Shopping at LEGO or Amazon?
Please use our links:
LEGO.com •
Amazon
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
Walt Disney to lose millions on Lone Ranger film
Pretty bad news for the future of the Lone Ranger theme, I guess:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-23598825"Walt Disney has warned that its Lone Ranger summer blockbuster will lose it between $160m-$190m (£104m-£124m) after heavy spending on promotion failed to bring returns."
0
Shopping at LEGO.com or Amazon?
Please use our links: LEGO.com • Amazon
Recent discussions •
Categories •
Privacy Policy •
Brickset.com
Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. Sign in or register to get started.
Quick Links
Brickset.com is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, the Amazon.com.ca, Inc. Associates Program and the Amazon EU Associates Programme, which are affiliate advertising programs designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
Comments
A user rating of 6.7/10 on IMDB across 31,000 users is actually really good because IMDB scores tend to be on the lower side so it seems like a large majority of people who watched it actually liked the film itself. The critics in contrast only rated it at 3.7/10 which shows how out of touch professional critics are yet how important it is to buy them off because of the effective protection racket they run.
The colossal screwup here seems to have been that hundreds of millions were blown on ineffective marketing and that's where the loss is occurring. It seems they blew over $100 million on marketing without actually achieving anything, which isn't surprising as I've seen hundreds of posters and adverts for Monsters University but nothing in the UK for The Lone Ranger. It seems more than anything it's the marketing executives that need to be fired for spending so much money and not having anything to show for it.
I think in other discussions here the amount of people who said they liked it probably do outnumber those who said they don't by about 2:1 which does reflect the IMDB score it has quite closely. The problem has largely been one born of bad management rather than bad acting, directing and storywriting by the sounds of it. I haven't seen it yet but I intend to.
It seems the sets are selling well even if the film hasn't made up it's marketing budget. I don't know what happens in that case though, if the film is a flop and Disney axes any future products or further films then does Lego have the option of carrying on the sets if the sets themselves are successful? I don't think I've ever really seen a relatively new set sold out before, but maybe I don't look for the right ones. I just found it unusual to have such glaring gaps in shelf space in a Lego store like that for a specific range.
From their comments it does sound like the comments by Depp about bad reviews isn't just sour grapes. Odd.
You're absolutely right that the two are intrinsically linked in terms of determining overall financial success of the product but to achieve that success you need both a good product and good marketing whereas it seems in this case they had a good product, but bad marketing. This is why I think it's reasonable to feel a little sorry for the product if it was mostly decent but victim of an inept and incompetent marketing department.
1) Direct funding from industry to give good reviews. Bad reviews are given if they don't pay up.
2) By bringing in readers by getting interviews and exclusive news - interviews. Guess what happens if an actor doesn't want to deal with the press? They get slated, they become victims of hate stories and they get bad reviews. Play ball and give the press their interviews and they'll given you a good write up.
3) By creating populist/controversial headlines to sell views. $150million dollar flop! It'll never be as good as the original! Johnny Depp is racist as Tonto!
The problem is there's more money in being underhanded in that sort of business than there is in being honest. Giving honest reviews may get you a bit of advertising money or it may get you a few paid subscribers but that's never going to be as much as you'll get by telling a major studio you'll tell all your readers their new film is crap if they don't pay up.
There are reviewers and review sites out there that are honest, but when they're at an inherent financial disadvantage they find it difficult to compete with the large underhanded players. In this respect it's not really much different to the British press whereby papers such as The Daily Mail that routinely lie and make stuff up have much higher circulation figures and hence money than those that break real actual news and stick to the facts.
That's why if you want honest reviews then go see what the user reviews say. Aggregated numbers from multiple user reviews are always best, hence why IMDB's figures are such a good example. They don't care about money, they just tell you what the average consumer thinks..
And not so coincidentally, Baz Bambigoyne used to/may still write reviews for the mail, and routinely touted average films (and plays, and musicals) as much better than they are, presumably so he'd be more likely to get access for interviews from the major stars. For instance, the war of the worlds remake from a few years back was, according to Baz, 'the greatest action adventure film of all time'.
I remember the times when a 6/10 on IMDb was reserved for truly stellar masterpieces. (Before you ask, my sample size are thousands of movies, from all over the world, over the course of 15+ years, which is how long I've been a registered user there.)
Today, absolutely everything across the board begins life at 8+, and takes literally years to be knocked down to more realistic levels. Complete trash barely ever gets below the 4 mark. The bottom 100 still get as high as 2.5.
And of course with big releases in particular, it doesn't help that there are tons of fake accounts misused for marketing. I beg to differ yet again, as that number is not representative of the people who decided the movie was so bad that they didn't bother attending in the first place. It is only representative of the people who did go in (or are paid to praise), despite all the criticism the thing is getting. So a disproportionate number of them are either fans come what may, or their expectations had been lowered so much they could only be exceeded.
Also, for a summer blockbuster, 30k votes after over a month is literally nothing. It is not plenty large enough at all.
Lastly, the movie hasn't even been released worldwide. In fact in Germany, the biggest European movie market, it is only to be released tomorrow. Expect the ratings to drop even further.
