The lesson of Jack the Giant Slayer: Delaying failure and fixing the unfix-able is expensive and often counter-productive.

As most of you know, Warner Bros. intended to release Bryan Singer's Jack the Giant Killer in June of 2012 before pulling it from release, ordering reshoots and the like, and calling it a more kid-friendly Jack the Giant Slayer.  I don't know what the film's budget was prior to the date change and related reshoots, but it was probably a lot less than the $195 million that they ended up with.  And for what?  The film opened this weekend to $28 million.  If patterns hold for this kind of release, it'll likely top out at $70 million domestic at best and around $250 million worldwide as a best case scenario.  But point being, how much better of an opening could Warner Bros. expecting for a half kid-friendly/half dark-and-violent retelling of Jack and the Beanstalk starring absolutely no one of any box office worth? How much worse of an opening would Warner Bros. be looking at had it just gone ahead and opened it in June of 2012 as they intended?  Is it really worth the extra tens-of-millions of dollars that they ended up spending on the picture? Delaying the inevitable oftentimes merely gets you the same result at a greater cost.

Daniel Craig doesn't deserve a raise for The Girl Who Played With Fire because Daniel Craig is not a box office draw...

This one is pretty simple.  Daniel Craig allegedly (Hollywood Reporter) wants a raise for his appearance in Sony's planned The Girl Who Played With Fire.  Sony is refusing and may even be trying to wrangle a pay cut.  Sony is allegedly digging its heels out of the desire to cut costs, as the first film grossed $232 million worldwide yet still barely broken even due to its frankly absurd $90 million budget.  Had the film cost a more reasonable $60-$70 million, it would have been quite profitable for Sony.  But it didn't so it wasn't.  If we must see the two other chapters in the original series, then they damn-well shouldn't cost nearly $100 million apiece. You could argue that Rooney Mara is an essential component of any sequel and should be hired even at a token higher cost this time around.  But everyone else involved is expendable.  Daniel Craig, whose character was as bland a male lead as you can ask for, is not a box office draw, period. If Sony sees fit to write out his journalist protagonist, I imagine it won't affect the film's financial fortunes one iota.  Daniel Craig is one of countless actors who do just fine in a marquee role or a popular franchise but flounder elsewhere.  If Daniel Craig wants a raise from Sony, he is welcome to ask for one for the next James Bond film.   But outside of the 007 series, Daniel Craig isn't a box office draw, period.

Skyfall has crossed $300 million domestic! A closer look sees James Bond near the top of the action-film record books.

Sony is reporting that Skyfall grossed $260,000 yesterday, which was just enough to put its domestic total over the magic $300 million mark.  Putting that in perspective, this means that Skyfall has nearly doubled the previous domestic-best gross of the 007 series, the $168 million grossing Quantum of Solace and the $167 million-grossing Casino Royale.  Now that it's theatrical run is pretty much finished (it's got $5 million left in the tank, at the absolutely most), let's look at how it did in the grand scheme of things.  Even when adjusted for inflation, the film is the third-biggest domestic earner in the series, surpassing the adjusted-$279 million gross of You Only Live Twice ($43 million in real 1967 dollars) and hanging out below only the $515 million-grossing Goldfinger ($51 million in 1964) and the $585 million-grossing Thunderball ($65 million in 1965). It's the biggest-grossing spy film of all time and the highest-grossing non-fantasy action film of all-time.  Even when playing the inflation card, it's the sixth biggest spy movie ever, behind the aforementioned 60's 007 films, Mission: Impossible II ($310 million adjusted gross/$215 million actual gross) Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me ($315m/$205m), and the first Mission: Impossible ($318m/$181m).  If you factor in pretty much every remotely recent non-fantastical/non superhero action franchise, it still ends up with more tickets sold than all but the likes of Beverly Hills Cop ($522m/$234m), Rambo: First Blood Part II ($329m/$150m),  Rush Hour 2 ($310m/$226m), and Beverly Hills Cop II ($305m/$153m).  

Reason 4,325 why cumulative box office is a stupid statistic...

