hello and welcome to this week's movie math where it seems that very soon Joker
will be the only movie in the billion dollar club with a budget of under a
hundred million along with minions and Despicable Me three bad guys unite
I think Joker would find that very funny and I say it with love it's it's
certainly a huge achievement for Warner Brothers and Todd Phillips and Joaquin
Phoenix because yes Joker this time with the lowest drop in the top ten at a
stunning 28 percent hold in its fifth weekend is well past nine hundred
million worldwide myself and the trades thought it would end up somewhere in the
nine hundred million range but at this rate it should join the billion dollar
club by next weekend if not sooner and we shall celebrate but what I want to
say for now is is the don't forget that there won't be a sequel announcement
probably or any type of follow-up announcement until after the Oscars on
February 9th because Warner Brothers I think very
shrewdly won't want to upset that delicate artistic commercial balance
with when it comes to how Awards voters view the film I think that announcing a
follow-up project would seem a bit and mercenary and now I think they just want
to focus on the success of this film and how it's resonating with at the very
least audiences and I think a number of people in the media and the
entertainment business are supporting it as well very curious to see how it does
with awards nominations however while Warner Brothers has had a
major breakthrough with their DC franchise paramount and skydance failed
yet again to resurrect Terminator ala say Jurassic world it can be done
franchises can sink to the lowest of the low and they can still be brought back
with the right creative people uh I'm sure David Allison is like no fate but
what you make at my ass yes expect everyone to try and scapegoat this
disaster James Cameron already revealed over the weekend that he and Tim Miller
fought in the editing room he said he had liked this very dramatic description
he was like oh there's blood on the editing room walls on there like there's
blood in the blood in the and she to Jim but Cameron also admitted
that it was his idea to kill off John Connor in the first 10 minutes of the
movie so I mean look Terminator dark fate is clearly not a
movie that fell apart in the editing room so I think James Cameron's
complaints seemed ridiculous I mean it clearly fell apart in the writers room
which brings up the point that skydance put together a writers room in the first
place and I think we all knew that know that doing anything creatively by
committee is never a good idea everything that succeeds has one strong
visual leader right you know even the MCU has Kevin Feige in the in the
leadership position I mean if James Cameron didn't want to fully come back
he shouldn't have done us any favors James Cameron we're gonna talk a little
bit about James Cameron even more but first I want to talk about the fact that
some of the traits pointed to toxic fandom being to blame once more and how
male trolls were upset about John Connors fate but I have to point out
that a lot of women were upset as well but I think Hollywood would really
benefit from replacing toxic fandom with fans who care about characters that
Hollywood asked them to care about in the first place right you did too good a
job Hollywood you're a victim of your own success ah damn it they love the
characters that we created and they're not happy when we try and shunt them
aside very sloppily and disrespectfully so because I would say that you know to
blame it on male trolls because you know they're trying to put it in the
Ghostbuster situation but I think Ghostbusters to some degree also fits
under shoving beloved characters aside right I mean but when you see the
success of Wonder Woman and the even bigger success of Captain Marvel and you
know the whole Alien franchise and Sarah Connor to begin with and many many other
movies clearly audiences don't have a problem with strong female characters
audiences they know when a movie is diversifying organically and when it's
just tokenism a cash grab right a blatant cash grab because for all of
terminator dark fates blatant efforts the audience was still overwhelmingly
male at 58% with only 22 percent of the audience Hispanic whereas for a movie
like Coco Hispanics made up 36% of the audience it should have been
bigger with that strong Mexico play so yeah Terminator dark fate delivered one
of the lowest openings for the franchise ever even lower than Terminator 2 which
was in 1991 dollars by the way and while it did get a B+ from audiences so did
terminators three four and five the trades are saying it will take 480
million for this movie to break even with its higher budget advertising costs
plus there's back-end for Cameron and Arne although if I were paramount in
skydance if James Cameron said what he wanted to do with John Connor I'd be
like I'll let you do it if you forfeit your back-end let's see how much you
really believe in this idea Jim and I think you would have said nope and then
that wouldn't have happened so I think so not enough Studios asked
talent to put their money where their with their sometimes big mouth is and
with the dark Terminator dark fate underperforming in the US and overseas
including China at 480 is unlikely this is not the ideal lead-up to James
Cameron's upcoming Avatar movies right and it would seem that maybe the
filmmaker is not evolving along with his audience certainly not audience tastes i
hope these new avatar movies have some amazing must-see VFX which is largely
