Zack Snyder's Justice League

[tjmackey]

I still haven't seen his OWL movie!

I didn't enjoy SUCKER PUNCH.

His netflix movie is his returning to the zombie genre too. But at least it's a break from superhero movies!

Also:
https://www.cbr.com/zack-snyders-justice...ebut-2021/

It's nice to hear that JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH did pretty well for HBOMax!

[interaser]

Don't believe everything you read, numbers were clearly manipulated y WB

ZSJL was the biggest streaming movie ever.

[tjmackey]

Don't believe everything you read, numbers were clearly manipulated y WB

ZSJL was the biggest streaming movie ever.

are you suggesting that the third-party company in question (TVision, which measures the viewing across all major streaming services... not just HBOMax) was manipulated by the suits at WB?

why would the corporation/studio that decided to invest an additional $70million into completing and marketing SnyderCut then seek to get that 3rd party company to fudge the numbers to make the whole enterprise come across moderately LESS successful than it actually was?

[deleted user]

Hoo boy ... okay, what follows is a controversial opinion and it's just my 2 cents.

I call nonsense on the numbers too. No way a bunch of people signed up to watch that "Judas" propaganda. But I can totally believe they would want to create that impression.

That Judas movie has ~30k ratings on imdb compared to ZSJL's ~250k, and those numbers are probably fake too. If you look on rotten tomatoes, it has only around 1k ratings, while ZSJL has 25k. So 25 times more people went to rate Justice League than the other movie, but somehow more people signed up to HBO for the former? And even with that, the numbers are probably still manipulated and skewed heavily in the favor of Judas. RT for one has been known to intervene when a movie didn't get the ratings that a certain group thought it should get. And professional critics ... well those have been bought shills a long time ago.

My guess is that if those sign up numbers are real, then they weren't because of Judas but some other movie that came out during the same time.

[tjmackey]

as far as I'm aware, these were not figures quantifying new users/subscribers.

It was about viewing time.  And the article also acknowledges that SnyderCut's runtime may have played a factor in making it trickier to quantify how much view-time it accumulated over a specific weekend.  And that's on top of measuring streaming viewership ALREADY being a tricky practice to begin with.

It seems like it would be easier for a regular consumer to decide to sit down and watch a 2 hour long JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH in one sitting than it is for them decide to sit down for a 4 hour version of a movie that already came out... let alone finish it in one go.

Trying to track viewership numbers is a tricky thing.  It's also a very different thing to quantify compared to how much chatter there is about it online.

Anecdotally, I know I get a skewed perception of how big a new movie or TV show is because of the online communities and company I keep at a given moment.  If what I experienced was true, TV/movies like 30 Rock, Parks & Rec, Community, Arrested Development, Scott Pilgrim vs The World, or Fight Club must clearly have been the biggest deals at the time.

But no.  The actual Neilsen ratings or box office on those things upon release were very low compared to what a big deal they seemed to be for me.  Instead, it was generic thrillers and bland CBS sitcoms that hit the high numbers.

I learned early on that Internet/Social Media chatter about something often doesn't correlate to high viewership or box office returns.  From my position, these were just very passionate communities of fans that are vocal enough online for journalists to take notice here and there.  But when it comes to actually supporting these things when they need it the most, it doesn't always translate to real world success.  I assume piracy doesn't help either.

I completely get being skeptical of these kinds of numbers.  I completely acknowledge that ROTTEN TOMATOES is a heavily compromised company that plays ball with the studios.  Especially since it was owned or partly owned by either Warner Bros or Comcast/Universal at different points.  Ever since the early 2000s, I've never been happy about that site becoming such a big presence in movie journalism anyway (I despise applying 'metrics' to film criticism and journalism to begin with).

But in this case, I just don't see much point in WB intentionally cooking anything to make their additional $70million investment into SnyderCut come across less successful.

JUDAS wasn't even a WB production.  I think it was mostly just a distributor of a film that had to use four separate production companies to finance its reported $26 million budget.

[tjmackey]

ZSJL was the biggest streaming movie ever.

this is quite literally true!

it's longer than THE IRISHMAN!

[deleted user]

Hah, thanks for your measured and reasonable response. I almost was afraid this would go down a nasty path.

No, you're right, of course some groups are more vocal than others etc. and in theory this could be true. And yeah, I did make a mistake with reading the chart wrong, my bad. Basically for me it is as you said, I'm skeptical. I don't think Judas is a big movie, but it's exactly the kind of movie that would get pushed a lot these days. Meanwhile there seem to be a lot of people who do not like the Snyder cut and seek to undermine its popularity.

Obviously there is many ways to cook numbers if one has the desire to, and its equally hard to prove such a thing. There's a fun documentary out there called "The Chocolate Diet", where someone came up with a study that "proved" that eating a certain kind of chocolate helps you lose weight. It was done on purpose to see how easy it would be to spread such a lie. I don't remember the exact method they used there, but quite a bit of it had to do with fixing the numbers with clever math. They actually succeeded in getting published all over the world and newspapers wrote articles about it etc. I guess hence the old saying here in Germany, paraphrased ... never trust a study you haven't faked yourself.

But yeah you could still be right in principle. I just have my doubts. Conversely of course, a site that likes the Snyder Cut would probably be able to find stats that support their point of view, and not necessarily be more trustworthy either.

I guess it's just a sign of the times, everyone lives in his own reality, heh. Few people are outright honest, and that goes for all sides. And finding the truth oneself takes a lot of time and often the data just isn't available so it's anyone's guess.

[tjmackey]

I don't get nasty. I get wordier and long-winded by saying more words for extended periods of time.

My main takeaway is... one certainly doesn't have to put too much stock into these reported numbers. But there are enough reasons to be skeptical about them without having to resort to a WB CONSPIRACY.

We got the SnyderCut. Perception around Snyder has shifted to the positive with Whedon being trashed. Snyder emerged stronger. I don't think SnyderCut has to be THE MOST SUCCESSFUL STREAMING MOVIE EVER for this to be an absolute win after his family went through such a devastating tragedy.

[deleted user]

Hah. Must have become jaded. So many places on the internet now where people won't even listen to each other's arguments.

No I agree, it's a win either way. I'm sure the execs know the truth, and if the truth is good, maybe they will want to make something cool. We'll see.

[tjmackey]

Ooooh, Chris Terrio is going all out!

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/202...v-superman

Chris Terrio is not pulling his punches anymore. For five years the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Argo kept his mouth shut about his work on the DC films Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Justice League, even as scorn from critics and fans exacerbated already-painful behind-the-scenes memories. Worst of all, he agreed with many of their complaints.

He described the films that Warner Bros. released to theaters in 2016 and 2017 as incoherent misfires, undermined by corporate meddling, poor franchise planning, and tone-deaf decisions that prioritized costly VFX sequences over coherent storytelling. Terrio believes that Zack Snyder’s director’s cuts of both are much stronger, if still imperfect movies—an overall vindication of their work together. 

“The 2017 theatrical cut was an act of vandalism,” Terrio said. “Zack may be too much of a gentleman to say that, but I’m not.”
(The studio did not provide any comment on his remarks.)

hahahahaha

I await his rants about his experiences on Risewalker