Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

[SurfD]

Saw this over the weekend during a rare double feature with Inception on the tail end.

Absolutely fucking brilliant from start to finish. I went in knowing I'd like it and was in no way disappointed. I knew nothing about the comic. This movie is a zeitgeist movie for the NES generation, perfectly encapsulating everything about them in one bite-sized chunk. Quick cut film editing, razor sharp wit, the visual style of an 80's TV show mixed with anime (come on, the changing hair colors alone should clue anyone in that this is a manga given form), the heavy reliance on music all throughout, the compressed time transitions. Utterly brilliant. So many good jokes, good action, great art design, good acting. I don't see Scott as Cera's typical character at all. In fact, he's a bit of a shallow dickbag in the beginning - he's dating a highschooler that he clearly doesn't really even give much of a shit about, who is really only there to bolster his ego. As soon as he sees Ramona, he cheats on Knives and dumps her for the hotter, older chick. That is so not Cera's typical guy and he plays it well.

I love the fact that they never called attention to the weirdness surrounding the world (villains turning into coins, pee bars, sound effects, kung-fu fighting) with some kind of wink wink nudge nudge mugging, the characters just accepted it as natural. That's a hard act to pull off in something so over the top.

I can understand why some people wouldn't like the movie, as it's really a strange hodge podge of so much stuff, but really, if you were under the age of 30 when the NES is big, you should get screaming fits of laughter all through this movie. If you do not, you are a horribly broken person.

This.

One of my favourite bits (being a Canadian), was the scene where Ramona comments about using the Sub Space Highway that runs through Scott's head, finishin off with "Oh, I forgot: you dont have those in Canada".  Typical American / Canadian interaction you get all the time, just adjusted into the "wierd zone" that his world exists in.

[Threash]

http://www.cracked.com/funny-4739-scott-pilgrim/

Pretty depressing, yet right on target sadly.

[Merusk]

When did WUA start writing for Cracked?

[Ironwood]

Geeks don't matter, film at eleven.

[Mosesandstick]

I dare you to tell that to Anon.

[WindupAtheist]

Hollywood really needs to learn that a few thousand excited geeks may be able to fag up the entire internet with how excited they are about a given movie, but that doesn't mean anyone else gives a shit. They never seem to realize what a loud buzz can be made by sufficiently motivated people online, who are nevertheless too few to matter when the tickets are counted.

I dare you to tell that to Anon.

What a fucking pointless thing to say. So have two dozen grubby nerds playing Rick Astley on a boombox in Guy Fawkes masks destroyed Scientology yet?

[Mosesandstick]

Lighten up. There's no more green here. It was a comment on exactly what you just said.

[WindupAtheist]

Why the hell aren't we doing green anymore?

[Lakov_Sanite]

Why the hell aren't we doing green anymore?

The titles for episode's one, two and three should have been in green.

[HaemishM]

We don't use green because IGN used it or some shit.

Hollywood really needs to learn that a few thousand excited geeks may be able to fag up the entire internet with how excited they are about a given movie, but that doesn't mean anyone else gives a shit.

This. Hollywood, however, uses buzz as a form of currency. It doesn't use it WISELY, mind you, as they all too often misinterpret buzz as a one to one ratio to dollars spent, and frankly, it's much more unpredictable than that. When you are talking mass market, at the theater dollars, pre-release buzz really is worth jack and shit. First weekend buzz is golden, however.

I firmly believe Scott Pilgrim will break even based purely on DVD and international numbers, but it will never be a hit.

[DraconianOne]

I firmly believe Scott Pilgrim will break even based purely on DVD and international numbers, but it will never be a hit.

They said the same about Austin Powers as well. In fact, no, they weren't even as generous. Scott Pilgrim will easily break even with DVD sales - I will go on record here and predict that it will make more than $30 million. Behind the scenes, it won't be a loss maker for the studio because of all the TV syndication and in-flight licensing deals that they can get out of it (which never get included in sales figures but count for a lot of the profit behind the scenes.) The only reason Box Office numbers are ever touted by the studio is as a way of saying "look, this film made no money. Therefore we can't afford to pay any fucker who worked in it their miniscule share of the profits that we agreed in the contract because there was no profit made. Honest, guv!" Case in point - New Line and the LOTR trilogy. Made a fuck load of money, but New Line went "hey! That was a really expensive film to make - like really, really expensive and despite it making all the money in the world, we haven't broken even yet so, um, afraid we can't pay you."

Mafia accountants have nothing on the film industry number wranglers.

