Your face is tanking
And now for today’s lesson in institutionalised misogyny.
Today’s news: Ghostbusters ‘tanks’, ‘stumbles’ with 53% drop in its second week.
Presumably that’s a bad performance compared to other action movies in their second week then?
Let’s check…
Captain America: Civil War: -59.5%
Dark Knight: -52%
Amazing Spider Man: -61%
Oh, and for an example of an actual ‘tanking’:
Batman vs Superman: -69%
Now, let’s examine all the reporting last week that Ghostbusters was going to struggle because of its first week multiplier against its budget…
Ghostbusters first weekend US figures: $46m It had a $144m budget, so in its first week it made 32% of that. Descriptions: ‘Lacklustre’, ‘problematic’, ‘will haunt Sony’
Star Trek Beyond first weekend US figures: $59.6m It had a $189m budget, so in its first week it made 30% of its budget. Reporting: ‘Dominates’, ‘wins big’
To be clear: there are articles describing both movies’ openings as ‘solid’. But there’s basically no one calling Beyond worrying or Ghostbusters a big win.
So. ‘Nuff said? **********EDIT**********
A few people have requested sauce for the data above. Honestly, this post was an off-the-cuff thing this morning done off the first page of Google. I’ve resisted actually providing said data because the % drop and $ profit figures are verifiable basically anywhere you like and the quotes are all over the place. I have not done a thorough corpus analysis of everything written on Ghostbusters and Beyond, nor do I plan to. However, because I’m so damn nice, here are the particular articles I happened to read for the Googley-challenged…
www.hollywoodreporter.com
deadline.com
fortune.com
www.theguardian.com
www.breitbart.com (yes, I know who/what Breitbart is, but it came up on the first page of Google so that makes it a mainstream source on this occasion)
www.forbes.com
And, to be fair, on looking for my original sources just now, I also found this, so there is at least one article that’s circumspect about Beyond’s success. I can’t find the article where I got the second week drops info, but I imagine the numbers came straight from here and here.
There were more articles all showing this basic trend, but honestly, no matter how many I list, if you don’t believe me you’re gonna have to go search for yourself anyway, and if you do believe me, well, you already believe me, so why bother?
I created a tumblr specifically to tell you how wrong you are and that you know absolutely nothing about how the box office works or how movies judge a products success. First off, the only site you need is boxofficemojo.com - that’s it. Secondly, you are providing factual information and skewing it to fit your narrative. Yes, Civil War dropped 59.3% in the second weekend. That's a lot. However, it's opening weekend was $223,329,078 and it's second weekend was $90,947,075. Ghostbusters (2016) has literally no shot at touching the Civil War numbers. None.
Civil War had a budget of $250 Million, which is obviously massive, but here's the thing - studios on average need a movie to double it's budget to become profitable. Civil War has made $1,151,365,896 worldwide. If we pretend that doubling the budget gives us a good idea of how much it needs to make to make money Civil War needs $500 Million but it's already over a billion dollars. It's rolling in the money.
Ghostbusters though, had a budget of $144 Million so it would need to turn in a worldwide total of $288 Million to start making money back. it's currently at $130,482,521 which is presently almost $158 MIllion away from the goal and if it's only pulling in $20 million in week two in it's largest market this movie is a certified money drain.
To follow up on the other example she had using Star Trek Beyond it had a budget of $185 Million which means it needs to hit $370 Million Worldwide to start making money back. It's currently sitting at $117,677,031 in 7 days of being open and still has 22 countries that it hasn't released in. Ghostbusters still have a chunk of market opening up this week, but none from countries that really produce huge influx of money. So, overall, you’re trying to make a point that doesn't exist. You don’t understand the box office, you don’t understand how movies work or how turning a profit in movies works. Ghostbusters is a critical failure and I am disappointed to be saying that as I type this with a Stay Puft tattoo on my hand.Â