The wisdom of where the studios choose to invest their money, project-wise, and in what amounts, is a strange sport to study. People root for the financial success or failure of movies they don’t like or haven’t even seen, without any sense of who actually made them. Maybe it is inspired by this vague hope that financial trends might shift what types of movies are made – and it is true that this will happen, but I have never lost by betting on Hollywood’s ability to learn the wrong lesson – after all, this is the town that watched the triumph of Lord of the Rings and made Eragon.
As it has always been, green-light-decision-making is blind, it is fear-driven, and it is only good at what the collective wisdom decided worked before – even if the collective wisdom needs to ignore a few inconvenient realities that, if considered, might suggest that a lot of these people shouldn’t have jobs. In Hollywood, it’s always 2am at the craps table. As William “Nobody Knows Anything” Goldman once wrote: “Anyone who says differently is selling something”.
This is pre-amble to what may, or may not be, a regular feature around here – where I comment on the weekend box office top 10 from my own perspective. Numbers come via the good folks at Box Office Mojo.
1. Tyler Perry’s I Can Do Bad All By Myself
Weekend Take: $23.4M
Current Domestic Total: $23.4M
Tyler Perry proves he does not even need critics to launch one of his pictures. Perry is not re-writing the rule book, he is simply using it more intelligently than his peers, and beating the major studios at what they claim as their game – a branded, steady, cost-conscious stream of audience-targeted “product”. The conventional wisdom is that grown-up dramas are squishy and out of favor, overtly religious movies make people uncomfortable, and movies with black casts are bad investments because they do not sell well internationally. Yet he consistently makes two movies a year that are mostly grown-up dramas, which feature almost-exclusively black casts, and wear their faith on their sleeves – and in spite of almost universal critical panning, they are profitable.
One secret to his success is that he labored to build a core audience that he serves and tends and grows like a garden; he works quickly enough that they doesn’t forget him, and his ego does not demand he re-invent himself with every project, but allows him to play within pre-approved boundaries. His audience knows what they are buying as surely as when they buy a frozen dinner. But the more important secret is mathematical. The man spends wisely. I Can Do Bad All By Myself, like many of his films, is adapted from one of his plays, which he not only performed live but released on DVD, which gave him an inexpensive rough draft to test in front of an audience, and built awareness and loyalty. And the feature version cost only $13M – so after a single weekend it has already cleared the bar for success. Not many filmmakers, on their seventh feature, would be satisfied working at that budget. But not many filmmakers would even have finished three features at this point in their career, much less seven. And what I would like is for some more talented filmmakers to recognize that you can make adult drama at this price – you just have to know how to nurture the audience and then sell it to them.
Weekend Take: $10.7M
Current Domestic Total: $15.2M
Marketers have to be wondering how they ended up in a year where movies called District 9, 9, and (the upcoming) Nine would all be released within a few months of each other. This one – the numerical, animated one – does not offer a lot of precedent for financial performance, since it is one of those rare and welcome ventures to mature the animation audience in America. It was marketed intelligently and led with its uniqueness, rather than concealing it, and I approve of that. IMDB pegs its budget at $33.0M, alternately, the LA Times reports $24M. Either way, it puts them a lot less out on a limb than the makers of, say, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. And it means that even with catastrophic drop-offs in weekends ahead, we are looking, at least, at a marginal success with a good life ahead of it in the after-theatres market.
3. Inglourious Basterds
Weekend Take: $6.1M
Current Domestic Total: $103.9M
This week, Inglourious Basterds will surpass the domestic box-office performance of Pulp Fiction and become Quentin Tarantino’s most successful film. Given that those numbers don’t take into account 15 years of ticket-price inflation, it’s a BS statistic, but it will be bandied about by all the people who agree to act as if it is not. What is more interesting is that Tarantino (with Brad Pitt as accomplice) – has tricked that many movie-goers into watching a 2½-hour foreign-language film. And that Pitt, in the last five years, has become a much more reliable movie star in both the quality and financial performance of his projects. Hanging out with Clooney on those Ocean’s movies paid off in spades.