[WindupAtheist]

The fact that a project will eventually generate some sort of profit doesn't really matter anywhere near as much as fans of the current flop du jour always seem to think it does. It's all about expected return on investment versus reality. Sure this movie will eventually turn a relatively small profit. But if the studio wanted a small profit, they could have made a much smaller/faster/cheaper movie that actually lived up to it's limited expectations.

More to the point, they could have made three of them.

There's a ratio of expenditure to income that they're looking for, and it's not everything they spent plus one dollar two years from now. It's like the people on any MMO forum going "Sure the producers of My Favorite IP Online talked a bunch of shit about competing with WoW, but even with their disastrous sub-EQ1 subscription numbers I'll bet they're turning a profit!" Yeah, the profit of a third-rate generic Korean grinder that was made in one-fifth the time.

They won't go out of business, but don't expect anyone to look at things and go "Yeah we need to get right on the sequel to this, and make more things in this vein!"

[UnSub]

As a contrast, "The Last Airbender" has at least made a profit on its production costs, but maybe not marketing costs.

"Scott Pilgrim" is still nowhere near any kind of profit.

[Johny Cee]

I firmly believe Scott Pilgrim will break even based purely on DVD and international numbers, but it will never be a hit.

They said the same about Austin Powers as well. In fact, no, they weren't even as generous. Scott Pilgrim will easily break even with DVD sales - I will go on record here and predict that it will make more than $30 million. Behind the scenes, it won't be a loss maker for the studio because of all the TV syndication and in-flight licensing deals that they can get out of it (which never get included in sales figures but count for a lot of the profit behind the scenes.) The only reason Box Office numbers are ever touted by the studio is as a way of saying "look, this film made no money. Therefore we can't afford to pay any fucker who worked in it their miniscule share of the profits that we agreed in the contract because there was no profit made. Honest, guv!" Case in point - New Line and the LOTR trilogy. Made a fuck load of money, but New Line went "hey! That was a really expensive film to make - like really, really expensive and despite it making all the money in the world, we haven't broken even yet so, um, afraid we can't pay you."

Mafia accountants have nothing on the film industry number wranglers.

1. Scott Pilgrim has made approximately $30 million, with a budget between $60-80 million and (widely reported) another $30+ million in promotional costs.  In other words, Scott Pilgrim isn't going to earn back the cost of advertising the thing let alone making it.

Austin Powers, on the other hand, was always a profitable franchise if you just look at production costs.  It may not have lived up to expectations, but all three movies did considerably better than their production budget.

2. DVD sales are declining.  Google "DVD sales trends" or something similar.  Between Netflix, On Demand, or piracy people just aren't shelling out for a $20 DVD.

3. Even if somehow Scott Pilgrim becomes a massive cult success in later years, what you aren't looking at is the cash flow situation and the cost of financing/opportunity cost of the money tied up with Pilgrim.  Say it takes 5 years to break even....  that means the studio is financing that cash deficit either through borrowings (interest) or equity...  with comparable hits either in interest/financing difficulties not just to interest expense but also to how this is tieing up tens of millions of dollars that aren't being productive.  If it's being financed through equity, it's directly hitting your financial rations (ROE/ROI) which is going to hit your stock price.

4. Box office numbers are the best way to gauge interest among potential viewers for things like licensing and premium channel agreements.  This movie is going to be rushed to DVD and get the 2 week spin on a premium channel before getting relegated to weekdays at 2 AM, and end up on Syfy in 2 years.

5. Accounting issues.  Film industry accounting (which has it's own separate area of GAAP, like healthcare accounting and oil industry accounting) is bizarre when determining profitability mostly because the rules are really lax as to how you can assign operating overhead and fixed costs to project costs, which really doesn't match up to regular cost accounting or Construction/Contracting job accounting.

Basically, the rules let the studio assign large amounts of overhead costs/costs of failed films to their successful films for accounting for the project....  with multi-year projects like LOTR, the rules are really lax about how fast you can write off/assign the development costs for films as well, whereas regular accounting there are reams of rules as to how quickly you can amortize your costs for long-term projects.

At least that's what I vaguely remember from a quick perusal of film accounting.

[Teleku]

Hollywood really needs to learn that a few thousand excited geeks may be able to fag up the entire internet with how excited they are about a given movie, but that doesn't mean anyone else gives a shit. They never seem to realize what a loud buzz can be made by sufficiently motivated people online, who are nevertheless too few to matter when the tickets are counted.

We better hope they don't, since this is apparently the only way good movies can get made in Hollywood now.  

