79 result(s) tagged “Box Office”

As 2008 exited, withered and old and tired, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was birthed into theaters, fully formed as a Best Picture favorite. Among the major contenders, it’s the only conventional Oscar bait to have been given a wide release at this point. (Ignore The Dark Knight and WALL•E, which are first and foremost popular movies that just happened to garner a lot of passionate praise, and hence Oscar potential after they were released.)

So how did David Fincher’s latest fare in the final Box Office Power Rankings of the year? Well, it won, but not by much, challenged by the scrappy Marley and Me. That does not necessarily portend Oscar doom for Curious Case — it opened among some serious competition — but we might have expected more from a wide-release Academy hopeful that’s eager to be a cultural flash point.

As you no doubt know, Button is the resurrection of Forrest Gump the movie, but it doesn’t appear to be a resurrection of Forrest Gump the phenomenon. And that, I wager, hurts its Best Picture chances.

Gump opened in 1,595 theaters on July 8, 1994, and earned $24.5 million in the U.S. that weekend. Button opened in 2,988 theaters on Christmas day 14 years later and earned $38.7 million over a four-day holiday weekend. If you remove Christmas day, Benjamin only took in $26.9 million in its first weekend. When you consider ticket-price inflation, the number of venues, and production budgets (with the new movie costing nearly three times Gump), The Curious Case looks curiouserly infirm.

Continue reading for the methodology and the week’s full rankings.

Earlier this month, I noted that no 10th-place-gross movie has ever won the Box Office Power Rankings title.

That’s still true.

But Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire — which expanded to 589 sites this past weekend and landed in eighth place in overall box office — could have finished in last place and still won this week’s crown.

With 31 points (out of a maximum 40) and a three-point edge over The Tale of Despereaux, Slumdog could afford to lose two points — the difference between eighth and 10th place in gross. But it would need to retain all its other points, including for per-theater box office.

Slumdog finished with $5,184.65 in per-theater revenue, while the movie below it in that category (Despereaux again) earned $3,255.05. That gives a window of between $1.92 million (Desperaux’s per-theater revenue multiplied by Slumdog’s sites) and $2.05 million (Quantum of Solace’s 10th-place take) for Boyle’s movie to finish last and first simultaneously. (Eleventh-place Milk earned $1.73 million, so it wouldnt’ have sneaked in.)

And I officially spend too much time on this crap.

Continue reading for the methodology and the week’s full rankings.

If you’ve heard of the animated Delgo, it’s most likely for its infamy. Opening this past weekend in 2,160 theaters, it barely grossed $500,000. Its per-theater revenue was $237, meaning that with an average ticket price of $7 and five screenings per day, a little more than two people showed up each time the movie was exhibited.

Needless to say, Delgo does not show up in this week’s Box Office Power Rankings, won once again by Bolt, which is feasting on weak competition such as The Day the Earth Stood Still, a bomb that looks like The Dark Knight compared to Delgo.

Box Office Mojo notes that Delgo had the worst wide opening since at least 1982. The chart indicates that if you open in 2,000 or or more theaters, $2 million in ticket sales are pretty much guaranteed. (See: The Adventures of Pluto Nash [$2.2 million] and this summer’s The Rocker [2.6 million].)

So something went horribly wrong with Delgo.

At the movie’s Internet Movie Database trivia page, one learns that the independent production spanned six years and that the dailies were shown on the movie’s official Web site:

“Fathom Studios made a highly progressive move by opening themselves up to scrutiny from the outside. They posted their progress online over a number of years, and not in the form of sanitized press releases or occasional images. They were actually using their site to post dailies, rough footage, fragments of animation as they were being scrutinized, polished, and reworked. This was a first for any active studio production.”

Another nugget:

“Fathom Studios signed only recognizable, bankable actors for principle [sic] parts as part for [sic] their production master plan. They then rolled out their cast announcements gradually, thus maximizing the PR impact and addressing potential distribution concerns of the companies they needed to get the film into theaters.”

Here we note the distinction between getting a movie into theaters and getting paying customers into those theaters.

