BlazeBrendan Fraser says ‘Batgirl’ being shelved shows that movies are being ‘commodified’ in Hollywood.
brucethemooseI’m curious how financial incentives even worked here.
I mean, someone would get money for a theatrical release. And it’s not like recent DC cinema has a stellar reputation to “preserve”
It takes one screwed up system to reject that money.
MimicJarI mean, they’d get more money for a theatrical/streaming release.
The argument and implied reason for scrapping the film is that they wouldn’t. Look at “Shazam! Fury of the Gods” on a budget of ~$125 million the box office return was ~$135 million. Add in the theater split, any level of marketing, etc and the film lost money. For a streaming release you need to ensure you’ll retain, ideally gain new subscribers.
The number crunchers ran the numbers and said it wasn’t worth it. Although the funny thing is, with all the news about it, they could probably release it now and it would do fine.
That said I don’t agree with what happened, it just seems ridiculous.
They already have the enormous cost of production sunk though. I understand not paying for marketing, but it goes from “negative” to “massively negative” if they don’t at least license it out to streaming.
It’s probably something tax related, but still.
This is classic sunk cost fallacy logic. It’s because they had the enormous cost of production sunk, they resisted the fallacy and sinking more money into it since the returns were not favorable.
But this doesn’t apply. This product has like zero per unit cost.
And the bare minimum cost for getting it out the door is basically nothing. With the state they have, they could use a tiny amount of money to make much more, no matter how poor the movie is.
The only reasonable explanation is some external benefit to sinking instead of releasing, like a tax write off.