So, now that Iron Man debuted to a $100 million opening weekend AND Grand Theft Auto 4 opened to $500 million in first week sales, maybe (just maybe) it's time for Hollywood to stop blaming poor ticket sales on video games.
If you make a good movie, that people want to see, it doesn't matter whether Halo 17 comes out that week or not.
Just a thought.
...about the insanity that we've created: with Iron Man opening to $100.8 million this weekend, it has now become possible to break $100 million in your opening weekend, and yet still NOT be in the top 10 of all time best opening weekends. In fact, Iron Man will most definitely fall out of the top ten in just a few weeks, when Indiana Jones 4 opens.
It feels like we need to track box office differently now, and I'll use a sports analogy. In baseball today, there's a complaint that the small markets can't even hope to compete with the larger ones, especially since there's no salary cap in baseball, unlike basketball or football. Some are even saying that it's so unfair, that to maintain competition, the league should be split in two: one for the Yankees, Mets, and Red Sox of the world, and another for the small market Twins, Royals, and Brewers, etc.
I'm not sure where I'm going with this, and I've written and re-written and deleted some ideas a few times now in this entry, but it feels like there's a level of "fairness" that isn't being addressed in regular box office tracking.
What does it mean when a film in just 3 days can (hypothetically) gross more than all the Best Picture nominations combined through their entire runs, but still can't break into the top 10? I don't know...
I have to noodle on this a bit.
Aaron, I say this with all the love, admiration, and respect in the world.
Tina Fey's latest film, Baby Mama, starring Amy Poehler, made $18.3 million in its opening weekend to place at #1.
Aaron Sorkin's latest project, Charlie Wilson's War, starring some people named Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts, and getting promoted on some show called Oprah... opened to $15.9 million in a four-day-holiday weekend, behind some chipmunks.
Hoo boy... Tina's still got the quote of the (last) year: "I hear Aaron Sorkin is in Los Angeles wearing the same dress - but longer, and not funny."
I don't love Noah's writing, but his Summer Movie Preview is pretty complete, if nothing else. I find myself looking forward to Iron Man, Speed Racer, Indiana Jones, Get Smart (why open this on the same day as another huge comedy, The Love Guru?), Wall-E, Wanted, Hancock (could be Will Smith's first misfire in some time), The Dark Knight, Step Brothers, The X-Files sequel, Choke, Pineapple Express, Tropic Thunder, The International, Towelhead, Hamlet 2, and finally, Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 (no, not really). 
As you may have heard, there's lots of fear excitement in various entertainment industries about the fact that the film Iron Man is opening the same weekend that the video game Grand Theft Auto IV is released for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.
Nikki Finke says that the video game will hurt Iron Man's ticket sales, and Variety is reporting that GTA IV may pull in as much as $400 million in its opening week. Nikki also brings in a 3rd party to discuss whether video games are bigger than movies. He basically says that the numbers are bigger in video games, but that's because the games are almost 10 times more expensive. I say, "money is money." If studios could sell movie tickets for $60 a pop, they would. But yes, there are fewer people buying video games than movie tickets - tell it to the shareholders.
There were similar rumblings a few months ago, when Halo 3 supposedly hurt the box office take of Ben Stiller's The Heartbreak Kid, but I still believe that (oh, I don't know) the movie wasn't really interesting to anyone and was destined to fail anyway. Besides, is the core Halo 3 audience really the same people going to a Ben Stiller romantic comedy? I'm just sayin'.
You know what I predict for that weekend? With a huge comic book movie and a giant video game being released? Well, just look at the title...
Hey, guess what? Movie studios don't put women in lead roles!
There were about 110 movies with a male lead and 5 with a female lead. Of the second-billed females, nearly all are written as love interests of the first-billed man. There were over sixty movies in the sample with two male stars top-billed. The only movies with two top-billed female roles, on the other hand, were The Devil Wears Prada and Scary Movie 4.
Bob Iger spoke yesterday about a range of topics, including Disney's purchase of Pixar in January 2006... that $7.2 billion purchase.
"No, we didn't overpay," he said, in response to a question. "It was clearly fully priced," he added, jokingly. "Maybe that's a euphemism.
Can we all agree that buying Pixar for the innovation-less Disney was completely, totally, unambiguously worth it? It put Steve Jobs on their board, made gabillions in merchandising from Cars alone, (he even announced rolling out a MMO video game environment based on the Cars universe), and the stock is up 9 points since he took over.
Oh, and Pixar happens to make incredible movies. Not only do they have a deal for Toy Story 3, but here's the newest Wall-E trailer. Can't wait.
He also discussed something else that caught a few eyes around the industry.
Iger said that since hooking up with Apple's iTunes a year and a half ago, consumers have downloaded 40 million-50 million episodes of Disney-generated TV shows and 4 million movies.
