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sean10mm posted:This movie makes 20% more money with a different title than Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) Apparently WB agrees. Regal and AMC have already updated showings with the new name. The original title rules. loving DC is scared of its own shadow.
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Feb 11, 2020 00:39
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I honestly feel the main problem is that it’s perceived as a follow up to Suicide Squad which was a badly received film that a lot of people saw. I’ve seen a lot of “hey this was better than I expected.”
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Feb 11, 2020 02:33
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It's mainly that the film was promoted for like 2 weeks before it came out.
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Feb 11, 2020 02:52
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:It's mainly that the film was promoted for like 2 weeks before it came out. yeah, i actually had no idea when this was coming out. For all Suicide Skwad's faults, its marketing campaign was expertly constructed.
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Feb 11, 2020 04:02
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I saw the trailer before Joker six months ago and I don't think there was a worse venue to try and introduce it to people in.
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Feb 11, 2020 09:53
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Snowman_McK posted:yeah, i actually had no idea when this was coming out. Yeah. Noticed it when searching for a different showtime and saw that Glen Weldon gave it a positive review, so we went not expecting much and were very pleasantly surprised.
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Feb 11, 2020 16:33
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:It's mainly that the film was promoted for like 2 weeks before it came out. Yeah that's kind of important. And what commercials there are seem weirdly rushed and disjointed, like they're 1 year out teasers instead of OH poo poo IT'S OUT NEXT WEEK! Marvel makes a mostly homogeneous product that they understand very well and know exactly how to pitch to a mass audience. WB has no concept of what their DC movies even are, or who would like to watch them, never mind how to market them to these things called hu-mans that have all the money they want. It's such an odd kind of incompetence.
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Feb 11, 2020 16:49
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If I were a bit more cynical I’d say they were sabotaging the marketing for the movie so it could fail and they’d have something to point to when people ask for more female-led action movies. But that is to give them too much credit. WB and DC are just incompetent at this point.
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Feb 11, 2020 16:53
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sean10mm posted:Yeah that's kind of important. And what commercials there are seem weirdly rushed and disjointed, like they're 1 year out teasers instead of OH poo poo IT'S OUT NEXT WEEK! Yep, and keep in mind, it, Joker and Suicide Squad 2 were almost immediately greenlit three years after Suicide Squad, which was a big hit. (Technically there were two Joker movies greenlit, supposedly, lol.)
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Feb 11, 2020 17:12
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I'm not sure about this (and really, I don't think anyone at WB would be either if you asked) but I think the second Joker flick got stalled and kind of evolved into the Harley Quinn project.
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Feb 11, 2020 18:51
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Nah, pretty much as soon as Suicide Squad left theaters, the Harley Quinn spinoff already had a working title: Gotham City Sirens.
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Feb 11, 2020 19:16
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Did anyone else see IT Chapter Two in theaters, because there was a deliberate swerve of a teaser made for that where IT's balloons cover the screen and Harley pops one with her hammer and says something sassy about clowns.
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Feb 11, 2020 19:53
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:Nah, pretty much as soon as Suicide Squad left theaters, the Harley Quinn spinoff already had a working title: Gotham City Sirens. I don't remember that at all but I remember the other Joker movie being turned into a Joker and Harley concept for a while... uh oh, I think I'm getting Berenstein Bear'd
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Feb 11, 2020 20:27
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McSpanky posted:I don't remember that at all but I remember the other Joker movie being turned into a Joker and Harley concept for a while... uh oh, I think I'm getting Berenstein Bear'd https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/gotham-city-sirens-movie-david-ayer-margot-robbie-reteam-all-female-dc-villains-project- It may have actually still been in theaters at that point.
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Feb 11, 2020 20:30
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At one point, Joker, The Joker & Harley Quinn, Gotham City Sirens and Suicide Squad 2 were all in development.