And:

“The movie was scripted as the first film of a potential trilogy.”

There are at least two people excited about the possibility: Freddie Prinze Jr. and Chris Kattan.

Continue reading for the methodology and the week’s full rankings.

Cadillac Records opened this past weekend with a respectable $5,023 per theater, and got good reviews. It came in second place in this week’s Box Office Power Rankings behind only three-time winner Bolt, the unstoppable force that nobody cares about.

But because it was only in 686 theaters, it couldn’t make a box-office splash, earning $3.4 million overall and landing in ninth place. And because it was in 686 threaters, it was too big to be one of those only-in-major-cities movies that generate buzz and huge per-theater numbers. (Think Milk.)

If you believe (as I do) that perception plays a role in long-term performance, Sony/Columbia has done Cadillac Records a major disservice. It doesn’t smell like a turd, but on the surface it sure looks like one — yet only because of how it was released.

What might have been? Dreamgirls ($103 million in total domestic box office) opened in three theaters. Walk the Line ($120 million) opened in 2,961. Ray ($75 million) didn’t open wide wide (2,006 theaters), but it still managed a $20-million opening weekend.

Continue reading for the methodology and the week’s full rankings.

No movie has ever won the Box Office Power Rankings with a 10th-place finish in overall ticket sales. It’s certainly possible, but a film has to be perfect or nearly so in every other category to pull it off.

In just 36 venues, Gus Van Sant’s Milk actually was perfect in every other category — tops in per-theater average and in both critical measures. And the bio-pic about gay-rights icon Harvey Milk still lost.

Put simply, when you start by losing nine points off the maximum 40 at the outset, you need some help to come out on top, and Milk didn’t get much. Four Christmases beat Bolt in total weekend box office, and it and Twilight had better per-theater performances, but no movie got between the Disney cartoon and Sean Penn on the critical measures.

So the dog won.

Continue reading for the methodology and the week’s full rankings.

As we all expected, Bolt ran away with this week’s Box Office Power Rankings ... .

Hmmm.

Let’s step back a second. That Disney’s computer-animated dog won isn’t an upset, but its five-point margin is surprising. Even after I began plugging in the numbers, I was anticipating something close to a three-way tie between Bolt, Twilight, and Quantum of Solace. What I didn’t process was the effect of the bunching of critical scores — and the bunching of critical scores higher than we’ve seen for a few months.

Twilight’s Rotten Tomatoes score of 44 isn’t bad; in October, it would have been good enough to be middle of the pack. But last weekend, it was the only movie with a score south of 57. It’s nearly impossible to win the Box Office Power Rankings with just one point in any category, and the teen vampire flick ended up in fourth place, despite a nearly $70-million opening weekend.

Seven movies this past weekend had Rotten Tomatoes scores between 57 and 67. The Metacritic scores were even more concentrated, with seven movies crowded between 55 and 59. It can get messy in there.

The key to Bolt’s easy win was less its dominance than its ability to stay out of the logjam.

Continue reading for the methodology and the week’s full rankings.

Does it make sense to get out of the way of a certain blockbuster? Or should studios try to tap into a market being unserved by that which every human is required to see on its opening weekend?

There are certainly examples of effective counter-programming. Mamma Mia! found a $28-million opening-weekend audience despite The Dark Knight’s $158-million debut. It has earned more than $143 million in the United States.

Yet the numbers suggest that studios were wise to avoid putting any wide releases against Quantum of Solace.

In the period between big summer releases and big holiday releases — September through mid-November — in 2007 and 2008, the combined domestic box office of the top 10 movies averaged $84 million, with a median of $80 million. Outside of this past weekend’s $135-million take, only three of those 20 weekends topped $100 million (ranging from $115 million to $123 million).

So it’s a fair assumption that there’s a ceiling for overall box office on a fall weekend, and that an optimistic but marginally reasonable expectation is $115 million.

To figure whether there’s room for a strong opening (say, $20 million) along with a spectacular one (say, $50 million), let’s figure a 50-percent drop-off for the previous weekend’s top eight movies. That gets us $58 million based on the receipts from November 7 to 9.

