Disney's summer tent poles 'The BFG' and 'Pete's Dragon' expected to bomb, showing dramatic shift in Hollywood's ability to draw in audiences to the cineplex

It's no secret that the CGI special effects of The BFG look very artificial and forced
Updated 7/5/16

It turned out to be a bloodbath for new release, tent pole summer movies over the 4th of July weekend. Disney's The BFG came in a distant fourth at the box office with only a $22.3 million take over the long four-day holiday, trailing a surprise hit, low-budget entry of The Purge: Election for third place which took in $34.8 million.

Bad blood between Disney and Steven Spielberg over the failure of The BFG
might put Spielberg's involvement with Indiana Jones 5 in serious jeopardy
The Legend of Tarzan also disappointed with a weekend haul of $45.6 million, leaving the 4th of July winner to Pixar's Finding Dory which took in $50.2 million over the four-day stretch in its third week of release.

While Tarzan might recoup its loses through international box office returns, there is very little hope that The BFG will do the same. The movie only made an additional $3.9 million from overseas markets against $140 million in production costs. 

Rumors have also been swirling around Hollywood that this first time collaboration between Disney and Steven Spielberg will likely be their last as there are reports that the legendary Hollywood director was fuming that Disney hung The BFG out to dry, failing to properly promote the picture to even give it a fair chance to succeed.


How this disastrous fallout might affect the production of LucasFilm's Indiana Jones 5 is unknown. Spielberg is slated to direct that highly anticipated project, but at this point, it's unknown if Disney and Spielberg can even work together, given how toxic their falling out has become over The BFG.

Working with Disney on any original live-action movie has been described as
career suicide by many who work in Hollywood. There's also another term for
it, but we can't seem to remember at this moment what that's called.
There may be a lesson learned for many other Hollywood directors, stars, and producers who are thinking about collaborating with Disney on any original, non-sequel, live-action movie project.

You may be committing career suicide by working for the mouse because Disney may throw you under the bus as they did for a legendary film director like Steven Spielberg. The words "original," "bold," "fresh," and "relevant" are not compatible with the Disney marquee, especially on the live-action side.

Disney has a long track record of bombing on anything from its live-action studio that isn't attached to John Lasseter, Marvel, or LucasFilm.

That's likely due to their incompetence in and mishandling of marketing and promoting on anything outside the realm of Pixar animation. In the case of Spielberg, they literally hung him out to dry with little to no promotion on The BFG, virtually guaranteeing its failure at the box office.

One needs not look much further than their long string of live-action studio bombs (e.g., Alice Through the Looking Glass, The Finest Hours, Tomorrowland, The Lone Ranger, John Carter, Around the World in 80 Days, The Alamo, The 13th Warrior, etc.)


In each case, a disaster that was destined to fail became a self-fulfilling prophesy after Disney turned on their creative collaborators and abandoned them in the wind, and in each case, careers of several talented Hollywood movie makers and stars burned to ashes in the aftermath.

With any Disney studio movie, you have to ask yourself: Is it the filmmakers and stars or the studio, itself, responsible for this well-engrained pattern of failure? We think the answer is obvious. The Disney curse starts at the top whenever John Lasseter, Marvel, or LucasFilm isn't at the helm providing leadership.



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This is, so far, a very disappointing summer for the Hollywood film industry.

Legendary Hollywood director Steven Spielberg is reportedly
very upset that Disney has all but abandoned his movie, The 
BFG, just before its release date for the 4th of July weekend
And even Disney, who plays it safer than any other movie studio in Hollywood with more life-action reboots and sequels to well-known (and some would say tired) franchise hits, is finding an up and down struggle at the box office of late.

So far, most of Hollywood's biggest tent pole movies for the first half of summer have come up well short of their projected box office expectations, including the supposedly predictable bankable big hits that were expected to be can't-miss franchises, such as X-Men: Apocalypse, Alice Through the Looking Glass, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows, Warcraft, and Independence Day: Resurgence.

Unfortunately, it looks like a sure bet that this pattern of disappointing summer box office returns will continue over what is supposed to be the biggest box office weekend for the movie industry this Fourth of July with Disney's The BFG and Warner Bros' The Legend of Tarzan, both of which are expected to disappoint big time at the box office.

Both movies are expected to make an underwhelming $40 million each—if even that amount—over the long three day weekend. We say "an underwhelming $40 million"—which normally is a decent opening weekend take for any other movie—because the production budgets of these two tent poles were so inflated, at $140 million and $180 million respectively, that there's little chance of making a profit unless the opening box office returns are more than double their projected earnings over the holiday weekend.


With only Pete's Dragon left for Disney as a late summer tent pole movie entry—whose chances don't look much better than Alice Through the Looking Glass—it looks like Disney will end up with three out of four of its expected summer blockbusters actually turning out to be big summer bombs.

