When 'on track' becomes a 'disappointing': The perils of early box office reporting...

At 3:28pm yesterday, The Hollywood Reporter sent out links to an article regarding early box office estimates based purely on afternoon matinees on the East Coast.  In it, they claimed that Paramount's Footloose remake was on track to gross $20 million for the weekend, which was considered a solid win as tracking had put the film at between $15 million and $18 million going into Friday.  Yet by midnight, the numbers had been revised, both by The Hollywood Reporter and Deadline Hollywood.  Now the number is at around $5.57 million for Friday, which means that the 80s remake looks to gross around $16-17 million (of course, official Friday estimates will be out in a couple hours...).  So, as expected, Nikki Finke is screaming about how the number is 'disappointing', with yet another seemingly-invented quote from a studio executive about how the industry is 'DOOMED!'.  Yes, some of this is just Finke being Finke where every weekend is a failure and every movie is terrible.  But we have a situation where a film was 'doing better than expected' in the late afternoon, yet was a disappointment despite opening right in line with tracking because the earliest-of-early estimates were a bit over-inflated.  Yes yes, I know I spent the summer guessing the weekend box office grosses for major summer films based on midnight grosses, so perhaps I may be a hypocrite.  BUT, I didn't run around screaming 'bomb!' because a film's opening weekend didn't open right in line with my purely-for-fun midnight math.  As it is, I'd argue it's good news that an 80s remake that no one wanted and a prequel to an 80s horror film (which is in itself a remake of a 50s horror film) that no one didn't explode at the box office (The Thing looks to do around $10 million, give or take).  Maybe the world wants more than remakes and revamps of the movies they grew up with...

Scott Mendelson

The 24 Hour News Cycle of Movie-News part II: Obsessing on the Unknown.

In a continuing feature of sorts on how the 24-hour news cycle hurts the world of film news (part I), we'll be briefly (I hope) discussing the weird phenomenon whereby countless column inches are spent dissecting and analyzing that which is either not-yet known or painfully obvious. Would you have guessed that Warner Bros. wanted a young male heartthrob to play Clark Kent in Zack Snyder's Superman picture? Most of us would have, yet Nikki Finke reported this obvious fact as some kind of shocking new development. I don't mean to pick on Finke (her main sins come in the realm of box office analysis... come back next week), and the real problem is that every other blogger to just repeats the rumor/speculation/lie, complete with their own personal casting list or counter-point commentary ("Why Taylor Lautner shouldn't play Spider-Man!").

Friday Box Office (01-22-11): No Strings Attached opens with $7.3 million, but Nikki Finke falsely calls Ashton Kutcher a flop-machine anyway.

"...any movie starring Ashton Kutcher is probably a bomb..." - Nikki Finke discussing Paramount's unwillingness to personally send her a press briefing on No Strings Attached

An absolute falsehood. She bases her assertion on a single film, Killers, which opened with $15 million and grossed $93 million worldwide (which would have been fine had the film not cost $70 million). Valentine's Day (an ensemble film where he had the lead role) opened to $56 million just last year. What Happened In Vegas opened to $20 million and ended up with $219 million worldwide (his biggest grosser ever) just under three years ago. Sure, he occasionally out-and-out whiffs (A Thing Like Love, My Boss's Daughter), but Kutcher is a relatively consistent opener.

The 24 Hour News Cycle of Movie-News part I: Reporting the Rumor as Fact.

For the second time in just under a week, film studios basically revealed that they had duped the entire Internet for a period of several months. The first blow came last Friday, when Fox announced that Ridley Scott's Alien prequel was being dumped and reconfigured into an original project entitled Prometheus. It was revealed that Scott and writer Damon Lindelof had been constructing this original story for at least the last couple months. That means that movie news sites spend the last two months breathlessly speculating about the project that did not exist. But the biggest con was still to come... Did you hear that rumor about Tom Hardy playing Dr. Hugo Strange in the next Batman picture?

Green Hornet opens with $11.1m Friday: When meeting expectations is still a 'failure'.

So let me get this straight. A couple of months ago, The Green Hornet was that surefire flop that had switched release dates, been converted to 3D, and had survived an avalanche of bad press and rampantly negative speculation. A month ago, the tide started turning, due to some secret screenings for the hardcore nerd film bloggers and the realization that there wasn't anything of note coming out in the month of January. Two weeks ago, tracking started swinging upwards and the studio was optimistically discussing an opening weekend of around $35-40 million for the four day holiday weekend. So come Saturday morning, the picture has opened with $11.1 million on its first day, which puts it track to score around $30-35 million over three days and $35-40 million in four days. So, expectations met, mission accomplished, right? Ha!

"The weekend before Christmas is a terrible time for movies". It's apparently opposite-day yet again over at Nikki Finke's Deadline Hollywood.

Here's a not-so dirty secret: the weekend before Christmas weekend is the very best weekend to open a film, bar none. With a full two weeks of 'weekend days' and families spending much of that time together and looking towards a movie theater, anything that can open on this weekend has a decent shot at huge legs. Sure, you've got the obvious smash hits like Avatar ($77 million opening/$750 million domestic), Fellowship of the Ring ($47m/$313m), The Two Towers($65m/$341m), Return of the King ($83m/$373m), Titanic ($28m/$600m), Tomorrow Never Dies ($25m/$125m), The Pursuit of Happyness ($26m/$163m), Jerry Macguire($17m/$153m), and I Am Legend ($77m/$256m). But you also have the films that maybe didn't open as well as they could, but used the holiday period to make up for it with insanely leggy runs. I'm talking about King Kong ($50m opening weekend/$218 million domestic total), The Prince of Egypt ($14m/$101m), Mouse Hunt ($6m/$61m), Sabrina ($5m/$53m), and The Emperor's New Groove($10m/$89m) among many others.

So when Nikki Finke claims that "the last full weekend before Christmas is traditionally a lousy time for North American grosses", she obviously has no idea what she's talking about. And that 'unnamed studio mogul who exclaims: "They're not rushing out to see movies. What you tend to forget, going into this weekend, is that the pool of people who are available, and don’t have a lot of commitments on their time in terms of parties and presents and vacations, is small", well he obviously has no recollection of the oh-so-recent past either (or he's just covering for the under-performances of Yogi Bear and How Do You Know). How vexing it is when the people who get paid to know this stuff get it so obviously wrong.

Scott Mendelson