We can keep tricking them into making good movies for a loss, while surviving on the big profits from all the horrible movies.  I don't see a problem with this situation.  

[Khaldun]

What has influence over subsequent films (and other popular culture) does not equal what made or exceeded its expected profit. It doesn't NOT equal it either: the question of the impact of a given film or work of popular culture is kind of perpendicular to what made or exceeded expected profit. That's what makes analyzing the past economics of culture industries so complicated and confusing, and makes predicting what their future output (and economic expectations) might be cloaked in such mystery. It's not even that the studios deliberately try to make their balance sheets so murky so that they can assfuck someone out of a percentage they took in their contract--it's that people in the culture industry are constantly telling stories designed to make themselves look like gifted trend-spotters and everyone else look like a dumbfuck hack who got taken for a ride, and the net effect of ten thousand stories of this kind (crapped up by a lot of noise from observers, critics, geeks, etc on the Internetz) is to permanently shroud claims about whether a film, game, TV show or anything else was "successful" under a misty haze.

There are plenty of films that appear to have made fucking huge box office that bafflingly don't seem to inspire much in the way of imitation. There are films that appear to have nearly ruined the companies that bankrolled them which end up having a huge aesthetic influence on later films, or turn into cult successes years and years later. There are films prized by weird nerdy subcultures which suddenly leap into mainstream culture a decade later, and films which were boffo box office and degenerate into strange footnotes remembered only by oddball enthusiasts.

You have to separate the question of "did this make money, and the kind of money it was supposed to have made" from "did this film have a big impact or influence later films".

[Nevermore]

Some excellent movies end up being box office flops; some truly awful movies end up making a ton of money.  This is not news.  I could list quite a few movies that are among people's favorites that never made their money back when they were originally released.  See: Blade Runner.

[pxib]

I could list quite a few movies that are among people's favorites that never made their money back when they were originally released.

Well yes, and for years it has benefitted studios to have perennial classics they could re-release every few years in different formats... and pick up residuals from television broadcasts ad infinitum. That's still not something you can plan for, it's just something that happens. And there's a lot of middle ground of movies that are cult favorites, or well known for their influence in modern film, that still remain publically unpopular and never make back their money.

If they have a big budget, that's just bad mojo.

[Mattemeo]

It's been out in the UK for a little over 2 weeks now, and I've been to see it three times. I've actually only seen it twice, as the first time I went to see it, on release day, it was sold out on all showings; not something I'd expected at all.
A week later on my second try, I got the ticket early and even then the cinema was packed. Sadly I came down with the mother of all stinking colds while watching it and that severely hampered my enjoyment of the movie to the point where I left at the end believing I'd seen something great but completely unable to feel anything about it. Waited another week for the cold to settle down and I saw it again last night, and properly experienced it. Oh yeah, and the cinema was packed, again. I think its worldwide box-office will be a lot more generous than the American one, this is not a movie that's going to be a loss by any standards, even if it has to rely on DVD sales. If they've spent $30 million marketting it in the US, that's hardly the makers fault. It's barely had a whisper of advertising in the UK, but I think Wright's name attached to the film has a far bigger sway over here than practically anything else.

Anyway, after a second, less head-fucked viewing, picked up on a few more jokes and visuals (stars in Knives' eyes as she watches Sex Bob-omb etc), cemented my impression that Wallace and Kim are the best characters. Reading the books at the moment - been aware of them for some time but the moment I knew Edgar Wright was making a movie of them I wanted to steer clear, didn't want to judge the movie on terms of adherance to the books; I am a fan of Edgar Wright first. Books are great, nice seeing some characters expanded and differing plot lines but I really appreciate the conciseness of the movie in comparison.

[WindupAtheist]

Kick Ass was a somewhat more successful (and much less expensive) movie than Scott Pilgrim is turning out to be, but it's the closest and most recent analogue I can think of for comparison purposes. Let's see what it can tell us.

Let's say that the foreign gross comes out roughly equal to the domestic gross, as happened with Kick Ass. In that case the movie will have more or less broken even with the most lowball estimates of it's production budget sans marketing and distribution costs. Once you add those costs back in and allow for the possibility of the highball budget estimates, it'll finish anywhere from 30 to 50 million dollars in the red.

Let's say the DVD costs 30 bucks and wholesales for 20. The studio profit margin was about 50 or 60 percent on a DVD last time I heard, so they'll be making 10 or 12 bucks per sale. That means they would need to sell anywhere from 2.5 to 5 million copies just to finish paying off the costs of the theatrical run.

