Industry News
by saidiontheside

saidi’s take – 6/8/2023

Hello everyone,

  • The new #1 opening weekend of the summer (so far) is “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse”.  It surpassed predictions and made approx. $120 million over this past weekend.  That means the two biggest opening weekends of 2023 (so far) are both animated movies.  “The Super Mario Bros Movie” is still #1 for the year so far and it’s still going strong (#6 on the box office charts this weekend it’s total is now over $565 million domestic).  Also, “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” had THE BEST opening day of 2023 (so far) with over $51 million on Friday.
  • Worldwide, “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” also did pretty well with over $208 million worldwide total which is Sony Pictures best worldwide opening weekend for an animated movie EVER.  Meanwhile, “The Super Mario Bros Movie” is now the 2nd biggest animated movie EVER with it’s worldwide box office passing $1.3 BILLION which passes the previous #2 “Frozen”.
  • Over the weekend, the DGA worked out a tentative agreement with the studios so there will NOT be an unprecedented Triple Union Strike at the end of June.  However, there are several things that the WGA is asking for that the DGA didn’t need (like a minimum number of writers on a TV series – there’s usually 1 or maybe 2 directors.
  • However, there could still be a DOUBLE strike starting at this month because the Screen Actors Guild had a strike authorization vote today which was OVERWHELMINGLY approved with over 97% voting yes.  They’ve also said that the DGA agreement is missing items that they would ask for.
  • There are several TV shows that have paused production due to the current writers strike and there is also a few movies that have paused production including “Unstopable” which stars Jennifer Lopez and was filming near USC in the Los Angeles area until the production was paused last week.
  • The main Hollywood news sources (Hollywood Reporter, Variety, Deadline, etc) aren’t reporting this but other news sites are saying that Tom Cruise got REALLY upset when he found out that “Oppenheimer” would be taking pretty much ALL the IMAX screens in the country.  Since “Oppenheimer” opens just 9 days after “Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One”, that means that the movie will lose ALL its IMAX screens just 8 days after the movie opens.  Actually, it will probably play even less than that for the theaters that will play “Oppenheimer” on 70mm IMAX film since it will take a day or two to install and make sure the film projector is working correctly.  Plus, with the “Barbie” movie opening on the same weekend, “Mission Impossible” will lose other premium format screens like DolbyVision.
  • Speaking of “Oppenheimer”, it was announced that the 70mm IMAX film print of the nearly 3 hours movie will weight OVER 600 POUNDS and the film will be OVER 11 MILES LONG.  600 pounds is REALLY hard to manage so I would STRONGLY suggest if you want to see the movie in 70mm IMAX you see the movie as quickly as possible.  I bet the film will get scratched fairly quickly and god knows what will happen if there’s a film break on that movie.
  • According to reports, “The Flash” will only have 1 official premiere screening just four days before the opening day of the movie.  Supposedly, this is so the news of the “secret scene” (that wasn’t shown for preview screenings) doesn’t get mentioned all over the internet (like a couple other spoilers that have leaked out),  People are also saying that at the premiere, the star Ezra Miller will attend but will not talk to the press because the studio is trying to minimize any controversy about the stars past.  Unfortunately, Michael Keaton will not be able to make it to the premiere because he’s busy filming a movie (probably “Bettlejuice 2”) although he supposedly will introduce an advance screening of the movie in London for the movie.

Little bit of humor….

At first I thought there’s a possibility that this could be real – until a friend pointed out that the small type at the bottom says it’s just a meme and it’s completely unapproved.  However, I think this could be A GREAT promotional item.  According to reports, the special Red Whopper for “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” has sold out at Burger King locations.