Now, most journalists just say, "whoa... those are big numbers," and leave it at that. I like to call that lazy journalism. Silicon Alley Insider, however, decided to do some homework... and I quote:
Now... $123 million is truly nothing for a company of Disney's size, but it is all incremental revenue, as SAI reports. The net is that digital sales of TV and movies aren't going to be moneymakers anytime soon. I am curious though... how much does a Comcast make from VOD sales? Is it dramatically more than this... or generally on par?
I don't watch The Wire. I hate myself for that, as everyone who has ever seen it says it's hands down the best thing ever put on television. I need to go back and rent the DVDs for Season 1 and just start from the beginning... sounds like a project for when the family is out of town.
I noted that the series creator, David Simon, wrote a thank you note to its viewers, and there were some portions that struck me:
"This year, our drama asked its last thematic question: Why, if there is any truth to anything presented in The Wire over the last four seasons, does that truth go unaddressed by our political culture, by most of our mass media, and by our society in general?"
"We are a culture without the will to seriously examine our own problems. We eschew that which is complex, contradictory or confusing. As a culture, we seek simple solutions. We enjoy being provoked and titillated, but resist the rigorous, painstaking examination of issues that might, in the end, bring us to the point of recognizing our problems, which is the essential first step to solving any of them."
"If you followed us for sixty hours, and you find yourself caring about these issues more than you thought you would, then perhaps the next step is to engage and to demand, where possible, a more sophisticated and meaningful response from authority when it comes to such things as the drug war, educational reform or responsible political leadership. The Wire is about the America we pay for and tolerate. Perhaps it is possible to pay for, and demand, something more."
He goes on eloquently, but I'll let you read it for yourself.
It's times like these, when I see that no one watched this series (myself included), and yet Dancing With The Stars is on for its 6th freaking season, Deal or No Deal counts in most homes as doing math homework, Don't Forget the Lyrics was watched by 14.4 million people this week, the top 7 shows this week were all reality-based crap, 10,000 BC made $35.9 million this weekend, and Alvin and the Chipmunks grossed almost $350 million worldwide ... well, I get a little cranky.
While many have finally come to the realization that the DVD/Rental market is where most films end up finally turning a profit (and not in theaters), this revelation from Variety and Warner Bros. is a brand new step:
"After its strong start in Japan last week, The Golden Compass is on course to make box office history as the first film to gross $300 million in foreign while failing to reach $100 million in North America."
I tracked box office data for almost 10 years before claiming statistic fatigue, and I have never seen anything like this.
However, the news isn't all "glass half full" for the Hollywood studio. In fact, they're probably slapping their foreheads pretty darn hard with a "Doh!":
"As with all its films, New Line sold off the international rights to Golden Compass to a patchwork of foreign indies plus a couple of local Warner arms, in order to pay for the $180 million official budget. So it will reap little reward from the international success, while retaining maximum downside from the pic's paltry $70 million domestic gross."
I saw a 2007 version of this in the Sunday New York Times this weekend, but here it is, in all it's glory for every film from 1986-2007.
This is possibly the coolest thing I've ever seen.
Crap... I am such a nerd.
Happy 2008. Here's what caught my eye while I was out and about...
Alvin and the Chipmunks made $45 million this weekend. This tells me two things:
I'm re-reading that last sentence, and I'm having a hard time comprehending that someone actually decided to spend SIXTY MILLION DOLLARS making an Alvin and the Chipmunks movie, and even more astoundingly, that investment is going to pay off. I'm going to eat some shards of broken glass...
I Watch Stuff says, "With a $45 million weekend, it's finally the definitive proof that there is no God."
Forbes Magazine just posted an article where they mathematically determined a way to figure out which celebrities really were the most overpaid. It's super interesting, but they forgot to stick the landing.
Most magazines just print salaries and back end deals, which makes us say things like "Holy Crap! Tom Hanks got 170 bajillion dollars for The Da Vinci Code? That movie was so boring!" There's no context, no taking into account how much the movie made overall, etc.
Forbes, however, did something much more interesting. They derived a formula to figure out how much a movie made for every dollar that was spent on a star's salary. They looked at the last three films from "the biggest stars in the industry," added up their worldwide box office plus DVD revenue, and subtracted out the budgets (which includes star salaries). This number was called the "net revenue." I did wonder where they got their data for budgets (especially marketing), but I ignored that ambiguity for the time being.
Then Forbes divided that "net revenue" by the stars' salaries. That gave them information such as, "for every dollar spent on Nicole Kidman's salary, her movies return just $8 on average to the studios" or "Angelina Jolie (who makes less than Kidman) gives her studios $15 back on average for her last three films.
