With Melania and Iron Lung specifically, everyone is suddenly an expert.

First, yes, it has been widely reported that Melania cost $40 million to make and $35 million to market. Yes, 40 + 35 = 75. Yet, you should not report that number without context. Movie budgets don’t include marketing when they are reported, so in order to be fair to Melania, you shouldn’t either. Yes, you can mention the marketing budget, but keep it separate from the production budget.

I am not a fan of Melania (the person, I’m not going to say anything about the movie). Quite the opposite. I love being woke. I try to be sympathetic towards everyone. I strongly oppose unjust hierarchies. Yet, we need to be better than right-wingers. Part of that is that we need to talk about things on the same level. Melania deserves the same judgement as every other movie and since we judge other movies just based on production budget, we should do the same with Melania as well. This should not be complicated.

Then, Iron Lung. A very different problem here. Many movie news sites had problems reporting on the box office numbers for this movie. So, conspiracy theories began to pop up. Why? This is a movie made and distributed independently by a person with a big platform, Markiplier. When he says something, there’s a lot of people listening.

But… here’s the thing. These news sites can’t report what they don’t know. They get the box office numbers from the distributors and before they get those numbers, they use industry estimates, which are generally pretty close. Now, when Iron Lung wasn’t showing up on the lists, it seemed clear to some people that Hollywood was suppressing them.

If so, why would the news sites go along with this? For them, a movie like Iron Lung is a big draw. Also, theaters are happy to have a movie like Iron Lung, because they want the business and they don’t care if that business comes from a studio movie or not. In fact, they are happy to work outside of the studio system because the studios have been fucking them over for a while now with both streaming and consolidation. From what I’ve heard, Disney can have very extreme conditions they enforce with their movies. Since Disney is easily the biggest studio (with Marvel, Pixar, Fox, Star Wars and their own animated movies among others), this puts theaters in a very bad position. So, when they can work with independents on big movies, that’s a gift for them.

So, why isn’t Iron Lung being reported properly? Because the final numbers come from the distributor. Which, in this case, is Markiplier himself because he is distributing his own movie. If he is not reporting the numbers properly, the news sites can’t report them. Apparently, Markiplier never thought about this and it seems like he still hasn’t been able to set this up properly, because as of this writing I’m still seeing estimates from various weekdays when every other movie has final numbers.

And look, I’m not an expert, but I have been following these sites for many, many years. I don’t know about all the internal workings, obviously, but I see how the numbers come in and I’ve been reading their reporting besides just looking at the numbers, so I have picked up things here and there. So, when I see people who have no idea what they are talking about just trying to get a few more views on their shitty channels, I will just block them.

If you are reporting on something, please try to be smart about it. I know the Internet, as it is, doesn’t really encourage this, but it is still better in the long run. If you want a dedicated following, you should try to be good at your job.