League of Super-Pets bombing? If true, then it might suggest the children this was aimed at might find it too silly, especially if they're already watching the live action superhero content.
DC Movies - To Infinity and Beyond
- Thread starter dahj
- Start date
I really wonder what a film like, say, Minions has that puts it above League of Super-Pets, outside of brand recognition. I may not be particularly interested in Super-Pets but I'd watch it over 90+ minutes of minion shenanigans.
Then again, Minions having the pre-established popularity is probably the reason it makes so much money, over objective quality. Plus I never thought that Super Pets seemed like a big hit, it seemed like a forgettable mid-tier kids movie. I didn't expect it to bomb though, I thought it would just slowly get to ok profitability and get forgotten in a year. I wonder if it bombing will effect many plans going forward, at bare minimum I'm betting it doesn't get a sequel.
Then again, Minions having the pre-established popularity is probably the reason it makes so much money, over objective quality. Plus I never thought that Super Pets seemed like a big hit, it seemed like a forgettable mid-tier kids movie. I didn't expect it to bomb though, I thought it would just slowly get to ok profitability and get forgotten in a year. I wonder if it bombing will effect many plans going forward, at bare minimum I'm betting it doesn't get a sequel.
Minions and Lightyear are sequels to films that a lot of now parents enjoyed when they were kids. They have a built in audience. On the other hand, DC doesn't really have that. What's more there are probably a lot of families out there who now associate DC with adult style movies and may even be wary of a cartoon as to whether it will be appropriate for their kids.
It's a rotten shame if DC League of Super-Pets is doing poorly. It looks charming, including what promises (based on the trailers) to be the best cinematic portrayal of Superman in years. I'm still not attending films theatrically, but I expect I'll pick up the Blu-ray when it's released.
Superheroes intended for kids no longer sell. At all. That probably means that the superhero fad will die down soon.
Looks like it's going to be around $23 million for Super pets, which is pretty much the level I expected. Why people thought it would be a mega hit is beyond me. Similar opening to "The Bad Guys" which might end up crawling to 100 million. However, the Cinemascore for The Bad Guys was an A while Pets ended up with an A- so it might top out lower.
Another off-putting issue for the film is its need to capture some 1950s/early 60s-esque imagery and (from what I've heard) characterization. Boomers & early Gen-Xers (in the film industry) had/have an obsession with the artificial imagery from those periods, but no one else does, which includes that Eat-Your-Vegetables, house-daddy version of Superman. Despite a number of animated productions on TV & film forcing those visual motifs / tropes on viewers, kids were never shy about seeking out what they viewed as "real" superhero portrayals in comics or other media--and something that looks like its copy+pasted from a Montgomery Ward catalog circa 1955 is not going to fulfill their interests.
Who exactly is saying League of Super-Pets is bombing? Based on what metric? And proclaimed on early Saturday of its opening weekend, no less.
Previous projections had the opening weekend at $ 28 million. With Thursday previews, the box office was $ 2.2 million. Projections were thus adjusted to about $ 43 million. While Friday wasn't a hit, families don't tend to go on Friday nights the way people go to movies aimed at teenagers and adults like the Marvel movies. It's really the proper weekend, Saturday and Sunday, that make or break the opening weekend for a family movie, and we don't have final numbers.
While I don't think the opening weekend will get to the adjusted projections of 43 million, even the previous projections of 28 million would not make this a bomb, because, one, it would be about a third of the budget in domestic box office alone, and second, again, family movies work differently. The legs are the important thing with a movie like that. The Bad Guys made less than those 28 million on its opening weekend, and it is far from a bomb (and its budget isn't that much less than what Super-Pets').
And for the comparison to Lightyear, that is flawed. The budget of that movie was $ 200 million. Clearly, expectations were different there. Also, reviews were lackluster, resulting in the film having no legs to speak of. Reviews for Super-Pets are generally positive, and not only was there no competition this weekend, there will be little to no competition to speak of until September.
Not saying that the movie won't bomb. Just saying it's WAAAAYYYY too early to tell.
Previous projections had the opening weekend at $ 28 million. With Thursday previews, the box office was $ 2.2 million. Projections were thus adjusted to about $ 43 million. While Friday wasn't a hit, families don't tend to go on Friday nights the way people go to movies aimed at teenagers and adults like the Marvel movies. It's really the proper weekend, Saturday and Sunday, that make or break the opening weekend for a family movie, and we don't have final numbers.
While I don't think the opening weekend will get to the adjusted projections of 43 million, even the previous projections of 28 million would not make this a bomb, because, one, it would be about a third of the budget in domestic box office alone, and second, again, family movies work differently. The legs are the important thing with a movie like that. The Bad Guys made less than those 28 million on its opening weekend, and it is far from a bomb (and its budget isn't that much less than what Super-Pets').
And for the comparison to Lightyear, that is flawed. The budget of that movie was $ 200 million. Clearly, expectations were different there. Also, reviews were lackluster, resulting in the film having no legs to speak of. Reviews for Super-Pets are generally positive, and not only was there no competition this weekend, there will be little to no competition to speak of until September.
Not saying that the movie won't bomb. Just saying it's WAAAAYYYY too early to tell.
LOL what? Dude, the first Despicable Me came out in 2010. It's not a franchise "that a lot of now parents enjoyed when they were kids".
To an extent, it is. Looking it up, it seems its target age range was 12 and under, so the oldest of those viewers would be at least 24 now, which is certainly old enough to have young children. And there could have been older kids who enjoyed it too, say 14- or 16-year-olds at the time. (I don't know -- I've never actually seen any of the movies in the franchise.)
