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Who is this movie for?

Ghostbusters does not have a strong target audience. It is a franchise from the 80s, but 80s nostalgia is already played out in Hollywood. Are they appealing to old fans? How many old fans of Ghostbusters are still alive post COVID?

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Originally posted by whozit:
I'm hoping the film does well, they're trying to fix the mess from the 2016 flick. The trailer for 'Afterlife' was very good, the one for 'Frozen Empire' did seem that great. If it stinks the fan base will be sure to let us know.

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

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Originally posted by whozit:
I'm hoping the film does well, they're trying to fix the mess from the 2016 flick. The trailer for 'Afterlife' was very good, the one for 'Frozen Empire' did seem that great. If it stinks the fan base will be sure to let us know.

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I'm hoping it does well too, but I'm not going to see it. I didn't have any interest in Afterlife either, and I probably won't ever see that unless I'm out somewhere and somebody else wants to watch it for some reason.

I just don't think that it is going to make any money, for the budget reasons I stated above. If this thing cost any more than $100 Million to make I don't think the outlook is very good.

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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Originally posted by whozit:
You should check out 'Afterlife', the end will bring happy tears to your eyes,

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Ehhhh... maybe I will.

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you may forget about that abortion they made in 2016.

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Oh, trust me. Already long forgotten.

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Plus if this flick does well it'll piss off everyone who had anything to do with the 2016 flick, like the whiny bitches who stared in it.

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Ghostbusters: Afterlife was a welcome return for the legendary franchise, providing audiences with a great legacy sequel that paid tribute to the original entries while also taking it in a new direction. It was a more consistent direction than the 2016 film and ultimately ended up becoming a bigger success story. However, here’s the surprise: The 2016 film actually grossed more at the box office.

The thing that separates 2016’s Ghostbusters from 2021’s Afterlife are the budgets. The former had a ridiculously high budget of $144 million, so even though it grossed $229 million, it still lost over $70 million. Meanwhile, Afterlife had a much more respectable budget of $75 million, which meant that its $204 million gross was ultimately a success. That said, it was a moderate success.

The movie itself was a triumph that restored order (and the original story) for the Ghostbusters franchise. Nevertheless, the decision to now produce a sequel in Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire does come with a major risk factor. If the budget is bigger or the gross is much smaller, we could have another Ghostbusters flop on our hands – and given how fun Afterlife was, we hope that’s not the case.

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Originally posted by whozit:
A flick that's been flying under the radar is 'Cabrini', it has a 90% critics score on Rotten Tomato's and a 97% audience score. THIS, from a flick made by Angel Studios which the access critics hate. This is the same studio that made 'Sound of Freedom' which the access critics called right wing propaganda, and FYI, 'Cabrini' has the same director. This film has a strong female lead who takes on the system and becomes a Saint...and isn't woke. This film is all about the power of women and isn't woke, and dam near ALL the critics like it.

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Originally posted by whozit:
Ghostbusters opened at $16 mill on Friday, it looks like it'll do OK. They believe it'll make around $43 mill this weekend, this will be OK, not great, but OK.

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

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Originally posted by whozit:
Ghostbusters opened at $16 mill on Friday, it looks like it'll do OK. They believe it'll make around $43 mill this weekend, this will be OK, not great, but OK.

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Really though, it only made $11.3 Million on Friday since they count the $4.7 Million in previews in that $16 Million number.


The good news AND the bad news is that it cost $100 Million to make. (I knew there was no way they were going to keep it as cheap as Afterlife's $75 Million). But at least it wasn't $200 Million.

It's going to need $250 Million to break even now.

As I mentioned earlier, any movie only making 80% to 99% of its production budget on opening weekend worldwide is in a coin-flip situation that it will ultimately break even before it's out of theaters.

What's the appetite for Ghostbusters internationally? If it only brings in $43 Million domestic, will it be able to bring in $57 Million outside of the United States and Canada when China won't be showing it?


