this is the NEW YORK TIMES griping over Sinners having an "enormous" budget. it cost one third of whatever Netflix action pap that literally spends one week in one theater. it just had an amazing opening weekend with guaranteed WOM. WHAT ARE WE DOING https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/20/business/media/sinners-box-office.html
If nothing else you can count on the NYT botching every single opportunity to prove it's not an elitist, tone-deaf, white supremacy backed publication.
A friend had an excellent point - where is the handwringing over massive deals like the one Abrams or Waller-Bridge and more had that produced zero viable projects and cost collectively hundreds of millions? Surely, a profitable film in the long run is better than nothing, right?
it is incredibly telling and unfortunate that every single publication seems hell-bent on punishing WB for giving a successful black director money for an original movie, even if it's actually going over well. and that's something the industry should examine but of course they will not
They're probably upset that he got the deal for the rights to revert back to himself after like 25 years or whatever and they need to hit the movie with all this bs for it.
I really want to read a grand narrative of the anti-labor bent of corporate media in the last 5 years. So many disparate "things that make you go hmmmm" in media coverage are united by a conscious or unconscious hostility to people, art, institutions and policies that tip toward labor over capital
IKR? If we want to talk about out of control budgets, we need to talk about the odds of the next Mission Impossible flick (with a reported budget in the region of FOUR HUNDRED MILLION) having an even harder crash landing than the last one.
It's an epidemic! What if more and more artists want more and more control over their art and we the poor lowly studio have no choice but to uhh continue making tons of money anyway?
Irony is WB itself would punish it if it could [& might be encouraging this punishment] as Zaslav would have gladly had another Furiosa/Joker Deux/Mickey 17 esq flop rather than this putting a cramp in his "No more directorial vision, fire the duo greenlighting it & surrender to IP/Minecraft" vision
The Electric State cost $320 million and clearly has legs since Netflix still tries to convince me to watch it and also it hasn't killed the careers of its stars or directors so yeah we should drag this movie that doesn't fit neatly into our world view.
Amazing article linked, and yeah. That really shouldn't be weird. And it's not even immediate, he gets it BACK after X amount of years. Yet hollywood wants to freak out of course because how dare the people doing the work get money for the work they did.
I think Red Tails was held as some sort of litmus test as to whether a cast of Black actors can draw enough to cover a blockbuster budget, which it didn't succeed at. Adjusted for inflation Sinners is a more expensive movie and there's this belief it's doomed because we've seen this before.
I think the thing of him getting the rights back after 25 years has really shaken the class of execs who text their every anxiety directly to trade reporters, and they want it to fail so that maneuver doesnt catch on
I’m not going to claim to understand why but that seems to be just what studio movies with even a moderate level of spectacle costs these days, which one would think a reporter for an industry trade would know
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They are never beating the allegations.
Zaslav hates fandom.
Outrageous.