As noted elsewhere in this thread, production is barely half the cost of returns. Marketing is the other half. What you see here is a rejection of the sunk-cost fallacy.
I agree with you. The article even mentions that streaming services were interested in buying it. I do not understand why trash it rather than sell it to someone for a modest amount.
Why did they spend the money to finish it? Are there some tax regulations that incentivize it? or is this just bad management?
As awful as the movie sounds to me, I want to see it now.
I think there's probably some room for more diverse options.
The last couple of times I went to the cinema were for when they'd do an English release of a popular anime film (One Piece Film Red and the Slime Isekai film). Those are not getting mainstream promotion. I don't think a couple of banner ads on animenewsnetwork.com count as meaningful. But they were in the "normal" multiplex with modest schedules. I feel like before the pandemic, those would exclusively get a one-week run in the art-house cinema by the college.
I wonder if it's a bit of a "flailing" response from an industry that 1) seems to have lost their cadence a bit after pandemics and labour stoppages, and 2) is still trying to figure out what's a viable draw when so much is heading straight to streaming.
The second-run cinema in town seems to be about a 50-50 split now between "second run of newish films" and a random assortment of classics and things obviously meant as family-friendly.
This just seems to obvious to me, even when doing the math:
Max costs an average of $12.99/month. $30 million / $12.99 = 2.3 million. Max has over 95 million monthly subscribers, and one has to imagine that ~2% of the subscribers would pay for a single month of Max in order to see this movie. After that one month, the movie's made its budget back without having to market it at all. Like, come on, it's the age of the internet -- if you really don't want to market the film at all, just Tweet out "Hey this movie is out now on Max, go watch it" and you're sure to reach a decent amount of people.
I'm sure there's an argument against what I just said that it creates the perception of their original content made for Max being low quality or something, but that can't be worse than the now extremely accurate perception that creatives can't trust that their work will be released by WD, and thus would prefer to work for other studios. I myself work in Hollywood and have absolutely zero desire to work on a WB project after Batgirl and now this.
> Max has over 95 million monthly subscribers, and one has to imagine that ~2% of the subscribers would pay for a single month of Max in order to see this movie.
But what already-paying subscribers /would/ do buys you no beans. You need to find 2% of the current subscriber base who would cancel except for this movie being released, or 2% new subscribers from this release. Which besides being implausibly large to begin with, isn’t going to happen without massive marketing investment — the non-customers who value this at $13 are already less likely than the average person to know it exists, being non-customers.
That is releasing in Hollywood. Due to the nature of the industry and the jobs everyone works, simply publishing it is an unthinkable thought. I get that "it should be as easy as uploading a repo to GitHub", but just for starters imagine the incurred cost of residuals tracking. Yes it's amortized over the whole enterprise's catalog, but that's work that still has to be done.
