ST The Last Jedi Box Office Discussion (see warning on page 307 before posting)

Coco is an animated movie, those pretty much always have great multipliers, that has little to do with word of mouth. Not to mention that using multipliers on a movie that started on a Wednesday is all sorts of wrong anyway.

Despicable Me 3 had a multiplier of 3.66, The Boss Bay one of 3.5, The Emoji Movie 3.5, Ferdinand 6.11 and rising, even the Smurfs managed a 3 multiplier. The only bigger animation release that kind of failed at that was Cars 3 with one of 2.88.
The year before Finding Dory was at 3.6, Secret Life of Pets 3.53, Zootopia 4.55, Kung Fu Panda 3 3.5, Pete's Dragon 3.53.

While Coco reaches a multiplier of 4 if you ignore its start-date, that is something you cannot do. Multipliers only work when movies start on a Friday. Which isn't the case for Coco, Sing or Moana.

Beyond that, the higher the opening, the smaller your chances of a high multiplier. Yes, Wonder Woman got an extremely good multiplier of 4. That is rather rare. It also wouldn't have gotten anywhere near such a multiplier if it had a really huge opening. Star Wars is the height of everyone rushing out to see it, hence the huge openings. With those kind of openins it is virtually impossible to reach the multiplier of a movie like Wonder Woman, as evidenced by the fact that no huge opener has that kind of multiplier. TFA is already the closest, with a multiplier of 3.78. Most comic book movies fail to get anywhere near 3.Even The Avengers barely made it past that mark. With that kind of opening, the multiplier has little to do with whether the movie was received well or not. You just punish movies for creating huge interest right away.

And no, the audience numbers at RT still are, and always will be, completely meaningless. As evidenced by the fact that Black Panther is currently burdened with lots of fake votes to push down the rating before it even is released. And not just at RT either.

 

The point is that a highly anticipated sequel will be frontloaded. Multipliers signify in part the level of anticipation for a film.

 

Those were not my number's but Mendelssohn over at Forbes

In industry parlance, the easiest way to judge a film’s word-of-mouth is by its “multiplier,” an essential measurement of how well a release holds after its opening weekend
https://www.theatlantic.com/enterta...shing-success-of-the-greatest-showman/551081/

The point of my post was, that you can accurately mathematically measure WOM by the
multiplier

 

But that's just it, you can't!

Multipliers don't tell you anything, unless you actually know how they came to exist. Movies aimed at kids have a far better multipliers than regular movies, and it has nothing to do with word of mouth. Huge openers and more generally movies with a pre-build fanbase have lower multipliers because people rush out to see them. The higher the opening, the harder it is to get a great multiplier. As listed above, Ferdinand had by far the biggest multiplier of all animated movies of 2017, and that most definately didn't happen because it was by far the best animated movie, it happened because it had a tiny opening followed by a holiday boost. And then you get to the topic of multipliers being entirely useless when applied to anything but a Friday start.

Stating that multipliers are an indicator for WOM is nothing but a gross simplification that ignores how the entire business works.

Again, look at The Avengers and Wonder Woman. The multiplier would imply that WW had much better WOM, but that isn't the case at all. TA merely suffers by far more people rushing out on opening weekend to see the movie. All you can take from this, is that WW had really good word of mouth, not that it had better word of mouth than The Avengers, because those two movies were starting under completely different circumstances.

Or to put it another way: Wonder Woman made ~310m after the opening weekend, The Avengers about 415m. Multipliers are nice and all, but they are useless without context.

 

"how well a release holds after its opening weekend"

 

But do you get the point? The multiplier is a measure of how frontloaded a film's gross is, but the frontloading could be for any number of reasons, including (but not at all limited to) poor word of mouth. Different movies are going to have different patterns to their runs.

 

Which means absolutely nothing at all. Way to ignore the entire argument because you have nothing to counter it with.

Again, The Avengers made ~415m after the opening weekend, Wonder Woman only ~310m. "Holding better" is still meaningless when you are making less. Of course it is easier to drop less when you are coming from lower numbes. Not only that, but you have also burned through way less possible attendance.

You are punishing movies for creating a huge interest right away. Not only is it absurd to ignore that the number of people who see it right away might have loved the movie, but it is also weird to act as if the multiplier itself somehow beats out the actual attendance / money made.
TA made 200m on OW and followed that up with over 400m after the OW, Wonder Woman opened with 100m and made over 300m after the OW. So not only did TA have a far bigger audience right away, it also had a far bigger audience the rest of the way. Clearly if WW had the better WOM, it should have made more money than TA at some point during the important stages of the run, and not just at the back end when the movies were all but out of theaters.

And that, once again, is the problem when people blindly take up something without looking at the context. Multipliers are meaningless if they aren't applied correctly. Suggesting that they are a definitive answer to the WOM-question is flat out wrong. There is a clear link between the size of the OW and the eventual multiplier. If the multiplier was a clear indication for WOM, then huge openers would always have bad to average WOM while small openers would have good to great WOM. That obviously makes no sense. A movie with a modest opening, heck, even a movie with a pretty big opening, tends to actract a lower attendance after the OW than a big opener, even if it has a big multiplier.

