“UP” Yours Brooks Barnes and Richard Greenfield

Shocker: Up nearly broke $70m, despite the drumbeat media coverage about how the supposed lack of interest from younger boys and no female lead would not interest audiences. Most egregious was the NY Times piece, which built its jittery thesis on a seemingly fundamental misread of the relative box office success of Pixar movies. That was also where we had to hear from one Richard Greenfield, of Pali research, going on the record to downgrade Disney stock because he thought Up couldn’t connect. Woops! Then as now, I don’t understand why anyone, much less a media reporter, would put much value in what an errant Wall Street analyst has to say about movie marketing. These are people who couldn’t understand their own financial instruments, and pretended like all was well as they followed each other off a cliff. So we should we expect them to know how to value movies? Answer: we shouldn’t.