Weekend Box Office part I: Fee Fi Fo Flop: Jack (the Giant Slayer) bombs harder than even John Carter.

Pretty much everything I said last March about John Carter applies to Jack the Giant Slayer.  There are a few differences.  Jack and the Beanstalk is technically a well-known property and Bryan Singer had the live-action track record that Andrew Stanton did not.  But otherwise it is pretty much the same fallacy with pretty much the same result: $200 million cost plus who knows how much in marketing for $27.9 million on opening weekend.  No stars, source material no one really cared to see onscreen, marketing that didn't convince them that they should, a release date that put them within one week of a likely juggernaut, and mixed reviews.  Like John Carter and Battleship, Jack the Giant Slayer was basically a $200 million variation on 'Generic Blockbuster: The Movie'.  Unlike Disney and Universal respectively, Warner Bros. seemed to see this one coming well in advance.  They changed the release date from June 2012 to this weekend and changed the title from Jack the Giant Killer to 'appeal to families'.  Yet they still spent $200 million on a would-be family film that I can't take my daughter to because it's PG-13 and (allegedly) features slightly toned down Lord of the Rings type violence. To be fair, some of that $200 million cost was due to reshoots and the date change, but why bother?  Warner spent untold extra millions to get the exact same terrible result they got this weekend.  And really the film's cost is as usual the prime offender.

2012 in Film: The Year's "Worst" Films.

Almost to the end, folks.  But before we finally recap the best (or, err, my favorites) of 2012, let's take a pit stop to discuss what are arguably the worst films of 2012.  Now as always, I can't presume that I've seen every probable terrible movie out there (I generally avoid Adam Sandler comedies and didn't catch Parental Guidance in time), but I tried to highlight films that were both very bad and whose respective failures meant something more than just their artistic inadequacy.  As always, the films below are in alphabetical order.  So, without further ado, let's dive in!

Alex Cross:
To William Hurt in A History of Violence, "How to do you f*** that up?!"  You have a long-running detective series filled with larger-than-life villains and often insanely over-the-top violence.  You have Tyler Perry, if perhaps cast against type than at least hungry to prove that he can do something different.  You have Matthew Fox theoretically willing to chew up every bit of available scenery.  And you have audiences primed for a kind of old-school adult-skewing genre picture that the previous two Morgan Freeman-starring Alex Cross films (Kiss the Girls and Along Came A Spider) represented back in the 1990s.  How in the world do you make this film this incredibly boring?  First of all, you take an explicitly R-rated story and neuter it into a still-inappropriate PG-13.  Then you pile on generic cliche on top of generic cliche.  Then you instruct every actor other than Fox to be as lifeless as possible.  Finally, you never decide to make a down-to-Earth crime thriller or a would-be superhero/super villain story.  The end result is a painfully dull would-be thriller that can't hold a candle to the most average episode of Criminal Minds.

2012 in film: Audiences show (relatively) good taste.

We won't know what effect the 2012 movie year will have long term for quite awhile, but we may very well come to see 2012 as the year audiences said "Thanks, but no thanks."  No, I'm not talking about some imaginary movie going slump that never was and arguably never will be.  I'm talking about the fact that this year, seemingly moreso than in recent years prior, American audiences seemed actually almost... picky?  If you glance at the films that were hits and the films that were bombs, you'll notice at least a token quality curve, especially when dealing with the mainstream and/or blockbusters.  Time and time again, audiences seemingly rejected the prepackage blockbusters that were tossed their way as if to ignite some kind of Pavlovian response.  While on the other hand, they seemed to embrace not so much the 'good' would-be blockbusters but ones that existed somewhat outside the conventional wisdom about what could or couldn't reach mega-gross levels. To a certain extent, at least to a degree worth acknowledging, conventional wisdom went out the window in 2012.

Box office speculation: Will Total Recall "pull a John Carter"?

Note: I posted then removed this article late yesterday afternoon when some figures were questioned by an unnamed writer more knowledgeable than me. I realized that I hadn't bothered to link to anything since I thought the figure was common knowledge, and I didn't have time to investigate at that exact moment.  The article below is as is, with appropriate linkage.  

