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Week Of August 21, 2006 - Snake Handling Mon / Wed / Fri
August 21, 2006
SoaP On A Rope
Snakes on a Plane seemed like a landmark in the history of the internet and the movie business as we went into this last week. Coming out of this weekend, the questions about what this weekend's box office means makes it all the more complex and compelling a landmark.
We don't have any real answers yet, because we can all only guess at the future of the film. But I want to make it clear from the outset that I don't consider this weekend a disaster for this film. I think that water found its level. But how and why and whether it needed to are issue still up for endless - and generally overripe - debate.
ISSUE: The Title
CHOICE: Do you stick with "Snakes on a Plane," as Samuel L. Jackson and the internet band felt was a "must do" or do you find a title that will piss off the heeks, but might be more marketable?
TRUTH: Snakes on a Plane is an attention grabber, every bit as much as Air Pacific 242 (or whatever it was) is not. But Snakes on a Plane also separates your interested from your uninterested like a knife through butter.
CONSEQUENCE: According to tracking, about one quarter of the potential audience this weekend had no interest in seeing this movie. Figure another 50 percent really needed their brains twisted in order to get them serious about buying a ticket. So you're down to 25 percent of the audience that you are selling the movie to comfortably, based on the name alone. SoaP got about 15% of the weekend audience. Not bad, considering.
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ISSUE: The Genre
CHOICE: Horror or action?
TRUTH: Action movies tend to be driven by bigger action names than Samuel L. Jackson and snakes killing people sure seems like horror to some… but…
CONSEQUENCE: By angling the movie as a horror film, the chance of expansion beyond that genre was curtailed.
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ISSUE: The Audience
CHOICE: Do you sell to the core or do you try to expand the base, knowing that some movies that try to expand beyond their core damage that base badly?
TRUTH: Every one of those geek kids who were obsessed with this movie online showed up this weekend. New Line appears to have decided not to try very hard to expand that base. And we'll never know what might have happened if they chased a wider audience.
CONSEQUENCE: Not very many who were outside of the expected target for the film bought a ticket. The core was probably good for between $7 million and $9 million worth of the box office.
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ISSUE: Samuel L. Jackson
CHOICE: Is it really all about him?
TRUTH: You know what New Line knows about a popular violent black man as the near-exclusive image for an action movie? They know that Wesley Snipes opened a popular comic book franchise, Blade, to $17 million in 1998. That was Snipes' biggest non-sequel opening ever. And for Sam Jackson? Aside from Shaft, which was a remake, this is one of his biggest openings for a lead.
No one has ever worked harder for a movie. And Jackson was brilliant at it.
CONSEQUENCE: I love that LJ Cool Sam, but in the legendary words of Cameron Crowe, "You had me at hello." I point to Jamie Foxx's endless tap dance for Ray. They got an Oscar nomination, but the movie still topped out at $75 million domestic. Call it the plantation ceiling, but no matter how much we love and respect Mr. Jackson, Mr. Foxx and other great black movie stars, Will Smith and Denzel Washington are the only ones who seem to cross over right now. And even Denzel seems to have limits, certainly overseas.
Coach Carter opened to $24 million, but the film was PG-13 and was of the "feel good" school of films, not horror. Same with the Tyler Perry films. If I had to guess at the split for the weekend, I'd bet half black and half geek. But there may have been more to milk from the black community, had the studio decided to narrowcast a little more. The hope for a wider berth meant not bowing to that "urban" core.
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ISSUE: The Date
CHOICE: The basic idea was to take a dominant position in the last gasps of the summer. There was really never any other date seriously considered.
TRUTH: Talladega Nights overperformed expectations in all four quadrants and the combination of Step Up and b, which was supposed to launch a week earlier, seem to suck up all the teen girls who might have ever considered going to Snakes. Even Material Girls' crappy $4.4 million start hurt. Those three films grabbed $23.9 million, or almost a quarter of all the business this weekend
CONSEQUENCE: Sometimes you eat the wolf, sometimes the wolf eats you.
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ISSUE: Critics Screenings
CHOICE: To show it or not to show it?
TRUTH: The movie is good enough, for what it is, to avoid any backlash from with the critics or the core for the audience. Also, this movie was not pre-sold the way The DaVinci Code or even something as naturally silly as The Benchwarmers was. As such, there was little reason to hide the movie until the last minute.
CONSEQUENCE: One more tool that could have convinced audiences outside of the core that this was a must-see summer fun fest was lost. The NY Times' rave, amongst others, may have some benefit to the legs of the film, but that "It sounds crazy, but critics seem to love this nutty snake movie" conversation never got to happen.
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ISSUE: The Internet Buzz
CHOICE: Fight it or embrace it.
TRUTH: The internet is a niche world and the most intensely engaged elements of the web (which are not movies, but pornography, gossip, and personal interests) are not the same as the broad media world. It is an absolutely critical and valuable piece of turf… but it is only so big.
CONSEQUENCE: The internet buzz was a double-edged sword. For those who participated, there was no downside for them or the movie. But for those who were not part of that world, there were two camps: those who loved the possibilities of it all and those who just saw it as a bunch of web idiots wasting hours of time on a stupid movie about snakes on a plane. (A few of us lived in between.)
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ISSUE: The Traditional Media Response To The Internet Buzz
CHOICE: Mock or Embrace.
TRUTH: The Traditional Media doesn't understand and doesn't seem to want to understand the internet. Coverage tends to be very black and white. And on this film, we were on relatively new turf, which meant that concepts were even more simplistic.