That leaves us $57 million. So if one predicted a $50-million weekend for James Bond, that would only leave $7 million on the table for the counter-programming. (Quantum actually made $68 million, but hindquarters are 20/20.)

One could point out that release-date decisions are made far in advance, and one could argue that a 50-percent drop of the $84-million fall average that one might use to make such decisions would give us enough room for a $50-million opener and a $20-million-plus opener under our imaginary $115-million ceiling.

I would point out that Quantum of Solace barely squeaked by Role Models in this week’s Box Office Power Rankings.

One might claim that I’m trying to change the subject.

And I would tell one to shut the hell up.

Continue reading for the methodology and the week’s full rankings.

It was odd to read these two things within a few minutes of each other:

On Role Models:

“[T]he kind of movie you don’t see every day, a comedy that is funny. The kind of comedy where funny people say funny things in funny situations, not the kind of comedy that whacks you with manic shocks to force an audible Pavlovian response.”

On Slumdog Millionaire:

“[O]ne of the rare ‘feel-good’ movies that actually makes you feel good, as opposed to merely jerked around.

The latter movie opened in a handful of theaters on November 12, so it doesn’t show up in this week’s Box Office Power Rankings, but Role Models does, and debuts at the top along with the Madagascar sequel.

The curious thing about the Seann William Scott/Paul Rudd comedy is a pair of nearly constant refrains in the reviews: It’s formulaic, and it’s funny.

We shouldn’t be surprised that a Hollywood movie stays on a well-trod path, of course, but are we now in an age when genre tags are so meaningless? When it’s a pleasant shock when a comedy is funny or a thriller makes our pulses pound? Nearly all action movies have action, yes, but it’s one of the rare labels that describes the content rather than the (ostensibly) intended effect.

I don’t want to make too much of this, but both of these reviews contrast the strengths of these movies with what we have been conditioned to anticipate from them: “manic shocks” and being “jerked around,” respectively. The benefit of these diminished expectations is that it doesn’t take much to please people.

Continue reading for the methodology and the week’s full rankings.

The consensus that Kevin Smith’s Zack and Miri Make a Porno and Clint Eastwood’s Changeling were poor performers — the weakest Halloween weekend in a decade! — certainly isn’t based on the track records of the filmmakers.

Smith’s bawdy comedy debuted with a little more than $10 million, while Eastwood’s missing-child drama brought in $9.4 million in expanded release. Those numbers might not be good for that particular weekend (compared to previous years), but they’re in line with Smith’s and Eastwood’s recent careers.

Zack and Miri is Smith’s second-best opening weekend, a million dollars behind Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back and just a hair ahead of Clerks 2. Considering the number of screens it opened on, Zack and Miri is at worst a very mild disappointment compared to those two but is otherwise exactly what one might have guessed.

Similarly, Changeling’s first weekend of wide release was slightly off the peak performances of Flags of Our Fathers and Mystic River, and nearly $3 million off Million Dollar Baby’s Oscar-buzz wide release. Downright predictable.

So while neither was able to knock High School Musical 3 from its box-office or Box Office Power Rankings pedestals, you’d have been a fool to expect them to.

Continue reading for the methodology and the week’s full rankings.

The theatrical success of High School Musical 3 begs a question: Was Disney too slow to capitalize on the success of the original, which drew an audience of nearly 14 million the first two nights it aired in January 2006?

High School Musical 2, after all, got 17 million pairs of eyes with its American television premiere. Maybe it was about building the brand, but that seems like a lot of ticket cash foregone to me.

With an average movie-ticket price approaching $7 (according to the National Association of Theatre Owners), the second sequel got about 6 million asses in seats in its opening weekend. Senior Year also topped this week’s Box Office Power Rankings by a wide margin, and it was the only release in the top 10 to be Rotten Tomatoes-approved “fresh.”

But keep a couple of deflating facts in mind:

• That Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus concert movie from earlier this year drew $31 million its opening weekend on fewer than one-fifth as many screens. And it got better reviews.
• High School Musical 3 had a per-screen average less than $2,000 more than the lowly retread Saw V.