what helped the first film although some people really to be fair love the first
avatar i don't understand them but they exist there's some talk today in The
Hollywood Reporter that maybe James Cameron who's plotted out a trilogy
could move this to the small screen but I think everyone's pretty tired of
nominally terminator at this point but I think to some degree James Cameron he
should you know I think Martin Scorsese's you should take note all of
James Cameron's negative headlines in the press he's always complaining about
what other people are doing but not doing anything good himself and I think
you know you should take a little bit of a break before avatar you know maybe
someday comes out alright so but speaking of today's audiences and
toxicity there's a little bit of that going on here Harriet was able to find
an audience I think which is fabulous I loved that movie
despite those Cynthia areevo having a controversy which is I think weighed
down the filming kept some people from seeing and it certainly shadowed the
film on social media areevo is very good here but one has to wonder
movie would have opened even bigger with a different actress in the lead role
audiences who did see the film gave it an A+ and it had tremendous support from
the african-american community at a whopping 50 percent that's fantastic and
it opened on par with solo and that movie went wide in 2015 I don't see
Harriet being a huge awards contender but I think it could have amazing
staying power and certainly helped kasi Lemmons level up with her career oliver
Duvernay and maybe areevo will get something out of this but if I were a
studio executive I would wonder what she costs the movie as for the weekends
other are new releases wide releases both arctic dogs and
motherless Brooklyn barely opened in the top ten and while ever Norton has
thanked Warner Brothers for being so supportive of him with this movie maybe
they shouldn't have is it's got a low Rotten Tomatoes score low box-office and
as a result low Awards chances so I'm glad I mean as Warner Brothers in the
make Edward Norton feel better business it looks like it all right now speaking
of awards season parasite and Jojo rabbit which both expanded this weekend
but still neither is gone wide are almost in the top 10 so close I can't
believe Arctic Dogs motherless Brooklyn took their spots but Jojo does go wide
this coming weekend and we'll see what neon does with parasites expansion
parasite did however pass up the light house overall and the light house seems
to have peaked now which is not great for its awards chances to be honest with
you Netflix of Court of course because they never do did we report on the
Irishman's box office which opened in eight theaters in New York and Los
Angeles because movie theaters of course as we've discussed before won't play the
film because went on Netflix insists on a 30-day window the National Theatre
Association played pretty dirty by doing an interview at The Hollywood Reporter
over the weekend saying that Netflix had bungled an opportunity to work with
theater owners to get Marty Scorsese's film in front of more audiences but I
have to say someone who went to one of those eight theaters I went to the
Belasco here in New York City which has been selling out it's only $15 a ticket
Netflix didn't up charge anybody even though I think they created a very
amazing experience especially at that price point I'd say it was magical and
truly sell liberated film is an art and a communal
experience everything the Oscars say that Netflix tries to tear down it was
very very good and I would say that Netflix might have end up having the
last laugh they might have they might have really struck upon something here
perhaps by accident and trying to work around the theaters but if they maybe by
a couple of theaters they're trying to buy theaters in New York and Los Angeles
the Egyptian and the Paris I think it would be great if they could permanently
take over the Belasco sorry Broadway it reminded me actually
the famous Ziegfeld theater before it tragically was closed down but if
Netflix gonna have a couple of theaters not just in New York in LA but in all
the major cities not just in the United States but maybe all over the world they
get one really nice theater house and they play their movies you know they
have a new one every month or so and they truly make it this kind of
experience I think people would flock to that marriage story opens at the Paris
here in New York on Wednesday I think this could I think this could really
work out for Netflix and might become something very exciting I hope I would
love for them to do this again and if you're in the tri-state area as I
tweeted go see the Irishman at the Belasco and the tickets are very are
really starting to go so make sure you buy them as soon as possible if you want
to go the tickets are on télécharger as for the overall top ten Addams Family
has just a wee bit more money than Maleficent domestically but still I
think that shows that Disney made the wrong bet when they decided to try and
position the Angelina Jolie flick as Halloween fare
whereas Addams Family was true Halloween fare as for this coming weekend it looks
like dr. sleep will have an easy win while last Christmas which is coming out
way too early and midway fight it out with Terminator dark fate for second
place playing with fire also for some reason
will hit theaters and that's this week's movie math thanks for going over the box
office with me be sure to share your thoughts down below subscribe today
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