Disney's ill-advised decision to model the green dragon after a furry plush doll
may have already sunk this live-action reboot of Disney's forgettable live-action/
animated flop from 1978
This is particularly concerning for the Walt Disney Company because, in the last fiscal quarter, only the movie studios division's revenues were a bright spot for the company, while all the other segments (i.e., media networks, theme parks & resorts, consumer products & digital interactive) missed Wall Street expectations.

This sudden and unexpected reversal of fortunes for the Disney studios shows how volatile a business the movie business can be nowadays, which only goes to show how savvy Wall Street analysts were by discounting Disney's movie revenues in their stock price projections in Disney's last earnings call.

Since many experts are forecasting similar results for Disney's other segments next quarter, Disney's movie studios falling short of expectations will confirm what many financial analysts have feared coming for some time: Disney's salad days may be behind it, and there may be no area of significant growth for the Empire of Mouse for the foreseeable future.


So far, only Pixar's Finding Dory has been able to cash in big at the box office this summer, suggesting that there is a dramatic shift in the viewing habits of traditional movie-going audiences away from buying movie tickets at local movie theaters.

The last time the studios saw a huge drop in summer movie attendance was back
when arcades competed with movie theaters for the attention of teenage boys
What has caused that seismic shift we will go into detail below, but from what we can see, it looks like a trend that will continue to decline well into the unforeseen future.

So what was wrong with The BFG and Pete's Dragon in particular?

In the case of The BFG, the movie was very well reviewed by critics and brings with it a first time collaboration for Disney with Hollywood's most bankable director in Steven Spielberg; however, kids movies are notoriously critic-proof, as little children don't seem to care what serious film critics think.

So the success of a big-budget Hollywood family movie really relies on marketing and how good the trailers look to build an audience before the crucial opening weekend.

On both ends, Disney has fallen flat on its face with The BFG, and they have all but given up on properly publicizing and promoting the movie.


According to industry reports, Disney has no faith in the movie and went so far to demonstrate their lack of faith in Spielberg by not holding a star-studded screening of the movie in New York to help kick-off the movie's release—an ill-advised decision by the studio which may have ultimately upset the legendary film director.

Instead, Disney is giving away free, low-key advanced screening in various test markets to help promote the movie. That's usually done with a low-budget indie movie rather than a $140 million Hollywood studio project.

This is one of the weakest Fourth of July weekends for movies in years
The second and more important part of the movie's failings seems to be what was revealed in the trailers. The look and CGI special effects of the movie look especially cheesy and wholly unconvincing, much like the 2013 CGI bomb Jack the Giant Slayer.

This, however, is not the only miscalculation in production that Disney has made for its summer entries in live-action feature films. The green CGI dragon in the upcoming Pete's Dragon, set to be released in August, also seems to be wanting more in the realism and creative departments.

We're not quite sure why Disney chose this particular movie from the Disney vaults to reboot into a live-action feature movie to begin with, since the first Pete's Dragon was such a forgettable campy flop for the House of Mouse back in 1978, but modeling the CGI dragon in what can only be described as a furry plush doll seems to be the kind of studio decision that would ruin many a childhood for those unfortunate enough to watch the live-action remake.

This kind of light-hearted portrayal of a live-action dragon—especially in comparison to the fantastic portrayal of a CGI dragon in The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug—seems to reek of box office death.


In any case, there seems to be a much bigger concern for all the Hollywood studios. There seems to be a dramatic demographic shift in the summer movie-going audience which has resulted in this summer's woeful box office returns.

That audience used to be dominated by teenage boys and young men; however, they have been noticeably absent in the movie theaters this summer. Could that be because video piracy has become so prevalent that this group can now pick and choose which thrill-ride movies they choose to experience on the big screen versus seeing them streamed online for free?

What's out there that can enhance the movie-going experience in theaters to
bring back paying ticket buyers?
With tickets costing upwards of $20 a pop nowadays, it's certainly reasonable to believe teenage boys may be more finicky about which movies they are choosing to buy tickets for versus just waiting a few days until the pirated versions of first-run theatrical movies come online.

That certainly could be the case, which could spell really bad news for the studios. In order to bring back audiences into the movie theaters, the studios will have to somehow enhance the movie-going experience even more than they have done so far to try to entice this key demographic back to buying movie tickets.

At this point, what else can the studios do? The novelty of 3-D and IMAX presentations of movies has more or less leveled off in popularity in recent years. The booming threat of video piracy, however, is far from level off anytime soon.


It appears that the movie studios may be seeing the history of the recording industry with Napster repeat itself. If that's true, then what can the Hollywood studios really do to stop the hemorrhaging?

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