• @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    422 days ago

    It’s barely afternoon on Saturday as I read this - I don’t get how they can decide it bombed already. Feels like someone’s trying to make it bomb.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      71 day ago

      They release these on Saturday or early Sunday pretty frequently, projected from presales, previews, and Friday #s. They can be a little off but they’re usually pretty close.

    • @Stovetop
      link
      English
      322 days ago

      The movie is critical of capitalism, it wouldn’t surprise me.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        3
        edit-2
        1 day ago

        Maybe a little bit, but everything after the beginning of the movie seemed to take place in more of a monarchy situation where roles and resources are allocated directly by the ship/colony leadership and the only apparent economy was the black markets for drugs and extra rations.

        • @[email protected]
          link
          fedilink
          English
          41 day ago

          The book is pretty clear on themes, and fascism is only distinguished from a truly absolute monarchy in the respects you mention by their laws of succession.

          Fascism, btw, per Mussolini and Gentile, is the merger of state and corporation. At at least a small scale it will absolutely try to function without a market and pay its workers directly with necessities while using the withholding of such as both punishment and means of persecution.

          • @[email protected]
            link
            fedilink
            English
            1
            edit-2
            22 hours ago

            They said capitalism, not fascism, I can see how the movie is being critical of fascism, but the primary setting seems distinctly un-capitalist to me.

            • @[email protected]
              link
              fedilink
              English
              3
              edit-2
              13 hours ago

              Same end goal.

              Just an FYI: the book also describes the fate of a colony world called Galt that gets genocided and consumed by a hyper-capitalist’s clone army. The logic is simple. He wants more clones, and the best source of more biomatter fit for making clones is human bodies. He’s also been told all his life that he’s a superior life form, so what use is anyone “lesser?” It doesn’t matter that the Galtists consider themselves “rugged individualists”, they are less thans and therefore useless beyond making his numbers go up.

              The book and setting is not shy about criticizing capitalism’s commodification of human life and disregard for suffering. It’s the entire point of how Expendables are treated, lol.

              I don’t doubt that a movie had less time to make some of the themes more obvious, but they’d have had to completely remove the concept for it not to be clear.

              • @[email protected]
                link
                fedilink
                English
                211 hours ago

                the book also describes the fate of a colony world called Galt that gets genocided and consumed by a hyper-capitalist’s clone army

                If this was the explanation given for why “multiples” became taboo, I think they must have replaced that with the explanation that someone used it as a way to have an alibi to get away with smaller scale serial killing.

                commodification of human life and disregard for suffering

                This definitely comes through as the central theme of the movie, the idea of objectification in its various forms, how it’s internalized or goes unnoticed. And there is a connection to capitalism; the central problems of the movie are caused by sadistic villains who are in charge because they are absurdly rich. But that aspect of it seemed like less of a critique and more of a tropey backdrop and plot device (ie. the loan shark who’s too rich to care about being paid back and just wants a pretense to make snuff films). To me for something to be primarily described as a critique of capitalism, it would have to spend more time actually considering capitalism and how it works, and this movie isn’t really about that imo.

      • @THB
        link
        English
        182 days ago

        Honestly had little interest in this but you just sold me on it

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        -1
        edit-2
        5 hours ago

        havent watched this one yet, but arent these usually sprinkled with some anticommunism and doomerism to compensate for it?

    • @jordanlund
      link
      English
      132 days ago

      Ticket sales pre-orders.

      If Friday’s pre-sales = x% final sales, and you know pre-sales for Sat/Sun, you can roughly predict the weekend.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        51 day ago

        Yep. Literally decades of sales data is used to predict various aspects of a films revenue.

        Not just weekend sales but weekly drop off can be accurately predicted.

        They often know how a movie will be perceived well before it hits theaters and use that determine how much to spend on promoting it.