The muiltiplier can be used well for indivudual movies. You can look at Wonder Woman, Jumanji or The Greatest Showman and conclude that they held extremely well. But that is the extent of it. You can't compare the multipliers of small opener with those of big openers, much less assume that a relatively "better" hold is the same as an absolute better hold, or that the smaller opener had better WOM just because it was more backloaded than a movie that opened with huge hype. What you can do, is compare movies like The Avengers and Age of Ultron. Though even in that case it wouldn't be 100% clear whether the difference in multipliers comes from WOM or possible hype for TA that lured audiences that wouldn't return for a sequel. In this particular case it is mostly the former, but it doesn't really have to be that way.

 

It looks like if Jumanji had done well in China, it would have had a shot at 1 billion.

 

No @Jedha doesn't get the point because they've been pushing the negativity on TLJ from day one, by posting as many negative news stories, negative spins on the figures and wannabe celeb youtube blog links as they can possibly find. All thrown in here with very little of their own personal opinions btw. So if a low multilpier can be manipulated to try and fit an obvious agenda ...

 

A friend told me that he saw TLJ in China. Can anyone confirm that whenever a new character appeared on screen, they even inserted text explanations about the character?

 

Everyone should watch Jenny Nicholson's review of TGS.

Also, why are we talking about multipliers again?? I showed that TLJ objectively has above average legs for a huge opener like 100+ pages ago. This talking point is bunk.

 

Yeah, and the movie has yet to open in Japan. I think 1b WW is now a possibility for Jumanji, which is insane.

Re: Multipliers, frontloading, user scores and WOM

Sequels do tend to be more frontloaded, especially lately, where popular big budget movies have become increasingly frontloaded. Movie companies like Disney have realized that pushing for bigger number of screenings in the first weeks gets them bigger profits they can take from the theater runners, than if the movie plays in smaller number of screens but stays in the theater for a long time. So whether TLJ had great legs or not is not really a concern for Disney, as they certainly reaped huge profits from the first week runs anyway. It will only be a concern if there is significant loss of audience for IX, but then again, SW fans have noticeable hard time of quitting even when they don't like what they see (I mean, it's not like it affected much the prequels anyway).

And naturally, this frontloading affects old-school measurements like WOM and multipliers.

User scores can be pretty unreliable too, though using Black Panthers' current IMDB score is not a good example. I mean, Batman vs Superman had a crazy amount of 10/10 ratings from like 15,000 users before the movie opened to the public, and as we can see, it had little to no effect in the final score. There is also the weighted vs arithmetic mean in IMDB to take into account, which I have no idea how it works because the site refuses to tell us, and that can influence perceptions. For instance, Black Panther actually has an arithmetic mean of 7.2, but for some reason the score was weighted down to 6.6.

Regarding WOM, the only way you can measure the WOM of big-budget frontloaded movies now is by tracking what people are saying about the movie for a period of time since its premiere and compile loads amount of data. Synthesio did that for TLJ and CNET published the results. The results: it’s divisive, skewing more positive than negative. But we already knew that.

 

Interestingly the average take per theatre dropped by only 4.9% over the previous weekend. So the drop has far more to do with the decline in theatres (43% less theatres playing it than last weekend).

I have to think Disney’s lower profit margin demands for theatre owners has lead some to replace it with newer content from studios who didn’t squeeze them as badly on the take as Disney does now. Disney asks for a higher % of the profits (among other terms) than other studios do from the cinemas. It’s awesome for Disney who earn far more of the early returns on their films than other studios do so Magnar’s posts about when certain films earned 90% of their total value come into play on that end too (Although some of them are also Disney owned as well).

EDIT: And people tend to underestimate action comedies starring some of the biggest family comedians in any one era a lot. The Last Jedi just passed the biggest box office shocker of all. The film that established the formula for action comedy in the first place for the modern era. I’m referring of course to Eddie Murphy’s smash hit Beverley Hills Cop which ushered in who knows how many buddy cop clones for decades (some of whom also became hugely successful). TLJ just passed it this weekend on adjusted for inflation all time and is closing in on Cleopatra next. These films were huge for their times. Just like TLJ is.

I suspect Jumanji is a little bit like Ghostbusters or a better version of Night at the Museum. The Rock is a mega star. Kevin Hart is this era’s Eddie Murphy it seems and brings out a family audience that a guy like Jack Black missed entirely with his hipster School of Rock. Even though it’s PG-13 I suspect families are taking younger kids to it. Like they do Jurassic movies. TLJ is also PG-13 but feels older to some parents on word of mouth and “darker.”

 

To be fair, I don't think Japan is a big enough market for that.