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Feb 11, 2020 21:06
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not trolled not crying posted:You could really tell Stahelski and his guys were a part of this, to a fault really. I watched the Wick 1 and 2 action scenes after the movie to compare, and if that's your complaint in this movie, then it should be leveled against Keanu, too. There's way more gunplay in those, but it's the same style. I actually have no idea what your critique is here, but the choreography in all of these is very deliberate, there's pauses, holds, breaths in the action, and to focus on the stuntwork. Wick 1 has way more frenetic editing where there's shots that cut between different angles to show the next surprise bad guy and to make up for the multiple takes, but 2 and Birds have much more tableau pieces (or the crazy booby trap fight where there's 4 different fights going on), especially with the hand-to-hand. 'They were slower and didn't shoot enough people' is kind of missing the point, which is these types of action scenes are much more dancelike and deliberate to actually allow the actors to be involved than say, something like in Bond or a martial arts film where the stuntwork is cut far out or behind the back more often. They've learned a few things since the Buffy days. And it's miles better than most Marvel sequences.
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Feb 11, 2020 22:01
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Space Fish posted:Did anyone else see IT Chapter Two in theaters, because there was a deliberate swerve of a teaser made for that where IT's balloons cover the screen and Harley pops one with her hammer and says something sassy about clowns. I remember that indeed, I thought it was pretty clever to be honest
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Feb 11, 2020 22:12
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Timby posted:At one point, Joker, The Joker & Harley Quinn, Gotham City Sirens and Suicide Squad 2 were all in development. Yep. Funnily enough, Sony is on movie 2 of their Sinister Six films.
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Feb 11, 2020 22:37
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The movie's take on Black Mask seems a little interesting- he clearly grew up in privilege and has something of a Patrick Bateman deal going on, but he's specifically a failson, with that very special brand of burning rage that comes from slightly frustrated privilege but not actually having had to really struggle at any point in his life. Even the Penguin's from a rich family that lost their fortune and aspires to at least act like a classy gentleman.
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Feb 12, 2020 05:08
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sean10mm posted:WB has no concept of what their DC movies even are, or who would like to watch them, never mind how to market them to these things called hu-mans that have all the money they want. It's such an odd kind of incompetence. Just some insight as someone who used to work there: for a long time, WB made more films a year than any other major studio. DC is a big property, especially after The Dark Knight, but it was just one house in a very big slate that included things like Harry Potter. Disney, on the other hand, released maybe 3 films a year. When they acquired Marvel, they started basing their entire slate around comic book films and animation properties. It was a Very High Priority. Now, they obviously have stuff like Lucasfilm and FOX to add to that, but at least until 2022 or so, their slate is still mostly just a few specific IPs. Disney's skyrocketed from having that kind of laser focus and WB no longer has a lot of its long-term franchise properties like HP to fall back on, so they're playing catch-up on something that used to be a middling property for them and is now their biggest. It doesn't help that they are still, by and large, a television studio and have relied on backends from stuff like Friends to subsidize films that did poorly. Without a cluster of other major IPs to buffer DC's losses like they used to, their marketing team was scrambling to make movies via committee, which they've only recently realized was a very bad idea. It doesn't help that, right when WB knew they were going to be losing a ton of franchises, they decided to let go of Alan Horn, who then moved on to become Disney's CCO. Dude knows his films and absolutely guided WB through a ton of success almost single-handedly. I have no idea what was going through Time-Warner's head when they did that, but it's not a coincidence at all that Disney got bigger under his command while WB is still trying to reconfigure its branding. Axel Serenity fucked around with this message at 08:34 on Feb 12, 2020 |
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Feb 12, 2020 08:25
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Axel Serenity posted:Just some insight Really fascinating stuff, thanks for sharing. What does making movies via committee mean here?