If you've read this site for any length of time, you've heard me claim about the constant reporting of what's basically called cumulative box office.  Cumulative box office is basically the total weekend box office of all films currently in theaters.  It's the kind of statistic that presumes that box office is a team sport, rather than a solo enterprise.  It's the stat that led to the whole 'great movie-going slump' of 2005, wherein various box office pundits screamed that movie going was doomed because the cumulative weekends were down from the same respective weekends in 2004, never mind that different movies were being released in summer 2005 compared to summer 2004.  Since then we've had any number of 'slumps!', usually during periods when we had more smaller, lower-budget films instead of non-stop tent poles every weekend.  This weekend  we're going to hear a lot of talk about how this Thanksgiving is the biggest Thanksgiving ever by around $20 million.  That's terrific news for the industry I suppose, especially if you're the part of the industry releasing The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn 2 or Skyfall.  But if you're the part of the industry that's releasing Rise of the Guardians, you're probably not having a very good Thanksgiving.

Why the box office failure of Fun Size is actually good news.

Call it reason 3,214 why movies aren't dead.  As you all know, the Nickelodeon comedy Fun Size debuted in theaters last weekend with nary a peep. With just $4 million to its name by Sunday night, it was the 64th-lowest opening weekend for a wide release in history.  Why does any of this matter?  Well, precisely because it doesn't matter.  The film starred Victoria Justice, Jane Levy, and Chelsea Handler and was sold as "The Hangover for kids".  It was also yet another example of a female-centric comedy.  It bombed.  But you know what didn't happen?  You didn't hear hand-wringing about how a female-centric comedy tanked at the box office. You didn't see speculative essays about what the film's failure meant for the future of female-driven comedy in mainstream cinema.  Heck, I did not see one single article discussing even the fact that the film was in fact a female-centric comedy.  I've always said progress comes when you don't have to talk about it.  Well Fun Size bombed last weekend and nobody really cared.  I'd argue that is progress.

Release date musical chairs: How to fix the upcoming November/December clusterf**k...

I mentioned this briefly last night, but taking a look at the release date calendar of the last two months of the year, it is clear that something is quite amiss.  It's not just a matter of too many movies being released at the end of the year, nor even a matter of too many "Oscar bait" pictures drowning each other out as is sometimes the case.  No, when you look at the release calendar for November and December, you notice an odd pattern.  There are nine weeks in the last two months of the year, during which we have a total of twenty-one (21) wide releases, counting the November 16th expansion of Spielberg's Lincoln.  Now you might think "Oh, that's about two per week, that's not so bad".  But the problem is the scheduling itself.  There are five of those nine weeks with just a single new release, leaving the fifteen other movies to fight it out over the remaining five weeks.  It gets even more dire when you look at the specific release schedules in question.  You've got four weekends with one (1) new release and one weekend with two (2) new nationwide releases.  That leaves fifteen movies fighting it out over four weekends, four weekends which now average 3.75 films a weekend.  Something's gotta give and/or someone has to have the good sense to move around a bit and spread the wealth.

Why did no studio move their upcoming action films to September 7th after The Gangster Squad split?

Yes yes, last weekend's box office was the worst since after the 9/11 attacks.  Normally cumulative weekend box office doesn't mean a damn thing, but this weekend deserves study as a prime example of missed opportunities.  The actual reasons for this are interesting for two reasons.  A) Just like 9/11, the six degrees-of-separation reason is once again rooted in an act of mass violence.  Had the Aurora shootings not occurred on July 20th or had Warner Bros. shown a token amount of backbone, The Gangster Squad would have been the big opener of the weekend and surely would have delivered a better debut than The Words, which turned out to be the sole truly wide release.  Moreover, the weekend shows us how much we've become accustomed to weekly blockbuster opening weekends each and every frame.  But the real question of last weekend is why didn't any studio bother to move a token major action release onto the September 7th slot.  Yes, I know Lionsgate randomly dumped The Cold Light of Day onto 1,500 screens with next-to-no advertising, but considering the coming storm of major genre fare over just the next three weeks, you have to wonder why a studio, any studio, didn't think to jump into the near-vacant slot and avoid the coming storm.

2012 Summer Movie wrap-up: The Avengers and the art house save an otherwise mediocre summer movie season.

This is actually a pretty simple summer movie season to analyze and/or dissect.  In short, the expected mega-blockbusters were indeed mostly mega-blockbusters, the expected middle-of-the-road hits were just that, while the films pegged most likely to flop or at least financially disappoint did just that.   If you had polled pundits at the beginning of the summer over the top four films of summer 2012, you they probably would have told you some combination of The Avengers, The Dark Knight Rises, The Amazing Spider-Man, and Brave.  And three of those films did pretty much what should have been realistically expected of them.  The core artistic pattern of summer 2012 was pretty simple: Most of the mainstream entries, even the ones expected to soar, ended up being artistically disappointing while the indie scene was on fire all season long.  Speaking financially, audiences embraced most of the major art-house films while being just a little pickier when it came to mainstream fare.  But the biggest news of summer 2012 was the general success of old-school movies, as a number of original properties and/or star vehicles proved quite profitable.  I've written extensively elsewhere about the slow and steady return of the 'movie' so I won't dwell on that here (essay and essay).  But when Magic Mike is a smash hit while a Total Recall remake is a money loser, one hopes that the studios will take note and perhaps learn a lesson different than "Let's make a sequel to Magic Mike!".

