As you may have heard, Star Wars: The Force Awakens has taken in more than a billion dollars worldwide, so far. $1.09 billion, to be exact.
But the folks over on Return of Kings still think that their “boycott” of the film was a HUGE SUCCESS. How’s that, you ask?
Well, as RoK contributor David Garrett figures it, if Return of Kings hadn’t warned the men of the world that The Force Awakens is “SJW propaganda,” the film might have taken in roughly $4.2 million more than it did.
That’s right: it could have made $1,094,200,000 instead of the paltry $1,090,000,000 it’s taken in so far.
IN YOUR FACE, SJWs!
So how exactly does Garrett arrive at that $4.2 million figure? WITH SCIENCE.
Fifty-five percent of respondents to a Return of Kings Twitter poll have said that online reporting of the social justice nature of The Force Awakens influenced their decision whether to see the film. Extended across our readership, with over 900,000 users accessing ROK between November 21 and December 21, this amounts to a potential direct impact of $4,219,456.54 (55% x $8.38 x 915,482) on total revenues. $8.38 is based on the average cinema ticket price in the US, which is now an all-time high.
Well, you can’t argue with that!
And that $4,219,456.54 figure doesn’t even take into account the other right-wing media outlets that warned their readers about the evil SJW agenda behind The Force Awakens. Add that in, Garrett suggests, and the total cost of the right-wing “boycott” is in the “tens of millions of dollars.”
I have done a similar calculation to determine how much of a financial effect my writings about their “boycott” have had on the box office of The Force Awakens.
8.38 (ticket cost in dollars) x 7,390,966,099 (the number of people who might have been influenced by my posts, based on total world population) + 0.47 (amount of change in my pocket) – 7.67 (estimated cost of lunch today) / 2 (number of cats in my apartment)
So that comes to $61,936,295,906 per cat in my apartment. In other words, without my influence, The Force Awakens would have lost $60,846,295,906 at the box office (per cat in my apartment), making it the biggest financial disaster in Hollywood history. (I think. I’m not really that good at math.)
A loss of that magnitude would have had a disastrous effect on the world economy, including my cats. And I have prevented it.
You’re welcome!
@kupo – also anecdotal, but WHTM’s reporting on the boycott of Mad Max: Fury Road made me want to see it. This was in the summer, when I was going out with a guy, and we saw it in glorious 3-D. (A totally misandric situation: man suggests artsy documentary, woman suggests noisy action movie, the two end up watching noisy action movie.)
I’m looking forward to the new Star Wars! I don’t know if I’ll see it this holiday, though.
Anyway, I agree with exactly one sentence of that RoK word/number vomit: movie tickets are expensive. Inflation’s a thing, true, but they do seem unreasonably expensive (minus Tuesday specials and the local Dollar Cinema that’s $2.50 a ticket).
I don’t have any trouble believing ROK gets 900k unique visits a month.
But that absolutely does not translate to 900k visitors, because “unique” is usually defined as the number of people who access the site on any given day; a fan who visits RoK every day is not actually 30 people.
Another thing. I know we’ve pointed this out many times. It’s kind of amazing that manurespherians complain about feminists doing activism on issues they perceive as first world problems such as street harassment, affirmative consent, and the wage gap. How dare we complain about these problems when third world women face FGM and honor killings! Yet they turn around and focus their activism on the horrors of having to deal with a blockbuster movie protagonist that doesn’t look exactly like them for a change. Really, guys?
What you’ve failed to understand is that the money and opinions of a bunch of racist and sexist internet trolls is at least 1000 times more important than the money and opinions of POC and women. That’s at the very least.
Apparently Disney also failed to understand this, to the tune of a billion bucks. 😀
Ah I was confused about what constitutes a ‘unique’ visitor – I didn’t realize it basically resets every day. I take back what I said above about their head count being accurate.
Scene: Disney accountancy office. An army of troll-like accountants is counting a mountain of $1000 bills. The top of the mountain fades into the mist.
Enter right: ROK MRA breathlessly waving a piece of scribbled on toilet paper. “We just cost you $4M”
An army of troll-like accountant heads turn on an army of stiff troll-like necks to stare coldly… soullessly.
An eternity passes
The ROK MRA shimmers and fades
Tumbleweed blows by.
An army of troll-like accountants turn their heads, and return to counting $1000 bills.
*tricyclist wanders off in search of more whiskey*
Only in your little pretendland, Garrett. In reality, it smashed the box office even with your pathetic “boycott.”
I’m shocked, SHOCKED, that in the US you can see a movie for $8.38 (on average). Here in Aust I’m lucky to get away with change from AUD$25.
Other than that, nothing really surprising here. Same old bullshit clamour for relevance.
Remember that these are the people who said that Mad Max: Fury Road was a critical and commercial flop. Words, what do they mean?
I think we need to make a big list of all the movies that Valizadeh and his friends hated, and cross-reference how many of them were what he called failures, or what non-manospherians might call a massive success.
Maybe this could also be the answer to Hollywood’s much-lamented problem with running out of acceptable bad-guy groups. If nobody likes MRAs and their boycotts end up enriching the filmmakers, then I smell a way to kill two birds with one stone.
Ditto this. Their mangry flailing moved it from my “Ehh, I’ll probably watch it eventually, because ‘splosions, but there’s no rush” list to my “DAY ONE PURCHASE*” list.