CONSEQUENCE: Story after story focused not on the movie, but on the internet part of the story. Great story, but all it did was expand the emotional space between the lovers and the haters… the movie became a referendum on the web and not the movie. And again, because the movie was not in play until opening day, the good and the bad of that continued.
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ISSUE: The Studio Response To The Internet Buzz
CHOICE: Fight The Web, Embrace The Web, Try To Dance In Between
TRUTH: Studio web publicity departments are not built to control things that are not in their control. The internet community is not only rebellious, but extremely fast in their response and the width of that response is almost impossible to exert any control over.
CONSEQUENCE: The New Line team managed the web community as best they could. As with Lord of the Rings, they made the effort to bring them into the tent and to make them part of the team, increasing the rooting interest. Before it was over, there were even hugely popular new technologies thrown in, like the "Sam Jackson Personalized E-mail or Phone Call" thing.
Again, the only thing that wasn't done was to chase an expanded base. There are all kinds of internet communities that are not the geek snake lovers. And I would have loved to have seen the web promotion to expand its view, without spending a ton of money, in this arena as in every other.
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ISSUE: The Marketing
CHOICE: The internet geeks launched publicity for the movie long before New Line was prepared to publicize or market the film. So do you ride that wave or go another direction?
TRUTH: It is very, very difficult to sell an R rated action movie when most of the action is the reason for the R rating. Snakes can be shown, but can't strike. And if you want to go somewhere else, you may be playing right into the danger zone of confusing the issue so much that no one knows what the movie is. (See: Lady in the Water)
CONSEQUENCE: The problem I have with the marketing of the film is that it didn't really do anything other than to reinforce the "M-Fing Snakes on an M-Fing Plane" tone set by the star. The outdoor campaign told us nothing new about the film… sensational teaser one-sheet… but those red-tinted billboards that showed a lot of people, but indicated nothing clearly were not sensational.
The marketing was, in the end, as presumptuous as those who screamed that this film should have been rushed into an April or May release. For instance, as clever as the DJ scratch gimmick that allowed Samuel L. to use his now signature phrase on broadcast TV, the imagery of the rest of those TV spots was pure internet Flash animation style stuff. And for audiences that are not into that look, the images aren't as smooth as people are used to seeing. It was another internet-style experience, even on broadcast television. But internet is a niche medium and broadcast TV is meant to be a wide medium. No one wants to say it out loud, but if you are spending TV money, you should be chasing the lowest common denominator, which is a phrase that, of course, does not speak to low quality, but to the wideness of the people who can connect to your message.
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ISSUE: The Publicity
CHOICE: Roll with the wave…
TRUTH: No movie has had more publicity this year than Snakes on a Plane… but what kind of publicity?
CONSEQUENCE: It's hard to fault publicity in any way here. Awareness was through the roof. But the one flaw in the game, in my view, was not to sell the three young actresses in the film in a more aggressive way. It never even occurred to me that Sunny Mabrey and Rachel Blanchard were in the film. And I was barely aware of Julianna Margulies. This trio, forced to deal with snakes and Sam Jackson's machismo should have been great TV fodder. If you could get a group slot, you could throw in Lin Shaye as flavah.
Publicity did a great job… but within the specific parameters of the play.
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ISSUE: Conclusion
CHOICE: Were big mistakes made?
TRUTH: What was truly singular about what happened on this film wasn't the internet buzz, but rather the perfect storm of interest from traditional media and people who don't really go in for this kind of movie.
CONSEQUENCE: It is too easy to pick apart the choices New Line made along the way. I have one major issue, which is that they seem to have gotten seduced by the heat. Like a sucker who thinks he can win at 3 Card Monte on your city's downtown streets, they saw it all… it was so easy… it was going to go against logic… how could it not?
Even down to the last day before the film opened, people all over the place fought what tracking was telling them. Lots of awareness, little interest. But hey, tracking has been terribly off lately, especially with teens. So the wave was going to come and sweep SoaP up into the stratosphere.
New Line distribution chief David Tuckerman said it in one of the wire service articles and he was dead right… when push came to shove, the movie behaved pretty much like any horror movie. Some have done better, some worse. But the studio saw it as a horror film, sold it as a horror film (with humor), and got an opening weekend like a horror film.
The hardest things to manage in Hollywood are expectations. It's not unlike gambling in Vegas. You want to believe in luck and streaks and something greater at play than chance and math… but that way lies madness.
I have been kindly told that the studio was aware of my earlier comments on the strong passion and limited box office potential of all the web buzz. But what seems not to have sunk in was that the value of that buzz didn't become any greater this weekend than it was four months ago. For all the buzz, they seem to have stayed inside the lines. And if anything kept a bigger opening from happening, it was that.
Then again, had they tried something else, it could have been worse. It could have gone better. We will never know.
All we really know is that there is this fun movie out there called Snakes on a Plane. It's better than Blair Witch, but it won't do the same box office. But it may sell as many DVDs. And so it goes…
E Me.
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Week Of June 5, 2006 - 666 Tue / Iraq Doc Wed / Seattle Fri
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Week Of July 12, 2006 - M. Night Mon | You, Me & Wed | Monster House Fri
Week Of July 17, 2006 - 8 A Year Mon / Water Wed / Revamp Fri
Week Of July 24, 2006 - Comic-Con Mon / Gossip Wed / Fri
Week Of July 31, 2006 - Mel G Mon / Talladega Wed / Fri
Week Of August 7, 2006 - Mon / Wed
Week Of August 14, 2006 - No Column Mon / Wed / Snakes Fri
