Monday Morning Quarterback Part II
By BOP Staff
October 27, 2009
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Kim Hollis: Saw VII and Saw VIII have already been announced. Do you expect further slippage or do you think these outings can redeem the franchise? Also, if it were your call, would you delay the release from the expected October 2010 date?
Josh Spiegel: Well, now my day's worse. I'd been aware of Saw VII, but not a Saw VIII. It's hard to tell if there will be more slippage for the series; considering that the last movie made twice as much in its opening weekend, the drop-off could be a bit of a fluke. I think that the success of Paranormal Activity, though, may clue other studios into the fact that the Saw franchise may soon fall apart. In this case, I think the only way to kill off this series is to provide heavy competition.
Tim Briody: I don't know if it'll jump back up to the $30 million mark but as long as there isn't a Paranormal Activity II released this time next year, I think the films will be okay. Saw VI is still already profitable, by the way.
Sean Collier: They're so cheap, there's not really a reason to stop until, say, a $6 million opening or thereabouts. And I certainly wouldn't delay - this is a franchise that could lose fan interest in a heartbeat, so they need to stay constantly present.
Michael Lynderey: How many of this decade's horror sequels finished with $30 million or less, but were still followed by another theatrically-released sequel? The answer is none (although you could count Freddy vs. Jason following up Jason X as an understandable exception). That said, if I were Lionsgate, I'd actually go ahead with a Saw VII for next October, make it in the oft-suggested 3D, and sell it like the last entry in the series - this time for real - wrapping up all the loose ends and giving this whole gory story a definitive ending. If that's the game plan, they may get their last hurrah yet - and Saw VII could save face. One way or the other, though, I do not expect to see a Saw VIII released in October 2011. It's just not going to happen. Not after this weekend.
Jim Van Nest: I don't switch up the release date on one of these until it tanks on its own. If I'm the studio, I look at this as a fluke and I continue on the same path that has gotten me here. I think the days of the $30 million opening may be in the rearview mirror for Saw, but I see no reason (other than the aforementioned Paranormal Activity II) that Saw VII won't be able to reclaim its #1 spot next Halloween.
Tom Macy: I wouldn't delay them. One of the strengths of the Saw franchise has been its consistent shoving of itself in the faces of movie-goers. It's almost like people are bullied into seeing them. This year, however, was the first time horror lovers had a choice of where to get their kicks from. I look at this situation like the plot of Forces of Nature. The movie-goer is Ben Affleck, in a stale relationship with Maura Tierney, or the Saw franchise. But he doesn't know the relationship is stale until Sandra Bullock – Paranormal Activity - comes along. In the end, though, Paranormal Activity, while new and exciting, doesn't sustain that initial excitement. Affleck then realizes the nice comfortable companionship he had with Maura Tierney – Saw - is really what he wanted all along.
Reagen Sulewski: Losing this year is a bigger deal than people think, I would suspect. This is a series that since the third entry or so, has been predicated on forming a habit ("It's Halloween, so go see another Saw movie, suckers! Did I say that out loud?"). If you break the chain, there's no guarantee you get them back into that tradition. So I could see this going a couple of different ways in that they just proceed on as if nothing has happened, or they try a radical shakeup up to the formula that works for another year but leaves them lost as to where to go next. In either case, they get to Saw XIII, but Saw IX is not released in theaters.
Jason Lee: I think Saw VII goes back into the mid $20s but resumes its decline from there. Frankly, I'm surprised that the franchise has retained such a large audience this far along already.
Pete Kilmer: I think at this point you have to finish the series. If, as the producers say, they have it plotted out to Saw VIII, then go for it. What I fear happening is that they will reduce the budgets on the next two movies and that it will really show. If they were smart, they'd play to the audience that is still there, don't go into cost cutting measures and complete the series and make a kick ass box set of DVD's for the series that will earn them a ton of cash.
George Rose: If other production companies don't learn from Paranormal Activity's lesson and gain the courage to face the Saw series, I think Saw VII can bounce back with better marketing and make at least $20 million on opening weekend. Saw VIII probably could, too. I really hope that doesn't happen, though. With any luck, a better franchise has just been sent into production to open against Saw VII next Halloween and will prove the franchise is history. Saw VII may be the last one to have an opening weekend bigger than its production cost. If Saw VIII doesn't make more than $10 million on opening weekend, we might be seeing Saw IX go direct-to-DVD. Then Saw X will go into space like Jason X did to try and revive the franchise without success, and then Michael Bay will start remaking them. Jigsaw has just officially joined the ranks of Michael, Freddy, Jason and Leatherface.
