Hollywood Torrent: Depeche Mode’s Big Tour, Fox-Disney Update, Judging Justice League
Good afternoon from Los Angeles, wherever you may be. Depeche Mode, the British synth-pop group formed in 1980, is having one of the most remarkable tours in modern music and its most-successful concert run ever. The band sold 1.27 million tickets through the first nine months of 2017, more than Ed Sheeran, Justin Bieber or Bruno Mars — much younger pop acts at the top of their game.
In October, the band became the first act to sell out four consecutive shows at the Hollywood Bowl, an open-air theater in the hills of Los Angeles that’s hosted everyone from the Beatles to Luciano Pavarotti. Now Depeche Mode is back on the road for its second tour through Europe this year and will head to Latin America in 2018. Not bad for a group whose album sales peaked more than 20 years ago.
The group’s late-career success is notable because this band has never been a global smash like fellow British rockers Coldplay or Oasis. I’m not sure I could have named one of the group’s songs before I reported this story, and I watched a lot of MTV and VH1 was a child. Even at the peak of Depeche Mode’s fame in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the band never sold more than a few million copies of any one album.
So how do you explain their success? Start with a simple observation. Older rock groups are the most successful touring acts in music save for a pop star or two. Their fans are old enough to have developed a lasting fondness for the band, and have enough money to shell out for expensive tickets.
That explains why the top tours of 2017 are Guns N’ Roses and U2, two bands that released their best-selling album 30 years ago. But Depeche Mode was never as big as either of them, both of which sold more than 25 million copies of just one album.
Depeche Mode’s late-career surge is also a tribute to a band that has carefully nurtured and expanded a loyal army of fans known as the Black Swarm (or Devotees) who follow it all over the world. Some fans have seen the band perform more than 40 times just this year.
Delly Ramin Moradzadeh was just 14 when she developed an obsession with the band. She’s now seen them more than 30 times, and spent more than $2,000 on tickets and merchandise this year. Her kids are too young to see the group in-person, but she’s already acquired a onesie for 11-month old Zac and a t-shirt for two-year-old Zoe.
To read more about how the band has hooked these fans, give our story a read. — Lucas Shaw
Disney-Fox talks progress
Disney is the most likely buyer of Fox assets, including the film and TV studio, according to David Hellier, Nabila Ahmed and Anousha Sakoui.
Comcast and Verizon have been mentioned as potential buyers as well since an initial report about talks between Disney and Fox, but Fox is said to prefer a deal with Disney. CNBC reported Tuesday that a deal could be done as soon as next week, and would value the businesses at around $60 billion.
What would happen to the Murdochs, one of the most famous families in media? James Murdoch has been floated as a potential successor to Bob Iger at Disney.
The reckoning
After months of sexual harassment allegations against politicians, celebrities, movie moguls and regular joes, I must return to a question: What responsibility if any the companies that employ harassers and alleged harassers bear?
I touched on this briefly a couple months ago because it seemed implausible Harvey Weinstein’s brother and deputy were as ignorant as they claimed to be. The same goes for many of these companies just now responding to allegations.
Take Matt Lauer and NBC. NBC fired Lauer after a co-worker accused him of harassment, preempting a story in Variety chock full of horrific details. It was a savvy PR move. Yet rumors of Lauer’s infidelity and poor behavior have circulated for years, according to Brian Stelter, who wrote a book about morning TV.
Is it possible scores of reporters and colleagues knew of Lauer’s alleged improprietirs, and yet his bosses, who paid him tens of millions of dollars a year, knew nothing? We don’t know.
The latest: Netflix has fired Danny Masterson from The Ranch after four women accused the actor of rape. Masterson denies the allegations. And Netflix will proceed with the final season of ``House of Cards’’ without Kevin Spacey. The new season, the sixth, will be eight episodes.
How big of a failure is Justice League?
Justice League crossed $500 million worldwide in grosses this past weekend, its third in wide release. That’s ample time to judge the success or failure of one of the most expensive movies ever made.
Warner Bros.’ DC Entertainment has to be disappointed with the result. Justice League will be lucky to hit $800 million, a pretty low bar considering four different comic book movies already surpassed it this year (Wonder Woman, Thor: Ragnarok, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 and Spider-Man: Homecoming.) The only major superhero movie this year that didn’t is Logan, which cost about a third of the price of Justice League.
By comparison, Marvel’s super team (``The Avengers’’) grossed more than $1.5 billion its first time out.
The comparisons between Marvel and DC have been, at times, a little unfair. People forget that it took several movies before the Marvel movie machine was as large as it is today. DC’s first Superman movie grossed more than Marvel’s first Iron Man movie, while Wonder Woman was bigger than the first Iron Man, Thor or Captain America. It wasn’t until The Avengers, the first Marvel movie released by Disney, that $1 billion became the new benchmark.
This was to be the year DC shook its reputation as the underperforming younger brother to Marvel (in terms of movies). Wonder Woman was a big hit, and Justice League arrived just a few months after, ready to capitalize on the sudden popularity of Gal Gadot (and enduring interest in Batman and Superman).