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?

As Men In Black 3 crosses $400 million worldwide, some thoughts on preconceived box office notions and the wisdom of double-checking your conclusions.

As of yesterday, Sony's Men In Black 3 has grossed $400 million worldwide after twelve days of theatrical release.  At this rate, $600-$700 million worldwide seems probable.  So even if the budget is $300 million, so large that the film may not be profitable even if it surpasses The Hunger Games's $645 million worldwide take, it is quite clear that Men In Black 3 is a pretty big worldwide box office hit.  It's arguably so big that only The Avengers (already well-ahead of course), The Dark Knight Rises, The Amazing Spider-Man (also a Sony film), and a trio of animated films (Madagascar 3, Ice Age 4, and Brave) stand even a theoretical chance of out-grossing it this summer.  Yet I come not to cheer-lead but to ponder.  At summer's end, will anyone bother to remark at how well the film did over its entire run?  Will the various pundits who wrote the film off as a flop or a disappointment after its 'mere' $200 million four-day global opening weekend over Memorial Day eventually check back at Box Office Mojo and realize the error of their original prognosis?  It's unlikely. The box office pundits of the world are often so dead-set in their preconceived presumptions, sometimes before a film even opens, that it's too much to admit that opening weekend isn't everything and that sometimes a would-be disappointment didn't disappoint in the end.

Avengers box office: $18.9m on Monday, for a $226m four-day US total. Oh, and $700m worldwide thus far.

There is little doubt that The Avengers will join the $1 billion mark at the global box office, the only question being whether it will do so this weekend or next weekend.  With $700 million in the global can in 13 days, the film is the second-fastest grossing blockbuster of all-time so far (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part II earned $700 million in ten days of global release and $800 million in 12 days).  It's way too soon to start tossing off comparisons invoking James Cameron, although I'd argue that a final global tally above Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part II ($1.3 billion) is a sure thing at this point.  So for the moment, let's concentrate on the domestic front.  After a stunning $207 million over its first three days, The Avengers grossed $18.9 million on Monday.  That brings the film to a four-day total of $226 million, which is not only the highest four-day tally of all-time but exceeds the record six-day $224 million gross of The Dark Knight four years ago.  The film has the eighth-biggest Monday gross of all-time (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part II earned $18.1 million on its first Monday, natch).  The higher numbers were Spider-Man 2 ($27 million), Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull ($26 million), Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End ($25 million), The Dark Knight ($24 million), Shrek 2 ($23 million), X-Men: The Last Stand ($20 million), and Avatar ($19 million). Most of the other films higher on the list had first or (in the case of Avatar and Shrek 2) second Mondays that were part of a holiday weekend, be it Memorial Day, Independence Day, or the Christmas/New Year portion where everyone is off of school.  Among Mondays where nobody gets off school or work, it *is* the biggest Monday gross of all-time. Among non-holiday Mondays, The Dark Knight had a better fourth day of $24 million, but that was in the middle of the summer.  But what this does mean is that The Avengers may have to settle for a $270-275 million full-week total (horrors, I know) as opposed to the pie-in-the-sky $300 million Friday-to-Thursday gross had it pulled in Dark Knight-level weekday grosses.  That's all for now.

Scott Mendelson    

Thoughts on Sam Raimi's Spider-Man, ten years after its surprising and record-setting $100m+ debut.