Brett Beach: I think Saw VII 3-D, although quite a mouthful to utter, should help to bring back the grosses in the range the series has come to expect, at least with the higher ticket prices. I do need to share one slight annoyance which has been bugging me for several years now. Note to producers of Saw films: you are not the first franchise to release four, five or even six films in annual succession. The first six Police Academy films were released between 1984-1989 and all in the spring, within three weeks of the release date of the first. Just sayin'...George Gaynes and Bubba Smith deserve some respect.
Machine guns shoot out his butt? What kid wouldn't love this?
Kim Hollis: Astro Boy, an animated feature from Summit Entertainment, opened to $6.7 million in 3,014 locations. What do you think about this result?
Josh Spiegel: Astro Boy suffered partly because of how uninterested kids were in the character, partly because of the continued success of Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs, and partly because the marketing wasn't terribly engaging for any audience member. I'm not sure what else to say here, as...well, who cares about seeing an Astro Boy movie? There wasn't much call for a film, and no interest in the product.
Sean Collier: Why bother to reinvent kids' properties that no kids are familiar with? Just make a slight variation and call it original. Kids had about as much reason to care about this as they would a Woody Woodpecker movie, so they should be thrilled with $6.7 million. (Incidentally, please tell me someone has already greenlit a Woody Woodpecker movie.)
Jim Van Nest: I generally use my kids as a barometer for how a kids flick will do and there was no interest in my house for Astro Boy. The "I have machine guns in my butt?" line got chuckles at home, but there was nothing in the way of a demand to see this one. By way of comparison, I was bombarded with requests for Cloudy With a Chance For Meatballs every time the commercial ran. And on Nick...that was A LOT.
Reagen Sulewski: What few ads they had for this were terrible, and appealed to the wrong demographic. It's boomers that have the best association with Astroboy, and they weren't going to be brought into the theaters with butt-installed machine guns. You can kind of place this in the same category with Thunderbirds and Speed Racer (which at least tried something different and succeeded at that, if not in box office terms).
Michael Lynderey: There's a clear message being sent here about old animated TV show adaptations - "thanks, but no thanks". Astro Boy is the kind of title that sounds vaguely familiar - you just know you've heard it somewhere before - but you don't know where and you don't much care to look it up and find out. The box office basically reflected that line of thinking. It's unfortunate in a way, because it was a pretty decent film, but the heavy competition was the seal of death to a project that already had a very questionable pedigree.
Max Braden: I had no conscious idea that this character was more than half a century old. And from the ads I saw it didn't look like anything different from what you could see on Saturday morning TV or playing Sonic the Hedgehog video games. For Summit, this is going to turn out a little better than their last animated distribution, Fly Me To the Moon, which grossed a total of $14.5 million. And they're too busy fantasizing about Twilight money to care. But it's another step down for writer-director David Bowers; his previous, Flushed Away, only managed to gross $64.5 million in the U.S. against a $143 million budget.
Tom Macy: I'm a little surprised it didn't do better. It's a brand name, albeit a slightly obscure one, that's an animated film with no real kids movie competition. There were certainly enough venues. It reminds me a little bit of Valiant. Remember that? Exactly. It had a similar budget, around $40 million. It didn't have a ton of competition in the animated department, and this was when releasing a CGI kids movie was like pushing a button an getting an automatic $100 million. Hmm, that's not a bad idea for a movie premise. Yeah, maybe Frank Langella could be in it with part of his face missing! Ah, dammit! Richard Kelly totally beat me to it. Anyways, I think Summit may have underestimated how recognizable the name was. I had heard of Astro Boy but I didn't know what it derived from. Also, the trailer seemed to focus a lot on the action, which may have scared off some parents worrying about the violence factor. But it was clearly targeted at kids. No one was seeing this without someone taller that 4'2" in tow. So there was a little too much straddling of the fence. Perhaps things would have gone better if Summit just played it safe and rolled out some fart jokes.
George Rose: I'm surprised it earned less than the Toy Story 1 & 2 re-release but not at all surprised it failed to reach the heights of Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. That movie was a wonderful surprise. Maybe Summit should have spent less money filling every store at the mall with The Twilight Saga: New Moom merchandise and more money making Astro Boy a 3D event.
