It’s official! Terminator: Dark Fate has flopped at the box office.

Last week saw the much-anticipated release of what was billed as the most exciting Terminator movie since Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

Terminator: Dark Fate is the first movie of the franchise to involve the series’ creator James Cameron, who returned as a producer.

Thanks to his return and some early positive critical reviews, Terminator: Dark Fate was expected to triumph at the box office on its opening weekend.

Instead, Dark Fate only managed to earn a paltry $29 million for its entire U.S opening weekend.

Across the Pacific in the world’s largest movie market, China, the film grossed an equally unimpressive $28 million over the weekend, despite being shown in a large number of movie theatres.

What is clear is that there were a lot of empty seats and angry movie theatre owners.

The question is, have we seen the last of the Terminator saga?

I’ll… won’t be back!

Let’s make no mistake about this, today’s movie business is a far cry from when the original Terminator movie came out.

Well, in one fundamental way at least.

As the legendary director, Martin Scorsese recently pointed out, today, movie theatres all over the globe are dominated by Marvel movies.

While this is a sad fact, it should not have stood in the way of the success of a well-known action franchise like The Terminator.

So what went wrong? Well, the buzz is that it was not the fact that the movie was the first all-star female-led installment or lacking in a good storyline.

Rather, it is simply because audiences have had enough of the saga because of the string of mediocre sequels that have arrived over the last few decades.

Most fans claim that there has not been a good sequel since the 1990 Terminator 2: Judgement Day.

Between that movie and Dark Fate, there have been three others which, despite box office success, have been received with mixed opinions from fans.

Ultimately, it seems that all but the most diehard of fans have simply had enough of the franchise.

This raises another question, how did Hollywood with all its marketing and industry knowledge not know this?

It’s time to point the finger.

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Lessons Not Forgotten But Never Learned

Albert Einstein is credited with the saying, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.”

Why in today’s age where companies such as Netflix have built their enormous success on understanding their audience, why does Hollywood keep getting it wrong?

In the past, movie moguls and producers would go on their gut feeling and greenlight projects. The ones that continually got it right became gods in the industry while those that didn’t were quickly flushed down the toilet.

Hollywood eventually moved to a model that would see it increasingly pouring money into blockbusters which had the best chance of yielding massive returns. Hence, the superhero movie bonanza we have seen for the past few decades.

The basic principle is that if a studio puts all its money into making X number of blockbusters, a few of them will fail or just recoup their investment, while a few will be box office successes and make huge amounts of money.

While this system does work, it is out of date.

Terminator: Dark Fate cost over $100 million to make. If it is lucky, it will recoup its investment over the long term which includes DVD sales and Netflix views. However, that is only if it is lucky.

Up Steps Data-driven Moviemaking

There is already a tried and proven way that movie studios can get an accurate picture of how well a movie will perform at the box office.

Companies such as Largo are expert at predicting future box office returns, even as early as the script phase of a production.

To date, Largo has analyzed over 30,000 movies in order to refine its sophisticated AI big data analytics software that we call LargoAI.

LargoAI recently predicted a gross of $201 for Sony Entertainment’s movie Venom. The film concluded its run after earning $213 million. That is an accuracy rate of an incredible 94.37%.

largoai
LargoAI

More amazingly, Largo is already able to make predictions that factor in error margins for unpredictable variables such as downturns in regional movie markets.

As Largo points out, “LargoAI’s script analysis of Domani e Un Altro Giorno predicted an expected Italian box office gross of somewhere between €1.6 million and €3.9 million. This estimate was to prove accurate, despite an unpredictable slowdown in the Italian movie market in the first quarter of 2019 when the film was released.”

This factor means that LargoAI would have been able to predict the failure of Terminator: Dark Fate at the box office.

A combination of historic trend data relating to the performance of recent terminator movies cross-referenced with that of other franchises, along with an assessment of the expected performance of other current released would have allowed Largo engineers to flag up the danger.

While there is the chance of unexpected failure with any movie, the simple fact is that had the movie producers consulted an expert data-driven movie company such as Largo, then this disaster might have been prevented.

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