I also don't know what kind of competition it's going to be facing in the coming weeks since I haven't been keeping up with movie information like I did last year. Maybe it lucks out and benefits from a weaker than normal box office like a lot of the late movies from last year like Wonka, Migration and Aquaman 2 did. At least they released it several weeks after Dune: Part 2 came out instead of a week before.

I still suspect that this movie loses money in the end. I may change my stance on that when the official international numbers come in on Sunday or Monday though.

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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Ughhhhh...

Come on guys... It can't be boring. Anything but boring.

Minor spoiler warning...

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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Frozen Empire will give the market a boost this weekend, but it’ll need to top $40 million if we’re going to have a $100-million weekend overall.

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
So I decided to finally go and reference my 2023 spreadsheets to look at performance of movies on opening weekend vs. the end of their runs to get a real comparison to gauge Ghostbusters' chances here. The following is the list of movies that had a Worldwide Gross anywhere between 50% and 99% of their Production Budget on opening weekend and what that percentage was. I then follow that up with the final percentage of the budget that it made after it was out of theaters (As of 01/04/2024... I did update my spreadsheets at the end of the year, but I don't remember if I updated the 2023 Hollywood thread).

Remember, 250% is break even. Anything less is a loser, anything more is a winner.

Fast X - 93.82% / 210.17% (LOSER)
Gran Turismo: Based on a True Story - 89.83% / 196.41% (LOSER)
The Equalizer 3 - 97.14% / 265.27% (WINNER)
Transformers: Rise of the Beasts - 87.44% / 224.45% (LOSER)
Thanksgiving - 84.00% / 306.04% (WINNER)
Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part 1 - 81.03% / 195.28% (LOSER)
Cocaine Bear - 80.00% / 257.05% (WINNER)
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem - 72.86% 257.65% (WINNER)
My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 - 70.56% / 217.24% (LOSER)
The Flash - 69.50% / 133.26% (LOSER)
Wonka - 65.60% / 503.20% (WINNER) *I got the current figure for Wonka since it's still in theaters.
The Little Mermaid - 65.52% / 227.34% (LOSER)
A Haunting in Venice - 61.67% / 189.33% (LOSER)
The Boogeyman - 57.14% / 235.27% (LOSER)
No Hard Feelings - 54.44% / 185.45% (LOSER)
Trolls Band Together - 53.26% / 211.46% (LOSER)
Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom - 52.54% / 211.71% (LOSER) *I got current data for this movie since it made a lot more after 01/04/2024.
Shazam: Fury of the Gods - 52.40% / 105.75% (LOSER)

Total list: 18 movies
Total losers: 13 movies
Total winners: 5 movies


Right now, Ghostbusters is sitting at exactly 61.40% on opening weekend worldwide. This will likely increase by $1 to $3 million because of studios lowballing projections, but I think it's pretty close since Sony Pictures just lowered their projection $200k to an even $45 Million this morning, which is never a good sign.

If it doesn't increase, this puts it over 4 points below The Little Mermaid and even a few tenths between A Haunting in Venice. Either way, there's no way they lowballed it so much that it would displace Wonka on the list.


Wonka was the only movie in 2023 that grossed 65% on opening weekend and ended up winning in the end. (And boy, did it win...)

No movie that was in the Top 100 Worldwide 2023 list at any point that made below 65% of the production budget worldwide on opening weekend ended up breaking even. The two that were closest was the low budget "The Bogeyman" and the stupid expensive budget "The Little Mermaid". [ETA: CORRECTION. Migration did at only 47.83%. See below.]



Just more evidence supporting my original argument that this was going to flop and a 3rd movie isn't likely to be made.

Sony Pictures killed themselves with that budget. Had they done the right thing and kept the budget to $75 Million like they spent on Afterlife, we'd be having a much different conversation about this right now.

In that case, it would be sitting at 81.8%, which would still be a steep hill to climb for the break-even point, but at least we'd be in a territory where there was at least some winners on the heap that started with similar openings.





ETA: OOPS! By only grabbing movies that had 50% opening weekends, I totally forgot about Universal's Migration. That opened with only 47.83% and went on to gross 400% of the budget (and it's still in some theaters today).

This really was an outlier for several reasons though. This was the little movie that could. Excellent word of mouth helped this one probably more than any other movie in 2023. It was also the benefactor of an extremely weak box office for the first 3 months of 2024 just as Wonka was.

And speaking of Wonka, at only a 65% opening weekend itself, it benefited massively from the same weak 2024 box office that Migration did. Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire will not be so lucky.


Ghostbusters' only saving grace here is that it's getting a staggered international release and we may not have the full picture here yet. But that being said, with rare exception I didn't mark down in my notes any information about staggered releases for movies in 2023, so this might be quite common and it may already be reflected in quite a few of the movies on the above list.

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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Originally posted by whozit:
'Ghostbusters' may do OK because it has a fanbase, the 'Fast and Furious' films chased away their fanbase because the films got REALLY stupid, remember street racers in space? I was surprised 'Mission Impossible' flopped, I thought that would be a sure fire hit.

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Right now, Ghostbusters is sitting at exactly 61.40% on opening weekend worldwide. This will likely increase by $1 to $3 million because of studios lowballing projections, but I think it's pretty close since Sony Pictures just lowered their projection $200k to an even $45 Million this morning, which is never a good sign.

If it doesn't increase, this puts it over 4 points below The Little Mermaid and even a few tenths between A Haunting in Venice. Either way, there's no way they lowballed it so much that it would displace Wonka on the list.

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Careful there, buddy.

Word is that Congress is looking to pass a bill taxing theft.

Right now I'm seeing it's only regarding retail theft since that supposedly accounts for $15 Billion per year in business tax revenues, not including sales taxes.

But I don't see why they wouldn't easily apply that to online piracy when it's so very easy to attribute it to you. Especially when you're always advertising how you do it on an ancient website that is completely searchable on Google without needing any login credentials to view every post.

Hope you finally got around to getting a VPN. We all know you didn't have one when I harvested your IP address.

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Originally posted by second:

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Careful there, buddy.

Word is that Congress is looking to pass a bill taxing theft.

Right now I'm seeing it's only regarding retail theft since that supposedly accounts for $15 Billion per year in business tax revenues, not including sales taxes.

But I don't see why they wouldn't easily apply that to online piracy when it's so very easy to attribute it to you. Especially when you're always advertising how you do it on an ancient website that is completely searchable on Google without needing any login credentials to view every post.

Hope you finally got around to getting a VPN. We all know you didn't have one when I harvested your IP address.

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6ixStringJack, you know nothing but that is the way of Trumptards. Somebody with a camera copied Ghostbusters onto a memory card but they didn't steal the hundred-pound reel of film from the theater. Too bad for Hollywood, but they knew this day was coming since 2013 when Steven Spielberg and George Lucas predicted a film industry 'implosion', which implies rapid collapse. Steven and George got it slightly wrong. What is happening is more like a termite infestation slowly eating away at Hollywood's wood beams and posts of their Malibu homes on the beach.

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I'm not going to get into an argument with you on the pros and cons of piracy here buddy.

But you suffer from Main Character Syndrome and you put Haken in potential jeopardy every single time you post pirated links on his wide-open to the rest of the world website.

And the Government and IRS isn't going to care one little bit about your views on piracy either. They already know everything everybody has ever downloaded illegally, whether they brag about it online or not. If they end up passing laws that tax people for the value of every intellectual property they've downloaded at their IP address, that's going to be quite the hefty bill. And trust me, they're not going to give you the sale prices when they do their figuring either. It's all MSRP, baby.

Having a VPN isn't going to help you because VPNs DO keep logs of all your traffic no matter how many youtubers will tell you that they don't when they're shilling the services, and the Privacy section of the contract that you signed and didn't read states clearly that they will share your information with the authorities if they're asked for it.

They won't even have to use the labor of one of their new 87,000 agents to do any of this either. It can all be done via computer programs in current year.


Good luck.

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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

I'm not going to get into an argument with you on the pros and cons of piracy here buddy.

But you suffer from Main Character Syndrome and you put Haken in potential jeopardy every single time you post pirated links on his wide-open to the rest of the world website.

