James Bond Film No Time To Die Delayed Again Over Covid (theguardian.com) 53
You know it's bad when James Bond still can't get out of the house. "No Time to Die," the 25th film in the Bond franchise, was delayed for a third time late Thursday, the surest sign yet that Hollywood does not believe the masses will be ready to return to movie theaters anytime soon. From a report: Daniel Craig's final outing as 007 will now arrive on 8 October, the official Bond Twitter account announced. It had been set to be released in April following multiple pandemic-enforced delays. No Time To Die is the latest major release to be pushed back as Hollywood studios scramble to protect their films from certain box office doom, with cinemas remaining closed in markets around the world. Earlier this month Warner Bros announced it was delaying the release of Sopranos prequel The Many Saints Of Newark. And after MGM released the Bond news, Sony said Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway was moving from April to June, Ghostbusters: Afterlife was pushed from June to November and Cinderella, which stars singer Camila Cabello, will now arrive in July.
No time to die (Score:3)
"No Time to Die"
Is this now an ironic title?
It's just another James Bond film, just release it already.
Or don't actually, I don't care, just seems too trivial to see it come up in "news" every few months...
Re:No time to die (Score:5, Insightful)
It's just another James Bond film, just release it already.
They can't.
They know it's garbage which can only make back the money spent on it if they force people to pay exorbitant prices for tickets, multiplied by the number of friends they have to get to watch it with them so they could justify the cost to themselves as an "evening out".
The fact is, the production costs ($250 million in this case) and the expected box-office take of the movies has been inflated for decades now.
Every action movie is expected to be a "blockbuster" and every "blockbuster" is expected to net at least a billion dollars.
That's the reasoning these movies were produced under and that's the money they were expecting to make out of it.
And that's the money they've already borrowed and spent, based on the presumption that at least a billion dollars will pour into their accounts any day now.
Just to break even they'd need to make at least $625 million. And that's not gonna happen now. Or any time soon. Maybe never.
My guess is they're sitting on it and praying all their creditors die of COVID.
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I wonder how much of those budgets is actual expenses, and how much is money laundering or tax evasion schemes.
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What? Are you a polygamist? With multiple wives and dozens of kids? Do you live in a desert and need to drive a thousand miles to get to a place with a cinema? Are you quoting in dollars from a banana republic and it's more like 100USD?
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Apparently they tried to sell the streaming rights for $600 billion.
Serves 'em right (Score:2)
Re: No time to die (Score:1)
Dead (Score:2)
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People love going to the cinema in spite of what you say.
So it will come back with a huge rush.
Cinemas aren't the problem (Score:2)
Agreed. Drive-ins did great last summer despite have little new content to show. In short, Bond needs theaters a lot more than theaters need Bond.
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I suspect that films costing hundreds of millions of dollars to make are dead - the industry just hasn't realized it yet.
And while COVID-19 may have pushed them over the edge, they were already on life support before it showed up.
deciding delays (Score:4, Funny)
I run a small scientific conference. About a year ago, we were hearing news about COVID-19 and thought we should probably make contingency plans. The first contingency was to move from June to September. The second was to skip 2020's meeting and meet again in 2021. The third was to meet again in 2022.
Now, I'm not saying that we're smarter than studio execs, and we also don't have the pressure of needing to make money on these events (they barely break even in any case, and we don't get paid for doing them). But we chose Option 3, based on the then-available evidence, our best guesses about how bad things would get (we waaay underestimated), historical patterns from previous pandemics, a couple of models we threw together, and our estimates for when a vaccine would enter wide-spread deployment (we were long by only a month). It wasn't rocket science, and we didn't do a professional-level job of it. It was pretty seat-of-the-pants noodling. I mean the folks who do professional modeling of the pandemic did a far, far better job than us. But we recognized what a hassle it would be to re-schedule everything only to need to postpone or cancel it again, and how that would make us look, well, kind of inept.
But why didn't the studio execs see the same things we did? With the luxury of time (meaning, without the need to make money Right Now, and the ability to postpone in order to make serious bank later), it seems a better strategy would be to set some time in 2022 as a release date, and then trot out one trailer after another every 4-6 months, interviews, etc., maybe release some mini-films with additional back story like was done for Blade Runner 2049, to build expectations. The world will have a huge appetite to return to the cinemas for summer blockbusters once they are able to, but this summer will be muted compared to next. And the studio execs wouldn't look, well, kind of inept.
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Remember each day they don't release is a small loss on the inflation of their already-spent money. Skip if it were earning mere interest instead.
This was one of the problems with high inflation rates in the 1970s. The governments with large debt benefitted, but corporation investment in time between purchase of materials and work, and sales, suddenly became a non-trivial component. Mere months's worth of inflation needed to be added to the calculations.
Here it's lower, but is climbing to ~5% over two ye
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Maybe they did, but investors want their money. So pushing until 2022 probably has some legal dealings with it. My guess is that they are projecting a lower turnout even if theaters were open as usual and that is why it keeps getting delayed. Once it was leaked that "Bond" was essentially going on a hiatus, and that the NEW "007" will be replaced with a black female character. It kind of created a wound with many fans.
The argument is that fans don't want to pay to watch a bond film that doesn't feature Bond
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But why didn't the studio execs see the same things we did? With the luxury of time (meaning, without the need to make money Right Now, and the ability to postpone in order to make serious bank later), it seems a better strategy would be to set some time in 2022 as a release date
Movie cost some $250 million to produce. That's not their money. That's borrowed money.