Jason Lee: This movie just felt retro (and not in a fun "Christina Aguilera does big band music" sort of way) from the outset. The animation looked slickly-old, the character feels like a throwback to an ancient era, and the commercials/trailers really felt like they were aiming at a super young audience. This was going to be a tough sell no matter what.
Pete Kilmer: No one (and I'm generalizing) in the mass market under 45 has ever heard of Astro Boy. So there was zero interest by the kids to see it. No doubt Astro Boy has a storied legacy outside the US.
Their big problem? Who wants to see a movie about a vampire's assistant? I mean, does he send the guy's faxes? Answer his phones? Take in his laundry?
Kim Hollis: Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant opened to only $6.3 million in 2,754 locations. What went wrong here for Universal?
Tom Macy: Umm, everything. I hate it when I just feel embarrassmed for actors. Sometimes it's because they're miscast, like Brad Pitt in Troy. Or they're just plain awful, like Brad Pitt in Troy. But the worst is when it's an actor I really respect and admire. John C. Reilly, dude. What's going on up there? The tone of the trailer was all over the place. Is this supposed to be funny? Scary? I'm sure Universal will say both, but you need to pick a direction. Instead of looking funny and scary it just looked boring and stupid. And last time I checked, boring, stupid movies are not exactly what's in these days.
Josh Spiegel: First of all, here's a movie that should have done well. If anything else, it's about a kid who becomes a half-vampire. As we'll soon see from what is likely going to be a huge success in New Moon, vampires are still very popular with teenagers. However, the marketing was too small and unable to encapsulate in 30 seconds or an ad what the movie was about. I'm still relatively intrigued about the movie, as it's from Paul Weitz (too bad he didn't take his brother's gig directing New Moon), it stars John C. Reilly, Willem Dafoe, and Salma Hayek, but....what IS this movie? People were probably just too baffled to be interested.
Sean Collier: Please note for posterity's sake that October 23, 2009 was the date that vampires became oversaturated. Took long enough.
Jim Van Nest: I'm on the other side of the fence than Josh. The cast was the only intriguing thing about this film for me. I mean seriously, with the Twilight obnoxiousness and True Blood dominating HBO-land AND something called the Vampire Diaries on TV, I'm ready to kick Count Dracula himself in the groin. This is a plea to everyone in Hollywood about vampires. Please. Stop it now!
George Rose: Universal clearly tried to capitalize on the vampire craze right before Twilight's New Moon and Halloween. Unfortunately, vampires are most appealing to age groups old enough to understand their sexual appeal. To make it more accessible for the youth, it looks like the marketers chose to focus on the wide variety of characters and creatures in the circus. What the trailer shows is a movie that looks like the offspring of Sky High and the current fourth season of TV's Heroes. I can't even really tell if it's a vampire or mutuant movie. Whichever one it was aiming for it fell closer to John C. Reilly's Walk Hard with its sense of parody. Maybe Universal should have hired the team behind Meet the Spartans and called this Vampire Movie. It's sad that it probably would have made more money if that had happened.
Reagen Sulewski: This is a Nickelodeon channel movie that escaped somehow and got into regular release. I thought that residual vampire crazies would lift this somewhat, but the fact that it never quite figured out what movie it was supposed to be in the ads really doomed it. Also, I want to call Dateline on John C. Reilly's character.
Eric Hughes: It's probably also worth mentioning that no matter how much make-up you put on the man, John C. Reilly will never have that authentic vampire look.
Pete Kilmer: Not near enough marketing of Salma Hayek in leather. That's what killed it.
Michael Lynderey: Like Twilight last year, Cirque du Freak was going to sink or swim based on the inherent popularity of the book series it's based on. Obviously, one of the two had a bit of a bigger fanbase than the other. Considering this is a surprisingly violent PG-13 kids movie that got a real critical thrashing, it didn't have much else going for it other than turning out the base.
So, did you hear that Amelia Earhart landed on a Pacific island and was eaten by giant coconut crabs? Now *that* would have been an awesome movie!
Kim Hollis: Amelia, Hilary Swank's latest theoretical Academy Awards contender, opened to $4 million in 818 locations and was met with resoundingly negative reviews. What do you think of its box office? Are you ready to dismiss it from the list of serious awards contenders?