4. All About Steve
Weekend Take: $5.6M
Current Domestic Total: $21.7M
Delaying the release of All About Steve from March to now, with Bullock’s Proposal triumph and the recent explosion of visibility for Hangover star Bradley Cooper still fresh, was probably the best thing for it – its premise does not have easy appeal and the reviews have not been kind. A roughly 48-percent second weekend drop is not poisonous these days, but it’s not promising for a movie that wants to bank the female audience that tends to emerge more slowly from the cave. I cannot find budget information from the usual sources, but it does not look like they went outside the $30-40M range at most, and that means that if it’s a loss, it’s a minor one.
5. The Final Destination
Weekend Take: $5.5M
Current Domestic Total: $58.3M
Horror films flirted with 3-D in the 80’s in an episode of the Friday the 13th franchise and the climactic reel of a Nightmare on Elm Street entry – now the genre appears ready to make the gimmick their regular Saturday night thing. The economic argument for 3-D is two-fold: 1) theatre owners can milk a little extra profit margin out of the more-expensive tickets (they only had to buy the equipment once, but can charge you for it forever), and 2) those higher ticket costs, as with the bastardized pseudo-“IMAX” large-screen projections, produce inflated grosses, which the usual suspects in town can strut around. The horror budget-to-audience formula is one of the sturdiest in town – this might extend the lifespan by another year or two; like adding a baby to a sitcom.
6. Sorority Row
Weekend Take: $5.3M
Current Domestic Total: $5.3M
The non-3-D slasher film that is a re-make rather than a sequel opened modestly, and second weekends tend to be brutal in this genre. Still, depending on whose budget numbers you believe (I have seen $12M and $16M both reported, which makes a difference in this ballpark), it will be neither too successful nor too disastrous when the last stub is tallied. Taking the longer view at the trend of exploiting branded titles at the expense of original ideas, this is another one of those coal-mine canaries that will, like the others, be ignored. If Land of the Lost didn’t teach Hollywood anything, they are certainly not going to be caught learning from this.
7. Whiteout
Weekend Take: $4.9M
Current Domestic Total: $4.9M
This graphic novel adaptation was filmed over two years ago, and critical descriptions reek of second-guessing and post-production tinkering. Since the rise of the Internet, selling a movie as an opportunity to see a famous and beautiful woman in her skivvies just doesn’t take you where it used to. A $40M production budget qualifies as a B-thriller these days, but even that was far too squanderous, given that Kate Beckinsale’s name value has yet to really amount to much outside of the Underworld franchise, and she has done precious little to maintain the non-special-effects credentials she earned from her early work.
8. District 9
Weekend Take: $3.5M
Current Domestic Total: $108.5M
Peter Jackson and Neill Blomkamp’s glorious thumb to the eye of conventional wisdom (no stars, heavy message, ambiguous ending, under-the-radar marketing campaign) starts to come in for a clean box office landing, having succeeded in setting off a pop cultural brushfire and reaping well-deserved rewards. One of the most genuine success stories of the summer – and a sequel is there if they are so inclined.
9. Gamer
Weekend Take: $3.3M
Current Domestic Total: $16.3M
The second weekend did not like Gamer, and Neveldine/Taylor’s attempt to branch out from Crank ends up as something close to a washout. But a long life on DVD awaits, and the premise may lend itself to some direct-to-DVD sequelizing – Lion’s Gate wrote the book on this kind of long-term exploitation, and will figure out a way to make good on their investment.
10. Julie & Julia
Weekend Take: $3.2M
Current Domestic Total: $85.2M
$30-$40M has been the counterprogramming magic number for summer 2009. One breakout hit after another – District 9, The Hangover, The Proposal, and this success – all came in at that budget, while those with more bloated budgets will barely break even, if at all. Earlier in the year, $25M projects Taken and Paul Blart: Mall Cop were runaway hits, while Watchmen capsized. Hollywood would see more job stability if they made movies like these their meat and potatoes instead of trying to find and finance an Iron Man for every weekend.