I found this to be a fantastic way to derive star value, because it naturally lessens the impact of low budget or independent films, which pay their stars less, have smaller budgets, and (in a sane world) lower box office expectations. When most people just average the box office take of a star's filmography, it never takes those differences into account.
So, why did I say that they dropped the ball? It's because THEY DIDN'T PUBLISH THE FREAKING LIST!
Sure, they call out Russell Crowe and Nicole Kidman as stars that aren't worth their salary, and they have this annoying picture gallery that makes me click through pages (and up their eyeball count for advertisers) which lists more people (Will Ferrell, Tom Cruise, Will Smith, etc.) but they don't show their work. Who are the worst 20? More interestingly, who are the top 20? Who brings in the audiences, but commands a low paycheck?
Maybe it's in the printed version of the magazine, but I can't tell you how disappointed I was to not be able to see the whole list.
First I was depressed last week by Anne Thompson's piece on how Michael Clayton isn't making money at the box office, but I didn't want to write about it just yet.
But today, Hollywood Wiretap and the Los Angeles Times are both covering the issue on a broader scale. No independent films are making money, and the major studio dramas are struggling also. Here's a sampling, in no particular order:
| In the Valley of Elah | Warner Independent | $6.6 million |
| Lars and the Real Girl | MGM | $0.3 million |
| The Hunting Party | MGM/Weinstein | $0.9 million |
| Sleuth | Sony Pictures Classics | $0.1 million |
| Reservation Road | Focus | $0.04 million |
| Lust, Caution | Focus | $2.1 million |
| Rendition | New Line | $4.1 million |
| Things We Lost in the Fire | Paramount/DreamWorks | $1.6 million |
| The Darjeeling Limited | Fox Searchlight | $3.8 million |
| Gone Baby Gone | Miramax | $5.5 million |
| Into the Wild | Paramount Vantage | $6.5 million |
| Elizabeth: The Golden Age | Universal | $11.8 million |
| Michael Clayton | Warner Bros. | $22.7 million |
| The Assassination of Jesse James... | Warner Bros. | $2.2 million |
| Eastern Promises | Focus | $16.9 million |
There are plenty of excuses reasons for this - poor marketing, too many dramas in the mix, piracy, NC-17 ratings, some of these films haven't gone wide yet (but they won't if they don't perform well when they launch), poor reviews, and of course the easy way out: the depressing state of the world, "the war in Iraq, the housing slump, global warming, the fires..." says the LA Times. What? No Halo 3 to blame? I enjoy pointing at the dumbing down of society, and we're all too busy at home worrying about Britney's kids and watching Dancing with the Stars or Deal or No Deal, but I think that's a scapegoat as well.
The theory that holds the most water to me, is that they are victims of their own success, causing a glut of films that were only attractive to limited audience already:
"Companies such as Miramax did so well that almost every entertainment conglomerate started its own specialty division, and a range of independent financiers, such as Sidney Kimmel Entertainment, also jumped into the fray."
It's also going to be crucially important for studios to keep costs low and perhaps think about this business model differently if there's a much more crowded market for competition. There used to be a formula detailing how to platform release a film like Brokeback Mountain, The Queen, or even My Big Fat Greek Wedding, but with a limited audience, limited theaters and screens, and a much wider set of options for that small audience to choose from, studios may have to redefine what success means on this smaller scale.
Thank goodness Wild Hogs made $168 million and a sequel is on the way. Shoot me.
UPDATE: Jeff Wells has jumped into the fray:
I slipped into a preview screening of [Before the Devil Knows You're Dead] last night. It was showing to a group of KCET subscribers -- an older, fair-minded group that likes adult prestige films -- and you just could feel the lack of excitement in the room as they walked out. You could cut it with a knife. They'd just seen one of the year's absolute best and most of them were thinking "hmmm, downer....not very uplifting!"
Ad Age and Portfolio.com are reporting that the success of Halo 3 is being blamed for The Heartbreak Kid flopping at the box office, among other things:
"Word is that Universal Studios Home entertainment topper Craig Kornblau sent out an internal memo citing the video game as the reason sales figures for the Knocked Up DVD were less than hoped, and even the TV ratings took a few unexplained hits that were ascribed to the addictive sweep of Halo 3."
Nice. It couldn't have anything to do with the fact that no one really wanted to see The Heartbreak Kid, could it? I love how people are comparing it to the weekend box office total from the previous year, where a little film called The Departed came out. It had some box office stars that you might have heard of, and I think it might have won some awards, like the Oscar for Best Picture... can't be sure... don't quote me on that.
Anyway, I'm sure that there are some people who didn't watch TV or go to a movie that weekend because of Halo 3, but there's no way it had as much of an impact as crappy marketing and (less so) terrible reviews. I love how studio execs love to find excuses and blame everything else other than their own organization's work.
