There’s always plenty of blame to go around when a big-budget film doesn’t live up to expectations, but the buck tends to stop with the guy or gal in the director’s chair. While last year’s Ghostbusters reboot was relatively well-received by critics, moviegoers weren’t as keen on the film judging by its box-office take. As a result, plans for an updated franchise were waylaid and the blame game was off to the races.
Though the pot had been relatively stagnant in recent months, OG (original Ghostbuster) Dan Aykroyd stirred it — appropriately enough — on Sunday Brunch, a British morning show that features culinary creations and celebrity guests. When the hosts brought up the future of Sony’s prized franchise on yesterday’s show, the actor was careful to praise the performances of the new generation of paranormal exterminators, and instead focused his criticism on director Paul Feig. Still, what he had to say may just have PR-conscious studio execs asking: “What did you do, Ray?”
Don’t hold back, Dan. #Ghostbusters pic.twitter.com/WtZ0MbRsmk
— Ross Maclean (@ross_maclean) June 4, 2017
“The girls are great in it. Kate McKinnon, Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig — what wonderful, wonderful players they are — and Leslie Jones. I was really happy with the movie, but it cost too much. And Sony does not like to lose money. It made a lot of money around the world but it just cost too much, making it economically not feasible to do another one. So it’s too bad. You know, the director, he spent too much on it. And he didn’t shoot scenes we suggested to him and several scenes that were going to be needed and he said ‘Nah, we don’t need them.’ Then we tested the movie and they needed them and he had to go back. About $30 to $40 million in reshoots. So, yea. So he will not be back on the Sony lot any time soon.”
If you’re looking for a one-line postmortem on the reboot, it’s “Sony does not like to lose money.” Ultimately, this franchise was derailed not because of the quality of film, but because the numbers just didn’t add up. That isn’t because nobody went to see the film, but because it didn’t attract a wide enough audience to justify its substantial production/marketing budgets.
If you believe Aykroyd’s version of events, Feig was more than a little bit cavalier with the allocated dollars and cents. According to Deadline, however, Sony is disputing his math, claiming that the reshoots he referenced actually cost between $3 and $4 million.
As it stands, the future of big-screen ghostbusting is in doubt, but Sony is still heavily invested in the property, with an animated TV series in the works and a separate division of its studio (Ghost Corps) working on churning out a variety of projects. Stay tuned.
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?