Films & Fiction Weekly

After their recent merger with Skydance, Paramount is now looking to buy Warner Bros., which would be a bad thing for movie lovers.

Obviously Warner Bros. has made a lot of bad decisions (and a lot of bad movies) in the last few years, but the one thing that we don’t need right now is more corporatism in Hollywood, quite the opposite, in fact.

To much of the movie business is now held by a handful of large companies, and it’s hurting creativity. It leads to a lack of competition, a lack of releases, as studios look to avoid competing with themselves, and brings out the worst trends of modern entertainment.

Look at what happened to 20th Century (without the Fox) when they were bought out by Disney in 2019. What used to be one of the most successful movie studios has been turned into a label, stuck to a few minor releases, or else an IP mine, where Mickey Mouse can dig away furiously, sapping every bit of life from things like the Alien and Predator franchises. 20th Century’s own venture into superhero movies with the X-Men series has gone now, just another thing that Disney’s Marvel can wring some nostalgia bucks from.

If Paramount got hold of WB, then something similar would happen.

What we really need now is more variety. More studios–preferably smaller ones–that will take risks, make new and original films, and get them out to audiences without having to deal with the corporate politics of the big names. A place where creativity and innovation might stand a chance.

Granted, any criticism you can pin on Disney also exists at WB, but one thing’s for sure, more consolidation won’t help to solve those problems, and will only make a bad situation worse.

Alien: Island

Alien: Earth seems to have forgotten its very premise. Think what it would be like if the xenomorphs came to Earth. As Ripley said: “if one of those things gets down here then that will be all!” Well, not so, it seems, because so far all of the action has been on either spaceships, like we’ve seen before, or confined to a small remote island in the middle of nowhere. The cool idea of aliens running through cities has never materialized.

Maybe that’s for the best, considering what low IQs everyone seems to have here. How can it be that a research facility run by a trillionaire is so badly equipped to deal with these creatures? Why aren’t there dozens of scientists and androids working on research, considering the company only has six weeks to complete their experiments before they hand the aliens over to Weyland-Yutani. Why is everything left to Kirsh and the child/synths, who have no clue what they are doing?

Kavalier knew these aliens were arriving. He set up the Maginot crash, so he should have been prepared, but seemingly had no plans or security protocols in place.

Six episodes in and I’m really done with this show. I really thought this could have been good. Sadly, I was wrong.

Superman is a hit, apparently

Superman is supposed to have made $125 million of profit, just from its theatrical release, which makes it one of the biggest hits of the year. Call me cynical, but I’m not believing that. It seems to go against all established measures for judging the success of a movie.

Let’s look at the numbers. Superman made (at the time of the news) $614M at the box office. Roughly 50% of that goes to the studio, so say $310M. From that you have to subtract the budget of $225M (which may be higher), leaving $85M. Even then it’s not as profitable as claimed, but that $85M doesn’t include marketing, which for a movie like this is likely somewhere around $100-150M.

It makes no sense to claim such a high figure. Compare it to James Gunn’s last movie Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.3; that film cost $250M and made $845M in cinemas. According the Deadline, it made a profit of $124M from all release formats, including theatrical, home media, and streaming.

If the numbers reported for Superman included such things, or else other revenue sources like merchandise, etc., I might believe it, but this seems to big a stretch. I’ll accept that WB are happy–or at least satisfied–with the result. After all, superhero movies are struggling, the last movies in the DCEU flopped, and they could be treating this as a base to build from, similar to Iron Man. But that still doesn’t mean that Superman is profitable, and certainly not into nine-figures.