December 20, 2004

Looking at this weekend's box office can give you a headache.

Figuring out exactly what the story with Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events is impossible at the moment. On one side, you have the fourth best non-sequel opening in December, following Lord of The Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings, Ocean's Eleven and What Women Want. On the flip side, the film did over $10 million on Friday and didn't get the traditionally expected kids-film bump on Saturday that would have lead to a weekend gross of over $35 million.

Did the film get hurt by word-of-mouth or critics? Or did the film skew to teens and not reach the younger children who traditionally lead to a much higher Saturday than Friday? Or are parents waiting for word-of-mouth to help them decide whether the film is appropriate for the kids.

The possible answers are all the more interesting because there was some conflict between the director and the studios involved over the degree of darkness… Mr. Silberling wanted it to be on the darker side. As a result, many of the reviews called for the film to be darker than the version that was settled upon was. However, the studio concerns over not going too dark may have accurately guessed at what happened at the box office this weekend.

Of course, both sides could end up being right and both sides could end up being wrong. How much do critics matter? Will kids talk their reluctant parents into taking them to the theater over Christmas weekend? And how much of the material that caused anxiety is going to end up on the DVD in the end?

Also confusingly complex is Sony's weekend, on the heels of a Spidey Year that will put the studio at the top of the market share charts, suffering a 1-2 box office pain with Closer and Spanglish. Both films are from prestigious directors with longstanding personal relationships with the studio. Both films were more expensive than most dramas that would be greenlit at any studio these days. (You say Spanglish isn't a drama? Have you seen it? Even if it is funny, it is not an Adam Sandler comedy… and when you think back on it, the notes of this filmic symphony are all pretty dramatic.) And there is a very real chance that neither of these films will reach $30 million domestic. That could lead to tens of millions of dollars in losses, even with international and home entertainment counted.

(For the record, I consider annual market share and the count of overall domestic grosses each year one of the most worthless film business statistics of them all. Congrats to Sony and all… market share is life and death in the Japanese business mindset. But market share doesn't have anything directly to do with profitability and the total annual sale of tickets is truly irrelevant when the lost ticket sales are being lost not to disinterest, but by alternative and even more profitable income streams coming back to production and distribution entities.)

No doubt, one of the big stories of 2004 is The Failed Auteur.

Of course, there are a lot of movies that didn't work out there. And there are lots of people who will disagree that any one of the films by the following filmmakers failed. But by my count, Brooks and Nichols join a group of filmmakers that have distinct voices, were given room to rumble this year and tripped themselves up - a group including Wes Anderson, Bernardo Bertolucci, Jonathan Glazer, Barry Levinson, Mira Nair, Trey Parker, David O. Russell, M. Night Shyamalan, Stephen Sommers and Oliver Stone.

If the studios set up a fantasy director's league and you ended up with these twelve filmmakers as your team for any given year, you would have to feel pretty good. Not every one is a box office home run hitter, but there is not one among these dozen filmmakers that you would expect to be anything less than exciting, whether they are from the commercial side or the art side. Only five of the filmmakers are older. Sadly, there is only one woman. But every one of them creates a lot of anticipation. And this year, every one of them came up short. What were the odds?

One of the auteurs who didn't come up short was Alexander Payne, whose Sideways has won as many critics awards as any film in anyone's memory. The frenzy is so overwhelming that after two straight weekends of 30something percent drops at the widest part of the film's two months of release, the film picked up an estimated 32 percent this weekend despite losing 51 screens.

Wait.

The hottest critics' movie around, needing those critics because the film has no big box office names, dropped 51 screens the week after getting award after award after award? What's up with that?

Well, it is the latest Academy Awards distribution strategy in town. Reflecting other successful release patterns, from Schindler's List to The English Patient to Chicago, Sideways will hold up its wide release until January 28, right after its now-presumed Oscar nominations (Jan 25) hit, supported by a serious television advertising push.

What none of the other Oscar-nominated examples went through was a 15 week wait from release to going wide. But Shakespeare in Love did wait 10 weeks before going wide the weekend before the Oscar nominations. Obviously, the strategy worked for Harvey Weinstein and Miramax back in 1999. The weekend before the film went wide, it had grossed about one-third of its final total.

Will you find anyone outside of Searchlight who currently believes that Sideways, which was much better reviewed and critic-supported than Shakespeare in Love, will behave like Shakespeare in Love, which is to say that it will win Best Picture in a perceived upset and pass the $100 million mark at the domestic box office? Probably not. But that hardly disqualifies the notion.

The other strategic advantage in restraining the push for Sideways for another month is that it assures that there will no box office sputtering between now and the Oscar nominations going in on January 15. Finding Neverland is sending mixed messages now, this weekend adding an estimated 13 percent at the box office, but only after having a 45 percent increase in screens. Buying a gross is doable and is being done. But the downside for Finding Neverland, if anyone is watching, is the lowest per-screen number among all the films that have less than 1000 screens and are in the Oscar race, except for the 10th week of Being Julia and the 13h weekend of The Motorcycle Diaries.

Box office should be a part of the Oscar discussion quite often this year. Right now, Ray is looking like it will remain the box office leader among nomination contenders right through nominations. Sideways is waiting. Million Dollar Baby is waiting, going Top 12 Markets on January 7 and presumably going wide around the same time as Sideways. Finding Neverland will be chasing $30 million when nominations are announced. The Aviator goes mid-wide this week and could be pushing $60 million when noms come out. And Hotel Rwanda goes out on seven screens this week… expansion is an unknown right now.

Isn't it ironic that one of the arguments for nominating The Incredibles is the same as for nominating Fahrenheit 9/11. Either would be the biggest box office hit of the Academy Best Picture group.

Yeah… pass the aspirin…

READER OF THE DAY: BOLERO writes: "If Thomas Haden Church doesn’t win for Sideways, it will not be because of Clive Owen or Morgan Freeman winning (for Closer and Million Dollar Baby respectively). It will be because Jaime Foxx is not going to win for Ray in the Best Actor column, but instead for Collateral as Best Supporting Actor. If the Paul Giamatti train that’s gaining speed (because of the critic’s awards), keeps going strong I think that there’s a good chance he could be crowned for Sideways. Of course there’s a good chance that I’ll be wrong, and perhaps Collateral will be forgotten altogether for acting awards, but it’s really turning into Foxx’s year all around. I quite enjoyed Sideways, but I think Foxx should win for Ray (I have yet to see either DiCaprio’s or Eastwood’s performances so I guess my view is still slightly limited). This is a perverse system though, and the Academy crowns odd choices occasionally (Julia Ormond for The English Patient anyone?), so we’ll see.

Then again in a perfect world, for me at least, Jim Carrey would win for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but it doesn’t look like that will happen.

Speaking of Carrey, I just got in from Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, and as a somewhat fan of the books, I found the film to be an improvement on the source material. What read as somewhat flat characters at times in the books are brought into the third dimension. It wasn’t as dark as I was expecting, but it was just dark enough to not be totally lost. I liked the creative choices made, and it was an even movie throughout. Plus the kids were not nearly as annoying as the Finding Neverland children (and better actors too). But I digress…critics are too tough on Carrey. He made the character of Count Olaf much more likeable than I imagined. This helped sell the idea that adults never see through the disguise. I’m not about to crown it the best film of the year mind you, but it was good for the time it lasted.

That would be my two cents for today."

E-ME: Do Oscar nods get you to the theater?