IMAX and midnight box office: Skyfall has $4.6 million so far. Can 007 top $100 million for the weekend?

While I am all in favor of major films doing advance IMAX-only releases, MGM and Sony's decision to open Skyfall a day early in IMAX makes the numbers a little tougher to analyze.  For the record, the 23rd official James Bond adventure earned $2.2 million on Thursday playing in 463 IMAX engagements.  The only real plausible comparison is Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol which opened five days early on 425 IMAX screens and earned $4.1 million on its first Friday of such play.  In addition, Skyfall earned another $2.4 million in wide-release midnight showings (a large chunk of its 3,500 screens), bringing its gross to $4.6 million before 'regular business hours'.  That extra day of IMAX-only play, along with the fact that Monday is a holiday for most schools and many businesses, makes the math a little more speculative, but no one said this is an exact science, so let's dive in!  

Learning the wrong lesson: Audiences liked our original films? Let's make sequels to every single one of them!

2012 has been a banner year for, among other things, somewhat original, non-franchised *movies* often targeted at adults.  As I've written before (essay) the stories worth writing after summer 2012 weren't so much about the would-be tent-poles that flopped but the non-tentpoles that were pretty big hits over the first three quarters of the year.  Safe House, The Vow, Magic Mike, Ted, Think Like A Man, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, and The Moonrise Kingdom all proved to be superb investments, with Magic Mike becoming probably the most profitable movie of the year (it cost $7 million and grossed $154 million and counting worldwide).  So the obvious lesson should be that there is indeed a worthwhile audience for original films that aren't intended to be the first in an epic fantasy trilogy.  The obvious lesson should be that audiences *do* crave some original material mixed in with their superhero spectaculars.  But instead of studios seeing the writing on the wall and taking the money that they might have spent on the next Battleship and investing it instead in a handful of smaller, non-property affiliated star vehicles somewhat aimed at adults, they have decided is that what audiences now want is sequels to pretty much every single film listed above.  Moviegoers said "Yes!" to originality, so Hollywood now chooses to respond with "Okay, sequels it is!".

Guest Essay: Merrill Barr explains why Comic-Con is a better marketing tool for television than it is for movies.

From time to time, Mendelson's Memos is able to present reviews and/or essays from guest writers, as is the case this afternoon. Merrill Barr is a frequent analyzer and reviewer of television for both blogs and podcasts. A former contributor to FilmSchoolRejects.com, he currently runs the television podcasts The Idiot Boxers and Operation: Nikita for FatGuysAtTheMovies.com and occasionally provides written reviews for DarkMediaOnline.com. He can be found on twitter (@sonic43), Facebook (facebook.com/merrilljbarr) and Tumblr (TheIdiotsBox.com). He can also be contacted via email at TheIdiotBoxers@gmail.com. Please enjoy, share, and comment.

Four years ago, when it came to movie hype, there was no greater combination of studio marketing and rabid fandom than Comic-Con. Iron Man, The Dark Knight, Green Lantern, Twilight, Captain America, Piranha 3D, Avatar, Scott Pilgrim, Cowboys & Aliens, The Avengers, if your movie had even a sliver of nerdy potential (and sometimes not at all [Salt]) you went to the annual San Diego Comic Book Convention, better known as just 'Comic-Con'.  But that mentality is shifting in movie land.  The downside to a massive marketing push like Comic-Con is – and let’s not beat around the bush, that it is all marketing. Really cool, sometimes clever and intelligent marketing, but marketing none the less – is that there needs to be results. The problem is that it’s hard to differentiate the impact of Comic-Con vs. every other piece of marketing inside the box office because of one thing… Time.