit.

 

I'm calling it now; Denis Villenueve's upcoming Dune will do decent but not spectacular business... somewhere around $450-500m (give or take) worldwide tops. And considering the production cost of this thing, plus P&A, it's going to be a stretch to break even on it's theatrical run... but I suspect will do gangbusters on ancillary release.

What that will mean for the concluding second film is anyone's guess... I see it hasn't been officially greenlit as yet (although Jon Spaihts is writing the script as we speak).

I've always held this film (based as it is on a strange, esoteric, and rather niche literary property) would be better served - and less risky - as a single three-hour+ film... but I hope to be proved wrong...

 

Count me as another one who's surprised it's poised to break $100M. I guess that's star power for you.

 

I'm not that familiar with Dune but I will say the 2020 movie version has to be leaps and bounds better than the 1984 Lynch version I suffered through a few weeks ago. I get a feeling it will be similar in tone to Blade Runner 2049, beautiful to look at but slow and ponderous.

 

One theory as to why Disney backed off anything draconian with "The Last Mutants" and not only let it come out in theaters, but supposedly gave the thing back to the director and let the director have his way with it, is that they want to sidestep what has happened lately with several films that were supposedly/allegedly taken away from directors, where a groundswell (whether justified or not) of fans clamor for "Release the Snyder Cut" or "Release the JJ Cut!", etc. Obviously, "The New Mutants" isn't as high profile as either of those.

But I think Disney knows "The New Mutants", even if it's actually maybe a pretty solid film, probably won't do well at the box office, and they're unlikely to use any Fox elements in their eventual X-Men-adjacent MCU stuff (though there are rumors lately that they are talking to Patrick Stewart about doing more X-Men stuff). So they want to avoid a "Release the Director's Cut!" PR issue on that one especially, and they have little to nothing to lose to just let the director put out his preferred cut, and then neither the director nor whatever contingent of fans can complain afterwards.

I'm pretty annoyed when I read that Disney "inherited" these Fox films. They didn't "inherit" them, they *bought* them! They *chose* to buy it all. I think all evidence indicates that stuff like "Dark Phoenix" would never have caught the box office on fire, but Disney has not helped some of these "legacy" Fox film releases. They are surprisingly being a bit more pro-active with "The New Mutants" than I thought they would be; perhaps there is a cast member or two from that they might want to use in the future? But that's setting a pretty low bar. I'm not going to congratulate Disney on not so proactively purposely tanking old Fox properties they don't care about. I'm not giving them extra credit for being so gracious as to not dump stuff to streaming.

 

I think an argument could be made that among "casual" moviegoers, "Dune" is an even less known "name" than "Blade Runner", and the excellent "Blade Runner 2049" did not do very well at the box office a few years ago.

Knowing what they know about this genre in general right now, and Villenueve's style, and the messy history of previous "Dune" projects, I can only hope the studio for this new one are adjusting their expectations accordingly. "Blade Runner 2049" had a relatively well-known film name in its title, and had Harrison Ford in it, and only made $259 million worldwide. I could envision "Dune" only getting to around that point. Maybe a little more, but maybe a little less. A huge, breakout success for the film would be for it to get to $400-$500 million worldwide.

I think WB can create buzz for "Dune" later this year in a way they couldn't have in the past, and the film has a seemingly impressive cast (though most of the cast members have also participated in under-performing films too).

Also, I do have to say, as someone who has never been deep into the "Dune" mythos, it's not exactly the most accessible, easy-to-pick-up story/plot. A one-paragraph synopsis makes "Blade Runner" seem like "Ernest Goes to Camp" plot-wise.

 

I'm afraid its going to be a big flop. Who are the masses dying to see this movie? There are old guys like me who loved the first 3 books and the original movie, and....?

 

If the film had a more mid-range budget, then this all wouldn't be as much of an issue. It could then play a bit more niche. It could do "Mad Max: Fury Road" sort of business at the box office then.

But if "Dune" is like a $180-$200 million budget film, then getting to like $600-$700 million worldwide is going to be a tall order.

For whatever reason, "sci-fi" is just not a hot thing right now, even couched in darker, grittier styles. "Dune" seems like something that would get a lot of acclaim as an HBO "limited series" show, but not something that has to bring in three quarters of a billion dollars to be a moderate hit.

 

I'm an old guy and I'm not that familiar with Dune at all, the under 40 crowd will be looking at this as a new property. Will they give it a chance? It's going up against Coming 2 America and Spielberg's West Side Story.

 

I get what you're saying, but I think Disney has as a result of buying out Fox's movie division, inherited the problems of the FoX-Men franchise. Again, it was their choice and all, but they are just trying to get all their IP under one roof.

I find it crazy that Fox could never properly adapt The Dark Phoenix Saga. Instead, they made the same kind of dreary, similar film twice with the loose plotline of Jean becoming Dark Phoenix. Fox needed to up the ante and do something closer to the epic Claremont/Byrne comic story, but they fumbled it again instead.

 

I thought the new "Dark Phoenix" was just fine. It wasn't a masterpiece. But it was far from the trainwreck a lot of reviews made it out to be. A lot of reviews of that film led me to the conclusion that a "Dark Phoenix" film, despite being seemingly a no-brainer success, is actually very hard to pull off, because I think people don't like the Dark Phoenix/Jean Grey character as its portrayed in the underlying story arc (even going by the comics or the animated series). A lot of complaints I saw about last year's film seemed to be rooted in complaints about that character's story arc and personality.

More generally, I just don't cut Disney *any* slack when it comes to those Fox properties. They knew everything that was on various slates when they made that purchase. Sure, they have to bring the X-Men into their "universe", and I don't think that's a problem. My mention of Disney buying Fox rather than seemingly innocently "inheriting" Fox films had more to do with the entire Fox slate, not just the Marvel stuff. They bought a huge film studio, which had a bunch of projects completed, others partially completed, others still too far along to stop, etc. All staffed by real human beings actually being effort into trying to make good films, and many of which had and still have varying levels of fan bases. Disney has zero room to complain, even to investors/shareholders, that whatever Fox films are dragging them down. They decided to buy the whole ball of wax. They could have done the purchase differently. They could have sold off some of those Fox films to other studios. They obviously weren't going to do that with Marvel stuff. But some of the other stuff could have been given to other studios that may have supported those films a little more.

 

I can only speak to your first point here, it's probably true that people don't like Jean Grey that much, now (Sophie Turner didn't do the character any justice). But Claremont got death threats for killing Jean off back during the original saga. She's also one of the core 5 original X-Men. So what happened? If Fox really wanted to go toe to toe with Marvel Studios, they would have adapted the Dark Phoenix Saga properly, maybe over the course of two movies and followed the original story closer. Except Fox decided to do it on the cheap and basically remake Ratner's X-Men 3: The Last Stand. Dark Phoenix was too low-stakes in every way.