Josh Spiegel: On the one hand, we're talking about a biopic starring Hilary Swank. That alone raises Amelia's Oscar credibility, as does the film's director, Mira Nair, and co-star Richard Gere. However, the reviews have been so bad, the marketing has been, I imagine, purposely small, and the amount of interest was very low. The story of Amelia Earhart is still fascinating, but it sounds like this movie was less interested in her mysterious final flight than everything else in her life (despite the fact that Earhart's known mostly for disappearing). This one's a disappointing failure, to be sure, and one that probably won't get Swank any awards buzz.
Sean Collier: I don't have words to convey how bland this movie was. It's out of award contention mainly because no Academy member will be able to watch the screener without falling asleep. Hilary's agent should update his resume.
Jim Van Nest: We've seen over the years that box office (or lack thereof) will not stop the tom-notch films from cleaning up at the Oscars. By the sounds of the reviews, though, this is not a top-notch film and THAT is why Oscar season will come and go with little mention of Amelia.
George Rose: This is dreadful. I hate to say that because I really do like Hilary Swank and Richard Gere, but I never saw this as an awards contender. Not even a little bit. Was P.S. I Love You an awards contender because Swank was in it? No, and this shouldn't be either. What could have been so compelling about Amelia's life to warrant a movie? Affairs have been done before, planes have been flown before and Swank needs to stop cutting her hair off. Titanic was great for many reasons but I imagine one of them being that the movie showed what we didn't already know. If Titanic was about Leo and Kate falling in love while the ship was being built, nobody would have seen it. Instead, they showed us the devastating results of things that occured AFTER the ship left. All Amelia does is show us a visual interpretation of information we can find at a local library. Does anyone really care that she was in an open marriage before she disappeared? I'd rather see a fictional interpretation of the events after her disappearance.
Michael Lynderey: It's too bad because I really like Hilary Swank, but I'd say Amelia is officially cut from the Oscar class of 2010. If the pool of Best Actress contenders is shallow enough this year, Swank may sneak in with a nomination, but otherwise this one's got no real chance at any major awards - not with a RottenTomatoes rating lower than Saw VI's, that's for sure. The box office certainly doesn't help - there's little room for expansion here, and even a $15 million total seems out of reach at this point. Swank looked set on having a successful awards contender released exactly every five years, but it didn't quite work out this time. I've started crossing my fingers for 2014, though.
Reagen Sulewski: This wouldn't be the first movie to defy critical disdain and become an Oscar nominee, and there's ten films this year, so... but no. You can get over the critics hating your movie, but critical *and* commercial flop? If that happens, you're done. Swank could still be in the running for Actress (with so few great female roles, anything prominent has a shot), and maybe something like Cinematography or Costume, but we've mostly heard the last of this film.
Tom Macy: I'm really surprised at how universally panned this was. I thought Hilary Swank's presence alone would at least garner some "great performance, bad movie" buzz. I also am shocked at the by-the-numbers-oscar-bait rap that's it's getting. I would have thought with Mira Nair at the helm they'd be more to it than that. Which makes me sad. Then again, you could point to Vanity Fair, another visual epic of hers with a big name that completely fizzled. The box office doesn't surprise me. I think they were going for a word-of-mouth fueled roll-out, as is typical this time of year. But judging by the words-of-the mouths I've encountered, it's all down hill from here.
Brett Beach: I am quite shocked that Mira Nair, director of vibrant and sensuous fare such as Mississippi Masala, Monsoon Wedding and Vanity Fair, appears to have delivered a neutered by-the-numbers bio pic. Maybe if they had had Hilary Swank's Amelia team up with Amy Adams' Amelia? There's my high concept offering of the week. The sacrificial lamb to the gods of Oscar campaigns has been offered and the race can begin in earnest. The Weinsteins must be breathing a big sigh of relief.
Max Braden: Swank is an Oscar name, and this is the kind of safe, studio, epic style movie that would normally be an obvious choice, but the voters would have to be aware that they'd be voting for nostalgia and not quality. Even Swank's die hard fans should admit that this wasn't her best work. If they compare her to Cate Blanchett's winning role as Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator (who Swank sometime sounded like she was trying to mimic), Swank is going to come up short. The movie's best award hope would be to run unopposed. I don't think the "everyone gets a Best Picture nomination" format this year is much help either.
Jason Lee: This film's Oscar chances, in a sad mirroring of the titular character's fate, have nosedived into the ocean. I see no Best Picture and no Best Director - and only a sliver of a shot at Best Actress.