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Feb 12, 2020 20:43
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PhysicsFrenzy posted:Really fascinating stuff, thanks for sharing. What does making movies via committee mean here? Basically, the producers and studio execs letting the marketing team dictate creative decisions based on audience research. Sometimes you need research because movies cost a shitload of money, but it can also hamper a film when you have a circle of executives saying "Well, audiences responded well to this so we need you to put more of it in" for every aspect of a movie. The irony is that Disney is actually much, much worse about letting the market dictate how they create content, but they also are experts at matching properties with creative teams that work within that system really well. They know how to give audiences exactly what they want (which has its own share of problems creatively but, well, they made mountains of cash with it). WB has traditionally been a very director-focused studio; they let directors really play within their own vision. If they like someone, they want to keep them under their wing for a multi-film production deal, so they usually give directors a lot of freedom so they'll want to work with the studio. That backfires, though, if the director match-up doesn't work well within a target market, which is what happened with Zack Snyder. I, personally, like Snyder but he's very polarizing. Letting him have free reign over major DC stuff really set the course for how things were going to go after that, and it got worse as the studio execs started trying to reign him in with directives from the marketing team since his style really, really doesn't play well with being told what and what not to put into a movie. David Ayer is pretty similar in that way, and Suicide Squad was basically the summation of WB saying "Disney does this so we need to make a checklist of what made GotG successful and go down the list." But Ayer's style doesn't really match up well with punk rock hits and comedic anti-heroes well at all. He makes pretty great cop dramas like "End Of Watch," but SS was a very, very different movie from what Ayer specializes in, and they should have changed out directors for someone with more experience in comedic timing and balance. I don't think it's coincidence that DC films have gotten slowly better as more directors are allowed input beyond Snyder and WB has managed to find a decent balance between "audiences want this" and "We hired this director for a reason so let them do their thing." I don't think there are really many "bad" directors at the professional level, but there are bad studio executives who don't know how to match a property/logistics with a director's individual style. Alan Horn was fantastic at it (because he founded Castle Rock Entertainment). Kevin Tsujihara was awful at it (because he was an accountant with no experience running a production company). Axel Serenity fucked around with this message at 22:43 on Feb 12, 2020 |
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Feb 12, 2020 22:25
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It's such a painfully obvious lesson, you can't have it both ways. Either you're gonna let your director do her own thing and live or die on that, or you're gonna be in total control of whatever project they're working on. You're not gonna go in there and fix it later based on changing tastes or whatever.
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Feb 12, 2020 22:42
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Yeah, you really have to match directors up with an IP from the get-go, not three films in. Some directors are a lot more open to working within a market, or their styles already fit a property extremely well. It's about finding that right match. Patty Jenkins is really doing great, I think. I loved BoP and thought Cathy Yan did a wonderful job on a small budget. WB does need to work on teaming up good screenwriters though, which is another part of the battle. There are a lot of moving parts. Personally, I wanna see a Guy Ritchie "Constantine."
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Feb 12, 2020 22:51
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LORD OF BOOTY posted:I really hope this is the movie that Mary Elizabeth Winstead finally kinda blows up from, because god drat, she owned in this. I mean she's been getting steady work for like the last 10 years. She seems to be doing OK.
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Feb 13, 2020 04:23
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Prince Myshkin posted:I mean she's been getting steady work for like the last 10 years. She seems to be doing OK. Someone else put it pretty well: she's been getting consistent roles, but they're not really good roles and they're not really in good movies.
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Feb 13, 2020 05:30
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:It's such a painfully obvious lesson, you can't have it both ways. Either you're gonna let your director do her own thing and live or die on that, or you're gonna be in total control of whatever project they're working on. You're not gonna go in there and fix it later based on changing tastes or whatever. Also, managing expectations. MoS and BvS were enormous financial successes by any reasonable metric, but WB set themselves the plainly unreasonable metric of an Avengers-level megaball jackpot right out of the gate. That Snyder  failed to deliver on this after a second chance, plus the relentless braying of a terminally online fandom on social media and his daughter's tragic suicide, gave them the excuses they needed to switch horses mid-stream, and we all know how that turned out.
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Feb 13, 2020 06:01
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Switching to Joss Whedon really was a hilariously poor decision for so many reasons.
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Feb 13, 2020 07:27
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Switching to Joss Whedon really was a hilariously poor decision for so many reasons. Honestly I think if they gave Whedon the job from the get-go it would have "worked" in the sense of making a lot of money and winning over people on Twitter or whatever who like Marvel and hate Snyder. It would have been a bad movie that CD would have hated but that goes without saying. Replacing Snyder mid-movie with Whedon, and having him do a rush job to make a completely different movie out of it, was just ridiculously dumb and resulted in a product that basically alienates all humans.
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Feb 13, 2020 17:12
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They should have replaced Whedon with Snyder when filming Avengers
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Feb 13, 2020 20:28
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McSpanky posted:Also, managing expectations. MoS and BvS were enormous financial successes by any reasonable metric, but WB set themselves the plainly unreasonable metric of an Avengers-level megaball jackpot right out of the gate. That Snyder Yep, and obviously Disney isn't immune, as they can't manage one foot outside of their wheelhouse without completely loving it up - whatever else you think, people are still somewhat interested in Last Jedi but have completely forgotten Revenge of the Skywalker or whatever even came out, same as Justice League.
