May 24, 2005

I have long written about the idea that total domestic box office is one of the least meaningful stats in the crayon box o' industry stats. It's the kind of stat that leads to lazy thinking, especially in the press.

This is not an industry where you can watch trends through overall purchasing habits... at least, not in the short term Overall percentage of theatrical dollars expended on kids movies or comedies or comic book movies... those would be interesting investigative stats, trying to examine trends. But when a film like The Passion of The Christ or My Big Fat Greek Wedding turns up, truly not of the studio system, and has the impact they had, it skews the machinery.

This is a business of short term product launch and more and more, by the industry's self-destructive design, short term life expectancy for all but a tiny handful of titles. So the soft numbers for Kingdom of Heaven does, in its third weekend, affect the overall box office number from last weekend, allowing a weekend with a record breaking Star Wars performance to remain about 5% behind last summer's also-massive Shrek 2 opening weekend. However, Kingdom of Heaven will not and was never expected to effect the weekend, for instance, when Batman Begins opens.

Or to keep it all in the immediate history of this year, the lack of The Passion of The Christ does not have anything to do with the Kingdom of Heaven/House of Wax weekend substantially underperforming (by $25 million) last year's Van Helsing opening weekend.

There were two other weekends this year that underperformed last year by more than $25 million. One was Easter weekend, which last year saw a huge resurgence for The Passion and this year offered only the surprisingly successful, but not overwhelming launch of Sahara. The other was on The Passion's opening weekend last year versus this year's launch of Diary of a Mad Black Woman. Again, a surprisingly strong opening happened - in this case, of another indie - but could not begin to compete with a market expanded by The Passion.

It all started so well...

Four of the first five weekends this year were up from last year. Martin Luther King Day Weekend was up about $30 million this year from last. President's Day Weekend was up about $12 million. The "thirteen down weeks" schtick literally starts on the weekend that Passion of the Christ opened last year.

The current bottom line is that the overall domestic box office is about $260 million behind last year, which is off about 8% of the overall box office at this time. But there is one significant stat in all of this.

Even though weekends represent a disproportionate percentage of the box office, the numbers are only off about $115 million on the weekends, leaving about $145 million of the trouble to Monday-Thursday. But even this statistic needs to be analyzed much more deeply... much more deeply than I am ready to go this morning.

It's not really fair to just keep screaming "The Passion of the Christ" and leave it at that, just as the overall anxiety creation is not fair. However, of the $260 million "missing" from the overall domestic box office this year, $63 million is represented by just the weekend of The Passion's opening and the Easter weekend for The Passion.

The April/May equation is the other area of a major variable and that too has explanations that have nothing to do with audience fatigue. Does anyone really believe that audiences passed on xXx2 because they didn't feel like going to the movies and wanted to see all that stuff blow up on DVD? Anyone... anyone?

The constant reality of the box office is that the majority of people make specific choices on each film. And unfortunately, a lot of the paranoia inside the film business is because the core age group of executive workers is having kids and watching DVDs instead of going to the movies. But we are not our customers!

People who never go to the movies anymore weren't, for the most part, on line for Star Wars last weekend either. Now isn't it amazing how when a movie with a strong consumer demand arrives, audiences show up and when there isn't, they don't?

As Kingdom of Heaven - and Van Helsing before it - proved so ably, it ain't the date it's the movie. The date and the summer and the "mood to see movies" is an opportunity, not a guarantee. Journalists want to turn the box office into trends endlessly so they have something to write about and - The Holy Grail - to perchance be right about something first! Inside the industry, trends are appealing because it can take the heat off. After all, if Kingdom of Heaven doesn't do great, it is much more appealing to talk about the tough trend of the moment and how it was the wrong date for a historic epic than taking the heat for not hiring a movie star who could be sold or for running a remarkably bland ad campaign up until the last moment, when it was too late.

That said, the nightmare of a still increasingly front-loaded domestic box office system is real for studio execs who have to deliver or get blamed. The sickness of "one shot and you're out of the game" thinking is viral and no one has found the medicine to stop it yet.

Memorial Day weekend should snap "The Streak." But the question is, can the market be elastic enough to allow that to happen? Last year's Memorial Day weekend was the biggest single weekend of all time, as I recall, with $248 million for the 4 days. July 4 weekend, with Spidey 2, was good for $223 million in four days.

