Weekend Box Office (03/24/13) part I: The Croods isn't Dreamworks' comeback because they weren't in free-fall.

What a difference three years and an deflated expectations make.  Three years ago this weekend, Dreamworks had to eat a token amount of crow when How To Train Your Dragon opened with *just* $43 million.  Coming off the $59 million debut of Monsters vs. Aliens a year prior and elevated expectations due to the "new-found" popularity of 3D, the film was written off initially as a slight disappointment with the hopes that strong reviews and word-of-mouth would keep it alive.  Of course, the film had insane legs and eventually ended up with $217 million domestic, but that's another story.  Now, coming off the somewhat disappointing Rise of the Guardians ($303 million worldwide), a series of company lay-offs, and the delaying and/or cancellation of a few projects (like Me and My Shadow), Dreamworks is now trying to sell the (estimated as of this writing) $44 million debut of The Croods as a comeback and/or a massive win for the company.  But not only is this not a comeback, but I would argue that Dreamworks doesn't have anywhere to come back from and that the perception of their failing after a single disappointing film is indicative of the fall-out of our obsession with rise/fall narratives where they don't belong.

Weekend Box Office (12-09-12): Playing For Keeps bombs as the moviegoing world awaits the Christmas rush.

The decision by Warner Bros. to move The Gangster Squad (trailer) to January, 2013 and Universal's choice to move Les Miserables from next weekend to Christmas day should have caused a giant game of musical chairs.  It didn't, and now we have the second December weekend in a row (with one more to come) with just a single new release).  Meanwhile the last two weekends of the year are going to be jam-packed with major films (Jack Reacher, This Is Forty, DJango Unchained, The Guilt Trip, etc.), all of which could have *easily* topped the box office and/or dominated the competition had they opened this weekend or last weekend.  But weekends that are barren of new releases save for a Gerald Butler vehicle tend to be very boring box office weekends indeed.

Weekend Box Office (12-02-12): Killing Them Softly stumbles as holdovers dominate.

The post-Thanksgiving weekend is among the worst frames of the year for movie going.  With the exception of Tom Cruise's The Last Samurai back in 2003 and Behind Enemy Lines back in 2001, I can't think of a single wide release major movie that broke out over this specific weekend (feel free to jog my memory in the comments section).  So the fact that there were only two low-profile openers isn't a surprise, nor is it a surprise that neither film opened all that well.  The top opener of the weekend was Andrew Dominik's Killing Them Softly (review/trailer).  The well reviewed crime drama/political parable earned just $7 million over the weekend, which makes it Brad Pitt's worst wide release live-action opening since before he became a movie star (IE - Interview With the Vampire in 1994) The film was originally slotted to open in October before getting tossed into this early December death slot.  Among the many would-be Oscar bait films coming from the Weinstein Company, this one sadly got lost in the shuffle.  In September it was all about The Master and now it's about expanding The Silver Linings Playbook (a solid $3.3 million this weekend on 371 screens) and prepping for the Christmas Day release of Django Unchained.  The inexplicably received an "F" from Cinemascore, which is odd as the film was seen by such a small number of people that you'd presume those who went knew what they were getting into.  Anyway, at least the Weinstein Company released the film wide, meaning that those who wanted to see it got to see it.  Costing just $15 million, it's already made that much overseas and should break even once domestic receipts are tabulated.  Call this one a win for art over commerce.

Weekend Box Office: Rise of the Guardians stumbles as most everything else (Life of Pi, Red Dawn, etc.) flies.

As I wrote yesterday, this weekend was a perfect example of the issue with reporting cumulative box office as if it means anything.  Yes it was the biggest Thanksgiving weekend on record ($295 million total over the five days), but such a thing tends to happen when you have three strong holdovers and three relatively strong new releases in one frame.  As always, it's the movies.  More importantly, total weekend box office success is only important if your film is among the ones doing well.  

Dreamworks' Rise of the Guardians basically flopped.  There's really no nice way to say it.  In five days, the $145 million animated film earned $32.6 million while earning just $24 million over Fri-Sun.  As I mentioned yesterday, this is the lowest opening weekend, by a very large margin, for Dreamworks Animation since Flushed Away back in Fall 2006 ($18 million).  Even the film's five-day total ($32.6 million) puts it as the lowest comparative three-day opening weekend since 2006 and their 17th lowest total out of 25 films.  The reasoning for this actually pretty simple.  The film didn't look very visually appealing, the marketing didn't promise anything beyond a painfully generic story (both sadly true about the film itself), and the campaign was based upon the idea that having three holiday icons that everyone knew (Santa, Tooth Fairy, Easter Bunny) and two that were far less well-known in pop culture (Jack Frost and the Sand Man) engaging in a riff on the first X-Men picture was automatically appealing. It wasn't, and with Lincoln and Skyfall winning out as consensus choices for large families, and with Life of Pi  coming out far stronger than expected as a family film choice, plus the still-strong Wreck It Ralph ($149 million thus far, making a go at Tarzan's $171 million finish), Rise of the Guardians just couldn't muscle out of the pack.

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.

Red Dawn, Rise of the Guardians or Life of Pi? John Gosling previews the Thanksgiving weekend's new releases.

Red Dawn is a remake of the controversial 1984 film of the same name, which was written and directed by John Millius. Made as the threat of nuclear war was prevalent, it saw Russia and its allies invading America, with the picture focusing on a small town and a group of high school kids turned resistance fighters. Apart from its notoriety in 1984, it also became the first picture to receive a PG-13 rating and was deemed the most violent film ever made by the Guinness Book of Records, with a total of 134 acts of violence committed in its run time. Thought to be unsettling (and all too possible) at the time, it has since become something of a cult classic. At the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, MGM announced plans to remake the movie and set stunt co-ordinator and second unit director Dan Bradley to helm. The idea was to shoot the film in 2009 with a view to release in November 2010. For the lead role of Jed Eckert, Bradley cast the relatively unknown (at that point) Chris Hemsworth, based on footage he had seen of his work in Cabin in the Woods (another MGM flick). Josh Peck, signed on to play Jed's brother Matt, and was joined by Josh Hutcherson, (who has since gone on to star in The Hunger Games) and Friday Night Lights alumni Adrianne Palicki. Kurt Russell was said to be up for playing the role of downed-pilot Lt. Col Tanner, but Jeffrey Dean Morgan would ultimately take on the job. The plot would follow that of the original quite closely, but substitute an invading Russian army for a Chinese one - something that  would become the cause of much criticism during the film's production. Shooting took place as planned in late 2009 and photos of Chinese propaganda posters from the set soon showed up online. Apart from the 'enemy' controversy, filming went smoothly and everything started to come together for the 2010 release date.

Review: Rise of the Guardians (2012) is a stunning disappointment, with little substance, no character.

Rise of the Guardians

2012
97 minutes
rated PG

by Scott Mendelson

Rise of the Guardians is an astonishing exercise in generic storytelling, with so little new to bring to the narrative plate that even a morsel of good ideas can't save it from tedium.  I can't speak to the source material, but the film amounts to a high concept idea ("What if the various holiday mascots formed a superhero group?") where no more imagination was offered after the initial pitch.  The story is basically a Mad Libs team-superhero origin story, where we follow a new recruit into a new world and learn the mythology through his eyes.  That the story shamefully rips off the first X-Men is less of a problem than the heroic cohorts having almost no discernible characteristics beyond their costumes and holiday-related duties.  With paper-thin characterization and no real surprises in the offering, Rise of the Guardians amounts to a mostly dull effort that diminishes both big-budget animation and superhero stories at the same time.

A kingdom with no ruler: The current animation landscape...

For the second year in a row, Pixar will not have anything close to the best animated film of the year and will not have the highest-grossing animated film of the year, not worldwide anyway. This is not a rant to bag on Pixar, as they will be fine (I'm optimistic that they are merely experiencing growing pains) and I'm more curious to examine what the animation field looks like without an uncontested leader. The critical disappointments of the likes of Cars 2 and Brave along with the lack of any guaranteed masterpieces for a little while puts Pixar in a position where it's now just 'one of the guys'.  Disney has been trying to reclaim its once-uncontested title, but it too now sits in a position where it's 'just one of the gang', as there is no guarantee that the likes of Wreck It Ralph will even out-gross The Lorax domestically (worldwide, Tangled was the first Disney toon to top $350 million since Tarzan back in 1999).  Critically, Disney has not had an out-and-out gem since Meet the Robinsons back in 2007, where it was matched by Pixar's Ratatouille.  So the question becomes what does the animation landscape look like when neither Disney or even Pixar is the uncontested king of the proverbial hill?  The answer is somewhat more exciting than you'd think.

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.