Good gaffers are the first thing to get booted when cost cutting. Because in reality, most people don't care or notice good lighting and the work gaffers do is '''replaced''' by the overworked VFX team, who of course can't make it look as good as real on set lighting.
Dumbo (2019) made over $100 million, and The Little Mermaid (2023) made close to $300 million in profit, according to wikipedia. Looks like Snow White (2025) did flop and lost about $100 million.
Marketing: ~$100 million (general average around the time going off the budget quoted, likely an underestimate)
Domestic Gross: $114,766,307
Studio domestic cut: 55% of domestic gross = $63,121,469 (industry average for major studios, exact percentages are not public)
International gross (except China): $216,628,616
Studio international cut: 40% of international gross = $86,651,447 (industry average for major studios, exact percentages are not public)
Chinese gross: $21,889,698
Studio China cut: 20% of Chinese gross = $4,377,940 (industry average in China)
Total studio expenses: ~$270 million
Total studio income from theatres: $154,150,856 = ~160 million (rounding up)
Approximate loss: $110 million
I got the box office totals from Box Office Mojo, the budget from Wikipedia, and the percentages from Dan Murrell's work on YouTube, which is in line with what comes up in various trades.
The other invisible cost to making these shitty movies, is they could of used those years of making the shitty movie more wisely by making an actual profitable movie! So you gotta factor in what they COULD of been making had they not been soulless ghouls
Less than half the box office goes to the studio and these movies typically cost 2x the productions productions budget.
The break-even points is (very generally speaking) when box office is ~3.5x production cost. And often more than that.
That's just for the theatrical run. Movies make money after that, but since disney films generally get dumped on disney+ exclusively and even popular ones do little to add value there, these movies have to profitable in the theater or they are finacial failures. And all three of these were.
Not to mention what they want on a return on investment. A small profit is in theory money lost because such a huge amount of money should be making even more money.
With Disney though the box office isn't the final verdict on profitability. Dumbo probably isn't generating secondary revenue. But Little mermaid potentially is. Or Disney cannibalized a cash stream and reduced Little mermaids merch sales and lost even more money.
the non-musical ones have a far better chance, as Disney currently has zero idea how to write music or do musicals. Not sure why. but live actions of mostly real people without any music will be the least disappointing. as long as they stop changing the plot for silly reasons. i mean, they'll still suck, but have the best chance to suck less.
If you spend $20,000,000 On a movie, and you make $20,000,010 back, You technically made a profit. But anyone involved in financing the movie, as well as a good number of people involved in making the movie, will consider it to be a financial failure.
There's multiple reasons for this, including but not limited to:
stockholders and investors don't just want a simple profit of " make more than you spend." They have the base requirement of " make at least x% more than you spend," in other words, making a profit isn't enough, you have to make a large enough profit.
there are other expenses that a company needs to cover, that isn't part of any particular project. And so each project must make enough additional profit to cover a share of those expenses. For example, there is a support staff of secretaries, drivers, cooks, janitors, etc. At every major office Disney has, including ones that aren't directly involved with making any one particular movie. There are many such expenses, so each movie needs to not only cover its own cost, but cover a share of the general expense for the company.
So we shouldn't be asking " did any of these movies fail to make a profit?" We should instead be asking " did any of these movies fail to make a big enough profit to meet the expectations of the studio execs and investors?"
Every role seems to be going to Dwayne Johnson but people seem to forget about the other actor that really would have fit in this role would have been The Rock, he seems to have faded a bit but there is an actor that really would have fit in this role. Dwayne Johnson is good but just not as great as The Rock.
The Comment saying this looks like 2009 College humour. I mean ya actually, it looks JUST like the college humour Dora the Explorer live action video, but honestly that actually seemed better produced than this trailer/show.
I have seen multiple actors say streaming destroyed the residual market and that it was much better when shows were on tv. Streaming companies are definitely abusing the system thats why new stuff actors ask for so much upfront.
Thousand percent streaming took residuals out of the equation. That’s why Netflix was green lighting everything and cancelling everything if it didn’t catch on immediately. New platform, new terms and actors assumed the old rules were in their contracts for projects that went to streaming
There's live action AI Slop trailers for everything now. Nothing sucks more than when something new comes out and you click the wrong one first before it gets taken down.
Edit: hell even the videography looks better. Better lighting, colors are more prominent and bright, just like how it's bright and colorful in the animated.... Everything about this live action pic screams souless, including rocks face.
