Monday Morning Quarterback Part I
By BOP Staff
August 29, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Kim Hollis: So, how's the weather where you are?
Matthew Huntley: Calm and warm, which is why I'm sending some to my friends and family back East. Hope everyone is safe and secure. My thoughts are with you.
Samuel Hoelker: Boston's been fine. We prepared for the worst (as in shutting down my theater), and all we've really had is typically bad rain and wind. I hope everyone else more in the line of fire is fine.
Brett Beach: Portland, OR stays the course. We had an atypically cooler summer up until a week ago when we hit 90 degrees for the first time this year. We had a few more of those days and some high 80s but we have begun cooling down for the week ahead. Reading about all the precautions and evacuations in advance in the eastern states it seems like those were instrumental in keeping the loss of life down to the low (but still heartrending) levels I have heard to be the case.
Max Braden: When the heavy rains and wind gusts from Hurricane Irene hit my area, I actually thought, "maybe like pre-Memorial Day May movies signalling the unofficial start of summer, hurricanes signal the unofficial beginning of fall." And now at 75 degrees, it feels chilly! This makes me want to claw my way back into the warm embrace of summer and its brain-melted movies.
Jason Lee: My 1:30 pm flight from DC to Boston was cancelled, so I was stranded in our nation's capital for two days. Needless to say, my cat was not happy.
David Mumpower: I know that our Washington D.C./Boston/New York contributors have had an exciting weekend, but it was sunny and in the 90s for us. Summer in the south is relentless in terms of heat and humidity. I think I speak for all of us when I say that I'm glad the Eastern seaboard largely dodged the worst of the hurricane.
Zoe Saldana may want to consider a restraining order against some BOP staff
Kim Hollis: Colombiana opened to $10.4 million. Do you consider this a modest debut or are you impressed that this many people stopped fleeing in terror to see this flick?
Matthew Huntley: "Modest" may be too kind of a word to describe this opening. I think "sub-par" is more appropriate ($15 million or more would have bumped it up to the modest level, which is what I was expecting). Aside from the weather factor, the reason I think Colombiana opened so poorly was because the advertising didn't make it look unique enough. You might recall that Salt, last year's action thriller, also about a female assassin, had the hook of making us guess whether or not the title character was a good guy or bad guy. The ads for Colombiana didn't pose such a question or contain that level of intrigue. I haven't seen it yet, so I can't officially say whether it's intriguing or not, but the marketing doesn't give off that impression.
Brett Beach: I won't begin to attempt an estimate of what was left on the table from all the empty Eastern seaboard theaters this weekend, but will note that this is a million or so more than the ensemble cast (including Saldana) of The Losers pulled off a year and a half ago, so I would take this to be a slight victory, with a definite wait and see for next weekend when some people who may have planned to see it sooner had to hold off. I would also compare it to another Luc Besson scripted action flick that attempted to more or less launch an action star (2002's The Transporter, with Jason Statham, which opened with $9 million and finished with $25 million, again about what The Losers did). If this holds for even one weekend and winds up domestically with $30-35 million, I would peg it a win and - presuming international grosess are decent - a new franchise could be born. If not, well having Besson in your corner is not a bad thing.
Max Braden: That's less than I expected (and hoped) Colombiana would open to, and it's a third the opening of Salt. Plus the fact that it opened under The Help, which has very few explosions and ass-kickings, I think you'd have to accept that it's a slight disappointment from the potential it had. On the other hand it gets to claim number one new movie status. This vehicle rested almost entirely on Zoe Saldana's shoulders. I think for her this is at worst a wash with plenty of upside for her career going forward.
Reagen Sulewski: I think it's just a reflection of the fact that, Star Trek and Avatar aside, people just don't know who Zoe Saldana is, and while a capable physical presence she may be, but on first glance, people find the idea of her as a deadly assassin a little ridiculous. It's rare for an potential action star to hit a home run at that first at bat solo, and there really wasn't a lot in ads for this to make it stick out.
A quick comment regarding weather - even with this large even affecting a huge portion of the eastern seaboard, I'm not particularly buying it as an excuse. Why? Look at the returning films. The Help, Rise of the Planet of the Apes and The Smurfs all had weekends that were in line with what you'd expect for them, so if we're to accept that Irene scared a ton of people away from the theatre, is it that it only scared them away from new films? If we're blaming weather on the soft opening of these films, we're still accepting studio hype. These films failed on their own terms.
Edwin Davies: I agree with Reagan completely that this result indicates that, despite starring in the biggest film of all time and being a major part of Star Trek, one of the best blockbusters of the last few years, the general public have very little awareness of who Zoe Saldana is. That's not the be all and end all of box office, because we've seen a move away from star power as a selling point in recent years, but the lack of name recognition, coupled with a revenge premise that did nothing to differentiate it from any other revenge film ever made, meant that this was always going to struggle to be her breakout hit, even without a considerable force of nature to contend with. On a positive note, this is a better result than the similarly themed Faster, which opened to $8.5 million last November, despite starring The Rock, who is a far more recognisable face to action fans.
I'd disagree that the weather didn't have an impact. Don't get me wrong, I think that all of the new releases would have failed to one degree or another if the skies were perfectly clear, but they could have, to paraphrase Samuel Beckett, failed better had millions of people not been more concerned with battening down the hatches.
Jason Lee: The movie's opening weekend seems to me to be a collective "eh." As someone who never saw this movie's trailer in a movie theater, all I could glean from the tv commercials and clips was that the film featured a woman who was extremely skilled at kicking butt and who had a semi-cool sounding name. In August, with CNN anchorpeople whipping up as much Irene-terror that their fancy-shmancy touchscreens could muster, it's not surprising to me that the audience responded with apathy.
David Mumpower: I have a different point of view on this. I see Colombiana's performance as a net win, all things considered. It had seemed like the usual end-of-summer garbage release on paper, but the ads managed to make it look a bit better than that. I understand Reagen's point of view that the weather may be overstated as a factor here, an opinion I readily espouse in these situations as a rule. This is an instance where I have to think that the shutting down of New York City, which contains about 2.5% of the North American population, and several other heavily populated eastern regions had to have a significant impact. How much will be something we debate and Reagen is absolutely correct to point out that The Help's drop is modest just as I wonder if it would have been a zero drop film a la Taken with better weather. Either way, I think what we've seen here is that Zoe Saldana was the draw in The Losers, because she dropped all of the other established names from that cast while opening to slightly better numbers. People can say she's not famous enough if they like, but that strikes me as a solid endorsement of her career ascendance.