Nasir007 wrote: ↑Wed May 20, 2020 5:59 pm
captveg wrote: ↑Wed May 20, 2020 5:14 pm
Nasir007 wrote: ↑Wed May 20, 2020 4:22 pm
I am amazed this makes business sense.
Gotta look at it from AT&T's perspective. They didn't pay for
Justice League's production. To them it was simply another movie in the library of their purchase of Time Warner.
So now they have the HBO Max launch, which they are investing $100 millions + into. A-level streaming series like
The Crown and
The Mandalorian cost $10m+ an episode to produce. So, for the price of 2-3 episodes of an A-level streaming show (the reported $20-30m to bring Snyder's
JL across the finish line), they get to release a $300m+ produced film that already has a built in audience that has been literally begging to see it, plus all the free advertisement that has created.
This is a grotesque exaggeration right? The movie failed. Nobody was clamoring for it. The Snyder Cut troll community was a niche movement, barely this side of Qanon if you ask me.
This isn't Mad Max we are talking about. This is an awful unwatchable movie that on the evidence of Snyder's previous Director's cut, might be worse.
And even if the 300mil+ wasn't an upfront cost, you could definitely portion out a cost they paid for it in the acquisition.
Not denying that there was some business logic to it. If there hadn't been, we wouldn't be here. But I think it has to be more than a built-in audience.
I think more than anything, it kinda shows that streaming content is so fungible. There is no penalty for being bad or awful. There is little sense of merit or distinction to go around. If people have to fill an evening or a meal or a workout or bus ride, literally anything will do.
The movie sure did fail, but AT&T had nothing to do with that, in their view. Especially since it's not just a longer cut like
BvS was. That was still the same movie - a better, more appropriately paced version of that movie, IMO, but still the same movie, with both cuts delivered by Snyder for different market purposes.
JL is a different thing - a Frankenstein of a film that has the most basic skeleton of Snyder's film, but with massive alternate takes and added content to it he had nothing to do with, while also excising a lot of story that Snyder had intended to be there. It's like if the Love Conquers All
Brazil was widdled down even further to 30 minutes, then had another film's shoot add 60 more minutes of new content as well to bring it to the 90 minute runtime. Plus color timed wrong; plus a new score commissioned. (Not a comparison of the quality of
Brazil with any of Snyder's films; as much as I love
MoS it's not even in
Brazil's ballpark, so let's not take it down that road).
I'm not expecting it to be
Mad Max. I'm expecting it to be a
JL film I can watch alongside
MoS and
BvS and enjoy, matching those films stylistically and thematically (the theatrical cut of
JL goes out of its way to ignore those films aside from the most basic plot threads, pleasing neither those who like those films, nor appealing to those who wanted to completely disregard those films). I don't think that's much too much to ask if AT&T is willing to foot the bill as they are doing here. It doesn't have to be one of the greatest film of the decade or anything for me to want to see it and possibly enjoy it.
I don't think
JL factored much into AT&T spending $85b for Time Warner. The DC IP in general, absolutely. One failed movie? Just another item on the list of assets, even if it was a high profile failure.
Part of my point about the streaming content was indeed that if it is either niche and/or bad it doesn't draw much attention in the end (certainly not to the level of a theatrical tentpole failure) and mostly disappears into the vast crowd of content. As you said -"fungible". It likely won't remain in that state forever as the competition for viewers escalates, but it's there at this time. No one bats much of an eye at the shows that don't get larger acceptance and/or get poor reviews. Netflix has dozens of such content, from
Sense8 to
The Get Down.