Thanks to The Bourne Supremacy moving a week later to August 10th, we have another relatively light weekend at the box office, with only Diary Of A Wimpy Kid: Dog Days and Sony's Total Recall remake opening wide.  There is an uber-tight lid slammed shut on any advance word on Total Recall, with an embargo apparently existing until Wednesday for some and all the way until Friday for others.  I did not pursue and was not invited to a screening, and considering how busy I'm going to be for awhile I may not even see the film for a good long time (I'll see Diary of Wimpy Kid 3 before I see Total Recall).  But I digress.  What I come here to discuss is a relatively new phenomenon, which I would like to call 'pulling a John Carter'.  I don't mean that Total Recall will flop, although it *could* due to what appears to be a general lack of interest beyond morbid curiosity (is anyone in the blog-sphere talking about anything other than the relatively 'hotness' of Kate Beckinsale versus Jessica Biel?).  But at a cost of $200 million, Total Recall *has* to be a world-killing blockbuster both here and abroad just to break even.  And is there anyone here who thinks that Total Recall, sans a major global star or even 3D-enhancement, has the muscle to gross even $400 million worldwide, let alone the $550-600 million arguably necessary for a decent profit?

Weekend Box Office: (05/27/12): Men In Black 3 tops Memorial Day while The Moonrise Kingdom slays in limited release.

The Men In Black franchise returned to theaters this weekend after a ten year hiatus and, for better or worse, performed exactly the same as the prior Men In Black films. The first Men In Black debuted with $51 million over the Fri-Sun portion of its July 4th weekend back in 1997 while Men In Black 2 earned $52 million over the same portion in 2002.  To wit, Men In Black 3 earned an estimated $55 million over the Fri-Sun portion of the weekend with a projected $70 million Fri-Mon holiday gross. 3D-bumps and ten years worth of inflation puts a damper on the numbers (in today's respective dollars, the original's debut would be about $88 million while the sequel would be about $71 million), but the consistency is arguably a little remarkable.  It's arguably only a 'dissappointment' due to the unexpectedly high budget of the threequel, which shut down production for six weeks in the middle of filming in order to work out script kinks.  At a cost of anywhere from $220 million to $300 million, Sony was in the unenviable position of needing an 'out of this world' debut (sorry) to justify the expense, and this otherwise hearty haul wasn't it.   Having said that, it's still Will Smith's third-biggest Fri-Sun debut behind his last two blockbusters from 2007 (I Am Legend's $77 million opening) and 2008 (Hancock's $62 million Fri-Sun debut over July 4th 2008).

Money for nothing: A commercial (not artistic) defense of Paramount's decision to convert GI Joe Retaliation to 3D.

As most of you know, Paramount has announced that it is moving one of its three major summer releases, G.I. Joe: Retaliation, from June 29th, 2012 to March 29th, 2013.  The official reason for this date change is not quality issues with the film, the need for reshoots, problems with the marketing, or the desire to 'unkill Channing Tatum due to his increased visibility/profile. but purely because they want to take the extra nine months to convert the film to 3D for theatrical release.  Obviously most of the film punditry world is crying foul over this decision and as someone who was looking forward to the film I sympathize.  But putting aside the "I want to see it *now*!" and the "I hate needless and/or post-converted 3D!" arguments, it's tough in this current box office climate to argue that Paramount didn't make the right call.  Since Avatar kick-started the 3D trend 2.5 years ago, there has been a flurry of would-be tentpole films going the 3D route and an equal number of would-be blockbusters choosing to renounce the gimmick and go out as 2D only.  While we can all appreciate the filmmakers who stuck to their artistic guns in the face of box office pressure, the truth of the matter is that in today's marketplace, where a big-budget film's financial fate is often decided by overseas dollars, it's almost fiscal self-injury not to make the call.  For anywhere from $10 million to $20 million extra, you can add around 15-20% to your opening weekend grosses and around 15% to your total domestic box office, with an un-quantifiable upshot for foreign grosses.  For numbers like that, why *wouldn't* you convert your purely commercial popcorn adventure film to 3D?

Weekend Box Office (05/20/12): Battleship sinks, The Dictator and What To Expect When You're Expecting stumble, while The Avengers charges on.

Most box office write-ups written today or tomorrow will exclaim that 'The Avengers sunk Battleship!'.  The truth is that Battleship (review) sunk itself.  The film was terrible, a mishmash of a thousand prior blockbuster films all meshed into a generic template that seemed like producers checking off a list of ingredients on a sciencitic formula.  More importantly, the marketing accurately conveyed this and audiences decided to either stay home or see something else.  The assumption of global success, based on an arbitrary connection to a board game and $220 million worth of special effects surrounded by a stale concoction of used parts, was cynicism of the highest order.  The fact domestic audiences soundly rejected it has to be cause for optimism.  With John Carter and now Battleship (pity Taylor Kitsch, who stars in both but bears little responsibility), it appears that movie studios run the risk of indeed going broke underestimating the taste of the American public.

Review: Battleship (2012) is 'Battlesh*t', representing the culmination of corporate-minded test-tube filmmaking.

Battleship

2012
130 minutes
rated PG-13

by Scott Mendelson

Maybe it's all led up to this.  Ten years of big-budget spectacle film-making that seemed ever-more geared toward the theoretical fourteen-year old boy who doesn't necessarily know how to read his native language have brought us Peter Berg's Battleship. This is the very definition of empty spectacle, devoid of a single interesting character and (with one token exception) any interesting plot turns.  It is not so much a film as a prepackaged product, so intent on appealing to as many people as possible that it is completely devoid of any real appeal.  Battleship is the kind of movie that makes it so hard to defend the industry, and so hard to actually praise mainstream films when they do get it right.  If you're the kind of person who presumes that all movies stink and that the films being made today are by-nature inferior than the ones that were made in some by-gone era, Battleship is exactly the kind of alleged popcorn entertainment that you're probably thinking of.  If we often discuss big-budget franchise pictures in terms of food (The Dark Knight is a filet minion, Transformers 2 is a Big Mac, etc), then Battleship is basically a jar of baby food.  There is technically food inside the jar, but it is stripped of all sugar, all salt, and all taste beyond whatever natural flavors the jar might possess.

Weekend Box Office (04/22/12): Think Like a Man earns a whopping $33m, The Lucky One earns $22m, The Hunger Games stays strong and tops $350m.

It was an 'everybody wins' weekend at the box office as all three openers outperformed even the most optimistic expectations.  The number one film of the weekend was not The Hunger Games but rather Think Like A Man.  The all-star romantic comedy based off of Steve Harvey's best-selling relationship self-help book grossed a somewhat surprising $33 million on just over 2000 screens.  The Screen Gems film was notable in that the small studio made a real effort to market the African-American-centric rom-com both to black males and white audiences (Vulture has a detailed article about the marketing campaign).  Racial demographics aren't available yet, but the film played 63% female and 62% over 30.  For what it's worth, it earned an A from Cinemascore, including an A+ from audiences under 25. Even more impressive is that the film achieved a near-3x, including a token increase on Saturday (from $12 million to $13 million).  The film has a ton of 'would probably be a bigger star in a color-blind society' actors, including Gabrielle Union, Meagan Good, Michael Ealy, Steve Harvey, and Taraji P. Henson.  But the secret weapon may have been comedian Kevin Hart, who powered his stand-up concert film, Laugh At My Pain to $7 million last September despite playing on less than 300 screens.  Pay no attention to this large opening folks, nothing to see about an under-served audience demographic delivering near-blockbuster numbers on a $13 million budget.  Just move along and keep putting Anthony Mackie in fourth-billed supporting roles.

Why I'd rather see What to Expect When You're Expecting than Battleship.

I'd imagine I'm one of the few 'geek bloggers' who would rather see What To Expect When You're Expecting more than a number of the 'big summer tentpoles'. Aside from perhaps my advancing age, part of this is that a number of the summer films just-plain don't look very good. Aside from the fact that most of us are film nerds and anticipate the new releases as a matter of course, are any of us all that psyched to see Battleship, Men In Black 3, or Total Recall?  Is there a reason we pretend to be excited about ever bigger would-be blockbusters that all-but flaunt their lack of substance at us like a badge of pride?  At the very least, the Lionsgate adaptation of the classic self-help book for pregnant parents promises to actually be 'about something' and have a certain emphasis on human relationships and what-not.  And, as a participatory father forever irked by a popular culture that presumes that dads don't do jack-shit to help raise their kids ("I'd love to change that diaper, but there's no changing table in the men's restroom."), I am at least somewhat pleased by the recent ad campaign.  Lionsgate knows it has female audiences in the bag already, so as noted in the poster above and the trailer after the jump, it's aggressively pitching to men.  

Weekend Box Office (04/15/12): Hunger Games fends off Three Stooges, Cabin in the Woods, and Lockout.

In the third-to-last weekend before summer, The Hunger Games fended off a trio of "B-movies" to retain the top spot this weekend for the fourth time in a row.  But the ranking is arbitrary and the real news is (as always) the numbers themselves. There were three new wide releases this weekend and none of them were expected to set the box office on fire.  None of them did, although Fox had a surprisingly solid debut for the Farrelly Bros' The Three Stooges.  Despite painful trailers and an initial batch of lousy reviews, the film played well to family audiences and reviews seemed to improve as reluctant critics took in a matinee show and came out surprised.  The picture opened with $17 million, which is good for the third-biggest debut for the Farrelly Bros, behind the $22 million debut of Shallow Hal in 2001 and the $24 million debut of Me, Myself, and Irene in 2000.  Since Shallow Hal, the comedic directing duo have not had a film gross over $45 million in the US, so this spry opening should help them pass that particular benchmark even if it collapses next weekend.  Although it scored a rare 3x weekend multiplier, so it's not hard to imagine the film having token legs until summer arrives.   The film earned a B- from Cinemascore, with a 'C' from audiences over 25 but an 'A' from audiences under 18.  This $30 million production should be quite profitable especially when you factor in the seemingly invincible 20th Century Fox foreign marketing machine (this could easily be another Fox film that earns $60 million here but $120 million overseas).  While the Farrelly Bros have probably peaked critically and commercially, as long as they can bring in comedies at $30-40 million, they can probably do what they want for the rest of their careers.

Third Battleship trailer sells scale and non-stop explosions, but leaves me bored.

I made a comment the other day on a radio podcast I guested on, basically stating that there are at least a few 'big summer movies' that I'm not only not very excited about. I basically feel like if I end up seeing films like Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, Men in Black 3, or Battleship, it will be out of some kind of obligation or because there is something specific about them I may want to write about (for example, how well Snow White and the Huntsmen plays as a feminist adventure).  As for Battleship, I can see no societal value or social relevance that would merit an essay (I've already said my peace regarding the casting of Rihanna) and my only real curiosity involves whether or not the climax involves Liam Neeson muttering "You sunk my battleship!" right before he dies.  I will say that unlike a certain insanely expensive movie that came out last weekend, you can clearly see the money onscreen this time around.  The film looks pretty huge, perhaps the 'biggest' movie of summer 2012 in terms of large-scale action and worldwide scope.  But yeah, this film looks like a perfectly-blended hybrid of Transformers, Armageddon, and The Guardian.  But since the action is going to be personality-free robots attacking personality-free ships, I can't imagine any emotional investment will be found.  Maybe I'm too old for this kind of thing, or maybe Battleship really is the definitive personality-free/humanity-free blockbuster that we've been leading up to all these decades.  Maybe I'll see it, maybe I won't, but I don't expect to have too much to say about it.  This one opens on May 18th in the US but April 11th elsewhere, so we'll see...

Scott Mendelson      

She can sing, but can she act? Why exactly is Rihanna starring in Battleship instead of any number of actual black actresses?

I am not the first person to bring this up.  Heck, Samuel L. Jackson went on a mini-tirade about this a decade ago, regards to male actors.  But in a day-and-age where meaty roles for black actresses are incredibly scarce, especially in big-budget studio films, it has to be a little grating for the many underemployed African American actresses to see one of the bigger female-minority roles in a major summer tent-pole this year going to not a trained thespian, but a media-friendly musician of thus-far unknown acting capabilities.  Rihanna (full name: Robyn Rihanna Fenty) may indeed have the chops to convincingly play battle-ready Petty Officer Raikes who helps Taylor Kitsch fend off an alien invasion in Peter Berg's Battleship.  But one has to ask why a popular musician with absolutely no acting experience whatsoever got the prime gig ahead of any number of African American actresses who have struggled with the glass ceiling that exists in the industry.

Battleship gets a teaser, feels very Armageddon-ish.

I could go on and on about how this represents the pinnacle of what is wrong with the 'tentpole' portion of the film industry at the moment.  But truth be told, I'm more depressed that Peter Berg chose THIS as his follow up to Hancock (arguably one of the best original superhero pictures of the modern superhero era) and chose not to fill the cast with quirky character actors (think The Core).  But no matter, the finished product basically feels like an original (though contrived) invading aliens vs. the US Navy film that slapped the name 'Battleship' on its marquee purely for brand name recognition.  Which, frankly, if you're going to adapt a board game (or a theme park ride for that matter), that's how you do it.  I'm less annoyed at the whole 'let's make a movie out of Battleship' concept that I am at how contrived and generic the picture feels.  Peter Berg (who showed real action chops with The Kingdom) seems to be mimicking Michael Bay.  The alien threat feels like something out of Transformers (the red and yellow peg-shaped missiles are a nice touch), while the core storyline is pure Armageddon.  The only question is not whether Liam Neeson will die at the end (after giving Taylor Kitsch approval to wed his daughter, Brooklyn Decker), but whether Neeson's last words will be "You sunk my battleship!"  This one comes out May 18th, 2012, which is actually prime summer real estate, in apparently glorious 2D.

Scott Mendelson