I wouldn’t want those damned kids to get even bigger heads.

Continue reading for the methodology and the week’s full rankings.

Oliver Stone’s W. didn’t win this week’s Box Office Power Rankings, but it did better in every measure than I expected: $10.5 million in box office (fourth place), $5,175 per theater (third), 55 on Rotten Tomatoes (fourth), 56 on Metacritic (fourth). Consistency can pay off, and all that led to a second-place overall finish, behind the just-ahead-in-every-category The Secret Life of Bees (third, first, second, third).

It’s curious that the critical reception to W. has been so ... bland. Nobody hated it, and only Roger Ebert gave it four stars. If we do the Olympics-judging thing to its Metacritc scores by lopping off the top and bottom three, we get a range in the remaining 29 scores of 40 to 80 — from two to four stars on a five-star scale. Has a filmmaker who made a career out of polarizing critics and viewers become tentative and safe?

This is particularly strange given the opportunities for rage in his last two movies. World Trade Center’s Metacritic range was 50 to 90 if you remove the three reviews at the extremities.

Those are not the numbers of somebody taking chances. Those are not the numbers of the Oliver Stone of JFK and Natural Born Killers.

And that’s fine. Stone also made Nixon with the primary interest of empathy. It’s just surprising that he chose that road when all the signs were surely pointing him in a different direction.

Continue reading for the methodology and the week’s full rankings.

Quarantine won this week’s Box Office Power Rankings, and my first thought was that, with Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic scores of 61 and 54, respectively, the horror flick would have done even better a few weeks ago. Sure enough, those scores would have secured an additional five points for Quarantine because of weaker competition.

That got me thinking about dumping grounds — the conventional wisdom that early in the year and after the summer movie season, Hollywood drops its unwanted product on the market just to be rid of it. I decided to try to quantify the dumping ground.

I combined the median and average Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic scores for each weekend’s box-office top 10 starting July 20, 2007. Because both measures use a 100-point scale, one would expect that a typical week would have an aggregate score near 200 — or 50 each for median and average on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic.

The accompanying chart shows that — at least over the past 15 months — the conventional wisdom holds true. The obvious valleys fall in early autumn (post-blockbusters) and late winter (post-awards bait). The noticeable peaks are in late summer and the holiday season.

The highest aggregate score recorded so far was 267.4 for the weekend beginning July 20, 2007, with six movies scoring 76 or higher on Rotten Tomatoes, led by Ratatouille, Knocked Up, and Hairspray. The nadir of 145.9 came the weekend of March 7, 2008, with six movies scoring 27 or lower on Rotten Tomatoes, including 10,000 B.C., Fool’s Gold, College Road Trip, and Jumper.

Continue reading for the methodology and the week’s full rankings.

In this campaign season, what can we learn from the performances of An American Carol and Religulous?

The easy conclusion is that audiences aren’t real keen on such aggressively political material, with the two movies finishing ninth and 10th, respectively, in the weekend’s overall box office. The second easy conclusion is that conservatives are slightly hungrier for entertainment than people who don’t like religion.

Neither is correct.

While these two movies brought up the rear here in box office, at least they finished in the top 10, unlike fellow new releases Blindness, Flash of Genius, and How to Lose Friends and Alienate People. All of those opened in more theaters than Religulous, and all but Flash of Genius opened in more than An American Carol.

As for the conservative and whatever-Bill-Maher-is divide, Religulous had the second-best per-theater average in the top 10. An American Carol did better only than Burn After Reading, which had been out for three weekends.

Critics were far kinder to Maher’s anti-religion documentary than the the proudly conservative satire of David Zucker, which garnered worse reviews than anything else in our rankings. That might mean that movie critics hate God and conservatives.

Add it all up and it appears that pandering to right-wingers isn’t enough; they wanted something better than An American Carol.

Continue reading for the methodology and the week’s full rankings.

