DC Catch-All [Spoiler Zone]

What's that? You thought we were free of Snyder Cult Drama? Oh how wrong you were!

Rolling Stone just published a piece with some interesting tidbits and some analytics done on the whole affair, and from what I've seen, many of the die hards (discounting the 13% or so who are apparently bots, a level pretty well outside the norm) aren't taking it well.

[We] found that the forsnydercut.com domain — which claims to have made the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut hashtag go viral in May of 2018, and became the landing hub for efforts to bring Snyder back to the helm of the DC universe — was, at least at one point, registered to a person who also ran a now-defunct ad agency which promoted its ability to bring “cheap, instant Avatar traffic to your website.”

"Avatar traffic?" As in, the movie that was apparently the biggest most popular movie ever despite seemingly nobody actually liking it, that was virtually forgotten six months after its release, almost as if the hype about it was entirely manufactured to begin with?

How incredibly apropos.

I thought avatar was loved by most people. Wait do you mean the last airbender movie? If so yeah everyone hated that movie.

I have yet to meet someone with a stronger positive feeling about James Cameron's Avatar than "it was okay."

hbi2k wrote:

I have yet to meet someone with a stronger positive feeling about James Cameron's Avatar than "it was okay."

It was a visual spectacle, but that's mainly it.

I saw it twice in the theaters in 3D.

Quintin_Stone wrote:

I saw it twice in the theaters in 3D.

I saw it twice also but only once in 3D.

I think time has made us all forget how crazy into it some Avatar fans were.

See, I'd read articles like that, but I'd never actually see it in real life.

When I was in high school it had been roughly 15 years since a major theatrical Star Wars release, and yet Star Wars was everywhere. We watched the movies, read the novels, played the video games, wrote fan fiction, pored over the technical manuals. When the Special Editions came out we were there on Day One for all three. We watched whatever dumb TV show the Phantom Menace trailer was airing on, and we skipped school to wait in line for opening night tickets. Not everybody was that into it-- most had seen the movies, but not everyone was a superfan like my friends and I were-- but it was always around, and you always knew who the superfans were.

It's now been about the same amount of time since Avatar. I have nieces and nephews in various stages of grade school and the oldest in high school, and my day job at a community center has an after-school program and a summer school program full of grade school kids. Lots of them love Star Wars. Some of them love Five Nights at Freddy's or Undertale. Some of them are anime kids, some of them are sports kids. A fair number of them have permissive enough parents that they've seen Squid Game, and the rest are jealous and pretend they've seen it too. If any of them have even seen Avatar, I don't know about it.

So much of the financial success of Avatar seems to me like it was based on charging several dollars more per ticket for all the 3D showings. Still the only movie I ever paid for 3D.

Visually impressive but so very meh.

Medmey wrote:

Neat!
Looks less trope filled that Black Adam.

Warner Bros. shelves Batgirl movie with no plans to release. The very f*cked up history of modern DC films reaches a new low.

Rat Boy wrote:

Warner Bros. shelves Batgirl movie with no plans to release. The very f*cked up history of modern DC films reaches a new low.

That’s crazy. 90 million to make the movie and it included JK Simmons and Michael Keaton. That movie must be real bad not to even put it on HBO Max.

This is going to be Hollywood legend for years.

#ReleaseBatgirl

There's rumor and gossip out there that, more than the movie being actually bad, this is all about Discovery executives waving their dicks around. Even judged against the standards of the executive class, they sound like real charmers.

Something tells me the dickwavers aren't going to axe The Flash movie despite the fact that its lead is on the run from the law.

Well, the lead is white, but also non-binary. However, the character is a man, so I suspect it's safe.

Is it worse than the Wonder Woman TV pilot? It was pretty bad, in spite of casting Adrianne Palicki in the role.

Wait... Billy Bob Thornton played himself on Harley Quinn?

I'm bummed about Batgirl, but it seems like there's more than displays of genitalia involved.

