Talk:Ghost in the Shell (2017 film)

Box office bomb?

I’m a little confused as to why this film is supposedly consider the box office bomb because it made enough money to exceed production costs.73.51.193.121 (talk) 01:41, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

See above. Crboyer (talk) 01:44, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

Japanese response

While I'm glad the article includes some Japanese response to the film (and more would be better if possible, but) unfortunately Yahoo! Movies Japan is not a good source. Wikipedia does not normally allow user voted web polls (such as IMDB scores) because they are unreliable and the Yahoo! Movies Japan score is based on votes from the web. WP:UGC -- 109.76.209.240 (talk) 02:04, 30 April 2019 (UTC)

I still think an abundance of caution is needed when looking at user voted web polls but Hollywood Reporter did note "3.5-star rating on Yahoo Movies Japan, which is, remarkably enough, higher than the 3.2 stars held by Mamoru Oshii's seminal 1995 anime" which I suppose makes it barely acceptable.

Box office bomb

There seems to be some disagreement over this being a box office bomb or not. These claims were sourced and seemed reasonable, but if there are problems with the sources that should be discussed. Maybe more sources are needed.

One edit summary said "misleading to call this a bomb when it earned well over budget" but this seems to show a fundamental misunderstanding, films can earn more than their budget and still be considered a flop. The film only grossed 1.5 times production budget, and generally a film must earn 2 times the budget to break even (since theaters keep half the gross) and there are other costs such as P&A. It does seem like a flop to me, but instead of saying flop or bomb the article could use a more neutral wording and say "it was not a financial success". -- 109.78.196.37 (talk) 06:29, 8 May 2019 (UTC)

I'm not sure how trustworthy "Bomb Report" is overall (what you've linked), but calling a movie a bomb/flop implies earning less than budget. The logic behind this is however much one invests into creating a film ($110M in this case), one hopes it'll gross at least that much—obviously more is better—so the production will earn more money than what was spent making it. When the worldwide total amount this earned was $169.8M, just calling it an outright financial failure gives readers the wrong impression. If anything, the movie might be a domestic bomb when only about $40.6M of the earnings came from North America. Another problem I had with simply calling this a flop is that sources once used such a claim came from less than a month after this film's release. Those articles were mere speculation at that point and being too presumptuous as the movie was still in theaters back then and still had the chance to gross more money.

If citing something that says this didn't do well financially, then you'd have a stronger case by at least using a source that was from after it left theaters and factors in grand totals. I also wouldn't use claims of box office failure off of something that only bases such assertions from domestic grosses as that doesn't take into account all territories. To be clear, I'm not saying this was a big box office hit, only that we should avoid the misleading implications introduced by calling this an outright flop. Saying "it was not a financial success" would be more fair assessment and a potential compromise. There's also the idea of just giving budget and grosses without any comment on whether it was financially successful. In any case, thank you for not just blindly reverting me and my non-box office edits like another IP did. SNUGGUMS (talk / edits) 11:04, 8 May 2019 (UTC)

I provided the link because it was the first I found there are many others, it is a rule of thumb that a film that doesn't make at least double the budget is not profitable, and if we aren't all working from that shared premise the discussion is difficult almost impossible. This discussion has come up many times (here's one [1] it makes a good general point about avoiding hyperbole) on film articles but I struggle to find a better link, I urge you to take a closer look. Unfortunately the article Box-office bomb is not as well developed as it should be, the copy included with List of biggest box-office bombs is only marginally better. Example: Salon.com quoting Screenrant "the general rule of thumb is that in order to break even a movie needs to gross double its production budget at the box office".

I don't have strong feelings about this, but I do hope you will reconsider your starting point. I wish the guidelines from WP:MOSFILM were clearer. Getting more editors involved could help maybe. --

FWIW The IPV6 editor is not acting in good faith. He is failing to provide edit summaries or discuss here. The edit front loading the intro with all those references wasn't a good idea either. We should still have standards so I removed his adding of a bad source.

I'd like to let the figures speak for themselves but that would be misleading because of the rule of thumb of a film needing to at least double it's budget. This film certainly was not any kind of a success, and arguably a flop, but I don't want to make a big deal about it. -- 109.78.196.37 (talk) 21:53, 8 May 2019 (UTC)

Funny thing I just noticed, this very article already had a discussion about this being a box office bomb, but it got moved to the archive Talk:Ghost_in_the_Shell_(2017_film)/Archive_1#Box_office_bomb. It included an article from the New York Times from 1987 that explains WHERE MOVIE TICKET INCOME GOES.

• "the studio that releases a film to theaters - usually ends up with less than 50 percent of the money paid for tickets" hence the 50% rule of thumb
• the percentages vary depending on what deals the studio has and the studio takes a higher percentage in the opening weekend (Disney was in the news after they squeezed theaters for an even higher percentage of opening weekend)

The article doesn't even get into Hollywood Accounting by which studios use all kinds of tricks to claim that a film has not made a profit despite no matter what happens. -- 109.76.239.236 (talk) 16:41, 11 May 2019 (UTC)

Casting

This is really misrepresenting what Keiko Agena and other actresses said about the casting. It makes it sound like they didn't think it was that bad, but if you read the article, they were very critical. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/ghost-shell-4-japanese-actresses-dissect-movie-whitewashing-twist-990956 72.92.235.225 (talk) 17:05, 17 February 2021 (UTC)

The article likely puts undue weight on casting complaints as-is. It became clear upon release that casting choices were driven by plot elements, and that the casting complaints were no more than a twitter outrage cult. But easily-excited twitter mobs can be found for nearly anything, and do not always warrant an article entry. 70.176.79.67 (talk) 19:34, 27 September 2022 (UTC)

Countries of productions

I've listed below some countries for the country of production and the sources involved.

This is what i've come up with from various sources:

• AllMovie: (China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, United States) here
• Screen Daily: (USA) here
• Sight & Sound: (USA, Hong Kong, India, People's Repbulic of China) here
• BFI (USA, Hong Kong, India, People's Republic of China)

here (The BFI also goes into detail matching the production countries with production detail stating: "An Arad Productions: Arad Productions. in association with: Weying Galaxy. The filmmakers acknowledge the assistance of the: New Zealand Government’s Screen Production Grant present: Paramount Pictures, DreamWorks Pictures, Reliance Entertainment [presented] in association with: Shanghai Film Group, Huahua Media)

• Lumiere (United States, China, India, Hong Kong, Great Britain) here

Per the above, I suggest we go with what the majority of sources state. (So USA (5), Hong Kong (4), China (4), India (4) and skip on Great Britain and Japan which are mentioned only by one source each. Thoughts? Andrzejbanas (talk) 01:40, 22 April 2023 (UTC)

It has been a few days and I haven't heard any responses so I will go forward and make the change. Andrzejbanas (talk) 02:33, 2 May 2023 (UTC)