Late afternoon Tuesday, the Christian drama Fireproof had unofficially won this week’s Box Office Power Rankings, with a gross of almost $7 million and a per-theater average to make Eagle Eye sweat. By Wednesday morning, however, it was in fourth place.

Call it the Curse of the Small Sample Size. On Tuesday, the movie had one Metacritic review: a 50. On Wednesday, it had three: two 50s and one zero. Hence, its Metacritic average dropped from 50 to 33, and plunged its ranking in that criterion from second to last.

I initially thought that the movie was a victim of snooty critics skipping the “religious” film. But the reality is that the studio didn’t screen it for the heathens. So now I don’t feel so bad for Kirk Cameron and his cohorts; they got what they deserved.

And in the process, they showed one of the weaknesses of the Box Office Power Rankings: the potential for tyranny by The Onion’s AV Club and its accusations of misogyny.

Continue reading for the methodology and the week’s full rankings.

If you glance at the box-office top 10 this week, you might think that the supernatural romantic comedy Ghost Town was a bomb, finishing last among the four major new releases and eighth overall. But the movie’s title was almost a self-fulfilling prophecy, as Paramount/DreamWorks only exhibited it in 1,505 theatres — a sure sign the studio doesn’t believe in the movie. (Its opening-weekend competitors — Lakeview Terrace, Igor, and My Best Friend’s Girl — were all released in more than 2,300 theatres.)

Given a wider release and more marketing money, Ghost Town would likely have been a modest hit, easily making back its $20-million production budget in theaters. Consider that it was second-best-reviewed movie in the top 10 (behind only The Dark Knight), and that audiences liked it, too. Yahoo! users rated it B+ (compared to grades of B and B- for the other three big releases), while users of the Internet Movie Database gave it a 7.5 out of 10 (compared to a range of 5.2 to 6.5 for the new-release competition).

It’s unlikely that Ghost Town would have overtaken Burn After Reading in our Box Office Power Rankings this week with a more aggressive release, but its performance would have better reflected how people actually felt about it. This is a poster child for mis-released movies.

Continue reading for the methodology and the week’s full rankings.

Much has been written over the past 18 months about the death/irrelevance of film criticism in print media, as newspapers scaled back their movie coverage and Premiere stopped publishing a print edition.

The refrain has been that movie critics are out-of-touch and elitist, that they don’t reflect the values and tastes of audiences, etc., etc.

While that might appear true when Bangkok Dangerous tops the box office (as it did the first weekend in September), the truth is a little more complicated. Numerous (mostly unscientific) studies have found a correlation between box-office performance and critical reception.

Don’t read a cause-and-effect relationship into this and claim that audiences follow critics — that criticism matters because it affects audience behavior. Instead, let’s just note that audience behavior and critical reception often hook up.

For instance, the top movie at the box office this weekend was the Coen brothers’ Burn After Reading (also our Box Office Power Rankings champion), followed by Tyler Perry’s The Family That Preys, the decades-late Pacino/De Niro thriller Righteous Kill, and The Women. Check those opening movies’ Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic scores, and you’ll see a pattern. Whether you’re looking at gross or two measures of critical evaluation, they follow the exact same order. Freaky.

Continue reading for the methodology and the week’s full rankings.

Mamma Mia! isn’t a massive hit, but it has staying power. With $136 million in domestic receipts since its release on July 18, it’s at ninth place in the summer’s box-office race, yet it’s been a steady earner. This marks the movie’s eighth week in the box-office top 10 (and hence the Box Office Power Rankings), equal to Iron Man and The Dark Knight and one more than WALL•E, Kung Fu Panda, and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. That’s pretty impressive however you cut it, but especially in the absence of a huge opening weekend.

Last week, I predicted — nay, guaranteed — that Tropic Thunder would match The Dark Knight as four-time Box Office Power Rankings champion. I’m an idiot. Batman would have none of it, and reclaimed his crown.

As for new releases, Nicolas Cage borrowed Tom Hanks’ The Da Vinci Code hair for Bangkok Dangerous yet couldn’t even manage that film’s meager accomplishments: His action thriller barely beat Tropic Thunder at the box office and was hammered by the critics who saw it. It shan’t last long.