TLDR: intended as a streaming movie new execs decided on a theatrical release but the movie isn't enough of a 'blockbuster' or whatever to make back budget and marketing, so it's more valuable to Discovery as a tax write-off than a movie that makes little or no profit. So some 'The Producers' style shenanigans.

Rat Boy wrote:

Wait... Billy Bob Thornton played himself on Harley Quinn?

And James Gunn.

Tax law is bonkers. I spend money to make a thing. I don’t even try to sell said thing. I take a tax write-off because of the loss of sales of said thing that I didn’t even try to sell.

How does that make sense?

PaladinTom wrote:

Tax law is bonkers. I spend money to make a thing. I don’t even try to sell said thing. I take a tax write-off because of the loss of sales of said thing that I didn’t even try to sell.

How does that make sense?

I don't think that's exactly it. It's more of you've got sunk costs, but you project you'll only earn X amount of revenue. If said revenue is less than the remaining production costs plus marketing costs, you might be better off just writing it off against revenue now vs continuing to dig the hole you're already in.

Sometimes this is also done strategically based on other events and profits or losses the company are experiencing, so it's not nearly as simple as the above.

But in the end, it's once you realize you're in a deep hole, the first step may be to stop digging. Not keep digging harder.

MannishBoy wrote:
Rat Boy wrote:

Wait... Billy Bob Thornton played himself on Harley Quinn?

And James Gunn.

Billy Bob Thornton played James Gunn on Harley Quinn? Amazing range!

farley3k wrote:
MannishBoy wrote:
Rat Boy wrote:

Wait... Billy Bob Thornton played himself on Harley Quinn?

And James Gunn.

Billy Bob Thornton played James Gunn on Harley Quinn? Amazing range!

Clayface thinks so.

IMAGE(https://static.tvmaze.com/uploads/images/medium_portrait/231/577966.jpg)

MannishBoy wrote:
PaladinTom wrote:

Tax law is bonkers. I spend money to make a thing. I don’t even try to sell said thing. I take a tax write-off because of the loss of sales of said thing that I didn’t even try to sell.

How does that make sense?

I don't think that's exactly it. It's more of you've got sunk costs, but you project you'll only earn X amount of revenue. If said revenue is less than the remaining production costs plus marketing costs, you might be better off just writing it off against revenue now vs continuing to dig the hole you're already in.

Sometimes this is also done strategically based on other events and profits or losses the company are experiencing, so it's not nearly as simple as the above.

But in the end, it's once you realize you're in a deep hole, the first step may be to stop digging. Not keep digging harder.

Based on the chatter I've seen* I think that Discovery gets to do this because they can write Batgirl off as a liability incurred by Warner before the buyout. If it was a movie they greenlit it wouldn't work quite so well for them. Ordinarily they could can it and it would come off their bottom line so could still be worth it if they didn't expect to make back production and marketing.

Hollywood accounting is weird. Men in Black has never 'made a profit' so they don't need to pay back-end. And apparently Spider-Man Homecoming hadn't at the time the linked story was written either.

It also looks like the new Supergirl movie is probably being canned and there's no way Blue Beetle will happen under this regime and who knows about the other movies planned. Personally the Zatanna movie was one I would like to see happen.

HBO Max programming is being wiped out so the upcoming Harley Quinn season will probably be the last.

* take it for what it's worth and I know nothing, but I find it interesting.

MrDeVil909 wrote:
MannishBoy wrote:
PaladinTom wrote:

Tax law is bonkers. I spend money to make a thing. I don’t even try to sell said thing. I take a tax write-off because of the loss of sales of said thing that I didn’t even try to sell.

How does that make sense?

I don't think that's exactly it. It's more of you've got sunk costs, but you project you'll only earn X amount of revenue. If said revenue is less than the remaining production costs plus marketing costs, you might be better off just writing it off against revenue now vs continuing to dig the hole you're already in.