MGM is losing those millions as we speak, as interests and inflation are eating into them. Back in October, the interests alone were estimated at $1 million a month. [hollywoodreporter.com]
And that's not counting some (estimated) $66 million they've already spent (and will now have to spend again) - on promoting the movie.
At this point unless they make at least $800 million on it - it will be a flop.
I.e. It's overpriced garbage made on credit an
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It's easy. Movies are easy to reschedule - you basically pick a new date on the calendar. Now for movies like No Time to Die, they're movies that generally are going to need some room on the calendar because they're expected to overshadow everything else for a couple of weeks. So Sony can pick any date, but they work it out so no one else has releases close by.
Conferences are not - they often have to be booked years in advance - not a problem if you have a yearly event, but some venues just are booked solid
Movie theatres (Score:3)
already have one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel. MGM should just give it up and release the latest Bond flick via streaming service and/or on BluRay. They're still looking for that window of exclusivity where they can rake in lots of revenue before good digital copies start being shared; but they're in denial, they're living in the past, and they need to just stop doing that and adapt to the new reality.
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James Bond (Score:2)
Is James Bond a "secret agent"? What kind of a spy acknowledges his real name and literally everyone in most of the movies knows who he is super early on?. Nowadays AI would flag him immediately the moment he orders a martini. You don't think SPECTRE has spyware on every bartender point-of-sale system?
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You don't think SPECTRE has spyware on every bartender point-of-sale system?
But with all the poseurs, there are too many false positives.
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Well... he's kind of both. He's definitely a field operative in most of the books.
On a side note - "The Man with the Golden Gun" is a terrible movie, but it's probably the best of the books.
If it tanks (Score:2)
I was never really happy with the premise for this one. Craig seems to be doing the film under protest, and the writers seem to be overtly pandering.
However, if it tanks when it's finally released, they'll have a ready made excuse. It was COVID.
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IF it tanks? :p
Didn't you hear the movie has been renamed? (Score:5, Funny)
"Plenty Of Time To Kill"
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We are never going back! (Score:1)
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Not until we get super high quality VR headsets (120 fps, no screen door effect, deep blacks and HDR etc.) .. and even then it remains to be seen if the social aspect can't really be substituted even in VR. I don't see VR headsets losing the screen door effect until at least the year 2030 (the GPU requirements to sustain the required 8K at 120 fps are double that of a GTX 3090). Yes I know movies are at 24 fps .. but a VR headset needs to instantly adjust the surroundings view at 120 fps because it has to
Or just rent them out on platforms (Score:2)
There's plenty of media platforms they could use to rent them out on (AppleTV, Roku, etc.) - we know people that really want to see it would buy/rent it.
But, as usual, Hollywood studios wants an ego boost by declaring "Best Opening Weekend For Any Movie of All Time.... EVER!!!!"
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They tried selling to streaming services. They didn't bite. There is no way that they are going to make back their $250m budget on renting it out alone, especially since it's "gone woke" and replaced 007 with a female character.
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There is no way that they are going to make back their $250m budget.
Maybe it'll be a lesson for them not to gamble so much money on stories.
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Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
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Why do you nuts all sound the same? Do you all get your dreary, laughable talking points from the same Qtard forum?
I agree the media will indeed pretend Biden was a savior here, but it's no conspiracy people just fucking hate Trump and for good reason. But there's no grand conspiracy at work - it's the passing of time, the development of a vaccine, and more people taking it seriously. It would have ended in 2021 even under Trump.
Re:COVID will end 2021 (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, what the WHO recommended in that notice was "Where test results do not correspond with the clinical presentation, a new specimen should be taken and retested using the same or different NAT technology."
Imagine that, more testing actually results in more accurate (and lower) case numbers. I guess Trump really screwed himself with the whole "slow down the testing" strategy.
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If over the next 11 months, the number of COVID deaths go down, it's Biden misleading people, making him a bad President
But...
if over the next 11 months, the number of COVID deaths DON'T go down, it's Biden being incompetent, making him a bad President
Do I have that right?
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here's the meme (Score:1)
Renamed (Score:3)
The real reason for delays (Score:1)
They're buying time - not for theater releases, but for digital distribution deals.
They know their theater sales are going to suck. They've already invested hundreds of millions. They need to recoup their losses where are they going to do that? Online.
They don't have great deals with online distribution yet. They probably would really *like* to control the distribution, but they can't, because building a Netflix (or getting one to do what you want) is a lot harder than building a lot of bigass buildings wit
Too many theaters still closed (Score:2)
With so many movie theaters in key markets (including New York and California, 2 of the most important markets globally for movies) still closed by government order and many others around the world either closed by corporate decision or operating under restrictions (capacity etc) that reduce the total number of seats available in that market across that critical opening weekend/week below what the industry needs to make the big bucks.
Craig will die an old man... (Score:2)
Before it gets shown in theaters.
Other MGM Franchises (Score:2)
We know MGM is in a bad place. They cannot release the movie, but they also cannot not release the movie. Given so much money (i.e.: debt) they sunk into the project.
But what makes me more worried is their other franchises. Take Stargate for example. They did a "not so well received" SG:U series, which also caused the early wrap up of Atlantis. Their bad decisions on one project killed another which was going okay.
Yes, they released the James Bond back catalogue for free streaming platform. That might keep