Scarlett Johansson sues Disney over streaming release of "Black Widow"

RDJ made loads of turkeys pre-Iron Man. And yet Favreau fought for him to play the role. He thereupon became the top-paid star in the world.

Such are the vagaries of show biz! It’s best to not ponder it too much. These actors all have agents who will get what they can. Sam Worthington is not a star and never will be. I’m sure he was happy with what he got, but Matt Damon who *is* a star would have made much more. That’s just how it works.

ScarJo is a star of the first magnitude. Whatever she gets in the settlement, Disney will have made a bundle *and* will have gained millions of monthly subscribers who will pay and pay and pay and go on paying.

Even the ***** lawyer who thought attacking her like a 9-year old playground bully will make a ton, even as he’s fired.

 

That movie deserved to be a flop/bomb-It absolutely sucked.

I remember before it came out, there was some press/promo stuff in the newspaper tat had a quote from Armie Hammer where he said something along the lines of "I'm not sure if I'm prepared for the amount of fame I'm going to have because of this movie"... It's sure something he didn't have to worry about happening because of 'The Lone Ranger'...

 

I think Lone Ranger was underrated. I thought the photography and action scenes were incredible. I've gone back and watched the train scene a dozen times. The revisionist thing with Tonto becoming the lead wasn't a great approach, but I did like Depp's performance. Quentin Tarantino praised the movie.

"The first forty-five minutes are excellent...Then comes the train scene -- incredible! When I saw it, I kept thinking, 'What, that’s the film that everybody says is crap? Seriously?'"

Read More: Quentin Tarantino Defends 'Lone Ranger' as Best of 2013 | Quentin Tarantino Defends 'Lone Ranger' as Best of 2013

 

And now there's this:



How the ‘Black Widow’ Battle Could Break the Mold on Hollywood Dealmaking – The Hollywood Reporter

 

Break the mold or simply add another clause(s) to account for direct streaming PPV $$$$ if the studio chooses a hybrid release model.

 

Right -- they're just going to have to change all the contracts from here on to include a provision that says, "if we can't release to theaters, and the movie also goes to streaming, you only get X amount." I think Scarlett's problem is that nobody had thought of that 3 years ago, when the contract was signed.

The emails they sent back and forth prior to COVID also indicated it would be a a "wide theatrical release," which to me shouldn't include "a wide theatrical release and we're selling it for $29.95 on pay-per-view". Or a provision that she gets $5 per PPV purchase, something like that.

 

Just seen Black Widow in the cinema.
Wow! Disappointed... underwhelmed in fact.

 

Yeah, I thought the reviews pegged it a bit better than it really was. Still a lot of fun to see with my kid in a practically empty theater.

Part of the problem is the plot was badly telegraphed. Kept telling my kid: "I bet this happens. I bet that happens." And it went down exactly as predicted. My kid knows to tune me out, so it's all good. Most of you probably have me on ignore too, haha.

 

poor olga.

 

Still a contract is a contract.
She’ll be laughing all the way to the bank when when gets the $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$.

The film itself? 6/10

 

My hope is that she has enough money to not settle, to take this to court, win, and get the contract she signed and a real audit of this movie into court records.

Yes, it will be the end of her Hollywood career, but I think that she has more money than she can ever spend, would be perfectly happy to go back to small indie films, and would have "aged out" of Hollywood in a couple of years anyway.

 

Naw, there's plenty of Hollywood stars who won lawsuits and still went on to work for years afterwards. Bette Davis, Olivia De Havilland, Burt Lancaster, Elizabeth Taylor, and Kevin Costner are just a few actors who still had fine careers after lawsuits. I think on many levels, the executives understand, "eh, it's just business."

Scarlett Johansson Isn’t the First Actor to Sue a Studio—and She Won't Be the Last

 

Interestingly, every suit mentioned in that article was settled out of court except for the one by Olivia de Havilland - and that eliminated the studio system.

 

And this answers the question of whether the movie made a profit. It's fair to say at roughly $500 million, the film wasn't a bomb, but it wasn't nearly the big hit that other Marvel films were without a pandemic...

Answering Once and For All If ‘Black Widow’ Was a Hit or a Flop

 

It was a hybrid: a Hilop. Made no $ if it means the studios have to pay more to Scarly. But made tons of $ according to annual shareholders report.

 

I think if her pay was hinged to profit, it would be scaled down. If she gets 10% of the gross, they'd still make money and she would make some money. Often, profit participation hinges on certain milestones that have to be hit: #1 at the box office, #1 at the box office for X weeks, making $100M, $200M, $300M. Somebody said when one of the Avengers movies went over $1 billion dollars, five of the actors started getting like 2% of the gross, and I think Robert Downey ultimately wound up with $75M because he got 8% (after a certain number). Avengers: Endgame made $2.8 billion dollars, making it the highest-grossing film in history, so I think Marvel could afford to be generous.

