Monday Morning Quarterback Part II
By BOP Staff
August 17, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Kim Hollis: Final Destination 5, the Final Destination film after The Final Destination, opened to $18 million. What do you take from this result?
Brett Beach: Quite obviously, it suggests that interest and grosses have peaked after the last installment, and that this may end up throwing under FD2 as the lowest grossing of the series (it wound up with the worst opening since the second as well.) The budget was only around $40 million, which it should make back domestically. Even with a dropoff here, any uptick on the foreign front should push this one over $200 million globally, which would be a first for the series. Another upside is that over three-fourths of the grosses came from 3D locations, suggesting that the fans were willing to pay for some 3D horror (although this in itself may not be as meaningful, since it went mostly out as 3D. There were only three out of 20 odd screens in Portland playing it in 2D so I had to actively seek out a playtime in which to see it as such.)
It is ironic as this is the best-reviewed of the bunch, and, in my opinion the second best of the series after FD2. Eric Heisserer (A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Thing) is apparently the go-to guy for reboots and he pays appropriate homage throughout, leading up to an especially audacious finale that delivers a massive WTF even as it opens up a whole slew of questions. The bargain-basement last one may have hurt the momentum but this restores some goodwill and keeps me, for one, on the hook (pun intended).
Edwin Davies: Interest in the series seems to be waning, since even the genuinely interesting catch of saying that characters can trade off their fates by killing other people didn't seem to be enough to get casual fans of the series out in the same way that The Final Destination did. With that film, the obvious draw was the chance to see the Rube Goldberg death scenes in 3D, and even though it has been a mere two years, people have generally become jaded towards 3D. A large proportion of the audience may have seen it in 3D, but then again that audience was far smaller than the one that saw the last one in 3D.
Jason Lee: I gotta say, I expected this film to AT LEAST break $20 mil this weekend, if for no other reason than the fact that the commercials and trailers featured the most icky, eww-y, visceral scenes (lasik surgery, acupuncture, etc.) that I can remember from the franchise. I wonder if Warner Bros will have the guts to bring back a sixth installment, or if they'll send the next one straight to video.
David Mumpower: I am diametrically opposed to everyone else regarding the performance of Final Destination 5. I had considered this to be a nearly impossible marketing assignment. As Kim mentions, it's the movie after a title explicitly advertised as the last of its kind. We have seen this twice recently and the Saw franchise is a great example of how the scenario should play out. It died. Final Destination 5's $18 million is in fact the median performance for the franchise and is only about $1.2 million away from being the second. The data point that is out of the ordinary is the debut of The Final Destination with its $27.4 million opening reflective of the marketing cheat of finishing the saga. Yes, I just called this a saga. Deal with it. With the fifth entry, what Warner Bros. has proven is that demonstrating the right tone with the ads (Kenny Rogers' Through the Years being impeccably implemented) brings out consumers, even if they were grotesquely misled by the prior advertising campaign. I feel this debut is not only a win but an exemplary marketing achievement, all things considered.
Gallows humor only goes so far
Kim Hollis: 30 Minutes or Less, the comedic take on a real-life tragedy, opened to $13.3 million. What do you think of this result? Do you believe making light of the tragedy might have limited its appeal?
Tim Briody: The real-life tragedy is far enough removed that I wonder how much of the target audience was even aware of it. I think it certainly looks amusing, but by my count this is the 317th R-rated comedy released in 2011. The total is fine, it's not a complete disaster, but I'm pretty sure audiences could use a break.
Edwin Davies: I was completely unaware that this was based on a real-life story, let alone a tragic one, until three or four days before it opened. Considering the amount of time I spend reading and writing about movies on a daily basis, I can't help but think that normal people who just like to watch movies probably weren't all that aware of it either, so I think that any impact it had was probably negligible.
I think the main problem the film had was similar to that faced by The Change-Up; the marketing never really made it seem like there was all that much to the film other than the central premise, which looked fairly thin in the first place. Considering the glut of comedies this year, the idea of sitting through one that, based on its trailers, seemed unfocused and a bit short of ideas didn't seem like a good idea.
Part of me also wonders if the presense of Danny McBride in the trailers might have put people off. I personally love him in Eastbound and Down, but when it comes to films he seems to do best when his presence is limited. Plus he's still carrying around the vile stench of Your Highness, which can't have endeared him to, well, anyone.
Jason Lee: I agree with Edwin. This movie looked like a mere screwball comedy featuring "that guy from Parks and Recreation" than some comic interpretation of real life events. To me, marketing for the movie just made it come off as frenetic. I was not surprised at all by its tepid box office take.
David Mumpower: I guess my answer is personal here in that I watched the live events and I consider the Wired article on the subject to be the finest piece they've ever published. When I heard that this premise was being turned into a comedy, I cringed at the very thought of it and my discomfort never went away. Despite this, I thought the ads were freakin' hysterical and had expected 30 Minutes or Less to perform solidly. This debut is beneath my expectations and indicative of the fact that either people didn't like the ads as much as I did, the real life situation was a detriment, there wasn't enough star power or some combination of all three. Alternately, my box office radar was just way off. If you had told me this wouldn't match The Change-Up, I would have said you are nuts. Moreso than you probably are.
Well, Sue Sylvester did tell people not to see it...
Kim Hollis: Glee: The 3-D Concert Movie opened to $6 million. What do you think of this result?
Brett Beach: I guess this is what happens when you send a film out to 2,000+ venues as a 3D only film, and people just don't want to show up. But by the same token, I wouldn't have been surprised if it had done in the teens. Somebody keeps launching the soundtrack albums into the top 10, and though this may not impress anyone else here, in only 18 short months, the "Cast of Glee" surpassed both Elvis and the Beatles as the act with the most Billboard Hot 100 hits, charting over 200! I find this horrendous, but it's the age of digital singles, so what can ya do? I am sure there was very little invested in this movie, and no one's pride has been wounded, but if it's not an epic fail, it's a fail nonetheless.
Edwin Davies: As Reagan mentioned in his forecast, it's tough to get people to pay to see something they can watch on TV for free, and this stank of such rank opportunism that I can hardly imagine fans of the TV show running out, paying premium prices to watch the show when they could just watch an episode on Hulu. If the show had been off the air for a while, a la Sex and The City, then I could see people wanting to go and see it because there would be a real novelty to the experience. I doubt this will hurt the brand of the show much, but it's probably sobering for the creators to realise that it isn't the cultural juggernaut that they must have hubristically believed it to be when they decided to release a film version.
Jason Lee: I would assume that the gross majority of the songs sang on the Glee tour were from the show and were already released via iTunes or physical CD. If so, then the film's audience was the portion of the TV show's fans who A) were fans of the music B) probably already own the CDs and C) would have been interested in attending the tour, or actually did attend the tour. As such, I would imagine that most of the film's intended audience has probably been milked enough as it is.
David Mumpower: I also believe that there was clearly a large amount of chaos with this release, and that didn't help any along with the fact that a major player in the Glee universe was bitching about her part being edited out. That doesn't happen if there is cohesion in the process; like everything else involving Glee, this is a glorious mess that speaks to the passion of a few zealots. Meanwhile, the rest of us look on confusion and go, "All this over Glee?" From a box office perspective, this is somehow A) a disaster and B) rather impressive given the buzz. We don't see many box office paradoxes such as this.