Monday Box Office Post Mortem: Snow Blight
Not a great opening weekend for TMNT and The Last Voyage of the Demeter.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem has had a very bad drop on its second weekend. It is now standing at a gross of $70 million against a budget of $75 million, it’s going to leg out before it turns a profit.
And it’s not going to matter in the least because this thing was all about Paramount maintaining a license. They have a real TMNT that is hung up in development hell, it’s been going on so long that paramount suddenly discovered they had to get this steaming mound of movie grunted out before they lost the license. If it doesn’t make reach $150 million in the theaters they are just fine with that. Although it probably will break even when Blu-ray, PVOD, and Netflix sales are totaled up.
They couldn’t care less.
The Last Voyage of the Demeter on the other hand is going to hurt. Dream Works is going to be seriously gouged by this one. At $45 million it’s survivable but painful.
What is really killing it is the complete loss of the foreign box office. Dream Works was partnered with a film company called E-1. E-1 was the company that all of the FBO distribution rights for Last Voyage were contracted through. At the last minute, E-1 got bought up by Lion’s Gate which shredded all of Dream Works FBO contracts through the now defunct E-1.
While I’m on the record as being very doubtful about this movie, I’m hearing from people whose opinions I trust that Last Voyage isn’t Woke, in fact, it’s a throwback to the old Hammer horror films and as my loyal Darklings know, The Dark Herald do love him some Hammer films. I may have to steal time for this one before the Demeter suffers the now inevitable fate of her namesake.
I may have to go see this one if possible.
In other news, Rachel Zegler will not keep her mouth shut.
This silly bitch is going to sink Snow White and Seven Whathefucks before it gets anywhere near its launch date. Every time she opens her mouth she says something that makes everyone hate her. I looked over her bio and she was raised in a catholic boarding school and went to an all girl’s catholic high school.
Brie Larson has the excuse of having been homeschooled with the intent of making her a superstar so her personality traits are kind of sad when you think about the isolated childhood she had. Bree simply never got a chance to learn how to be a human, she was only ever been taught how to pretend to be one.
Rachel Zegler on the other hand comes across as a spoiled and entitled brat because that’s exactly what she is.
When she was sixteen Spielberg sent out an open casting call for Maria in his version of West Side Story. She sent in a couple of videos with her singing Tonight and Something Else. Spielberg picked her over 30,000 other candidates and it obviously went to her head. She started at the very top at sixteen, she’s a real-life Sharpay Evans who actually landed a big role. Her only other credit at the moment is Shazam Fury of the Gods but she has a bunch of other A- roles in post-production.
For those of you who are wondering, why in hell does Disney keep churning out these terrible live-action remakes? Well, my Darklings it comes down to Disney’s ironclad, inbred corporate culture.
There are certain belief systems at Disney that must be followed as if they are liturgical doctrines. Chief among these convictions is that the Vault is the company’s bread and butter. Granted, for a long time it was. This was back when you could rerelease a movie every seven years and it would still make money, which they did. The first time I ever saw Sleeping Beauty it was in a theater. It was trusted reliable family entertainment. A good movie that the kids had never seen before and a chance for parents to relax and enjoy a bit of nostalgia.
Disney viewed the coming of the VCR as a horror beyond imagining, they were convinced it would kill the theatrical rerelease model. Which it did, but it didn’t actually kill the Vault, it transformed it. Eisner’s predecessor, Ron Miller hated video tape but Eisner was keenly aware of something the previous regime wasn’t. Videotape wears out.
Thus was born the Disney Treasures from the Vault… Yours to Own (FOR A LIMITED TIME ONLY) campaign. It was yet another license to print money. Most video tapes that people bought were watched once or twice a year, so they could last for decades. But kids don’t watch movies like that, they will keep watching until the tape is projecting incomprehensible gibberish onto the TV. Disney got very good at predicting just about when it was time for a treasure to reemerge from the Vault, (assuming you didn’t want Song of the South). Better still they could charge a premium that other companies couldn’t because it was trusted family entertainment.
Far from rejecting DVDs Disney feverishly embraced them. DVDs were the primary market, theatrical releases were a secondary stream of income. They were nearly viewed as a marketing expense to support the all-important DVD launch.
And in 2008 it all came crashing down. Back to the drawing board, the Vault is Disney’s unquestioned and unquestionable cash cow, we just have to figure out how to milk it a new way.
The live-action remakes were in truth that new way to do it. The first one, Cinderella was actually a decent movie, Ken Branaugh delivered. Beauty and the Beast wasn’t anywhere near as good but somebody had had the brilliant idea of casting Emma Watson when the pining for more Harry Potter was at its keenest. Honestly, none of them have been very good since Cinderella but that didn’t stop them from raking in an average of a billion dollars or so each.
And then came Mulan. The reek of Baizou pandering could be smelled all the way from Beijing, truthfully the Han loved Mulan. The original Mulan, not this weird Hong Kong light knock-off of a Chinese movie with a highly objectionable girl-boss masquerading as their beloved Fa Mulan. Each of the live-action remakes since then has bombed.
The real disaster for the Vault was Disney Plus. At first, the streaming service worked as advertised, Disney dominated in streaming minutes month after month. And then the unthinkable happened, kids got bored with Disney.
Disney’s plan to use live-action movies as a way to keep the cash cow giving good milk has gone sour.
Especially as Disney has been unable to make anything that isn’t Woke for the past few years, they simply weren’t allowed to do it. Which is how Snow White and the Seven Dwarves turned into Snow Bronze and the Seven Godonlyknowswhat.
This film is already doomed to fail but Rachel Zegler makes it more of a certainty every time she opens her mouth.
Zegler shared her comments with Extra TV when she was asked, “I know you told me before that your version of Snow White is different and its more of a 2022 version of Snow White. What did you mean by that?”
Zegler responded, “The original cartoon came out in 1937 and very evidently so. There’s a big focus on her love story with a guy who literally stalks her. Weird. Weird.”
“So we didn’t do that this time.”
When asked if the prince would even be in the film, Zegler answered, “We have a different approach to what I’m sure a lot of people will assume is a love story just because like we cast a guy in the movie, Andrew Burnap, great dude.”
She continued, “It’s one of those things that I think everyone’s going to have their assumptions about what it’s actually going to be, but it’s really not about the love story at all, which is really, really wonderful. And whether or not she finds love along the way is anybody’s guess until 2024. All of Andrew’s scenes could get. Who knows? It’s Hollywood, baby!”
Zegler then revealed what the film is really about, “It’s an inner journey that she goes on to find her true self. And she meets a lot of people along the way that make the journey really incredible.”
Snow White and the Seven Dwarves is quite literally the movie that built Disney. It was the first animated film of all time and Walt bet the company on it. And Year Zero Disney’s only interest in this film is; how do we make this thing relevant to modern audiences? Modern audiences, the ones that apparently don’t exist unless you are Barbie and Mario.
The rumor is that there is now a major argument going on in the C-Suite at Burbank. Half the executives want to use Force Mejeur brought on by the strike to kill Snow White, and the other half are determined to fight to the death to save the Woke.
Disney is no longer capable of full filling its primary functions as a company.
