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Sunken ‘Jungle Cruise’ Gross sales Replicate Hollywood’s Delta Variant Troubles

Sunken ‘Jungle Cruise’ Sales Reflect Hollywood’s Delta Variant Troubles

LOS ANGELES – As Disney’s playful “Jungle Cruise” demonstrated over the weekend, the cinema visit remains interrupted, with the delta variant, instant streaming availability and muddy reviews all pushing ticket sales down.

Any other takeout would be de-Nile.

Jungle Cruise, a comedic adventure that cost at least $ 200 million to make and an additional $ 100 million to commercialize, raised approximately $ 34 million in 4,310 theaters in the United States and Canada, according to Comscore, including Thursday night previews checkout data. The PG-13 film starring Emily Blunt as the British version of Indiana Jones and Dwayne Johnson as the funny skipper on a river boat grossed an additional $ 28 million overseas.

“The market is currently vulnerable,” said David A. Gross, who heads Franchise Entertainment Research, in an email. “There is Covid, there is simultaneous streaming, there is piracy, there is the nature of the films themselves – different factors for each film. Simultaneous streaming seems to reduce the overall revenue of a film in all windows. “

Over the weekend, “Jungle Cruise” also arrived on streaming service Disney +, where subscribers (more than 100 million worldwide) can watch the film (and have permanent access to it) for an additional charge of $ 30. Disney said that Jungle Cruise generated approximately $ 30 million from worldwide sales of Disney + Premium Access. For comparison: “Black Widow”, the latest Marvel spectacle, collected around 60 million US dollars in the first three days of availability on Disney + Premium Access.

Scarlett Johansson, who played the superassassin Black Widow in eight films, sued Disney Thursday, claiming that the simultaneous opening of “Black Widow” on Disney + “dramatically” reduced box office revenues, costing her tens of millions of dollars in compensation . Her lawsuit drew a glowing response from Disney.

Daily business briefing

Updated

July 30, 2021, 7:43 p.m. ET

“Jungle Cruise” had what it takes to be a box-office hit. Mr. Johnson is perhaps the financially strongest movie star in the world, someone who can fill seats with the mere presence of a theater tent. Mrs. Blunt is not lazy in this department either; Her most recent film, A Quiet Place Part II (Paramount), was a huge hit in May, raising about $ 48 million in North American theaters in the first three days and eventually about $ 300 million worldwide.

In addition, “Jungle Cruise” was based on a classic Disney theme park ride, gave it built-in audience awareness, and got Disney’s unrivaled marketing machinery going. Disney justified a king’s ransom for the film in hopes that it could become the next “Pirates of the Caribbean,” a five-film franchise (also based on a Disneyland ride) that sells for $ 4.5 billion the box office and created a merchandising bonanza.

At the beginning of the summer, Hollywood, citing the introduction of vaccines and the pent-up demand, had high hopes for a box office spike. Instead, a few films have been successful – particularly those like “A Quiet Place Part II” and “F9”, which hit theaters exclusively in June – and a parade of others has disappointed, including “Snake Eyes: GI Joe Origins”. In the Heights ”,“ Old ”and“ Black Widow ”.

In particular, Mr. Gross criticized the “Jungle Cruise” concept. Action adventure as a genre has struggled over the past decade, he noted, although the series “Jumanji” (Sony) and “Jurassic World” (Universal) were exceptions. Overall, “Jungle Cruise” received lukewarm reviews, with some critics finding the film’s computer-generated effects cartoonish and not believable.

Audiences seemed to disagree, giving Jungle Cruise an A-minus rating in CinemaScore’s exit polls.

In a statement on Sunday, Disney said, “We continue to focus on giving consumers choice in these unprecedented times, and it is clear that fans and families will appreciate the opportunity to make choices about how to enjoy Disney’s world-class storytelling dearest want to enjoy. ”

With the ongoing coronavirus threat around the world, Disney noted, “Markets are open to varying degrees and not all exhibitors are currently open. Most markets also have capacity restrictions. ”According to Comscore, around 85 percent of theaters in North America are open.

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Entertainment

How David Ellison Constructed Skydance Into Hollywood’s Sensible Guess

How David Ellison Built Skydance Into Hollywood's Smart Bet

The equity deal with RedBird and CJ Entertainment valued Skydance at about $2.3 billion. At its current pace of growth — revenue is expected to increase more than 40 percent this year compared with last, the company said — Skydance could be worth $5 billion or more in a few years. Mr. Ellison would most likely pursue a sale or an initial public offering at that point.

Skydance could quickly become an acquisition target. After Amazon’s $8.45 billion purchase of MGM, content engines with access to established intellectual property, Skydance included, are hot prospects. Even if Skydance parts ways with Paramount next year, the expiring deal gives Skydance an incredible perk: the continuing right to invest in the Paramount franchises with which Skydance is already involved. “Star Trek.” “Mission: Impossible.” “Jack Ryan.” “G.I. Joe.” “Top Gun.”