Ten years ago, we had our first $100 million opening weekend.   Ten years ago, feeding off twenty years of anticipation, positive reviews, and a post-9/11 atmosphere that craved distinctly American heroism, Sam Raimi's Spider-Man pulled off the unthinkable.  And really, looking back on that fabled three-day weekend in May 2002, that's the thing that sticks out.  In these days of heavily-publicized box office tracking reports, with every blogger with a website playing box office pundit, with studios having mastered the art of saturation-level opening weekends down to a science, Spider-Man's record Fri-Sun debut was a complete surprise.  Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone had just broken the three-day record six months ago with $92 million.  Spider-Man wasn't even supposed to be the biggest movie of summer 2002, with that honor theoretically going to Star Wars: Episode II: Attack of the Clones.  Spider-Man was supposed to be the warm-up play, the summer kick-off picture that wetted the appetite for the big guns coming down the pike.  It was The Mummy, the Deep Impact, or the Twister of the summer movie season.  But as I discussed four years ago, sometimes the summer kick-off films surprise you.  Even so, with buzz building and free press galore coming from mainstream entertainment sources, pundits like myself were optimistically predicting an $80 million debut, followed by a somewhat quick plunge once Attack of the Clones brought the thunder 1.5 weeks later.  But as we all know, something very different happened.

Another weekend, another perfect example of the utter stupidity of weekend-to-weekend box office comparison...

Granted, I'm going by unofficial weekend estimates based on the Friday box office figures, but it appears that the entire total gross of all films in the box office top-twelve this weekend will equal around $96 million.  This same weekend last year had a total top-12 gross of $145 million, meaning this weekend will be down by about 34%.  I guess according to the standards set by the 'official' box office punditry, that would mean that moviegoing may be in a slump, right?  I mean, weekend-to-weekend totals are down by nearly $50 million compared to 2011 on this specific weekend!  Oh... wait, what's that you say?  Last weekend had the debut of Universal's Fast Five, the much-anticipated fifth installment in the recharged Fast/Furious franchise?  You remember Fast Five, right?  Great reviews, strong marketing, popular franchise... all of these things led to a massive $86 million opening weekend, the biggest in Universal history.  Yes that's right, last year had Universal rolling the dice and successfully kicking off the summer season a week earlier than usual, and it paid off in spades.  So you have a weekend where one film last year made almost as much as the entire top-twelve films' total grosses from this year.  You mean we shouldn't be too surprised if the cumulative might of The Raven, Safe, The Pirates: Band of Misfits, and The Five-Year Engagement couldn't quite measure up to a blockbuster debut like Fast Five? The four openers should gross about $36 million combined over the weekend, or about what Fast Five alone made on its opening day.  Oh right, maybe, just maybe, it IS about the individual movies performing at levels that are judged based on the respective expectations of each specific picture after all!  Four small-ish pictures debuted with relatively small-ish grosses, and their combined might plus the various holdovers weren't enough to equal the juggernaut of a presold (and well-reviewed, natch) blockbuster sequel.

Box Office Speculation: With few real competitors, why The Hunger Games will likely end 2012 as its second highest-grossing film.

I made an offhand comment in yesterday's box office write-off stating that The Hunger Games was all-but certain to end the year as among the top-three grossing films (domestically) by the time 2012 ended.  To be fair, it inspired more chit-chat on Twitter than it did here (my twitter followers really ought to comment here more often), but there were a number of 'what about THIS film?' and what-not.  So let's take a few moments to really examine the theoretical box office potential of the would-be box office giants of summer 2012 and the Thanksgiving/Christmas season.  This will be focusing on the biggest-of-the-big, so films that will merely be solid hits (Battleship, Snow White and the Huntsmen, anything and everything released between July 21st and November 9th) need not apply.  What is the plausible box office verdict on these films, and what real chance do they have against the likely $375-$400 million final domestic cume of The Hunger Games?  To put it bluntly, with one obvious exception, the odds are not in their favor.

R.I.P., John Carter. What its failure means and why it matters...

With ten days down and $53 million in the domestic kitty and $179 million worldwide, it's pretty much time to call 'time of death' for John Carter.  Disney is announcing that the picture will lose them $200 million, and it's almost fitting. The film serves as a shining example of everything that can go wrong when crafting a franchise film in big-studio Hollywood.  Not only was it a case where everything went wrong, it was a film where everything absolutely had to go right on a record level in order to have any hope of making its investment back.  To be frank, they should have seen it coming from a mile away.   

Classic Marketing: Universal teases The Flintstones a year in advance...

It was no secret that Universal was planning a big-screen adaptation of The Flintstones for the summer of 1994.  I remember actually being on the Universal lot while visiting a cousin in the winter of 1993 so I could shoot portions of a Bar Mitzvah movie (long story... another time) and being told by the Universal guy that if we got caught to say "We're here working on stuff for The Flintstones... nobody knows what the plot is yet anyway."  But a six months later, as my dad and I watched the lights go down for our advance-night 10:00pm screening of Jurassic Park (arguably the best single movie going experience of my life... ask me about it next summer), we were stunned that Universal had already cooked up a teaser for the seemingly un-shot and certainly unfinished Flintstones feature.  As you can see, it was basically just a bouncing ball version of the theme song, climaxing with an in-costume John Goodman screaming 'Yabba-dabba-doo!' at the top of his lungs.  Let me tell you, the entire audience roared with applause and I admit I was caught up in the infectious excitement for a project I couldn't really care less about.  That was the start of something new.

