THB #520 (Formerly Known As #420): Bits & Pieces
I kinda feel wrong publishing Newsletter #420 3 days before 4/20… but I’m not a pot guy. I am a little in love with a new Hulu reality show called High Hopes, that is coming out soon and for which I might be speaking to some “cast members.” But what makes the show so fun to watch is that it’s not really about pot, it’s about aspiration… amongst people who happen to smoke and sell a lot of pot.
Item One - I wanted to follow up on the Netflix column with a detail that I feel I left out when writing about the broader picture… if Netflix is changing its internal model to one that rewards the success (or the not-success) of the programming it makes and is tightening the spending, as it seems to be doing… what projects will come to Netflix? The streamer, it would seem, would go from near the front of the line for every deal to the middle or the back of the middle.
Why?
Because if Netflix is competing on an even field - meaning, roughly the same budgets with roughly the same opportunity to make more money in success - the willingness/unwillingness of quality filmmakers to miss out on the theatrical opportunity becomes that much more significant. Also, as has already been the case when the streamer was perceived as overpaying, the projects that ended up there were usually ones that could/would not be funded by Legacy companies.
So the primary benefit to taking what you see as a theatrical movie to Netflix will be that you have an instant audience that is bigger than you will ever see in theatrical and perhaps, through theatrical and all the other windows that Netflix eschews… though most likely, there will be a smaller, but more profitable audience in theatrical and then a similar result when the film finally gets to streaming, if it’s on Netflix, which has the biggest audience.
The next question will be how Netflix measures and rewards success.
A Man Called Otto was released theatrically by Sony Pictures. It cost about $50 million and sold about 12 million tickets to the movies ($113m/$50m in rentals) or about 24 million hours of viewing. In 6 months on Netflix, via the Pay One deal with Sony, the film was viewed for 61 million hours (about 30 million views).
Worked out well for Sony, its partners, and for Netflix.
The most viewed Netflix Original movie on the 6-month spreadsheet that Netflix released last year is The Mother, with an estimated budget of $43 million, with 250 million hours viewed or about 125 million views.
So the question is… would A Man Called Otto, made as a Netflix Original, have been a big win for Netflix? And what would The Mother have been if it had been made for theatrical release by Sony and then gone to Netflix a few months after release?
Would Otto have been a $70 million budget movie if it was a Netflix Original? Would The Mother have been a $30 million production investment for Sony had they made it for theatrical and the windows after?
And of course, one must ask the unaskable… what if Netflix had done a 2000-screen, marketed and reported release of The Mother in theaters and did $100 million wordwide, right in between Hustlers and Marry Me? And let’s say the movie then did 100 million views in 6 months on Netflix. Would that be a win or a loss in the current system and how would the new Netflix math change that?
I don’t know the inside details. At all. I have no idea if studios passed on The Mother or not and if so, at what price point. I have no idea if the reported $43 million budget includes the “pre-paid backend” bump that has been the norm at Netflix… maybe it cost even more. If there was a theatrical version possible at $30 million, that would seem like a deal that should have been done by a theatrical releasing studio. At $43m for production, it would have been a little rich for what seems like a Screen Gems/Lionsgate kind of film (albeit with a great, undervalued director)… though The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare apparently cost over $70 million. (Going down that alley will make me insane, though that movie was likely mostly paid for by international pre-sales.)
My point is… if Netflix is “normalizing” their “movie” model, cam they compete while refusing to commit to any real theatrical?
Netflix’s Q1 2004 report lands tomorrow… it won’t answer these questions, but write about it, I shall.
Item Two - Civil War. Saw it. Liked it. But what the hell is it?
A24 did a masterful job letting the media run itself into a frenzy about a lot of notions about the movie that were really not what the movie is at all. Brilliant trailer. Very Alex Garfield movie, which is to say, ambiguous in a way that makes the audience either do the work or not get it.
The movie does touch on things that scare the shit out of many of us in the Trump Mania, aka Dying of The Controlling White Man Light, era. I don’t think Jesse Plemons was even in the credits and as far as I can tell, has no name in the film… but he is the face of horror. The movie is not political. It takes no position. And most horrifyingly, neither does Plemons’ casually murderous soldier. One of the things that fascinates me about Plemons’ soldier is that even if he had a political position at one time, he seems to have lost that focus and is now… just killing stuff. He asks a lot of questions, but it appears that there is no good answer. He is just doing his job of killing, a mini-Kurtz figure, lost in the fog of war.
So what do you call it when you take an Oliver Stone movie and remove the politics? Is it more interesting or less interesting? Is a movie about journalists really about journalists or is Garland pointing the finger more widely, using journalists as an example of a group that sees itself as being above the fray?
I’ve only seen Civil War once and I look forward to seeing it again, probably twice, at minimum. Some answers may simply not exist, as some critics have suggested. But in Alex Garland’s work, there is almost always more than meets the eye, first time through.
Item Three - I hate to be that guy, but I’m gonna be that guy.
Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is going to underperform Ghostbusters: Afterlife.
Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is going to outperform Godzilla vs Kong… but not by that much considering the first release was in COVID-troubled 2021 and had a day-n-date release in America.
Dune II has significantly outperformed Dune… but again, not by as much as was hoped for. On the domestic side, the new film will almost triple the gross of the day-n-date 2021 release of the first film in Denis Villeneuve’s trilogy. But the international increase will only be about 35% from the first time around. And remember, the thing about DII was supposed to be that it was the big action movie, compared to the first film.
The 3 films will bring in $1.4 billion to the 2024 box office between them, so they matter. But 2 of the 3 movies were sequels to underperformers that just weren’t that well liked the first time around. Sony, smartly, sold the O.G. Ghostbusters in the new film… but they were barely there, least of all Bill Murray, who doesn’t have 10 lines in the film. The first name in Godzilla x Kong apparently had a total of 8 minutes of screentime in the 115 minute film.
Only 7 movies have grossed over $50 million domestic so far this year. Last year, there were 10 at this time.
And what is really missing is M3GAN and Cocaine Bear and Jesus Revolution and Scream VII, even more so than the big IP hits.
One last note… don’t make sequels to movies about which people aren’t clamoring for more. I’m not saying to abandon the IP. But find a new way of getting there. Maybe they will be more excited about the next take on the material.
Item Four - 20 Years of Participant. Here, I offer my shortlist of 25 “narrative” films and 25 docs that Particpant made or helped make that made the world/movie world better. The loss of this organization calls for a day of mourning.
Good Night, and Good Luck.
North Country
Syriana
The Visitor
The Kite Runner
The Informant!
The Beaver
The Help
The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
Contagion
Middle of Nowhere
Lincoln
Begin Again
A Most Violent Year
Spotlight
Beasts of No Nation
Neruda
The Light Between Oceans
Denial
A Monster Calls
A Fantastic Woman
Roma
Green Book
Judas & The Black Messiah
Radical
Murderball
Fast Food Nation
An Inconvenient Truth
Chicago 10
Standard Operating Procedure
Food, Inc.
The Cove
Page One
The Square
The Unknown Known
Ivory Tower
The Look of Silence
Citizenfour
Best of Enemies: Buckley vs Vidal
He Named Me Malala
Zero Days
RBG
American Factory
John Lewis: Good Trouble
My Name Is Pauli Murray
David Byrne’s American Utopia
All The Beauty & The Bloodshed
A Compassionate Spy
Collective
Food, Inc 2
Until tomorrow…