Monday Morning Quarterback Part I
By BOP Staff
July 5, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Kim Hollis: Transformers: Dark of the Moon opened to $97.8 million over the three-day portion of the weekend, giving it a running total of $162.6 million since Tuesday evening. What do you take from this result?
Brett Beach: Answer in a breathless (and familiar) nutshell: They lost some from the lost one, the 3D is apparently awesome so they will make more three-dimensional bank than a lot of other releases have this year, it may throw under the first one domestically, but not by much and international numbers are gangbusters and may push it up to a billion so it doesn't matter if domestic winds up "weak."
I think the time may have come for an inverse addendum to the BOP Ocean's 12 rule of poor quality of an installment eroding goodwill going forth, which is: if you heave enough explosions at an audience and leave them living the film experience from millisecond to millisecond unable to remember what happened in the last shot, they may be grateful for your efforts, or simply so amnesiac, that all bets are off. I didn't find the last one contemptible (I may have liked it a smidge more than the first), but I can't go another round with 'splosions, 'spolsions, 'splosions, which makes me at least a little sad, because McDormand and Malkovich are in it, for pete's sake!
Edwin Davies: As much as part of me wants to emphasize the idea that the badwill generated from the second one is responsible for the lower gross of the third, which I do think is absolutely the case, it's hard to argue that this isn't a success, even if it won't be as big of a success as its predecessors. As with Pirates 4, the things to take away is that sequels are often referendums on the quality of the previous films; that 3D prices and inflation once again prop up a result that would be far worse without it since it hides the fact that far, far fewer people went to see Dark of the Moon than either of the first two Transformers films; and that foreign grosses are becoming increasingly essential for determining the ultimate success of a film.
Reagen Sulewski: I think trying to read too much into the $11 million or so difference between the second film's three-day weekend and this one's is a bit like make financial decisions based on dice rolls. While there's probably some number of people who stayed away from this one based on the second film's epic suck, this is still the largest opening film of the year by a large margin, and will be the third-highest grossing film of the year by next Friday at the latest. For all this series' numerous flaws, explosions sell, plus there seems to be a sense of "well, I saw the last ones, might as well see these", an attitude that I find kind of baffling.
Another thing you have to be careful about when interpreting these extended opening "weekends" is the configuration of the calendar. Transformers 2 opened the week before July 4th, and but a lot more into the midnight screenings portion of its run. Transformers 3 has a Monday that's a July 4th, which is about as ideal as you can get in arranging the calendar. It's not really a "wait and see" situation, because this film is already incredibly successful, but exactly how these next few days play out will go a long ways towards determining whether it makes $350 or $400 million.
Matthew Huntley: What I take from this result is American moviegoers will see anything the industry tells them is an "event movie." Nobody wants to be left out, despite the awfulness of the product, so I think many people pay top dollar to feel like they belong. Either way you look at it - whether Dark of the Moon makes less than the original, more than the second or somewhere in between - it is an unqualified success for Paramount, and it angers me to say so since Michael Bay and friends have made no attempt to make these movies better. They are loud, stupid, uninteresting and sometimes boring. The action goes on for so long they become mind-numbing. Reagan is right that explosions sell, but only good explosions should. Transformers is full of too many bad or dull ones.
Kim Hollis: It's silly to say this isn't an excellent result. Did it lag a little behind Revenge of the Fallen? Sure. Who cares? People love these event-driven films and as long as Michael Bay makes them loud, outrageous and stupid, people will come (The Island had a smidge of intelligence behind it, so they didn't).
David Mumpower: Reagen is absolutely correct about the calendar configuration, which can destroy a July 4th title if the actual holiday falls on a weekend day. In this case, the Monday release artificially inflates the overall box office since people have more free time and Sunday works like a Friday, which is why the third Transformers film earned $30 million on three consecutive days. The $12 million extra it earned on Sunday combined with what is effectively a free $18 million yesterday boosts the revenue by $30 million simply due to the calendar.
Keeping that in mind, what I take from this result is that Michael Bay largely gets a pass in that everybody knows he doesn't make great movies yet they pay to see them anyway. In fact, I must admit that we had tickets for Saturday despite the fact that the previous Transformers film was among my least favorite tentpole titles of the decade. The only reason I haven't seen it yet is that my wife was sick that day, which Reagen hilariously described as her having Transformers flu, whose symptoms last exactly as long as is needed to miss show time for the screening.
Mmmm...popcorn.
Kim Hollis: In terms of disconnect between quality and box office results, do you consider Transformers the worst franchise going that does inexplicably well in theaters? Is it proof that perhaps we need more disposable popcorn films?
Max Braden: I don't think you need to scrape the bottom of the barrel to find popcorn films. To me, The Hangover is a great popcorn film. Get Smart was a great popcorn film, and in the same vein this year's Green Hornet was disposable but still light and watchable. The Transformers series seems to have tunnel vision with the idea that the way out of the tunnel is to head into more explosions. But even though the scale of box office is different, I'd pick the Fockers franchise as the worst one in regard to quality to performance ratio. We definitely do not need more of those.
Edwin Davies: I honestly can't think of a worse franchise currently going. At a push, maybe the Pirates of the Caribbean series since I really, really hate films 2-4, but the lighthearted fun of the first one stops me from completely condemning them. Plus, those films are just boring. The Transformers films are actively insulting, pandering AND boring, and I want someone to invent a term other than "blockbuster" to describe them so that they can no longer be included in the same category as Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Star Wars.
Reagen Sulewski: Relative to box office, I don't think there is a worse franchise out there, though I can at least somewhat understand why people would like the immersion in explosions and action, even if it's totally incoherent. The nomination of the Fockers franchise is a good one, although that seems to have been killed off, and had one of its stars openly mocking it while receiving a lifetime achievement award, which would be a pretty big nail in its coffin.
Supposedly the latest Twilight films have improved from the first one, which they'd have to, but they also have the handicap of terrible, terrible starting material that its own stars again mock, and also has the side effect of setting back feminism about two decades.
Matthew Huntley: Everyone on this thread is a film buff after my own heart. Well said all around. But if I had to add other franchises to the mix, I would say The Hangover and Cars, which, with the level of quality of their sequels, should now be put to bed.
David Mumpower: I believe this thread emphatically exemplifies the disconnect between what we like as a group and what mainstream cinema would be described as being. Most of the people I know who have seen the new Transformers film love it. This is a perfect example of a populist movie, one that may as well skip critics screenings altogether. Sometimes, most movie-goers want to watch stuff blow up and that happens to be the ONLY thing Michael Bay does well as a director. I think that as much as we wish this were not the case, the evidence suggests that the movie calendar could use more popcorn cinema. That's the most logical explanation for the divide between critics and consumers over the past two months.
Kim Hollis: I certainly agree that Transformers is a lousy film franchise. The films are loud, over-long, and frequently a garbled mess (I think that Bay "cleverly" disguises some of the effects so that you can't tell how crappy some of the Transformer fight scenes are). I don't know that I think it's the absolute worst (Twilight surely is a franchise with few redeeming qualities) but it's not anything I ever look forward to.