 

No, it has to have a good boost from China first. But let’s say if it ends in $950m after China, and if Japan can bring in an additional $50m or so, then it can reach $1b.
I don't know, right now it's impossible to come up with predictions, just wild guesses. This movie is performing way outside of the norm.

 

Jumanji run in china is over already, it opened one week after TLJ
Jumanji just beat spiderman worldwide and in the top 5 worlwide of 2017 there is no superheroes movie, the first time since 2011

 

^ Really? I thought it was still in the theaters there. My bad.
In that case it's now a wild shot to get to $1b.

 

I can confirm this is true. They described Rey as an orphan.

 

Yep. They had text explanations for Leia, Snoke, Kylo, Rey, and Luke I believe. I think that's it though.

 

Even if for some reason, you want to try to ignore the percentage drops. Look at what Jumanji has been making in total dollars since the New Year and what Last Jedi has been making. One can easily see that Jumanji has the better word of mouth.

 

But TLJ's legs were still decent enough.

For the record, what were TLJ's legs compared to Civil War?

 

Pretend for 6 weeks every single showing of TLJ was sold out. How many Star Wars fans remain after they've all went out to see it in record early showings? The standard group of 30-35% of people who saw the first film in each saga out of curiousity, and who wondered if SW was for them or not, who then decided it wasn't after seeing ANH or TPM or TFA. It's that group of the general audience that's always boosted the first offerings (ever) or the first in 10-15 years AND this new group of people who made up their minds to avoid it due to issues related to Luke that they heard about in advance and don't accept, or for political reasons associated with Hamill himself and his tweets, or Johnson himself and his tweets, or the social messaging in the film, and all of the R-Wing websites who explored that messaging to all of those readers who, as younger people, may have spent money on SW but who've become more politically motivated and chose to boycott, or review bomb a couple websites, and possibly seek out the pirated stuff including that now infamous 46 minute cut of only men in the film.

Based on the numbers, and the drops not being massively different than the drops from SW to TESB or TPM to AOTC, it seems like this group of boycotters (for Luke or political reasons or both) probably contributed to a 1-4% drop at most over the norm with their own boycott efforts or their review bombing efforts and given that Lucasfilm likely knows the history of middle film drops even more than all of us, and also knew that they painted a target on their backs with RW media and RW groups and men's rights groups... and given the hype surrounding the Black Panther review bombing efforts... I have to think that Lucasfilm's executives will probably be willing to sacrifice that 1-4% loss impacted by those people and instead see the value of the critical acclaim, and the general audience perspective as better indicated by IMDB, and the 1.32 billion dollar box office haul as a sign that it's not worth sacrificing their integrity or storytelling choices they feel are best long-term for Star Wars just to better appeal to that 1-4% group that are the angriest or who boycotted that helped drop TLJ slightly below the drops of AOTC and TESB. If the drops had been incredible beyond the norm it's possible they might have rethought things even in spite of the tremendous critical acclaim but with critical acclaim, 1.32 billion dollars (including a ton of that up front where they earned higher profit margins) and a pretty strong general audience figure... I have to think they're okay losing the group that was the most angered and putting forth the petitions and the 46 minute cuts and the like.

 

Clearly that was what my initial post was about but somehow that got distorted. In other words how does WOM affect a movies box office for better or worse? For TGS WOM has been essential to going from 8% it's opening week to 15% it's second week. Jumanji also, when I came out of the theater for TGS yesterday I overheard a conversation between two guys that said Jumanji was one of the funniest comedies he had seen in a long time. (anecdotal evidence) yes but that is how WOM works the execs know this despite those who say it has no affect whatsoever.

As far as TLJ's multiplier being in line with AOTC, ESB, R1 etc... this is not necessarily good. Why?

 

actual for TLJ 1.39 million maybe week days will be bigger than RO
I didn't see any international update

 

I have no idea really what you are trying to prove. Or what is your point here. Movies does not act like exact science. Because TLJ was divisive amongst fans - does not mean it had bad WOM. Could the soft collapse the movie had in January have other reasons behind it? Check your ability to do some research first. Jumanji had the 157 biggest OW or so ever and TGS probably is at number 1250 or so. But they were released with the intention of pretty cynical marketing thoughts ( yes, there are always a goofy comedy or an feel good animated film + the regular song and dance / musical movie released over Christmas). Actually TGS had terrible WOM from early on. Somewhat, the movie found an audience over time. Some insiders say its the catchy songs ( well selling soundtrack). Its probably not the pretty awful reviews. Jumanji, as we now know, did fare better in many ways.

Either way, the time where movies really had good long legs are long gone. Jumanji is not even what they used to call a sleeper hit, as it did not exactly came out from nowhere. It was planned as movie that could potentially target an audience looking for something more lighter and less existential than TLJ is.

Still, its your anecdote....but i prefer Trading Places ( which i watched yesterday on telly) as a comedy, rather than Jumanji, which i just found silly and a bit charmless. Thats my own anecdote though...