Those Good Old Days(™)...
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Those Good Old Days(™)...
I meant in terms of audience. "Joker" advertises like a psychological thriller that borders on horror; it's a movie with limited appeal.
People traditionally don't turn out for serious material they think will depress them. (Cf: "Logan" and "Nightcrawler," both of which made good money relative to their budgets but had modest takes compared to other movies in their genres.)
The closest analogue to "Joker" isn't "Deadpool" or "Aquaman." It's "Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile."
Logan made $226 million. Joker would love that and will probably do around the same amount.
Looking forward to it, but the Venice raves are exactly what happens in Telluride for something like Waves and Judy... Always need to wait for the second wave of reviews in these type of cases.
Yeah I'm not making any box office predictions.
I'm just saying theres a bulk of cinema goers that see no trailers, just show up and say "whats playing now? One please."
Edit: that's not speculation, btw. I've seen it with my own eyes.
Yeah. Nobody does this, really. I mean, I've seen people show up at the last minute and make choices off the cuff, but they have a sense of who's in the movie and what it's about before they slap down their 10 bucks.
Otherwise, what are they basing the choice on? The title alone?
This would suggest ticket buyers --- at least a group large enough to move the needle --- wandered into movies like "Hereditary," and "Midsommar" without a clue. I don't buy it. (Taken to the next logical step, it'd also mean people rented or streamed movies without knowing anything about them, and I don't think that happens either.)
I think you might be underestimating the ubiquity of advertising. Not just on TV, where trailers play constantly, but on social media. I've seen 15 second ad spots for "Joker" online without trying and the movie isn't out for another month.
Either way, randos wasting their money won't push the movie past the $300MM+ mark in North America.
(I'm not making too many predictions, either, but I'm kinda curious now. If Pop turns out to be right, that'd be pretty exciting.)
I’d imagine people will show up to Joker based on name recognition and the brand alone, despite any of the marketing. Venom made a killing last year, and he’s a villain who’s nowhere near the household name level of recognition that the Joker is. Suicide Squad also did gangbusters, in large part due to how heavily the Joker (and Harley Quinn) were pushed in the marketing, because the Joker is quite possibly one of, if not THE most instantly recognizable super villains in pop culture, period. And people will instantly recognize this as being a film about that same Joker from the Batman franchise and similarly turn out in droves to see what’s up. The R rating might turn some families away, but I wouldn’t underestimate this thing’s potential just yet.
Venom had a superhero trailer. You don't need to know what venom was before that.
This whole conversation is odd.
*AHEM* I worked at an upper middle brow arthousey multiplex a few years ago and I can say this happens. All. The. Time. I don't understand it, but I think people are in the neighborhood and are trying to kill time or something. Lots of older people would come in and flip through the synopsis book and/or look at the actors and title and such. People like this would ask us for advice, but usually people like that are so normie tier in their taste in entertainment, that we would give them the most middle brow "safe" movie we were playing (ie. Brooklyn over The Lobster even if most of the employees preferred The Lobster).
I was going to say this, yes. I think if we could figure out the percentage of actual people in the entire planet who know who the Joker is we'd be surprised at how large it is. So that on itself is a huge appeal - we know it's a somber, dark psychological thriller because we are nerds.
EDIT: And at least in Buenos Aires the random movie watcher definitively exists. It's always an old person.
You said you didn't want to make predictions, but then suggested there's a silent majority who will wander into "Joker" in numbers meaningful enough to impact the box office. At the level we're talking about, this translates into millions of ticket buyers.
I'm not saying you're lying. That would be weird of you to do and weirder for me to assume.
Pop, your anecdote literally includes an example of people researching a movie before they see it, and then buying a ticket based on star power and word-of-mouth.
I'm not surprised that happens at an arthouse. But I would be if I saw anyone do it at any of the bigger local chains.
My point is that there most certainly are people who will drive or stroll into a theater with the expectations of killing two hours with zero idea of what they want to see, zero research before they walk into the theater, zero idea of who stars in what movie, and zero word-of-mouth except from the rando guy working at the box office. When people say "word-of-mouth" I don't think they mean the dude at the box office. We never had that much power. Trust me.
Joker is also the biggest comic book villain in all of comics.
I cant count how many times I'm had to wait behind ticket buyers asking the movie theater attendant to explain what each movie is about.
I dont know where you are or what you do, but I envy you guys that live in cultured cities. I live in middle america with morons who wander around like zombies, I dont even understand how they managed to survive this long
This happens everywhere, Skitch. The theater I worked at was one of the more "cultured" theaters in frickin' San Francisco. Ya know, the most supposedly cultured city in America that isn't New York City. We still would get the marauding boomers who knew nothing of the movies we were playing.
How do these people survive?
It's odd to see articles that compare this to "other DC movies" and do the usual "Aquaman had this opening weekend" and "Wonder Woman made this much in the second week", even though it seems to me that nothing in the film itself connects it to any kind of DC universe or even the source material(?) Am I the crazy one here?
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