Kick Ass came out on DVD about a month ago and is reputedly doing well. By doing well I mean it's sold about 800k copies in North America to date, mostly in the first couple weeks. Between 8/22 and 8/29 it only sold a little under 60k copies, for example. I can't find any figures on overseas DVD sales, but let's just assume that they follow the same pattern as the box office and are equal to domestic sales. Even if Scott Pilgrim sells just as well as the somewhat more robust Kick Ass, those first several million profitless sales are a huge bite. By the time the studio gets to start keeping any money, it's likely there will be only a trickle to be had.

Now, these are all very back-of-the-napkin numbers I'm running. I wouldn't swear by them. The box office gross could vary, DVD profit margins could have changed in the last few years, the disc could cost something different, it could sell better or worse than I'm projecting, TV rights will throw a few bucks in there somewhere, etcetera. But I believe I've painted a much more realistic picture of what's going on here than the usual "Uh foreign and DVD will save the day somehow..." muttering you get from fanboys whenever one of these nerd-chic pictures flops on it's ass.

It's okay to love a flop, guys. Really. I've gotten to really like David Lynch's Dune, and that was a giant flop that never even turned into a hip cult thing. It'll be all right. I don't like being the designated sourpuss of box office doom (I love it) but there it is.

[DraconianOne]

Kick Ass was a somewhat more successful (and much less expensive) movie than Scott Pilgrim is turning out to be, but it's the closest and most recent analogue I can think of for comparison purposes. Let's see what it can tell us.

There's a famous William Goldman quote that comes to mind that applies to most of this: "Nobody knows nothing." He said it in relation to how do to determine whether or not a movie is going to be successful.

Is Scott Pilgrim going to be a runaway hit in the movies? It's probably a safe bet to say no. Is it going to make it's money back in the box office on this premiere release? Certainly not in the US and worldwide has got a big deficit to make up. That being said, it's still got a lot of territories to be released into - it doesn't even reach Germany until January next year and while the German cinemagoers may not like it, they're still potentially worth $5-6m worth of revenue. Or maybe it'll only be $600k - who knows?  Will it be a hit on DVD? Same answer - who knows? It could only take $10m but it might do a Hot Fuzz and take $33m in the US alone. (I still stand by my prediction of SP doing well on DVD and that's based on nothing but being an antsy bastard.)

But the figures that we're talking about are on the verge of being made up too. Is the movie budget $60m as per BoxOfficeMojo or $85m going on The Numbers' numbers? Is that pure above/below the line costs or does it also include marketing/distribution - and no, you don't know what it includes because the budget details are never fully released and it's idle speculation on everybodys part. So add it on if you want to up the numbers or don't if you don't. (FWIW, most budget sheets I've seen - albeit at a far lesser level - do include post-production costs like transfers, marketing, dvd production, festival entries etc. Also, from what I gather a lot of the marketing budget for studio-produced films was written off at a company level across the whole slate of a years releases rather than against a single release which is why numbers for marketing are so vague).

Even the revenue figures for BoxOfficeMojo aren't accurate at this stage because they don't include the US$2.75m that SP's 4 week run in Australia has netted so far.

So: at the risk of further being called a nerd-chic fanboy (although I still haven't been to see SP and at this point, am thinking about waiting 6 months until I can rent it) I'm going to put my stake in the ground. I wager that by a year after it's release, Scott Pilgrim will have broken even and that the Box Office sales and DVD revenue as shown on BoxOfficeMojo will be greater than or equal to $60m - as the production budget currently stands on the same site.)  If the published production budget figure has escalated to $85m or greater on BOM then I will concede that it is an unmitigated flop if the deficit is greater than $15m.

Yeah, I'm drunk. Wanna make something of it?

[WindupAtheist]

I'm tired of explaining shit just to have some twat go "Buh-buh-but nobody knows anything for sure, they do all sorts of crazy shit with the numbers!" You want something a lot shorter? This movie is beaten in both opening weekend and total gross by such recent luminaries as Step Up 3-D and Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore. It didn't open quite as well as Marmaduke (fucking lol) but will probably scrape ahead of it in total gross within the next couple weeks.

It's a flop. Suck my dick.

[Ratman_tf]

There's a famous William Goldman quote that comes to mind that applies to most of this: "Nobody knows nothing." He said it in relation to how do to determine whether or not a movie is going to be successful.

Speed Racer should have done far better than it did, by the Movie Formula. It had name actors, zippy special effects, loud music and a plain and simple story. I don't know about the merchandising and whatnot, but according to Wiki, it didn't even make it's money back.