Except kids still love the MCU, I'm pretty sure all the MCU films I went to in theaters (in afternoon showings at least) had kids in the audience, and I specifically remembering 8-10 year olds enjoying Endgame (although the parents were doing a good job controlling them, so it wasn't too bad) when I saw it in theaters.
The MCU is made for a general audience and the films are PG-13, but that doesn't mean they're only enjoyed by people 13 and up (although I'm sure Multiverse of Madness didn't have as many parents bringing their kids are an Avengers movie would).
Its a weird thing nowadays that people expect kids to only watch things made specifically for them. I watched Armageddon in theaters when I was almost 8 years old and loved it (I still have a soft spot for the movie). I'm pretty sure I watched the original Blade before I was 10, and Blade II around the time it came out (so around the age of 12). The average MCU movies, by comparison, are even more watchable for kids then the stuff I watched, even though they aren't not made specifically for them. Sure, kids will miss out of subtle stuff and more complex story beats, but the MCU has a lot to appeal to many different kinds of people and age groups. So, I don't think the lack of success with kid focused superhero stuff is going to hurt the genre in general.
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People can have kids as pre teens, doesn't make it the norm. Being technically possible doesn't make it a financially viable demographic. The average age a woman gives birth for the first time is 30. Add 2-4 years for the kids to be old enough to want to see a movie and we're 32-34. That would make the average mom with a single target age kid at least 20-22 when the first Despicable Me came out. Older if she has more than one.
Toy Story is a case of intergenerational nostalgia, parents sharing their childhoods with their own kids, sure. Despicable Me isn't, not yet.
Who was talking about preteens? Do the math. We're talking about a group of people up to age 24, if not older. They could've had children at 20-22 and have toddlers now.
Yes, the average, which means it's merely the middle of a wider range. An average of 30 implies that there are probably roughly as many women having children at age 20 as there are at age 40, assuming a symmetrical bell curve. No, it wouldn't be the majority of the original audience, but it wouldn't be zero either. It's misunderstanding averages to treat them as absolutes. An average is just a convenient fiction, an oversimplification of something more complex. The average position of a car on a circular racetrack is the center of the circle, a point the car never occupies at all. You can't take averages too literally. They're meaningless unless placed in context.
Apparently, the reason why he is appearing is because Aquaman 2 was supposed to be released after the Flash movie and it was actually Michael Keaton in those scenes. They were reshot for continuity reasons.
Also....
The end of the Flash movie hints at Crisis on Infinite Earths which would allow Affleck to show up one more time.
You're ignoring the entire point. The English said that the new DM's success is based on a lot of parents sharing their childhood franchises. That is categorically not the case. The vast majority of now parents were not 12 and under when the first DM came out.
I know. Whiskers is sooo cute.
Okay, that's a fair point. But on the other hand, the vast majority of Marvel or DC movies' audiences have never read a comic book in their lives. The readership for a best-selling comic book issue is something like the square root of the audience size for a successful tentpole blockbuster, on the order of 10,000 vs. 100 million. A built-in audience doesn't have to be the majority of the audience to have an impact. "Buzz" is often generated by a vocal minority whose opinions influence others.
I will concede that the premise doesn't apply as strongly to the Despicable Me franchise as it does to older franchises. I just think you're being too absolute about ruling it out. It could be at least a little true, is all I'm saying. I like to look for the middle ground instead of reducing everything to all-or-nothing binaries.
I'd say that's an entirely different argument, and one that has a lot of value. Nothing is more popular among Facebook mom's than Minion memes. The tiktok meme of teens in suits going to see the new movie is so big that theaters had to ban them. But that's not the same as intergenerational nostalgia, which is what TheEnglish was attributing DM's success too. Is it possible there are families out there with parents who are in their teens or early 20's and loved DM as kids and who have kids now that are old enough to go see the new movie? Sure, but it's not why the movies are a success. The numbers are too small.
I can't personally say why the movie underperformed against expectations but the speculation as to why it failed seems to map to their own usual personal preferences. Speaking just as myself, as someone who might throw something like Minions or Lightyear on when they hit streaming even if they aren't exactly targeted to someone like me, I didn't really find the trailers to pique my curiosity.
I guess if I was to throw my hat in on speculation, I think the best children's movies are good family movies and have something to offer everyone. I didn't think this one really looked like it had those elements to keep adults and older teens involved as well as the younger set. We had a family gathering some time back and one way or another Spider-Man Across the Spider-Verse was shown and we had people from 8-75 all having a good time watching it.
I guess if I was to throw my hat in on speculation, I think the best children's movies are good family movies and have something to offer everyone. I didn't think this one really looked like it had those elements to keep adults and older teens involved as well as the younger set. We had a family gathering some time back and one way or another Spider-Man Across the Spider-Verse was shown and we had people from 8-75 all having a good time watching it.
There were parents (and now some grandparents) who were young across the production run of WB's so-called "Timmverse" cartoons running from 1992 to 2006, with each of the shows being pretty serious, or sometimes downright grim. If they grew up on those series, they would not see any issue with their kids watching the adult-themed DC movies. Further, kids of the past couple of generations are not easy to psychologically categorize as (for one example) children of the 1950s, where many hard lines were drawn about what was made for kids and adults. I have relatives who watched The New Batman Adventures and Justice League / Justice League Unlimited, and it was not leap for some of them to migrate to the DCEU in recent years. They were already primed to see superheroes as serious business.