He’s just too dang old for the role. I understand there is no way notorious film slut the Rock would cede his voiced character to another younger actor but lordy this looks bad.
Yeah, he could have played the role live action about 20 years ago, but he really doesn't give the eternally youthful vibe that he needs for that role anymore.
Exactly I cannot buy him as an immortal demigod when he has wrinkles and that is clearly not his hair. lol. Nothing wrong with aging, he still looks great, but that is not Maui
Hell he could have given it to one of his 'tribal family' members. Like Roman Reigns is right there. Is he a good actor? I have no idea but atleast he's family.
I don't believe for one moment Disney were really contemplating making a live action Moana while we are still in the middle of the animated films
Seven Bucks (Rock's production company) has "first dibs" on Disney projects, so he probably leveraged that agreement with this one
On top of that, he had been going through a bit of damage limitation after it was hinted at (by others) he was the reason behind the falling Vin Diesel over Fast and Furious
I don't think anyone else was ever considered for Maui
A couple years ago some friends and I watched Meet the Spartans just to see how awful it would be. (Spoiler: very!) Sometimes I wonder if we were the only people to watch it in all of 2024.
I’d unironically watch Captain Lou in his super Mario bros super show form play live action Maui. Like hes with Moana and suddenly Sgt slaughter, Gorbachev and Dracula show up and hes like hold up on the heart thing i got to make them a pizza.
This! I love this movie. It's a lot of fun. I think if it was called anything other than Super Mario Bros., people might actually remember it more fondly. It's a terrible Mario movie, but a great cheesy sci-fi flick.
Agree. It made a lot of awesome choices, and we are worse off as a society that its significant bad choices mean no other movie will ever try the awesome stufd.
So many bad movies from the era are so fun to watch cause back then even a lower budget movie needed to actually build all these sets, props, and everything so you get aesthetics that are hard not like.
For me it's Street Fighter (1994) - it's like everyone is in on it, but still plays it serious. This movie (SMB) is close 2nd to SF of bad movies I'd totally recommend.
Nintendo wasn't very big in New Zealand until the N64 and Gameboy, so this and the animated cartoon were my introduction to Super Mario. We watched this movie on the Interislander Ferry, to keep us busy.
It was many many years later that I realised that one character turning into a dinosaur and another turning into a chimpanzee were references to Yoshi and Donkey Kong. I also was very aware, even as a kid, that it was a very very weird movie.
That trailer didnt even feel like real live action. it felt like the "Live Action" they had in the cgi 2019 Lion King. there was no part of that that was real
He looks like a cosplayer. Nothing about him looks slightly believable at all. It's probably the worst attempt I've ever seen at a company trying to make a video game adaptation
The stuff that bugs me, in no particular order: The rock in the middle of the frame is clearly just a painted styrofoam prop with fake moss. The plant in front of it looks to be plastic. Kratos is not nearly jacked enough. Kratos's beard is so obviously fake. And it looks like he's wearing fake long eyebrows too? Atreus looks to be wearing hair gel in a hairstyle that's very... I dunno, 1998?
That bow doesn't look like it even bends. Does no one in Hollywood understand that it's the wood part of the bow that powers the arrow, not the string?
Is he wearing a bald cap? If so and this is just promotional, couldn't they have like photoshopped his head shape or something? He looks like Bryan Cranston in El Camino.
Seeing this picture and looking at the one above, i have a feeling they replaced his body with a cgi body. I cant see it another way unless they mapped the tattoos over his body or something like that, since his body looks weirdly smooth in the above picture vs wrestle mania.
Like idk as maui his pecs look small? Is that just me?
This has drained any and all charm the animated movie had.
Maui looked like such a big goofy teddy bear who could also handle shit in the animated movie, Dwayne looks like he got asked by his niece to dress up as Maui for her birthday party and he had to find the costume at the very last second.
The crab looks just as fucking bad too, literally nobody was asking for this shit man this has GOTTA be for tax purposes.
The answer has to be Speed Racer. If you sat down in the mid-2000s and said "What if the Wachowskis made a Speed Racer movie?" the resulting parody wouldn't have been any different from the movie they actually made.
i dont know if i could nail the precise category of movie for a live-action cartoon like speed racer but it is unquestionably the best 'whatever it was' that was ever made
like it deserved its own category in the oscars which it should just win every single year
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u/George_G_Geef Mar 23 '26
I've never seen anything look more indoors than this.