Literally two weeks before the film launched we started seeing marketing that dubbed TLK as "the final chapter." The ending of the film is hardly definitive, but the marketing wants audiences to know "this is the end." But why? Why declare TLK as the final chapter if the story says otherwise? Were Paramount clued in on pre-ticket says and adjusted marketing in accordance to that? Beyond the Bee movie, have plans for TF6 been tossed out?
It's very hard to say, honestly. Only Paramount and Jim Gianopolous know whether the film was "doomed" domestically or not. Right now, production wise, Bee will press on. TF6 is still undetermined. If they wanna get a script and director nailed down, they have to do it pretty soon any pretty quickly, then I guess they'll decide from there whether they'll shift the date or not. It's all in their hands now.
Paramount knew that its dipping domestically, so thats why they've been promoting TLK and AOE in China and other major areas internationally.
They certainly didn't anticipate that *much*. But Bay had already been talking about it being his last outing, so the "this is the end," stuff is probably unrelated.
It's just marketing. They just say whatever it is they think they need to say to sell more tickets. They probably know there's been a certain amount of franchise fatigue, so perhaps they figure if people believe it's the final entry, they'll be more likely to turn out for the sake of getting closure on the franchise. But really they're just trying to sucker an audience into watching it so they can presell them on the sequels. As for what Michael Bay says, well that's just something he always says, then he waits for Paramount and Hasbro to show up at his mansion with an ever larger dumptruck full of money to change his mind. Marky Mark is playing the same game. Taking this position also allows them to save face if the studio have other ideas.
They knew it was not good. Why else would they have such a tight embargo? When a studio knows they have a good movie they let people write about it early - Just look at War for the Planet of the Apes - it doesn't come out for 2 weeks and there are lots of reviews out there. Meanwhile the reviews for TLK didn't come out till release day. That tells you all you need to know.
moving the release date at the last minute (similar to what they did with dotm) is never a good thing in my opinion, especially kicking it off of a friday & into a wednesday
Yeah, review embargos are never a good sign. Not only did they suspect a poor performance, they also weren't confident in the quality of the movie.
Both that and the review embargo are pretty good signs that they really needed that extra long "opening" to hang their hat on. Get those 5 days of ticket sales before word of mouth and reviews really start to spread. Can you imagine if it was only a 3 day opening? It could have been a 30 million opening, which would have been horrific for them.
well i actually think the opening weekend # would have been bigger, since those who went on wed. & thurs would have went on the weekend instead but it's really just semantics i guess..my point was they kind of cuckolded the opening weekend numbers just to, as you say, pump out some extra cash up front before the reviews came in...me, personally, i'll take the larger opening weekend numbers instead of the 5-day cash grab because now tlk looks truly pathetic with it's opening weekend numbers. it probably would have grossed in the mid 60s, low 70s if it stayed on a friday which is still paltry compared to aoe's 100m friday-sun gross it made less in an entire weekend than rotf did in it's opening day, a wednesday mind you...how the mighty have fallen
Looking at the domestic slide and how there really didn't seem to be much of hook to lure people back to the franchise Paramount had to know things were not looking good. But I don't think they were expecting the domestic numbers to be as bad as people are now predicting. I really don't think they expected the over seas numbers not to bail them out because they seem to have a developed this attitude of their Transformers were totally immune to both critics and people not being happy from the last film. I agree with the people saying calling it last and making it look like this would be the last film was just a marketing stunt since they had already announced their Transformers movie every year plan and no one anywhere at the studio has said reboot.
It doesn't feel like it. They knew the critics would hate it but considering the last film made a billion dollars how were the critics going to stop this one? Their plan for a Transformers Cinematic Universe shows they didn't anticipate the next film to underperform.
Considering this is the fifth installment in a ten-year-old franchise they would have been foolish to not expect diminishing returns. It's very uncommon for an open-ended franchise to maintain steady income over that length of time.
The thing is the TF films have often had poor reviews, so thinking it'd get poor reviews didn't mean they thought it'd financially underperform. True, but the degree of drop is still significant. They were hoping it'd still top 1 billion by most accounts, or at least close to it- i.e. within 100 mil of the last or so.