With weekend two of Sith (has to do at least $80 million over the weekend, no?), plus The Longest Yard (Sandler's biggest summer opening is just under $42 million... but this seems sure to be much higher) and Madgascar (even if it opens to 50% of what Shrek 2 did, it's $54 million, plus one more holiday day) all chasing strong, specific demographic groupings, it would seem a good bet that the trio, on they're own, could come close the entire number from last year. There was an additional $50 million in business aside from the Top Three last year on the holiday.

While the Chicken Littles run around screaming about the falling sky of 2005, the real question is about success... "How wide can the market expand?"

If The Longest Yard opened in early April and xXx2 was opening this weekend, the entire marketplace could be looking very different in the big picture. Yard could have cut the deficit in half before the first of May and xXx2 might have actually done better on this weekend, building a black audience more effectively than it did last month. Regardless of whether xXx2 did any better, the weekend is so loaded, that it would still be huge. The #3 film last Memorial Day was Troy with just $15 million.

But then, what would we have to talk about?

(A Note Of Structure: Of course, this whole thing is also skewed by the statistical bend of the calendar. With last year's leap year taken into account, the best way, it seems, to line last year up to this year is by "starting this year" with the Dec 31-Jan 2 weekend, while last year "started" with Jan 2-4. In trying to make it all fit right, I have made sure to compare holiday weekends to holiday weekends. And as of last weekend, using this system, this year is still one day behind last year. But Memorial Day Weekend is about to match up. Matching up the weekly numbers is a little easier, but the difference between weekend days and weekday days still skews things a bit.)

READER OF THE DAY: SNAKE SQUIRE writes: "1) You would think that there has to be some sort of market for foreign language films in this country. If not distribution wise, but pay cable wise. I have no idea why IFC, Sundance, Starz Cinema, or even one of the countless Cinemaxes has not gone to a larger foreign language film format. There is an audience out there. If you get them at home. Get them use to that kind of film. Maybe they will go to a theatre. Of course, this could be just far-fetched, and most foreign language films just need to have more martial arts in them. Whateverthecase; these films need to be shown more on the pay channels in this country.

2) First off; I love the frantic camera work of Revenge. Lucas said he based it off of Vietnam war coverage. Since Joss Whedon used it on Firefly and in the upcoming Serenity. I like calling it the Firefly cam. Easily one of my favourite types of camera movement to come along in a long long type.

The thing about Revenge and the six times I have seen it. Remains the UTTER GUT PUNCH the film leaves with me everytime. Few trilogy, has ever ended with such tragedy. Return of the King might have, but PJ had to keep it FUN! This film utterly kicks me in the balls, but that is life. You got the sweet and the sour, and a SW film where the bad guy wins. At least, you know, that in the end Luke redeems his father and saves the galaxy. Yet that does not change the kick in the balls that comes before hand.

Have a nice day..."

And this from REPEAT FATHER: "As a person who was reared on Star Wars fantasies as a child (at least half my waking hours were spent pretending I was the pilot of an X-wing fighter bombing the Death Star), it was quite an accomplishment by George Lucas to make me almost entirely ambivalent toward the prequels.

However, the original trilogy retained enough luster in my mind to lure me to see Revenge of the Sith on Saturday. And about halfway through, I just wanted to scream at the top of my lungs, "Thank God, this is fun again!"

Strange that Episode III, which Lucas seems to view as Star Wars' version of Hamlet, should be the most fun of the prequels, but I took great delight not only in R2-D2's hijinks in the beginning battle but also in Palpatine's snakey, over-the-top attempts to lure Annakin to the dark side. The wookie army was sweet, and the climatic battle, as heart wrenching as it was supposed to be, was breathtakingly staged with the volcanic planet as a backdrop. Sure, there's a ton of clunky dialogue, and the actors, for all their pedigree, never seemed to find the right pitch (somewhere between ham and Shakespeare) that's required for Star Wars. But the damn movie was F. U. N., and thank goodness after the first two lugubrious prequels.

On closer review, I think Sith discloses what most of us already assumed: Lucas' creative juices ran dry quite long ago. There is no character in the new prequels of any interest that didn't exist in the original trilogy. And it's quite obvious the only material that was worth a film was what Lucas had already written 30 years ago while creating the original Star Wars script. If Lucas hadn't screwed himself over by naming a new hope episode IV, maybe he could have saved himself some embarrasment and only made the two prequels for which he actual had material.

Ah, well.. . spilt milk. May the Force Be With You until the inevitable Episodes 7-9 show up in a multiplex not so far away."

E-ME. Do you really pay attention to trend pieces?