The holiday season from Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day is traditionally a proving ground for high-profile Hollywood movies. This is a seasonal time where highly anticipated movies catch audiences with lots of free time and boost opening day sales at the box office.
Hollywood, outside of a couple of summer hits, has struggled all year thanks to titles that promote woke culture and pander to certain people groups. Add in the extended SAG-AFTRA strike and tinsel town needed a boost over the holidays.
The movie dud parade continued over Thanksgiving where audiences seemed to stay home getting over their turkey comas instead of spending money in theaters. Two big-budget films were expected to recover their expensive investments from moviegoers, but audiences had other plans.
Two movies with budgets of $200 million each, “Wish” and “Napoleon,” had such dismal showings that Hollywood executives likely wish they contributed to the streaming wars by sending these two titles to the front lines online.
Disney’s “Wish,” according to The Daily Wire, brought in $8.3 million on Wednesday with an expected holiday five-day total of around $37 million. Apple Original Productions’ “Napoleon,” earned $7.7 million on Wednesday with an expected $30 million in the same period.
Critics and fans showed their dislike for “Napoleon” with low favorability ratings on Rotten Tomatoes. It seems people don’t like depictions of dictators in any historical time period. “Wish” was trolled for its concept of God being “bad” and in need of saving from an “empowered female character,” according to Daily Wire co-founder and Editor Emeritus Ben Shapiro.
He explained the general plot of the film where a king grants people’s wishes but he has an apprentice that decides the king’s selective choices aren’t enough. Shapiro sarcastically criticized the film’s premise.
“Which, you don’t have to go far afield to understand that what that kind of is is, ‘God is bad because he said no to you sometimes,’” Shapiro said. “So it would be better if there were an empowered female character to get up and make sure that all wishes be granted across the board.”
Disney caught serious backlash earlier this year for its new live-action adaptation of the Brothers Grimm fairytale “Snow White” starring Rachel Zegler. The expected release of the film was pushed back another year when the lead actress publicly denigrated the classic story. Disney has suffered ongoing losses in favorability with the public as the once-iconic company continues to support radical cultural ideology changes.
By contrast, The Daily Wire plans to release its own live-action adaptation of “Snow White” in 2024. The film stars actress and YouTube superstar host of “The Comments Section” Brett Cooper.
Key Takeaways:
- Hollywood suffers more big-budget film setbacks at the box office.
- Holiday ticket sales fall well short of blockbuster expectations.
- Critics and audiences pan latest releases from Disney and Apple.
Source: The Daily Wire