So, why isn't The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo a hit yet? Oh right...

This was posted as a comment elsewhere, but it touches on something I wanted to talk about, so I'm sharing it here too...
So as of last week, David Fincher's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo crossed $100 million in the US and $100 million overseas, giving the film a current worldwide cume of $211 million.  Yet, what should be a terrific result for what is currently an endangered species, an R-rated, hyper-violent/sexual adult thriller, is in fact something of a disappointment.  Why is that?  Simple, it cost too much.  It shouldn't have cost $90 million, end of story. I don't care how good or bad it is, I don't care how polished it looks or how splashy the 007 title sequence is, it was a film with a limited theatrical audience and should have been budgeted as such. The lesson over the last few years is that adult genre fare, even R-rated fare, can thrive as long as they don't cost anymore than $45 million. Contraband cost $25 million. The Town cost $40 million. The Lincoln Lawyer cost $40 million. Limitless cost $27 million. The Grey cost $25 million. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, a 2.5hr R-rated thriller that basically advertised that it wasn't appropriate for general moviegoers and had a limited international audience due to the fact they'd have to read subtitles just like the original, cost $90 million. Despite all of its negatives, it still grossed $100 million domestic off a $12 million Fri-Sun opening, showing genuine legs in a front-loaded marketplace even as a hyper-competitive January caused unexpected screen-bleeding.. But, because it cost $90 million, it will struggle to break even.  Sometimes, expectations be-damned, it's just about the math.

Scott Mendelson

I don't care whether Chronicle or The Woman In Black tops the box office, and here's why you shouldn't either...

With a neck-and-neck opening Friday, two of the three major wide releases both look like they will end up with around $20 million over the Super Bowl weekend.  Both Chronicle and The Woman In Black had budgets around $15 million and targeted ad campaigns, meaning that a $20 million debut makes both films pretty solid hits right out of the gate.  But many of the box office pundits are of-course obsessing over which film will be #1 for the weekend, offering up-to-the-minute updates as to which of the two films is in the lead over the ongoing weekend.  For example, Exhibitor Relations tossed out a Facebook post stating that "Chronicle is holding off The Woman In Black again today, up by about 500k, but the lead could shrink tomorrow. Still too close to call."  I've written now and then about how the spin and 'campaigning' in mainstream Hollywood is similar to the political scene in Washington DC, and it certainly applies in this case.   Like many of the political primaries being waged all over the country in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, weekend box office is not a winner-take-all proposition.  Just as most states' (38 out of 50) delegates are divided up based on percentage of total votes for a given candidate, the film that takes the number 01 spot does not get all of the ticket sales for the weekend.

Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol is officially Tom Cruise's biggest global hit ever. Why the film's $200 million+ domestic total puts it in rare company...

As of yesterday, Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol has earned $594 million worldwide, meaning that it has surpassed the $591 million earned in 2005 by War of the Worlds to become the biggest worldwide grosser in Tom Cruise's career.  Domestically, the film sits at $203 million, or behind the $215 million grossing Mission: Impossible II and the $234 million-grossing War of the Worlds.  On the domestic front, it's still ninth in terms of inflation, but the Tom Cruise films of the 1980s and 1990s didn't have to deal with losing 1,600 screens in two weeks despite strong legs.  It is beyond unfortunate that even a film as 'leggy' as Mission: Impossible IV has to contend with arbitrarily losing screens due to the 2-5 new releases that drop each and every weekend.  The jam-packed schedule of mainstream movie releases, as well as the absence of a viable second-run market, has kneecapped any number of films over the last 5-10 years and resulted in screen-bleed and depressed total grosses even if the films didn't exhibit the usual 'quick-kill blockbuster' behavior.

Pre-release tracking for The Muppets shows that today's kids are assholes.

The New York Magazine blog Vulture has an article detailing the box office tracking for the three major family-skewing Thanksgiving releases set to drop this Wednesday.  For the purposes of this commentary, we'll be focusing on the pre-release data for The Muppets (review).  It appears that we are raising a nation of Statler and Waldorfs... According to NRG research polls: