Monday Morning Quarterback Part II
By BOP Staff
June 29, 2010
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Kim Hollis: Knight and Day, Tom Cruise's latest attempt to beg for forgiveness, opened to $27.4 million over five days, including $20.1 million over the weekend. Was it a mistake for Fox to give this film a $125 million budget?
Tim Briody: $125 million? Someone's getting fired. Clearly, Hollywood execs are still trapped in 1996. This is not the same Tom Cruise. America is convinced he's crazy, and doesn't want to see him as "Tom Cruise" anymore. I bet he jumped up and down on Oprah's couch when they floated the idea of a Les Grossman movie.
David Mumpower: Honestly, I cannot blame Fox for going all in on this one with the lofty budget. That's the cost of doing business for potential tentpole action films and they certainly covered their bases here. They put Cruise in a role where his overhead is co-opted as part of the overall joke. On top of that, they gave him a legitimate top tier actress whose presence in movies enhances their box office. Better yet, Cameron Diaz was experiencing a career renaissance of sorts with the very well regarded What Happens in Vegas/My Sister's Keeper combination of funny romantic comedy and stellar drama. Fox did what they could to offset the risk of the project in this manner and as
Josh Spiegel (who is on vacation this week and thereby cannot speak for himself) recently chronicled in A-List, Hollywood loves few things the way that they love a comeback. Giving him the right script and a worthy co-lead positioned Cruise to succeed. The fact that this didn't happen goes a long way in demonstrating just how much Cruise's reputation has fallen apart in recent years. At this point, perhaps the only thing that could save his career is to dump Katie Holmes and marry Kristen Stewart.
Brett Beach: I'm not sure if an action movie with Cruise and Diaz could come in for much less than $125 million, unless they were doing it Cloverfield style. I think it was a dreadful mistake to open the film on a Wednesday. There is an art to doing that outside of leading up to a weekend with some form of holiday in the Fri/Sat/Sun and while it may have been intended to "build buzz", that seems to me to be a crap shoot time and again. 20th Century Fox seems to believe in this strategy, though, as they are opening Vampires Suck (the latest opus from Friedberg and Seltzer) in August the same way. Come to think of it, they did the same thing with The Rocker two years ago. The film will easily make its budget back with overseas revenue (which I think has become a go to line much like "Our band is really big in Japan.") I will look forward to reviews from BOP-ers.
Tom Houseman: Clearly the majority of that money went into Cruise and Diaz's pockets, as the special effects in this movie were very weak. But didn't someone realize before they started making this movie that they weren't going to have any clue how to market it? Should they play up the action? The comedy? The romance? It didn't fit into a neat box, so other than showing the stars' dazzling smiles this wasn't going to be an easy film to convince people they wanted to see. I don't blame the marketing team, I blame the people who greenlighted the film with this budget, as they should have known it would be a tough sell.
Reagen Sulewski: One of the classic blunders (land war Asia/Sicillian death on the line, etc.) is blinking on your marketing campaign. The last thing you want to do is to confuse audiences about what kind of movie it is you want them to see. You can have audiences amped up, make one bad commercial, and all those "want to see"s turn into "meh"s, and you're never getting those back. The initial hyperactive and kinetic trailers were in my estimation, perfect, and playing it up as a "Serious Action Film" robbed it of the most interesting part of the campaign. I guess they also got nervous when they saw the returns on Killers, but you need to have confidence.
The comments about the Wednesday opening are also on point - they made the move too late, and then barely pushed it. This has the feel of trying not to fail rather than trying to succeed.
Michael Lynderey: Knight and Day certainly seemed like a good idea on paper, but movies like this seem to be getting riskier and riskier to make. Established franchises, remakes, sequels, and comic book adaptations are where the ticket's at, while original action movies with big stars (i.e. of the Con Air or Face/Off variety) seem to be getting scarcer and scarcer. I think Knight & Day would have done very well if it was released in, say, 1998. Now, though, it's a bit out of time.
Shalimar Sahota: I can't understand this at all. I was expecting this to open double what it actually did on the weekend. Instead it's closer to what the The A-Team achieved few weeks back. Has Cruise's unusual behavior since 2005 (that didn't involve him breaking any laws or end up getting arrested) really had that much of an effect on his box office? If that is the case, and people are put off by Crazy Cruise, then I'm very disappointed. I guess audiences didn't want to see him playing someone that's probably closer to his real life persona than any other character he's played. With the exception of Iron Man 2, for whatever reason, audiences just aren't warming to action flicks this summer. As much as I'd like them to succeed, I wouldn't be all surprised if Fox's next release, Predators, and maybe even Sony/Columbia's Salt, ends up under performing.
I kinda agree with Michael, in that yes, as an original film, Knight and Day was certainly a risky venture. But I'm the kind of person that would rather watch and support an original film, rather than something from an established franchise. Though I understand how it would feel safer for the studios.
Eric Hughes: Michael, I hear ya, but I think it's the studios' unwillingness to take risks that lead to movies like Knight and Day. Next month's Inception looks fantastic not only because of Christopher Nolan and its star power, but also because it has more of an original story to tell. Something like Knight and Day can probably be compared to so many other things because it severely lacked in the creative process that would have made it unique. Or, that's the impression people seemed to have gotten from promo material.
David Mumpower: Eric, I disagree with you on that point in that Knight & Day seems to have too much creativity if anything. The "hero" of the film shoots a police officer at one point in the trailer. That's not something you see in an action film very often. Even the moments we've seen before like his riding the windshield of her car instantly establish the character as quirky and unique. At the end of the day, I put all of the disappointment on Cruise's doorstop.
Katie Holmes is dying to know.
Kim Hollis: Do you think this was Tom Cruise's last chance to regain his standing as an action hero, or do you think he'll have another opportunity to succeed in the genre?
Brett Beach: For someone whose career as a big-draw leading man now spans nearly a quarter of a century, I think it would be ridiculous to count Cruise out of the action genre (or any genre for that matter). I remained mystified as to how the CJ incident was the straw that broke the camel's back when he had survived nearly 20 years prior of rumors, innuendoes, and anecdotes about personal behavior that far exceed in weirdness anything he may have done on Oprah that day. I still find him to be a perennially underrated actor, and the "with me, up here/ without me, down here" clip in the Knight & Day trailer still leaves me in stitches. I think a "comeback" could be as simple as good hype and buzz for MI:IV which could clean up during the holiday season as the go to action film. Cruise may have lost the battle vis a vis Sandler this weekend but he has ten years on him and the ability to bag hits in virtually every genre. I say he is not down, not out.
David Mumpower: Despite how harsh I was in the Knight & Day discussion, I believe we are still largely in a to be determined stage with Cruise. When I look at his situation analytically, what jumps out at me is that Mission: Impossible II was a shiny but mediocre movie that earned $215 million. Mission: Impossible III is in the discussion for best action film of the 2000s yet it earned only $133.5 million. And I'm not stating that opinion on my own. The third film is better reviewed by critics and smokes its direct predecessor in terms of all popular internet movie metrics. The difference between the two projects is simply that consumers got fed up with Cruise's antics. Will they eventually let him off the deck? Well, John Travolta has been forgiven more times than Brett Favre has unretired and yet he's not only allowed but fully encouraged to keep making movies.
Tom Cruise has been in 16 $100 million domestic earners. There aren't five people in our industry who have his name recognition. Writing him off is a dangerous practice for this reason yet at the end of the day, movie producers are in sales. And the first rule of sales is that the customer is always right. If customers keep saying that no matter how good a movie looks, they won't see it if Tom Cruise is in it, he's done. Alternately, he'll make something like Mission: Impossible IV that people will love and all will be forgiven. Until that is settled one way or the other, he's in this box office purgatory. My current vibe is that at the age of 48, Cruise needs to move on to the role of wise adviser to the action hero if his next attempt fails. And the Tropic Thunder spin-off featuring his character, Les Grossman, would be a baaaaaaaad idea.
Tom Houseman: I think Cruise still has some life left in him as an action star, but I'm curious to see what happens to Cruise after his time is past. Besides cameo roles (Austin Powers 3 and Tropic Thunder), Cruise has only ever played the lead, the antagonist, and Frank T.J. Mackey. Will he start to take more supporting roles as he ages?
Reagen Sulewski: It's pretty clear that he's lost some portion of his audience pretty much forever, but a lot of other people are still with him (kind of like Michael Jackson, but without all the... ickiness). Mission Impossible IV will almost certainly work, but that's kind of a cold comfort - making sequel after sequel can't be the way he wants to run out the clock on his stardom, and eventually those franchises run out (Days of Thunder II!).
Add me to the group that thinks the Les Grossman movie idea makes no sense, although there's a slight, slight chance it could work artistically if not financially. I'd do it mockumentary style as a sort of "rise to power" film, but were' still looking at niche film at best.
Michael Lynderey: I was never a big believer in the storyline that Cruise has been faltering in the last four years. Minority Report, The Last Samurai, and Collateral, all pre-2005, weren't considered particularly great performers, while War of the Worlds ended up his highest grossing film, and that was released right after whatever events in his personal life people keep referring to. As for after 2006 - Valkyrie did pretty well for what it was, Lions for Lambs was hardly a typical Cruise vehicle, and so it's only Mission: Impossible III that I'd peg as a definite underperfomer. That, however, has now changed - Knight and Day really didn't do very well at all, did it? Maybe it's because this same basic storyline has been played out in so many bad movies lately, or maybe it got caught in the wave of massively underperforming action movies that's been hitting theaters this summer. Or maybe people are right about Cruise's status as draw. Oh, well. Either way, I have to imagine there's going to be some tinkering done with Mission: Impossible IV - and I don't mean just the addition of 3D or smell-a-vision - but they're probably going to try and get a real name co-star, or two.
David Mumpower: I think Michael introduces a fascinating thought to this conversation. What type of villain could be added to the cast who would provide the requisite drawing power to make Mission: Impossible IV a premiere movie event? I mean, they brought in one of the best actors of our generation, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and he delivered a sublime performance in Mission: Impossible III that meant absolutely nothing to the bottom line. What's the corollary to that? Mike Myers? Jim Carrey? Robert Pattinson+Taylor Lautner+Zac Efron? I'm not seeing any obvious solutions here.