Much as they'd like to think, there is no magic formula for making anything popular or sucessful, or everyone would be doing it.  

[Abagadro]

People don't seem to be taking into account that the studio only sees a percentage of the box office gross which shows how far in the hole it currently is.  With a 60M budget, it would likely need a worldwide gross of around 100M, plus dvd/tv sales to make any money.

[HaemishM]

Yes, it flopped. As I said, anyone who didn't think this would tank at the box office is deluding themselves. It's so niche it hurts.

Still an awesome fucking movie, and objectively better than Revenge of the Sith. 

[Samwise]

I bet it would have made a lot more money if it'd had some mechs fighting dragons or something.

[WindupAtheist]

Speed Racer should have done far better than it did, by the Movie Formula. It had name actors, zippy special effects, loud music and a plain and simple story. I don't know about the merchandising and whatnot, but according to Wiki, it didn't even make it's money back.

Much as they'd like to think, there is no magic formula for making anything popular or sucessful, or everyone would be doing it.  

I had Speed Racer pegged as a giant turd-in-waiting from the first trailer. It amazes me someone greenlit that, and that the public/media reaction was anything besides "FLOP AHOY!" from the get-go. It's the same sort of bafflement I'm filled with whenever someone puts Kevin Costner in a movie.

[Mattemeo]

It's a fucking great movie. Box-office is completely irrelevant whichever way you swing it. So it's not going to make its money back in a month, is that really a massive concern? It's hardly going to cause the career death of anyone involved from actors to producers to Edgar Wright. It'll happily shuffle along on word of mouth for ages. It was made, it is good, and it's still incredibly zeitgeisty (the worst thing about the movie is the pale imitations it's going to spawn), that's an end to it. Can't make people go to the movies (unless your name is James Cameron). You can hope they'll pick up on a good thing eventually, though.

[WindupAtheist]

It'll happily shuffle along on word of mouth for ages. It was made, it is good, and it's still incredibly zeitgeisty

Zeitgeisty word-of-mouth sleepers may not open big, but they tend to hang around for a while. This movie plummeted out of the top ten with speed and is rapidly shedding the vast majority of its viewing sites as theater owners move to fill their screens with other things. There is nothing in particular that marks its prospects as superior to those of a dozen other movies that no one will remember in six months.

I don't like being so negative (I love it) but if you don't care about its financial performance then quit talking about it.

[Ratman_tf]

I'd mention how stuff like Dark Crystal and Labyrinth became classics that still sell DVDs and make money for their publishers, but nowadays there's such a glut of movies, that I doubt much of anything will be like that again.

[Paelos]

I'd mention how stuff like Dark Crystal and Labyrinth became classics that still sell DVDs and make money for their publishers, but nowadays there's such a glut of movies, that I doubt much of anything will be like that again.

Fight Club.

[LK]

This reminds me of a situation today where I read an article speaking about the popularity of Female Shepard from Mass Effect only to have the numbers come out and show that 80% of people who play Mass Effect play Male Shepard. (Article is here.)

[Mattemeo]

This reminds me of a situation today where I read an article speaking about the popularity of Female Shepard from Mass Effect only to have the numbers come out and show that 80% of people who play Mass Effect play Male Shepard. (Article is here.)

Yeah, I saw some of the statistics that article alludes to... the numbers are bizarre. I can't stand the guy doing Male Sheppard's voice. He's practically speaking in binary, so utterly devoid of life, emotion or nuance. I compared him to the lovechild of Stephen Hawking and a Speak'n'Spell recently and now I feel bad for marring the parents by association. No wonder the majority of players seem to just play him as a total Jar-head. Soldier being more popular than every other class combined is really worrying for the prospects of future game variety if Bioware's shareholders get wind of how much development time was wasted on the rest.

But yeah, I see where you're coming from. There was this huge enthusiasm for Scott Pilgrim, right up until release, and then inexplicable silence, despite rave reviews. Voices and numbers not adding up.

[LK]

I also played Engineer and found it to be vastly superior to Soldier in avenging the fallen.

We're in a minority, and it's ok, because there isn't anything remotely like Scott Pilgrim on the horizon. This was our Serenity, we got it, and hopefully we can all move on now.

[Sheepherder]

I compared him to the lovechild of Stephen Hawking and a Speak'n'Spell recently and now I feel bad for marring the parents by association.

I've read somewhere that Hawking was asked whether he wanted to upgrade his little text-to-speech device to something that was made in the last 15 years, and refused on the grounds that it's more or less integral to his identity now.