Major film flops have Warner Bros. seeing the color red.
The company’s shares sank after a quarterly earnings report Friday came in lower than projections, according to the New York Post.
With two recent releases proving box office film disappointments, maybe the company — and Hollywood overall — ought to ask itself why Americans aren’t interested in seeing its products.
According to the Post, the earnings report showed Warner Bros. brought in $10.28 billion in its fourth, lower than analysts’ forecast of $10.35 billion.
The report had “the media giant’s shares plummeting 10%,” the Post reported.
Its stock dropped 16 cents a share, according to the Post, more than double the analysts’ average estimate of 7 cents.
And what was behind the financial hemorrhaging?
“Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom,” a sequel to the 2018 “Aquaman,” was apparently aimed at movie audiences eager to plunk down big bucks to be preached to about climate change.
It brought it a respectable sounding $433 million, according to the Post. But the movie had a budget of $215 million, which, according to the Hollywood-centric website Screen Rant, means it needed to make over $400 million to break even.
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So, it might have made its money back, which is a pretty disappointing result for a sequel to a movie that brought in more than $1 billion.
Warner Bros. also released a musical version of “The Color Purple” with a reported budget of about $100 million, according to the Post; the movie grossed only $68 million.
According to Screen Rant, it needed to make more than $200 million to break even. By that standard, it bombed by anyone’s definition.
Obviously, they were different kinds of movies — “Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom” not only had its wokish, wonkish climate change premise to sell, it was also burdened by the presence of actress Amber Heard, whose public accusations about her treatment on the set, as well as her messy legal fight with actor and ex-husband Johnny Depp, might have finally disproved the old Hollywood maxim that there’s no such thing as bad publicity.
“The Color Purple” musical version, meanwhile, had the problem of nobody understanding why exactly the world was crying out for a musical version of a movie first made in 1985.
It won a Best Actress Golden Globe for Whoopi Goldberg, and had a slew of Oscar nominations ranging from Best Film to Best Score — all without being a musical.
In other words, there was pretty much no reason to do it again, except for the fact that the movie is about a black woman growing up in the first half of the 20th century, beset by a lifetime of trauma and triumph. Warner Bros. clearly thought it was going to ride the guilt-ridden white contrition of post-George-Floyd-rioting-America to movie riches.
That hasn’t worked out so well.
And it probably didn’t help the remake’s cause that the author of the 1983 novel “The Color “Purple” that provided the material for the movie is Alice Walker, a woman whose hatred for the state of Israel is so intense that she refused to authorize a Hebrew translation of the book, as The Times of Israel reported in 2012. The movie was officially released Christmas Day, more than two months after the Oct. 7 massacre in Israel by the terrorist group Hamas brought new attention to the Jew hatred of the American left.
Take a look at the official trailer below. It’s really not hard to see why the movie wasn’t a hit.
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There’s no denying Warner Bros. knows how to milk the angst of the age for movie profit. This is the studio that distributed “Barbie” — a box office monster that brought in more than $1.3 billion, according to Variety.
(That’s a hit by any standard, even with all the whining about its alleged Oscar snubs.)
But there’s a limit to everything, and Hollywood appears to be hitting it.
Aside from a rare mega-hit (like “Barbie”) the news from the movies has been largely dismal in recent years, mainly because Hollywood has gone so woke it’s putting Americans to sleep — or turning them off completely.
The vast, vast majority of Americans turn out to movies for a few hours of entertainment — not to have their heads beat in, a la MSNBC, over climate change, the endlessly expanding rights of gays, lesbians and transgenders, the wrongs committed by the country against blacks etc., etc., ad infinitum.
(Did no one in Hollywood notice how well that little movie called “Top Gun: Maverick” did not too long ago?)
Americans are pretty clearly sick of much of what Hollywood is bent on selling — but the men and women in the studio executive suites refuse to learn the lesson.
At times it seems like Hollywood may never wake up from the woke nightmare that’s stifled its creativity for what seems like the entire 21st century so far, but hope has to spring eternal.
Seeing red on the balance sheets long enough should convince even the wokest companies to see the light.
