Im not saying for certain thats what happened but you are dense as fuck if you cant see how easily it can be done. Much easier and cheaper than stealing an election for example.
Lets say CM did 150mil in domestic box office, which matches the enthusiasm /engagement/ etc for that flop of a film.
Disney logs on to fandango or whatever the fuck and buys tickets across the country for several weeks, spends 250 million dollars.
Theater keeps half the ticket price, the ticket is sold they get paid whether someone physically sits in the theater or not. No need to bribe any theater owners, its built in. Also they were the ones allowing people to post the damn photos, hell some of the theater operators were the ones posting the pictures. " look at this sold out showing of captain marvel opening night" 7 people in the theater.
Disney gets the other half, so 125million refund. It costs them 125mil to boost the box office numbers, which is less than what they spent on marketing the film. Its a loss sure, but not a huge one if the movie is important enough, but its not something you can afford to do for every release. But on paper its not actually a loss, just an operating expense.
Its like you are arguing that there is no way a company would lose money going for woke points or something. What rock have you been living under? Companies have thrown away billions, this is a drop in the bucket.
Theater owners get a smaller cut of a blockbuster's first two weekends in most cases. They absolutely do give a shit if the theater is empty because it's zero concessions. Theater owners make more money off concessions than actual ticket sales in the first couple weeks, especially for blockbusters.
Internationally, the film studio gets a much smaller cut so even if they recouped a decent amount in the US in the first two weekends, there's still hundreds of millions of loss overall from later weekends and other country sales.
The pre-sales for this film were not out of the normal range, so the idea they were buying them up for weeks is completely false. They would have had to have a system that was buying hundreds of thousands of tickets in a matter of a couple days on release weekend.
And a lot of the other indicators that are used to project film success -- trailer views, social media interactions, random surveys, etc, all pointed to at least a sizeable opening. It had more trailer views than BP. I'm sure you'd say those were all faked by a massive botnet, but that just makes this conspiracy even larger. Faking 100 million trailer views in 24 hours is not a simple task, regardless of your server/bot farm.
I actually "did my research" on a lot of the examples of empty theaters. In most of the pictures, there's no evidence even indicating that it's Captain Marvel being shown. There's a couple anonymous sources purporting to be theater owners saying they had a bunch of empty seats. I'm sure if the argument was the other way around, a couple of anonymous twitter sources wouldn't be super convincing to you. There's certainly no "thousands" of photos of empty theaters that actually indicate it's Captain Marvel.
I think you can't fathom that anyone would want to see this so you construct an alternate reality no matter how implausible it gets. The audience for this film was more female heavy than pretty much any other MCU film. The "girl power rraaah" played a part as did being between two Avengers films. The idea that you think even a shitty film that was released at the height of the MCU between Infinity Wars and End Game would have only pulled in $150 million total in the US is insane.