I don't think Black Widow could have ever made that kind of money, but it's pretty much made the same money as Ant-Man ($519 million). While that's a lotta money, it's not a massive blockbuster. Still profitable, more than enough to make several sequels.

 

That sounds like an overestimate to me. Widow seems like it would not be over $100 million to me.

Avengers Endgame's $200M marketing budget cost more than most blockbusters

To put things into even more context, Infinity War's massive marketing fund only contained $150 million. Runner-ups at Marvel Studios include: Spider-Man: Homecoming ($140M), and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 ($80M). As you can see, there's no contest between any of these MCU films and Endgame.

 

I thought it was enjoyable enough. It was about what I expected, and I wasn’t expecting much.

I never wanted to much see a prequel film starring just her character anyway.

 

Black Widow?
I liked the first 10 minutes, back story.
Wasn’t expecting much, but thought it may surprise me like Ant Man, but alas .. no.

 

Eh, could be $80M, could be $120M, could be more. Don't forget Marvel also has the enormous financial burden of having to sit on the film for more than a year while the interest rates piled up. And they started and stopped several marketing campaigns waiting for the theaters to reopen. It was a mess, and lots and lots of money was spent.

Black Widow reportedly cost $200M, so spending $100M-$150M on marketing is actually pretty typical. I was part of the team who worked on the trailers for Spiderman 3 back in 2007, and that movie cost Sony roughly $300M. I was told the studio spent north of $175M on the ad campaign; we had 60 different TV trailers for that film, plus different aspect-ratio trailers for the internet and I think 10 different theatrical trailers for theaters. The TV trailers alone kept about 20 people busy for 3 months before the movie came out. It is a ridiculous amount of money, but they feel it's necessary these days. Spending $150M on marketing for a $200M movie is tinkertoys, provided it makes north of $500M.

Where'd you get the marketing numbers from? I got the number for Spiderman 3 from the VP of Sony Ad/Pub (whose name I shouldn't mention, since he's still there), when we did the trailers at Technicolor. But the world of 2007 is not the same as 2021 -- my guess is that costs are higher now. The trades are often cloudy when it comes to specific numbers on budget, ad expenses, and other costs; at best, it's an inside guess.

 

More fallout still spreading across the industry from the ScarJo suit. This WSJ article seems to be readable by all because it was a "shared" link.

How Disney and Scarlett Johansson Reached the Point of No Return

Since the lawsuit, brothers Joe Russo and Anthony Russo, directors of Marvel’s “Avengers: Endgame,” the highest-grossing movie of all time, hit an impasse in negotiations to direct another Marvel movie. The Johansson dispute left them unsure how their next movie would be distributed and how they would be paid, according to people familiar with the matter. The Russos declined to comment.

Just click that link to the syfy article in my last post. I copied and pasted the paragraph on marketing costs from there. Another source I've seen marketing numbers in is when Deadline does articles with summaries on a specific movie's costs and revenue and their estimation of the final profit. They usually show the breakdown in there of all the spending including marketing.

Spider-Man 3 definitely felt like a massive marketing campaign. I remember seeing it at midnight in IMAX because theaters were not yet doing the earlier Thursday showings for a new movie. The campaign paid off as it's still the 7th-biggest worldwide opening for a superhero film according to the Wikipedia page below (looks like 13th biggest superhero opening domestically on Box Office Mojo). You have to drop down about 20 more positions before you can find another movie older than 2010 on that list. I kind of feel like pandemic-era movies are not hitting that hard with the marketing because they're not confident the final grosses are going to justify a big spend.

List of highest-grossing superhero films - Wikipedia

 

As far as I’m concerned this doesn’t bode well for the studios argument.

Marvel’s “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” capped off Labor Day weekend at the box office with a bang. The superhero action adventure, starring Canadian actor Simu Liu, had an even bigger debut than expected, collecting $94.4 million in its first four days of release and setting a new high watermark for the holiday weekend.

If you release it, they will come.

 

If it’s good, they will come.

 

Black Widow had a bigger opening box office weekend + another $60 million in first weekend PPV. I guess the ? is how many of those 2 million PPV purchases would've gone to see it in theaters instead if the PPV option wasn't available.

BW opening weekend (Fri-Sun): $80,366,312 in 4,160 theaters
Shang-Chi : $75,388,688 + $19,284,160 on Monday in 4,300 domestic theaters

 

I can’t decide if I want to see it or not. I’m probably going to hold out for “the alpinist” as my next film