Continue reading for the methodology and the week’s full rankings.

If Tropic Thunder repeats as Box Office Power Rankings champion this weekend, it will match The Dark Knight with titles in four consecutive weeks. (Iron Man topped the charts for five straight weeks earlier this summer.)

This points out one of the flaws of our system: Box Office Power Rankings have no sense of scale. After 20 days, Ben Stiller’s comedy earned $87 million domestically to Batman’s $411 million. Christopher Nolan’s movie received better reviews. Yet in the eyes of the Box Office Power Rankings, they could soon be equals. It just isn’t fair, is it?

This is partly by design. One goal of this system is to level the playing field, to give underdogs a shot at Culture Snob glory.

Alas, no amount of playing-field leveling could help this past weekend’s releases, with Babylon A.D. and Disaster Movie earning a combined Rotten Tomatoes score of 4. That’s a lot of sucking.

So will Tropic Thunder come out on top once again? With only the Pang Brothers’ remake of their own Bangkok Dangerous opening wide this weekend, it has an excellent shot. Critics tend to be dismissive of Nicolas Cage action flicks, and the movie’s studio won’t be screening it for them. You know, because they want audiences to be surprised.

So call your bookie: Tropic Thunder will end up at least as big as The Dark Knight! Four-time champion!

And if it equals Iron Man’s five-week run, I’ll make Stiller a plaque.

(I just checked the release calendar, and I’ll be rooting for the Coen Brothers, Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, Tyler Perry, and women everywhere. Plaque construction is not my strong suit.)

Continue reading for the methodology and the week’s full rankings — in a chart that you might actually be able to follow!

How badly has George Lucas damaged the Star Wars franchise? At Box Office Mojo, The Clone Wars’ revenues are being compared to Final Fantasy and TMNT — and after two weekends, it’s losing to both.

The Clone Wars would appear to show that Star Wars is now being greeted with audience apathy and critical disdain; with a Rotten Tomatoes score of 18, it’s just a little better than Mirrors, the scribes say.

It could be that the world is simply seeing the movie for what it is: a commercial for the Cartoon Network animated series slated for the fall. I’d prefer to think that critics and audiences alike are trying to compensate for hype-fueled lapses in judgment over the past decade. Revenge of the Sith had a baffling Rotten Tomatoes score of 79, which followed more-reasonable but still far-too-generous scores of 63 and 66 for the other two Star Wars prequels. And the trilogy had a combined domestic gross of $1.1 billion. Shame on all of us. (I’m not above reproach.)

The Clone Wars dropped to eighth place in this week’s Box Office Power Rankings, with Tropic Thunder and The Dark Knight finishing first and second — just like last week. The new releases simply couldn’t compete, with The House Bunny finishing third, Death Race fifth, and The Longshots seventh.

Continue reading for the methodology and the week’s full rankings — in a chart that you might actually be able to follow!

It’s not a surprise that Tropic Thunder unseated The Dark Knight last weekend after four-week reigns atop the box-office charts and the Box Office Power Rankings. Good reviews, some protests, Ben Stiller, and a white-hot Robert Downey Jr. will do that, although its $40-million six-day take has to be considered something of a disappointment in light of its $92-million production budget.

What isn’t a disappointment is Woody Allen, who sneaked into the box-off top 10 and landed in third place in our rankings. With Vicky Cristina Barcelona showing in just 692 locations — earning the second-best per-theater average of the weekend — Woody rode good reviews to a great showing. A weekend gross of $3.8 million isn’t much, but that’s the beauty of the Box Office Power Rankings: Three out of four ain’t bad at all.

Just ask George Lucas and Keifer Sutherland, whose new movies scored within three points of each other (and low) on both critical measures and were less than 50 bucks apart on per-theater average. The Clone Wars’ higher theater count gave it the overall-box-office edge on Mirrors, but neither will be bragging: They finished fifth and sixth in the rankings.

Continue reading for the methodology and the week’s full rankings — in a chart that you might actually be able to follow!