Jungle – COOPER GENERAL NEWS

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.

Teams of researchers and volunteers fanned out across the mass transit systems of 60 cities, collecting thousands of samples from 2015 to 2017. They swabbed a wide variety of surfaces, including turnstiles, railings, ticket kiosks and benches inside transit stations and subway cars. (In a handful of cities that did not have subway systems, the teams focused on the bus or train system.)

The scientists’ subterranean sampling expeditions often attracted attention. Some commuters grew so curious that they joined the volunteer swabbing corps, while others insisted that they absolutely did not want to know what was living on the subway poles. Passengers occasionally misunderstood what the researchers were doing with their tiny swabs. “One man effusively thanked us for cleaning the subway,” Dr. Mason said.

The researchers also collected air samples from the transit systems of six cities — New York, Denver, London, Oslo, Stockholm and Hong Kong — for a companion paper on the “air microbiome” that was published on Wednesday in the journal Microbiome.

“This is huge,” said Erica Hartmann, a microbiologist at Northwestern University who was not involved in the study. “The number of samples and the geographic diversity of samples — that’s unprecedented.”

Then the team extracted and sequenced the DNA from each sample to identify the species it contained. In total, across all of the surface samples, they found 4,246 known species of microorganisms. Two-thirds of these were bacteria, while the remainder were a mix of fungi, viruses and other kinds of microbes.

But that was just the beginning: They also found 10,928 viruses and 748 kinds of bacteria that had never been documented. “We could see these were real — they’re microorganisms — but they’re not anywhere in any database,” said Daniela Bezdan, the former executive director of MetaSUB who is now a research associate at the University Hospital Tübingen in Germany.

The vast majority of these organisms probably pose little risk to humans, experts said. Nearly all of the new viruses they found are likely to be bacteriophages, or viruses that infect bacteria, Dr. Danko said. Moreover, genetic sequencing cannot distinguish between organisms that are dead and those that are alive, and no environment is sterile. In fact, our bodies rely on a rich and dynamic community of microbes in order to function properly.