Instead, DC. is left to wait a year for Aquaman, which will be seventh comic book movie of next year. Here’s hoping chronology doesn’t dictate the grosses.
Top of the charts
The #1 movie in the world is ``Coco,’’ which should surpass $300 million worldwide this week. The movie is doing especially well in China where it has sold more than $75 million in tickets.
Disney will lead the box office for the entire month of December thanks to ``Coco’’ and ``Star Wars’’ (as it did last year with ``Moana’’ and ``Star Wars’’). However, the North American box office is projected to be down this year. Ticket sales have declined about 4 percent from last year, and the new Star Wars movie would need to be an even bigger hit than expected for theaters owners to make that up in just a couple weeks.
The #1 song in the world is Post Malone’s ``Rockstar’’ and the top album is Taylor Swift’s ``Reputation’’ (same as last week, and the week before that). The albums with the best shot of dethroning Swift are Luke Bryan’s ``What Makes You Country’’ and Eminem’s ``Revival.’’ Every Eminem album has reached #1 save his debut (``The Slim Shady LP’’).
Oscar Odds update: ``The Post’’ was named the top film of the year by the National Board of Review while ``Call Me By Your Name’’ earned the same honor from Los Angeles film critics. The two bodies differed on just about everything (including best actor, actress and screenplay). So what does this mean? Check back in a couple weeks.
In brief
1. Facebook is looking to hire an executive to acquire sports rights for the social network, according to Sports Business Journal’s John Ourand. The executive will have a few billions dollars to spend.
That’s a lot of money, but not that much in the world of sports. The NBA and NFL rights collect a few billions dollars a year. First, Facebook has to decide if it wants to bid to be the primary outlet for an event, or an online supplement to the TV deal.
2. Speaking of the NBA… NBA ratings have increased 32 percent this year. Viewership of national NBA games is pretty slight compared to football. The most-watched regular season game drew 3.2 million people.
Yet this is still very good news for ESPN and TNT, which paid billions of dollars for the rights. The growth also undermines the argument that politics are depressing viewership of the NFL. NBA players have been the most outspoken critics of the current president among athletes.
3. Discovery is spending $70 million to increase its stake in OWN, the cable network it shares with Oprah Winfrey. Discovery will now hold about 70 percent of the cable channel, which has been on a tear of late.
The network managed to increase ratings in 2015 and 2016 while most TV networks have lost viewers.
4. Songwriters won a victory in their fight to collect more money from radio stations when a judge recommended the dismissal of a lawsuit stations filed in Pennsylvania. The stations had filed an antitrust suit against Global Music Rights, which represents a few dozen of the biggest acts in music.
Radio remains the most common way Americans listen to music, yet stations pay about 4 percent of their music-related advertising revenue to songwriters. GMR is trying to increase that figure, and is battling stations over its ability to negotiate.
5. U.K.’s Cineworld is buying Regal, a deal that creates the largest movie theater chain on the planet.
From Anousha Sakoui: ``Regal and fellow U.S. theater chains are under pressure as movie attendance has stagnated and many films this year have failed to meet expectations at the box office. The summer season — usually the most lucrative for the industry — was the worst since 2006.’’
6. YouTube said it is hiring 10,000 people to monitor the video site for inappropriate content. These employees will screen videos, and train the algorithms to better determine which videos are passable.
This year, YouTube has removed videos featuring kids in disturbing situations, more than 150,000 videos for violent extremism, ads from nearly 2 million videos and more than 50,000 channels pretending to be family-friendly.
7. The new owners of Los Angeles Weekly fired more than half its editorial staff, including all the top editors. Alternative weeklys have been decimated in recent years by the migration of advertising dollars online. That’s sad for anyone who relied on LA Weekly and The Village Voice to introduce them to new restaurants, musicians or political scandals being ignored by the mainstream press.
This is especially scary in the wake of the closure of LAist. The Los Angeles media scene was already suffering from a debilitated Los Angeles Times, but now two alternate sources are no more.
8. Snap is redesigning its photo-sharing app to separate friends’ videos from those uploaded by major media companies. The company hopes the design will ``encourage people to spend more time using Snapchat, increasing the app’s appeal to advertisers,’’ according to Sarah Frier.
Separating friends’ posts from professional posts could boost the advertising rates for the professional videos, or lead to the eventual separation of professional videos into a different app. However, it could also depress viewership of the professional videos that benefit from message traffic.
9. Fox fired Bryan Singer from its Queen biopic because the director never returned to the set after the Thanksgiving holiday. Singer had already clashed with star Rami Malek, the star of the hit TV show ``Mr. Robot.’’
10. Netflix Inc will produce a choose-your-own adventure show for adults, adding another genre of programming to a service that offers movies, scripted dramas, documentaries, stand-up comedy and reality TV.
Viewers of the program will be able to pick which storyline to follow, and go back to watch the same show again with a different result. Interactive TV shows have been around for years, but have yet to catch on with a large audience.
