This highlights the importance of keeping to a reasonable budget. GvK:TNE cost what seems to be a thrifty $150 million. At that price, even tacking on a hundred million for marketing, the film is already modestly profitable. It probably won't earn any more at the box office, but auricularly monies should make the film a solid success, if not exactly a blockbuster. Frankly, Warners would probably be smarter to offer the film to Netflix or Amazon and make that money too, but I'm not sure they can since they are stuck with their own moribund streaming service.
As that budget indicates, Warners has learned a tough lesson about budgets that Disney has so far failed to. Largely due to going into production on movies without a finished (or just awful) script available, Disney is stuck in an unholy cycle of spending too much on their movies to start with, and then having to go into bank-breaking rounds of reshoots. It's literally like the studio has just forgotten how to make movies.
All their expensive acquisitions, Star Wars, Pixar and Marvel, now seem permanently tainted. Captain America 4, for example, looks like a bust for the ages. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny lost hundreds of millions just on its own. So did Wish, Lightyear, Jungle Cruise, The Lone Ranger, The Haunted Mansion, Strange World, Mars Needs Moms, Onward, Mulan (live action), Turning Red, The Marvels, Black Widow, The Eternals, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.... We're talking billions in loses on these and more.
As theaters begin dying out, and with most streaming services destined to fail, we're literally looking at a paradigm shift for the entire industry. I think the era of movies with massive budgets of $200 to $300 million plus is about at an end. Better to tank on a $160 movie (Furiosa, The Fall Guy) than a over $400 million (!!!) one (Dial of Destiny).
I think Dune II will mark sort of a general ceiling for most movies going forward, even for would-be blockbusters. At under $200 million its world take of $700 million is pretty good, if not Avengers: End Game good. I wouldn't count on many of those in the days ahead though.
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