Comcast, which needs to boost its Peacock streaming service, could be a buyer. So could Apple, which considered picking up MGM. This spring, Skydance received feelers from a special-purpose acquisition corporation, or SPAC, led by Kevin A. Mayer, Disney’s former streaming chief.

“It’s true that we have had some interesting conversations lately, but our growth curve is still significant and if we keep working hard and stay adaptive that should afford us a lot of optionality in the future,” Mr. Ellison said, sounding more like an M.B.A. graduate than a budding entertainment tycoon.

Skydance has wide-ranging expansion plans. Amy Hennig, a former senior creative executive at Electronic Arts, is building a video game division. Another department focuses on virtual-reality content. Mr. Ellison recently hired Luis Fernández, a 20-year Disney veteran, to start a consumer products business. But Skydance’s future rests on scripted content and the degree to which it can create pay-dirt movie and television franchises out of whole cloth, as it appears to have done with “The Old Guard.”

Some people in Hollywood remain skeptical that Skydance has the creative expertise to pull it off. Mr. Ellison and his team have excelled at putting projects together (29 films and television series sold to streaming services in two years). But execution — quality — has been inconsistent. And quality matters: The Skydance-made “6 Underground,” an action comedy directed by Michael Bay, drew views from a blockbuster 83 million Netflix accounts in late 2019. But the movie also received less-than-stellar reviews, lessening Netflix’s interest in a sequel.

A stream of well-reviewed original hits would force Hollywood to finally take Mr. Ellison seriously as a creative power.

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The Swag Should Go On: Hollywood’s Pandemic Oscar Marketing campaign

The Swag Must Go On: Hollywood’s Pandemic Oscar Campaign

These blocks are usually full of voters; Paramount Pictures is there, as is Raleigh Studios, where Netflix rents production space. With most of the people in Los Angeles still holed up at home, the thoroughfare was eerily quiet at 5:30 p.m. last Monday. Actual crickets chirped at Paramount’s closed Bronson Gate, which had a sign that read, “By government order, access to the studio is now restricted. “

Funny at best, absurd at worst?

“The public must be so confused,” said Ms. Stone.

None of the studios or streaming services looking for awards would comment on this article. Campaigns are commonplace but remain a taboo subject. No film company wants to look like it is trying to manipulate voters.

However, it’s easy to understand where they come from.

“Like a political campaign, you have to rise at the right moment,” said Paul Hardart, director of entertainment, media and technology programs at New York University’s Stern School of Business. “At this point, you need the maximum exposure. And that’s hard to do. How do you get up to date at the right time? “

So the prey must go on.

As part of its promotion for Nomadland about an impoverished van resident, Searchlight Pictures sent a bound copy of the script to voters. The Hollywood press corps received “Nomadland” wine glasses, a “Nomadland” license plate, “Nomadland” key rings, a “Nomadland” t-shirt and a 5 x 2 foot “Nomadland” sunscreen.

To celebrate the virtual premiere of the film on February 18, Searchlight, in collaboration with local small businesses, delivered a “curated concession box” to the homes of the invited people. This included artisanal beef dried meat, jam with wild berries, oranges, pears, dried apricots, dill cucumber slices, banana bread, salami (“humanly raised”) and a chocolate canister.

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Lynn Stalmaster, Hollywood’s ‘Grasp Caster,’ Dies at 93

Lynn Stalmaster, Hollywood’s ‘Master Caster,’ Dies at 93

Lynn Stalmaster, a compassionate and tenacious casting director who changed the careers of hundreds of actors including John Travolta, Jeff Bridges and Christopher Reeve and who cast hundreds of Hollywood films and television programs, died on February 12th at his Los home Angeles. He was 93 years old.

The cause was heart failure, said his son Lincoln.

Billy Wilder, Robert Wise, Hal Ashby, Mike Nichols, Sydney Pollack, and Norman Jewison all relied on Mr. Stalmaster’s ability to identify a character’s inner workings and match it to the thousands of actors who lived in his mental rolodex. This alchemical process, as Tom Donahue, the filmmaker of “Casting By,” a 2012 documentary about the craft put it, made Mr. Stalmaster’s work a fine art.

“Lynn had a wonderful gift,” said Mr. Jewison, the director and producer of such films as “In The Heat of the Night” and “Fiddler on the Roof,” both of which were cast by Mr. Stalmaster. Mr. Jewison was the first filmmaker to give a casting director his own film credit when he starred Mr. Stalmaster in “The Thomas Crown Affair” (released in 1968).

“I always encouraged him to find unusual people,” Jewison said. “For ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ I had to find actors who could speak Russian. Lynn found her in San Francisco, where there was a large Russian community. None of them were actors. He was so awesome. And he was very good at reading with actors. He could keep her calm and safe. “

A shy teenager who trained as an actor in the 1950s and was in the trenches of audition and worked on television and radio, Mr Stalmaster was focused on the actor’s experience and became a fierce advocate for those he referred to believed. After meeting As 18-year-old John Travolta, he pushed for the role that was eventually cast on Randy Quaid in “The Last Detail,” the 1973 Hal Ashby film starring Jack Nicholson.

