No one cares about this but me I guess, lol, but this thing is shattering just about every record. At this point it has a shot at toppling Avatar's $2.8B record.

I think it's gonna end up between Avatar and Titanic.

Pikachu comes out 5/10 or something, I'm not a fan, but that's going to put a big dent in the worldwide traffic. Then Aladdin follows...none of these will put up those numbers, but they'll do enough to slow it down. I also don't think it has the repeat viewers of Titanic or Avatar, where you had people going to see the spectacle. Even though I personally have seen it twice, which I don't ever do.

This is really just an insane year for cinema. Endgame, Pikachu, Aladdin, Toy Story 4, Spiderman, Lion King, Frozen 2, Star Wars, Joker...insane.

Those are the only films that make real money. There was a time even during my life where could make a movie like the English Patient and net $200mm. That just doesn't happen now. There are too many other places to get that type of content, and people prefer to do so at home.

So, yes, they still make them (I know that was rhetorical), but they don't generate mass publicity. That is reserved for GoT, etc.

The formula now is to spend a lot to make a lot. Comics were ideal because the source material was already written and their demographic transcends pretty much anything. Rich, poor, any race, male/female...lots of people read them, know them, or at least think they're fun. Kids, adults, seniors. Even films that tank like Justice League still make money, but now we've seen what happens when they do it right with Avengers.

The comic renaissance is more or less saving cinema, for now anyway. Theaters were in very, very serious peril before these started being made. They still are, but it's a slower bleed.

I was never exposed to it either. I am a huge Batman fan. When the MCU started to get going, TDK trilogy was in its prime and I was firmly entrenched there. But once TDK ended, DC failed to build and that and then just destroyed Batman/JL. I still think TDK (second film) is the best stand alone hero film. But I can't judge Avengers on that because what they've done over 22 films is remarkable.

Infinity War was when I really got pulled in. Now I'm just a huge fan of the whole universe.

Difference being that while Marvel did prioritize making good movies and then piecing a universe together, I don't think that was ever Chris Nolan's thing. He was just rebooting Batman and there was no vision of tying a universe together. Heath Ledger dying didn't help things either.

Marvel had some success early, then DC tried to sloppily copy what Marvel was taking a decade to build. That doesn't work. Especially not when the movies are trash. The first two Thors are generally viewed as the worst films in that universe and don't even compare to many of the crap films DC made.

I think they might finally have something going with Joaquin Phoenix rebooting Joker, but this awful JL mess and the Batman dumpster fire need to be given a break and rebuilt completely.

I honestly got theater burnout before this wave of comic stuff, and I was absolutely not a huge comic fan growing up. IMO they just brought fun back to the theater.

Movies lost the escapism from the late 90s and into the 2000s. Every film was about corporate greed, some kind of race divide, saving the planet, etc. It stopped being fun. I had enough of that in life, I don't want to pay $20 to see that on the ultrascreen. These are escape movies again and it's fun.

$38 million domestic on a Monday. The only two movies to do more were The Force Awakens and Black Panther, both of which opened on a weekend where Monday was a holiday. For reference, a 59% drop from its Sunday earnings. Infinity War dropped 74%. This movie is defying the box office.

I saw it twice in regular mode, 2d?

I'm not a fan of 3D, I don't think most are. 3D never really took off the way studios were hoping it would. It seemed gimmicky for most films. Avatar was great for it, but only those kinds of visual spectacles really made it worth it. So I would say that generally, they're not, unless you really love 3D.

A Star is Born grossed $400 some million worldwide. Suicide Squad, a colossal flop, had a net of $571 million. That places it 100th on the list of the top 100 grossing films of all time. You're talking about a Best Picture nominee, and it doesn't even hold a candle to any MCU film.

Get Out was a hit with a worldwide gross of $255m against a $4mm budget.

Halloween 2019, commercially and mostly critically successful, $254mm against $10mm

Those smash hits aren't even on the same cosmic plane as fantasy/hero relative duds.

Bohemian Rhapsody is a once every 5 years success story. My point still holds. Those types of films are not replicable to the point studios can depend on them to keep the lights on. To put it in perspective, Black Panther grossed nearly half a billion dollars more than BR.

Ant Man and the Wasp out-grossed A Star is Born by $200mm. That is a C-Tier film for the MCU and one of 4 or 5 they can make in a year. Comparing it to the cream of the crop Oscar nominated films isn't really relevant because the studio is lucky if they can get three of those to make money.