On the same note, the top 250 also get as low as 7.9 so at 6.7 The Lone Ranger really isn't doing that bad. Yahoo user reviews give is 3.5/5 (7/10) so tells a similar story (though across a much smaller sample size of just under 1000 users). How can you decide the movie is so bad it's not worth seeing if you haven't actually gone to see it? That's kind of the point as to why it's a failure of marketing and why it's a pretty decent movie based on the opinions of those who did go see it. If people are deeming it a bad movie without ever having seen it then that's not a commentary on the quality of the film itself but mere opinion based on a failure of marketing. It's absurd to suggest that the opinion of people who haven't even seen the film can give a reasonable opinion of the film. Yes it is, even if 1bn people went to see it 30,000 is overwhelmingly a valid sample size to draw a reasonable conclusion from with a healthy degree of accuracy - you can do the calculation manually yourself if you wish, or simply use a calculator to do this for you, there are plenty online or as part of statistics packages. It's even large enough for a hundred or so marketing accounts to be trivially filtered out, especially when you consider that for each marketing account giving it 10, there will be a troll account giving it 1 in a sample size that large.
So many things go on in the world that never get reported for one reason or another, and none of those reasons are in your best interest.
I have seen it. My dh and I enjoyed it as a fun summer action movie.
Everyone that I know that has seen it has also enjoyed it. I have heard more than a few people mention they were surprised how enjoyable it was after such bad reviews. Our entire theater was cracking up at all the right parts, and I overheard at least a few people walking out surprised it was enjoyable after all the horrid reviews.
Sure there were a few things that did not work for me, but overall it was an enjoyable experience.
I do think the reviews did have an impact, combined with the overall poor job marketing it. I think those that marketed it seemedto have forgotten, they really needed to show why folks should go see a western. There are so many that really just did not know who the Lone Ranger was.
Other than that, my boys and I loved the movie and we love the sets, so I'm content and comfortable with how this news affects my life, as in it doesn't.
I heard that the failed blockbusters this summer are going to spawn premium ticket prices for blockbusters and such. Looks like new Star Wars movies will be $25 a pop.
This is further the case when as I say, if you check other user review sites you find similar aggregate results.
About the only thing then that could skew it is if internet users are more likely to like The Lone Ranger than non-internet users but I can't see any good reason why that would be true when the internet user demographic is so broad and representative in itself.
Yes, that's it. It doesn't show enough to America, and we Americans have boycotted the movie. Not because it sucks, because our egos aren't being stroked.
Amazon also owns LoveFilm.
Being in control of a movie review site must be a great way of ensuring favourable relationships with your movie distributors.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1210819/ratings?ref_=tt_ov_rt
Interesting that IMDB weights the average so it's not a true average, though looking at the actual breakdowns it looks roughly the same. The actual average is 7.1, which is again about the same as Yahoo's arithmetic average.
But it looks like across all demographics an average weighted for "accuracy" or not 6.5 - 7.5 is a realistic range for it which is puts it healthily in the realm of "not too bad" either way.
I guess "not too bad" is all relative - and you need to look at the scores of other films out at the same time if you want to decide on which film to watch using only metrics.
If it gets around 7/10 then I'd say most people felt there wasn't an awful lot wrong with the film yet it's still not done great and that goes back to my original point - the film had a major PR problem. The critics were slagging it off before it was even out (sounds like most before they'd even seen it) and people like myself who are always around various forms of media hadn't heard they were even making a new Lone Ranger until I found out about it by Lego rejecting the Western Cuusoo theme because of it. If with $100m marketing budget that happens then you've done something very wrong on the marketing/PR front. Contrast this to the new Avatar or Star Wars films and I know they're being made years ahead of actually being able to see them which is effective marketing as it builds anticipation. Disney completely failed to do that with The Lone Ranger and what was generally not perceived as a bad film flopped because of it.
Everyone's going to have their own tastes and views but ultimately if we're trying to pin a general label on a film as to how most people who actually experienced it perceived it on average which is really the only objective measure you can place on a film being "good" or "bad" then this sort of measure is the best we've got.
But you're quite right, just because the average suggests the film was moderately decent doesn't mean there aren't better things to watch out at the same time that may take priority and doesn't mean that you personally will absolutely hate it or absolutely love it.
Seriously, as others have mentioned - the DVD/BluRay sales and rentals will recoup even more money so I doubt that Disney will lose as much money as is speculated. Time will tell.
http://corporate.blog.lovefilm.com/ - "LOVEFiLM is an Amazon company"
It was one of those dot com era purchases.
Let this be a learning lesson for Pirates 5
As it is we get a fun little action film and a chance to pick up some nice Western sets at a reduced price before Christmas :-)
Now I have heard many reasons why movie studios do this, one reason is truth in advertising (They really got hammered), another is to short those who have the percentage of the movie profit clauses as they can say the movie made nothing, so those people get nothing..
In any case i think it is safe to say that this movie did not live up to Disney's blockbuster expectation and with all of the publicity and advertising for it it is going to hurt them making other movies.
They made the movie with stars, that is the first problem.. they suffered from Carter-itis.. which is they felt that for this movie you have to cram as many Buton stars as they could get.. the problem is they all cost too much for what the bring to the table IMO, and that along with the directors obscene salary, hurt them.