There was a dead heat between the actors, Mr Travolta recalled in a telephone interview, but Mr Quaid’s physical presence was more like that of the character, as Mr Ashby and Mr Stalmaster told Mr Travolta on a midnight phone call praising his work.

At the time, Mr. Travolta was doing theater and advertising in New York, but Mr. Stalmaster was so believing in him that he persecuted him for two years. When a role for a character in a comedy television pilot emerged at a Brooklyn high school, Mr. Stalmaster urged him to turn down a lead role on a Broadway show and return to Los Angeles for an audition.

He got the role – which turned out to be the boastful punk manqué Vinnie Barbarino on a show that would find its own place in television history: “Welcome Back, Kotter”.

“He was pretty determined,” said Mr. Travolta of Mr. Stalmaster. “He didn’t let anyone consider her. After ‘The Last Detail’ he told me, ‘Don’t worry. That will happen.'”

Mr. Stalmaster has been involved in countless other careers.

He nudged Mike Nichols to cast a young Dustin Hoffman on “The Graduate”. LeVar Burton was in college when Mr. Stalmaster cast him as a lead in the 1977 hit television series “Roots”.

Geena Davis was trained as an actress but worked as a model when Mr. Stalmaster cast her in a supporting role in Tootsie, Sydney Pollack’s 1982 romantic comedy starring Mr. Hoffman. It was her first audition and the role would be her film debut.

After seeing Christopher Reeve in a play with Katharine Hepburn, Mr. Stalmaster suggested him for a small role in “Gray Lady Down” (1978), Mr. Reeve’s first film role, and then successfully campaigned for him to be the Starring in “Superman,” ”Released that same year.

“Lynn understood the actor’s process and the actor’s plight,” said David Rubin, another casting director and president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. (Mr. Stalmaster was his former boss and mentor.) Mr. Stalmaster’s career has shown that “a success in Hollywood and a person are not mutually exclusive”.

In 2016, Mr. Stalmaster was the first and so far only casting director to receive an honorary Oscar for his work. At the Academy Awards, Mr. Bridges recalled how Mr. Stalmaster started his own career in the early 1970s. At the time, Mr. Bridges was in his early twenties and was trying to figure out whether he wanted a life in business when Mr. Stalmaster offered him a role in “The Iceman Cometh,” who would play John Frankenheimer’s 1973 film about Eugene O’Neill.

“These are some hard things,” Mr. Bridges recalled thinking when telling the audience of the awards. “It scared me as hell. I didn’t mean to do it to tell you the truth. I didn’t think I could do it. “

But he did, and the experience – terrifying but joyful too, he said – made him realize that he could live a life in acting. “I have to thank you, man,” said Mr. Bridges, nodding to Mr. Stalmaster, “for showing me this street. Lynn Stalmaster is the master caster. “

Lynn Arlen Stalmaster was born on November 17, 1927 in Omaha, Neb. His father, Irvin Stalmaster, was a judge on the Nebraska Supreme Court. his mother Estelle (Lapidus) Stalmaster was a housewife. Lynn had severe asthma and when he was 12 the family moved to Los Angeles because of the temperate climate.

A student at Beverly Hills High School, he took an interest in theater and radio and, after completing his military service, earned a bachelor’s and master’s degree from the UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television in Los Angeles.

Mr. Stalmaster has had roles in a number of films, including “Flying Leathernecks,” a 1951 picture of John Wayne, and a job as a production assistant at Gross-Krasne, a company that made films for television in the early 1950s. When his casting director retired, he was promoted to the job and soon opened his own agency.

“I would spend the days meeting new actors, all this great new talent,” he said on Casting By, the documentary. He was working on Gunsmoke and other hit television shows in 1956 when Robert Wise, the director who directed “West Side Story” and “The Sound of Music” asked him to cast the 1958 film “I Want to Live” Susan Hayward based on the story of Barbara Graham, a prostitute who was sentenced to death row.

Mr. Wise wanted actors who looked like the actual characters in Graham’s life. It was Mr. Stalmaster’s big break, he recalled, as he found new faces to round out the cast and gave the film “a truthfulness, the truth” the director wanted to achieve.

His marriage to Lea Alexander ended in divorce, as did an early, short marriage. In addition to his son Lincoln, Mr. Stalmaster survived his daughter Lara Beebower. two grandchildren; and his brother Hal.

Mr. Stalmaster’s friendliness was as much an element of his art as his matchmaking skills, Mr. Rubin said. But he wasn’t a pushover and he was enormously persuasive, “firm in his creative point of view,” said Mr Rubin, “but extremely adept at convincing others that it was indeed their idea.”