And hey, now it’s one of my all-time favourite action movies. Thankyou, rageaholic MRAs**! =)
*My shitty local cinema didn’t show it, so I had to wait for the DVD.
**I did that on purpose. *evil grin*
Critical flop? Certainly not. Commercial flop… yeah, pretty much. Unless it did incredibly well on video (which, anecdotally, it may have), Fury Road probably ended in the red. It did $375 million world wide box office against a $150 million budget plus marketing. When looking at box office you have to remember that the big number is how much was paid for tickets, so the studio only sees a portion of that, with the rest going to the theaters. For back of the envelope calculation purposes, figure about half gets back to the studio, though that can vary widely depending on circumstances. In any case, WB probably made less than $200 million on a movie that cost about $200 million to get into theaters with proper advertising. Not what a studio wants to see.
@Scott Hamilton
I was under the impression that most movies end up in the red, so any profit is considered good.
Clearly Disney is part of the social Marxist feminazi Jewish cuck cabal!
Oh, God. This is Poe’s Law big time.
If people didn’t here didn’t know me, they would have good reason to think this post was from a serious RoK reader.
I’ve been reading some of the old threads, thanks to the new random post feature and was struck by how the manosphere has devolved so much that they all sound like NWO Slave now.
Indeed. I was thinking about this the other day after reading an article from ’13 where David said this:
… Before the rash of MRA-linked murders and mass killings began. Before the manosphere joined forces with the Nazisphere. Now, David was right at the time, but it really shows just how far they’ve fallen in only two years.
Shit, if anything, “Racist, sexist, homophobic Marc Lepines” would be undeservedly generous now.
That might be true for the entire industry, including independents straight-to-video, and cable, but it certainly isn’t true of studio films. Studios don’t remain studios by losing money.
@raysa: Go see it! I went yesterday. I am the kind of grumpus who normally couldn’t give less of a shit about the latest installment in whatever ongoing movie franchise, has no interest in “nerd culture,” and constantly bemoans the fact that Hollywood no longer seems to make movies for grownups. And even I thought it was great. It’s a ripping old-fashioned adventure with decent writing and good characters and great action sequences. In other words, go because it annoys bigots, stay because it’s actually a good movie.
Semi-OT, but…the Unipiper just outdid himself:
Mind you, he doesn’t roll the BB-8 ball around, but just keeping his balance on it is pretty good.
Movie hated by MRAs hits the one billion dollar mark in a record twelve days while said MRAs pat themselves on the back because they believe their boycott cost said movie about four million dollars. Great job, boys. You sure showed Disney, didn’t you?
My night = made.
Studios make money by making lots of films, most of which are barely breaking even or in the red and some of which are significantly profitable. Also, creative accounting means that the Star Wars trilogy, The Lord Of The Rings trilogy, and Harry Potter have officially never turned a profit. Actors are often entitled to a cut of the net profits, you see.
Forbes apparently estimates Fury Road as profitable at a box office return of $375 million and definitely well past break even. It’s no The Force Awakens, but it’s a success.
Nthing that this was also the case for me with Fury Road. I had absolutely no interest in seeing it until the Manly Tantrum Brigade started, and lo and behold, I really loved it and had a whale of a time watching it.
I thought Nux was a little darling too. Not as badass as Furiosa, but just as heroic in the end, and he ended up being one of my favorite things about the movie.
__________________________________________
So, the total amount of people who participated in the RoK twitter poll (“Did online reporting of the social justice nature of the movie affect your decision to see the film?”) is: 565 people, 55% who said “Yes”, and 45% of people who said “No.” (I actually went to RoK’s twitter to find the poll because I wanted to know the numbers)
The thing is, they don’t specify what reporting they’re referring to. “Did online reporting of the social justice nature of the movie affect your decision to see the film?” could be referring to any news outlet that talked about it. It could have been RoK, it could have been AVfM, it could have even been more mainstream news outlets talking about how progressive the film is. No where does the poll question specify that it had to be RoK where their readers heard of it.
Even if we ignore the microscopic number of people who actually participated in the poll, RoK can’t even claim that they’re the ones responsible for the “boycott” when they didn’t even specify if their reporting specifically was what got so many people (roughly 311 people) to not see it. It could have been CNN for all we know.
Now, if we ignore that bit for the moment and move on to the microscopic number: If we use Garret’s figures, we can say that a movie ticket is $8.38 (if we assume that all of the people who responded to the poll were from the United States), so the actual cost that RoK might have cost Disney is USD 2606.18.
Chump change. The background actors most likely made more money than that for their work.
Now, I’m an artist, not a scientist, but the “science” on display here is so off-kilter even I’m noticing it.
Either way, what a massive failure of logic, boycotting, and “activism” on behalf of RoK. Well done gents. You’ve officially embarrassed yourselves yet again.
Count me as another person who had no intention of seeing the thing until I heard it had a badass female protagonist and had the manospherians’ boxers in bunches.
@Bina
That wins the internet today and for a long time to come.
WHAT!?
Do you know what Canadians pay!? Why are our movies almost double when our dollar is only 30% lower!? We’re being scammed!
Yeah, but the movie made a billion dollars in like a week, so fuck them. Who cares if a few whiny babies didn’t see the best Star Wars movie in years? More seats in the theater for people who aren’t idiots.