Wednesday, 5 July 2000

WEEKEND REVIEW

I'm not usually this happy about being wrong.

It's a good thing that this Weekend Review happens to fall on a Rant & Rave Wednesday, because ranting and raving is exactly what I feel like doing. I love it! I love that the almighty tracking which has become the anal obsession of box office forecasters everywhere was wronger than a virgin at a Brett Ratner barbecue. I love that I was able to say on Saturday morning, the second I saw that The Perfect Storm was ahead of The Patriot, that the journalistic take on this would be to blame the R rating and the supposed difficulty of historical drama. Of course, they did, pretending that the last big budget American Revolution movie, the disastrous Revolution starring Al Pacino, was somehow equivalent in quality to The Patriot. It wasn't. I have some real problems with The Patriot, but it is an infinitely better movie than Revolution and no one's career will end because of this film. At least, not outside of the Sony executive offices. (Interestingly, the screenwriter credited with Revolution, Robert Dillon, has as many high-profile bombs on his resume as any writer I've ever seen. Almost to the point where I'm wondering if the name is a popular pseudonym. Yet, he is credited with Waking the Dead, a film I liked very much. Go figure.)

What I love is that any entertainment writer worth anything will spend the next week or two scratching their head and wondering not what went wrong, but where they went wrong. How did we all get so caught up in the machine? I was less wrong about the showdown between Perfect and Patriot than any other writer I know, placing The Perfect Storm just $5 million behind The Patriot over 5 days. Yes, THAT was about as generous a guess as there was going into Friday, even though The Patriot was already "underperforming" on Wednesday's opening. Yet, when reports about the 3-day weekend hit on Sunday, the reporters I read were busy questioning The Perfect Storm's "ambitious" Sunday estimate, leaning heavily on the two Rs (Revolution and Rating) to explain The Patriot's fate, wondering aloud whether the film would actually improve on the Sunday estimate. No such luck. Based on the 3-day weekend. And forget blaming Fri-Sun on the Wednesday opening when you have a virtual holiday Monday to strengthen your Sunday number. The Patriot was the ninth best opener of the summer and had the twelfth best weekend of the summer, given that weekend two of Gladiator, Dinosaur and Mission: Impossible 2 all beat Patriot's $22.4 million 3-day opening.

Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. The opening of The Patriot was one of the biggest disasters in the history of the blockbuster business. Titan A.E. was very expensive and opened even worse, however anyone paying attention could see that coming from months out. The studio never found the handle on their pitch to the paying customers. No, this one was a nuclear meltdown. Everyone was convinced. And the audience chewed the film up and spit it out. Not because it was a revolutionary drama. Not because Mel Gibson's career is waning. (Gibson opened the more hardcore R-rated Payback on a non-holiday weekend last year to $21.2 million, just $1.2 million less than The Patriot's start. And Gibson & Co. opened the R-rated Lethal Weapon 4 to $34 million on the post-Fourth of July weekend last summer.) And not because the movie really sucks. (There are those who will make that argument, as others will about The Perfect Storm.)

From this close perspective, it is hard to say definitively why The Patriot smashed into the wall like Jeff Bridges and Rosie Perez in Fearless. But I would say that all that tracking information was the biggest culprit. NRG kept telling Sony that all was well and that their "mel-Mel-MEL" campaign was working just great. Wrong! It told them that opening Wednesday wasn't a way to protect themselves from The Perfect Storm, but a way to rape and pillage the box office for two days before the storm hit. Wrong! It told them that they could cruise to an easy win. Wrong!

But Sony was far less myopic than the journalists covering Sony. We are, supposedly, paid for being tough, independent-minded, truth seekers. HAH! When I walked out of the film and immediately said that Warner Bros. would be thrilled by The Patriot, the spin from other "journalists" began. One had the audacity to quote me without giving me credit before backing off of my opinion, which he knew was right. But the tracking told him otherwise. Hedge, hedge, hedge. (This is the same person who argued with me after we watched Me, Myself & Irene together, dead sure that there was no audience with which the film wouldn't connect. He loved the movie and just knew that everyone else would. I suggested that it was just short of There's Something About Mary's sweetness and he disagreed. And a few days later, he started backing off his opinion because other writers told him that they didn't like the film and one well-placed friend, who leads him wrong all the time, told him that exhibitors didn't like the film. Unbelievable. Meanwhile, Irene opened better than The Patriot and will probably out-gross and out-profit the film.)

So what will writers do about this miss? First, they will forget that they were ever in The Patriot's corner. You hear that splash? That's film writers throwing Devlin and Emmerich into Boston Harbor. For all the wrong reasons. Next, never likely to admit being wrong, they will smack The Perfect Storm around as much as possible as well. Credit for the director, the writer, the cast and the crew will be hard to find, outside of some friendly George Clooney pieces. What you'll see a lot of is bowing to ILM and the wave itself. One box office story has already cut the film down to being "the six men in a leaky boat tale." Give me a break.

"Sony Story & Readers Offer Lists"