August 18, 2003

What’s the box office story of this last weekend that you aren’t going to be reading headlines about anywhere today? S.W.A.T. fell just an estimated 51% in this, its second weekend. If the percentage holds, it will be the fourth best hold for a movie opening over $35 million this summer, behind Finding Nemo, Pirates of the Caribbean and Bruce Almighty. Pretty good company. There is a good chance that the film will equal or surpass the domestic numbers for Bad Boys II, which would be pretty good for a movie that cost a little more than half of the Big Boys’ price tag.

Also in the “better than expected” ranks is Kevin Costner’s Open Range, for which he personally deserves a lot of credit. He worked his ass off to spread the word. Of the four predicting web sites that appear weekly in MCN’s “Road To Box Office Hell,” I came closest to the number, but was still off by $2.6 million. Even the most optimistic folks at Disney were just barely into the teens with their estimates. The film still has a lot of heavy lifting to do to get to $40 million domestic, but the enthusiasm of American critics might translate overseas, where the American western has some aesthetic value that we don’t quite appreciate here.

Meanwhile, Seabiscuit continues to run (ha ha ha) and will surely pass $100 million domestic before heading off to pasture, perhaps getting as far as $115 million. Will this be enough to get it into the Oscar race? Time will tell. If it is going to fall off while coming around the clubhouse turn, it won’t be evident until November sometime.

Freaky Friday is another late season winner, already the highest grosser among the “Girls Grosses Gone Wild” group, it will shortly pass Holes and will probably trail only Spy Kids 3D in the “For Kids” category for the entire summer.

Pirates of the Caribbean is looking like it will pass The Matrix Reloaded to become the second highest grosser of the summer, giving Disney the 1-2 punch.

MCN’s Len Klady did a smart bit on movies that are chasing $100 million … something that Legally Blonde is too far away to try, but may end up as an effort by American Wedding, which is going to have a tough sprint to the $100 million line.

DUH!!!: There were two rather idiotic bits of box office analysis this weekend that I just can’t let pass. I’m funny that way.

First, there was a fairly sensible story by the L.A. Times Lorenza Munoz about the new era of word-of-mouth. Unfortunately, Ms. Munoz’ editors chose the one truly idiotic notion in the piece and used it as the lead and headline, “High-Tech Word of Mouth Maims Movies in a Flash.”

I suppose that this completely unfounded and unsupportable notion of progress was prompted by someone’s teenage and Rick Sands’ apocryphal story about Ringu being a smash in Japan because kids were text messaging one another after the earliest screenings. Unfortunately, nothing else in Ms. Munoz’ story in any way supports the preposterous notion that this was actually responsible for Ringu’s success in Japan any more than it was for The Ring’s success here… a success based on long, long legs and not any quick technological hysteria.

Worse, every other example used in the piece is completely off that central thesis. The second weekend drops of this summer’s movies would appear to have more than a little to do with the record-breaking highs for opening weekends.

Ms. Munoz knows so little about the box office that she is apparently impressed by Pirates of the Caribbean’s 17% Friday-to-Saturday box office bump when a 20% Saturday bump is pretty standard. Finding Nemo jumped 38% on its first Friday-to-Saturday. Bruce Almighty, 26%. X2, only 2%. Reloaded, 9.8% (in that case, its fourth day). My point is, it's a fake stat, which is greatly subject to things like genre, the size of the Friday draw and even some slightly bent reportage.

The theory that a drop of over 50% in the second weekend means “it’s over” is still true with small openers. But it is absurd with the big dollar releases. Matrix Reloaded was off 59 percent in its second weekend on the way to a $278 million domestic gross that any studio would be more than happy to take on. As I said earlier, S.W.A.T.’s 50% drop this weekend was one of the best of the high opening movies this summer.

Universal’s Adam Fogelson was on target with his comments, citing the Super Bowl commercial as the start of the “Gumby” tag that was laid on The Hulk. Of course, a $62 million opening weekend sampling assures that the drop-off for the film was based on the movie and not the internet reviews of the illegally pirated work-product tape. Had the movie worked for audiences, they would have told their friends and the movie would have played even better than it did in its “$131 million failure.”

But Munoz goes even further into the Land Of Made-Up Shit when she credits text messaging, rather backhandedly, for the $33.4 million opening of American Wedding. Gee, I guess Fogelson & Co. can go on vacation for the rest of the year. A few screenings of The Rundown with Ryan Seacrest and they can save tens of millions in ad dollars!!!

Munoz closes with Oren Aviv’s pretty accurate “insight,” "Make a good movie and you win. Make a crappy movie and you lose."

God, trendhopping pisses me off!!!

(Late Note: Pissing me off even more is my own mistake, when I wrote this piece, giving credit for that closing quote to Avi Arad. Oy! And while I was ripping Ms. Munoz!!! I realize now that I was speed reading and relating it back to The Hulk material... which I thought was a cool quote from Arad, given the story troubles on that film. Apologies to Mr. Aviv and Mr. Arad.)

AND THEN: There are the quotes from Box Office Mojo’s Brandon Gray that, despite some skill at predicting box office, suggest that either he knows nothing about the business or that he just wants to get quoted really bad.

Hugh Hart’s postmortem on the summer movie season hits some bumps all on its own, with analysis like, “Bad timing (following relatively late in the summer in the wake of another grrrl-power sequel, Charlie's Angels) and misdirected TV hype (a 48 Hours interview that presented Angelina Jolie as a devoted mom at the expense of her bad-girl mystique) didn't help this action picture.” I would say that the disastrous opening was a little more complicated an issue than that. But Brandon offered up these gems:

QUOTE: "Harrison Ford is an iconic star, and people don't want to see him riding on a little girl's bike."

REALITY: Harrison Ford has successfully played against type recently in What Lies Beneath. But more to the point, the only truly successful comedy in Ford’s entire career was Working Girl, fifteen years ago. Still, comedies Six Days, Seven Nights and Sabrina were actually more successful than same-era dramas The Devil’s Own and Random Hearts, as well as action flop, K-19: The Widowmaker. There were more than a few reasons for the flop of Hollywood Homicide, but the “little girl’s bike” was not the primary culprit.

QUOTE: Hollywood Homicide violated what Gray calls "a general rule of thumb: Never make a movie about Hollywood. In Middle America, people don't want to see that. Even ones that seemed to be a can't-miss, like Bowfinger (the 1999 comedy starring Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy), have disappointing grosses."

REALITY: Bowfinger was Steve Martin’s highest grossing film by more than double –grossing $66 million domestic compared to Sgt. Bilko’s $30 million - in the seven years before Bringing Down The House. Ironically, this was the same argument used against Chicago’s box office potential… $171 million ago.

QUOTE: "People don't want to see a movie about writing a book"

REALITY: Yes… and no one will go see a movie about a schizophrenic mathematician. No one wants to see a movie about a guy stuck on an island that has no words or music for 40 minutes. And no one will see a movie about some black guys sitting around a barbershop or starring The Rock or about a horny Greek girl.

QUOTE: "It shows that star power alone does not sell a picture," Gray says.

REALITY: Renee Zellweger has limited star power when it comes to opening movies. The $7 million for Down With Love was about right for Ms. Z. Bridget Jones’ Diary was a massive best-seller with a hard core female audience and it still only opened to $11 million. The failure of the film to do three times that opening is a failure of the film, both in word-of-mouth and in traction, in terms of getting a sampling. But you have to have star power to blame star power.

QUOTE: "I don't think the title helped. 'Cradle' is not a word you use if you want to get teen males to see your movie."

REALITY: Cradle 2 The Grave opened to 16.5 million in February. The Hand The Rocks The Cradle did $88 million back when $88 million meant something (1992). Both films were targeting boys. To blame the title, especially to a sequel… is Dumb & Dumberer.

READER OF THE DAY: SOCAR MARK writes: “Mixed critical nods, and what constitutes an ass-spanking in the zeitgeist, has tainted the Matrix franchise (for now) in pop culture. I, for one, really felt like I "got" Reloaded -- even more so than the first film, and can't wait to see what's in store for us in November -- but I feel that I am holding a minority opinion in saying so. Hell, I know it's a minority opinion amongst my peer group -- all smart folks, all professionals -- and that mystifies me.

But, you know, it really just may be nothing more than backlash. We've seen this before, right? Titanic, Private Ryan, American Beauty, Blair Witch - each one seemed to ignite something within the moviegoing audience in America, and each one now carries with it some sort of intellectually marginalizing cultural super-script that tends to relegate an admirer of any of those films into someone way less cool than someone who rhapsodizes over "Pi." I suppose that's just the way we are, with a pervasive need as a people to denigrate those texts that actually manage to compel the masses. Maybe it's our collective desire to always be the David to a hegemonic Goliath . . . regardless, it still pisses me off.”

And NOT THE BASEBALL PLAYER asks: “Whenever I read that the buzz is good on an upcoming movie, I wonder----

Who creates the buzz? (someone plants an item the columns of Cindy Adams or Liz Smith?)

Who hears the buzz?

How many buzzers does it take to create real buzz?

Does the buzz have to be interpreted?

Is it coming from studio flacks and PR people? (and posted on AintItCoolNews?)

Is it coming from critics who have seen a private screening before other critics have seen it?

Would you be willing to do part of a column about buzz and how it works or is manipulated in the film industry?

Speaking of which...Is there any buzz on "In the Clearing" with Redford and Mirren?

Is there any buzz on "Monster" with Charlize Theron? Is it even going to be released in 2003?

Has the buzz completely subsided on "The Station Agent?"

Why isn't there more buzz on Michael Caine in Jewison's "The Statement"? It seems to me that could be the big performance this year.

We all know there was a lot of bad buzz on "Gigli," and it seemed to be true, so how reliable is buzz?

Historically, has the buzz ever been totally wrong? It would be interesting to find out what the early buzz was on "Citizen Kane" or "The Wizard of Oz" or "Casablanca" before they were released. I don't remember what the buzz was like for "Jaws" or "Godfather" or "Bonnie and Clyde," but I would guess that some people were probably wrong.

E ME: You guys can throw some answers at this question if you like. I’ll get into some of the answers in tomorrow’s column.

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