And the Government and IRS isn't going to care one little bit about your views on piracy either. They already know everything everybody has ever downloaded illegally, whether they brag about it online or not. If they end up passing laws that tax people for the value of every intellectual property they've downloaded at their IP address, that's going to be quite the hefty bill. And trust me, they're not going to give you the sale prices when they do their figuring either. It's all MSRP, baby.

Having a VPN isn't going to help you because VPNs DO keep logs of all your traffic no matter how many youtubers will tell you that they don't when they're shilling the services, and the Privacy section of the contract that you signed and didn't read states clearly that they will share your information with the authorities if they're asked for it.

They won't even have to use the labor of one of their new 87,000 agents to do any of this either. It can all be done via computer programs in current year.


Good luck.

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

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Originally posted by second:
Trump added $8.4 trillion to the national debt and yet I didn't hear complaints from the stereotypical Trumptard about it. https://thehill.com/business/4426965-trump-added-8-4-trillion-to-the-n
ational-debt-analysis/

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Yeah. You keep "forgetting" how much of that was after Democrats worked with China to unleash Covid on America because there was zero chance they were going to win the 2020 election before they derailed literally every life in the entire world for years.

And now, ever since then, we just piss away trillions every year without thinking about it and the country is falling to shit anyhow.

Whatever.

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Wow. I'm so cool! I know how to pirate movies and TV shows in 2024!

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Originally posted by second:

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Wow. I'm so cool! I know how to pirate movies and TV shows in 2024!

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Why pay Hollywood to waste your time? Hollywood should pay you at least the minimum wage of $20 per hour to watch their products. Go to the movies and receive two new 20-dollar bills when you leave at the end. But if you want popcorn with their movie, you pay them.

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Fast Food Minimum Wage Effective April 1, 2024
https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/minimum_wage.htm

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

If they're that bad, why bother taking time out of your day to download them, let alone watch them?

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
$5.5 Million projected for Friday night on Ghostbusters.

Extremely doubtful it comes anywhere close to $22.8 Million for the weekend if that projection is accurate.

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
With what seems to be very little help overseas, there's zero chance that this one breaks even for Sony. It is going to enter its third weekend with over a $10 Million deficit to 50% of the break even point.

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
With what seems to be very little help overseas, there's zero chance that this one breaks even for Sony. It is going to enter its third weekend with over a $10 Million deficit to 50% of the break even point.

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It's at $114,963,665 now. It's $10,036,335 shy of the halfway to breaking even point going into the 3rd weekend.

Bruce predicts $8.9 Million (only a -43% drop), which until the international numbers are added in still does not bring it halfway to breaking even.

It's got a couple minor European countries that are showing it new this weekend, which will help marginally, but I don't expect much more than $10 Million additional to the global gross internationally on Monday. Maybe $12 Million more tops, which would give it an international total of $47,100,000.

It would still need $115 Million to break even, with no possible way of ever achieving that.

My guess for Frozen Empire is somewhere in the area of $175 to $180 Million worldwide total.

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

I suspect it will make in the area of $4.5 to $5 Million over the weekend, but that's only if the theater count doesn't change substantially. With Civil War and Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead needing screens this weekend, I'm sure that Ghostbusters will lose at least a hundred or two if not more. If it loses 500 or 600 or more, expect that number to be even less this weekend.

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Originally posted by second:
Each Ghostbuster sells fewer tickets than the previous one because ticket prices are inflating. There was a 27-year hiatus between Ghostbusters II and Ghostbusters (2016). Hollywood should have a refreshing 27-year gap until the next Ghostbusters in 2051. By then Bill Murray will be an actual ghost, which is fine for the plot in that future movie.

Worldwide Box Office
$187,988,000 Mar 22, 2024 Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire
$203,540,177 Nov 19, 2021 Ghostbusters: Afterlife
$229,008,658 Jul 15, 2016 Ghostbusters
$215,500,000 Jun 16, 1989 Ghostbusters II
$295,582,480 Jun 8, 1984 Ghostbusters

https://www.the-numbers.com/movies/franchise/Ghostbusters#tab=summary

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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