Ah yes, the ol' Xmas legs. That time of year when people being up the miraculous Christmas movie going window as time for the impossible to happen. Are Bumblebee and Mary Poppins Returns dead and buried? No. Is it too early to call either a disappointment? No.
When Poppins couldn't even open at it's tracking you know that there is a severe disconnect between the film and the audience that it's trying to reach. Just six months ago people were talking about the bloodbath that Aquaman versus MPR would be and now that we're here Poppins is, what, struggling to match half it's original projected opening number? Yes, Greatest Showman opened to smaller numbers and had amazing legs but that was an original project that built up an audience. Who doesn't know who Mary Poppins is? The Simpsons did an episode on her twenty fucking years ago!
Poppins will be a slow burn and surely end up well over $100m at the US box office but this is looking like another Disney branded under performer for 2018 sitting alongside Christopher Robin (less than $200m worldwide) and Nutcracker. Obviously their incredible box office numbers elsewhere don't make this a financial issue but it has to raising eyebrows somewhere.
Elsewhere there's no way that Hasbro (with their alleged financial woes) spent $100m+ to make a film that (potentially) ultimately loses money but does well on Rotten Tomatoes. This is showbiz, show
business and they are in it to reignite the Transformers brand which was so badly dented by the whimper that was Last Knight. Will it be profitable once everything is said and done? Possibly. Will it reignite the brand? Unlikely. Transformers doesn't need a well made and well reviewed family film that does middling business to make it a 'AAA' film brand again. Let's not forget that Paramount and Hasbro through AllSpark are developing a Hasbro cineverse and they need to make this work.
Travis Knight really needs to get a super high grossing film under his belt considering all the amazing films he's done.
But then again he's like the son of the guy that owns Nike so maybe he just isn't in it for the money and instead in it for the art and we'll just continue to push out amazing films that general audiences don't flock to at all.
You might very well be the first person to ever describe a Transformers film as 'art'.