Sometimes this is also done strategically based on other events and profits or losses the company are experiencing, so it's not nearly as simple as the above.

But in the end, it's once you realize you're in a deep hole, the first step may be to stop digging. Not keep digging harder.

Based on the chatter I've seen* I think that Discovery gets to do this because they can write Batgirl off as a liability incurred by Warner before the buyout. If it was a movie they greenlit it wouldn't work quite so well for them. Ordinarily they could can it and it would come off their bottom line so could still be worth it if they didn't expect to make back production and marketing.

Hollywood accounting is weird. Men in Black has never 'made a profit' so they don't need to pay back-end. And apparently Spider-Man Homecoming hadn't at the time the linked story was written either.

It also looks like the new Supergirl movie is probably being canned and there's no way Blue Beetle will happen under this regime and who knows about the other movies planned. Personally the Zatanna movie was one I would like to see happen.

HBO Max programming is being wiped out so the upcoming Harley Quinn season will probably be the last.

* take it for what it's worth and I know nothing, but I find it interesting.

I've also been seeing on this one that initial screenings for test audiences were horrible, and there may be somethings going on where the previous management was trying to get rid of Batman and Superman due to difficulty signing the actors (Affleck wants out, Cavill doesn't want to just do cameos, he wants Superman movies as part of a new deal). So they were trying to replace Batman and Superman with Batgirl and Supergirl whole cloth, with only Michael Keaton's old Batman around to fill the Nick Fury role of "Old Sage that Ties the Heroes Together". It sounds like Discovery sees that as a devaluing of their IP to not have their two biggest characters available in the DCEU (remember, The Batman is a side universe).

So it might be a combination of all of the above. Bad screening leads to stopping the project. Weird M&A accounting that makes the write off easier, and stopping what Discovery sees as a bad direction for the IP overall.

*shrug*

And on a side note, while they may be enjoyable, I don't see Shazam and Black Adam being as big as the core Justice League characters. And after they also burned some goodwill with the last Wonder Woman film, the DCEU continues to likely underperform for awhile. And who knows what happens with Flash. That's another thing I don't understand how it every makes it when you're lead actor self destructs in public.

MannishBoy wrote:

That's another thing I don't understand how it every makes it when you're lead actor self destructs in public.

Part of the crazy accounting, it has to be released so they can get what they can from it.

MannishBoy wrote:

I've also been seeing on this one that initial screenings for test audiences were horrible, and there may be somethings going on where the previous management was trying to get rid of Batman and Superman due to difficulty signing the actors (Affleck wants out, Cavill doesn't want to just do cameos, he wants Superman movies as part of a new deal). So they were trying to replace Batman and Superman with Batgirl and Supergirl whole cloth, with only Michael Keaton's old Batman around to fill the Nick Fury role of "Old Sage that Ties the Heroes Together". It sounds like Discovery sees that as a devaluing of their IP to not have their two biggest characters available in the DCEU (remember, The Batman is a side universe)

I don't really follow box office numbers so I'm not sure how it translates into a corporate bottom line, but it seems like there's an inverse relationship between how much people like a DC movie and how tied in it is with their attempts at a shared universe.

The Batman and Joker were both "side universes." The worst part of Suicide Squad was when it tried to make people care about setting up Jared Leto as the next Joker. The first Wonder Woman was okay, except for the perfunctory attempts at continuity with other movies-- oh, she had a black and white picture in the future, got to make sure everyone who was in it is in this movie even if they have nothing to do. Etc.

Maybe if what they want is Batman and Superman movies, they should just... make Batman and Superman movies. And not worry about whether it's the same actor every time or if they'll ever cross over or whatever.

Is it in canon? Is it an elseworlds or a what-if or a reboot or a spinoff or a prequel? Who cares? Just make a decent movie.

They were desperate to do what the MCU was doing with their movies cause they were making money hand over fist at the time.

But they f*cked it up.