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Feb 13, 2020 20:35
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Always lol at executives deciding that a film making a mere $875 million instead of a billion meant they should torch all good will with their fan base thus far and then they wound up with three out of four of the next movies being flops.
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Feb 13, 2020 20:52
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:Yep, and obviously Disney isn't immune, as they can't manage one foot outside of their wheelhouse without completely loving it up - whatever else you think, people are still somewhat interested in Last Jedi but have completely forgotten Revenge of the Skywalker or whatever even came out, same as Justice League. Disney basically did the same thing to Star Wars that WB did with BvS/JL, except they did it sooner so it wasn't quite the same magnitude of disaster because at least the panic attack impulse decisions were implemented BETWEEN movies instead of during shooting. The key to the MCU's longevity is that while they may not understand art, they loving understand project management. I bet their Gantt charts are on point, and everybody has clear marching orders for how to make bank and not poo poo things up for the writer & director of the NEXT film in the pipeline trying to hit THEIR marks. (This was hilariously untrue in the very beginning with Iron Man, though!) There is no half-MCUing it. Either you build a proper assembly line for this poo poo, or you just let directors make real movies and accept that it's going to be "messy" and not all of it will build to a giga-blockbuster finale in a straight line. WB (and Disney with SW) tried to split the difference and poo poo themselves in the process.
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Feb 13, 2020 21:12
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Pirate Jet posted:Always lol at executives deciding that a film making a mere $875 million instead of a billion meant they should torch all good will with their fan base thus far and then they wound up with three out of four of the next movies being flops. Amazing Spiderman 2 is another example of this. How on earth could you consider a movie that made 750 million dollars a flop. sean10mm posted:The key to the MCU's longevity is that while they may not understand art, they loving understand project management. I bet their Gantt charts are on point, and everybody has clear marching orders for how to make bank and not poo poo things up for the writer & director of the NEXT film in the pipeline trying to hit THEIR marks. There was that one going back to like 2012 where they had Marvel movies planned out to 2028(!) and they're right on schedule. If you put stuff out on time with the proper timing, it literally doesn't matter what you make:  Maybe a quarter of these widget rear end movies are even "good" and that obviously doesn't bother anyone.
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Feb 13, 2020 22:44
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sean10mm posted:Honestly I think if they gave Whedon the job from the get-go it would have "worked" in the sense of making a lot of money and winning over people on Twitter or whatever who like Marvel and hate Snyder. It would have been a bad movie that CD would have hated but that goes without saying. I mean it was more almost exactly around the time that Whedon got MeToo'd and all his geek cred immediately evaporated.
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Feb 14, 2020 06:25
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i never learned why the Avengers A has an arrow pointing right on it
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Feb 14, 2020 10:45
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Oh, Inhumans, what a laughing stock. Demoted from a movie only Ike wanted to a TV show everybody mocked. Everything else on the schedule came to pass eventually. I usually don't take any credence with these plans, having lurked on the Star Citizen which is hilariously 300 million in the hole after 8 years and with only a Gary Oldman gif to show for it.
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Feb 14, 2020 13:26
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I feel like there's too much to catch up on with Star Citizen drama so I don't bother.
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Feb 14, 2020 18:05
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It's best absorbed in factoids. Chris Roberts from all indications hasn't actually played a video game in possibly decades.
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Feb 14, 2020 18:23
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Ghost Leviathan posted:It's best absorbed in factoids. Chris Roberts from all indications hasn't actually played a video game in possibly decades. Chris Roberts wasn't even able to deliver the first Wing Commander, because he's a legendarily terrible project manager and doesn't understand basic coding. With WC1, Steve Beeman and Warren Spector had to bail him out to deliver an actual finished product. He had essentially zero involvement in WC2, which was all run by Steve Beeman. His brother, Erin, had to bail him out on both Privateer and Strike Commander. And by WC3, he had decided that he wanted to make movies, not games, so he had minimal involvement in the actual gameplay of that and WC4. And then there's the whole thing about when he wanted to sell Digital Anvil to Microsoft (because they'd run out of money and couldn't finish Freelancer), Microsoft's condition was that he step away from the company entirely.
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Feb 14, 2020 18:28
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