By Tim Briody

April 23, 2002

If you will, step into the Wayback Machine to November, 1999. The 19th James Bond film, The World is Not Enough, and Tim Burton's latest, Sleepy Hollow, are set to open the weekend before Thanksgiving. Many predicted Bond to rule the weekend and Sleepy Hollow to suffer, because both films were aimed at similar audiences and moviegoers would choose the known quantity in Agent 007 instead of taking a chance on Burton's adaptation of The Headless Horseman. (Hollow was also being dogged because of its cast. But that's another article.)

So what happened? The first time ever two movies opened to $30 million on the same weekend.

Simply put, there is not a finite number of dollars available for the box office each weekend. It can, and will, expand greatly when a quality film that the public wants to see enters the marketplace.

An even better example is the summer of 2000. Starting with Dinosaur the weekend before Memorial Day, each of the next 11 weeks saw at least one film open over $20 million. Look for openers over $10 million, and you can count the next three weeks, all the way to the one tried-and-true box-office black hole, Labor Day. Each week had one or more films that audiences were interested in seeing, and they benefited. People don't say "Well, gee, I really want to see What Lies Beneath this weekend, but each of the last four weeks has had a movie I wanted to see, so I don't think I'm going to go this week."

But what about the movies that bombed, you ask? Surely they were just lost in the shuffle, and if films like X-Men, Mission: Impossible 2 and The Perfect Storm weren't hogging all the screens, they would have done much better, right?

Nope.

Movies don't bomb because there were too many other movies out at the same time. Movies fail because no one particularly cared to see them. Rocky and Bullwinkle was doomed from the start. Titan AE? You saw that Superbowl ad, didn't you? Loser? Self-explanatory.

For a more recent example, look at Showtime. On paper, it's probably a lock for at least a $20 million opening. Eddie Murphy! Robert DeNiro! Buddy comedy! Spoofing reality television! It can't miss!

It's going to top out under $40 million.

But not because it entered a crowded marketplace, where Ice Age and Resident Evil were taking its audience. It under-performed because when you have Murphy and DeNiro in a buddy comedy, and the funniest part of your movie is William Shatner and T. J. Hooker jokes, you have a problem. It opened to $15 million, but fell off quickly and quietly thereafter.

When evaluating an opener, determine how each film stands on its own merits. What's in theaters now should not be a factor.
View other columns by Tim Briody