Monday Morning Quarterback Part I
By BOP Staff
November 14, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Kim Hollis: Immortals, a Relativity Media film that was billed as 300 3D, opened to $32.2 million this weekend. It had an $80 million budget. What do you take from this better-than-expected result?
Edwin Davies: The main thing I'm taking away from this result is that people have been really starved for balls to the wall action for a while now and even though it's a pretty terrible film, Immortals sold itself very well as exactly the sort of blood-pumping action epic that people were apparently clamoring for. If anything, this is result is a tribute to the marketing team of Relativity Media, who were able to drum up enough interest to make it their biggest opening weekend ever.
Going forward, I don't see the film making enough Stateside to cover its budget - I personally think it'll tap out at around $80 million - but it'll probably do very well internationally, so whilst it won't end up being the second coming of 300, financially or culturally, it'll make a pretty little profit when all is said and done.
Matthew Huntley: I'm not sure whether or not Relativity Media planned it this way, but they opened Immortals on a weekend where they could more or less have the male teenage demographic all to itself (the last movie to exclusively target this audience was Reel Steel, which came out over a month ago), and considering teenage boys make up the majority of the movie-going public, it makes sense the movie opened on top and above expectations. Like Edwin, I don't foresee this having long legs, even if there is no direct competition (the rest of this month is mostly family pictures and the behemoth that will be Twilight: Breaking Dawn), but $75-$80 million is a reasonable goal. Plus, this is the type of movie that shines on DVD and Blu-ray, and given how well it performed in 3D (the format made up 66% of its business), it should perform well enough on the home market to be considered a success.
Bruce Hall: I think that a solid opening weekend for Immortals is the best case scenario coming to fruition. Nobody is going to care about this movie next week when Happy Feet Two opens. And, apparently there's a film about vegetarian vampires who go to high school, sweat glitter and are too pure to have premarital sex. That sounds like it might appeal to young people, but I'm not sure.
In any event, I wonder if Immortals won't be more of a financial factor when it drops on home video? While a $32 million opening is definitely strong, in addition to the budget figure Kim mentioned, I believe that boffo marketing campaign Edwin mentioned cost at least half again as much. It's possible that between the domestic cume, which promises to drop off conspicuously after this week, and the international figures are tallied up, Immortals could still fall short of breaking even overall. But as Matthew mentioned (see how I did that?), this is the kind of film that promises to do brisk business on rentals and DVD. People who didn't see it in theaters will rent it, and people who should just rent it will buy it and watch it once. All of it makes Relativity's bank balance fatter.
Shalimar Sahota: It looks too much like a 300 wannabe to me, and because of that I thought it was going to fail. Opening at over $30 million is way better than I expected. In fact, I'm surprised that audiences have been more kind to this than with the similarly themed Conan the Barbarian. Seeing adverts describe how Immortals is in "epic 3D" probably helps sell the format more than the film, and as Matthew highlighted, a majority of audiences went out of their way to pay extra for it. However, finding out that it was "mostly" converted makes it anything but epic. That it already has a worldwide total of $68 million means that Immortals will become the highest grossing film of Tarsem Singh's career, that is until Mirror Mirror opens.
Reagen Sulewski: I'm definitely surprised at this, since I thought we were over this kind of empty spectacle of style with no story. As others are pointing out, any port in a storm, I suppose, especially with how we've had a notable lack of outright hits lately. Instead, we're settling for these modest $80 to $120 million medium-sized hits (Puss in Boots being the freakish exception). I think the lesson here is that if you want a hit, copy another hit to just the right level.
Brett Beach: The advertisting did the film's work for it. I am astounded at the tally, even with the quite large cratering from Friday to Saturday and on the weekend multiplier in general. To borrow haphazardly from another genre, I felt this would perform more like Skyline than Battle: Los Angeles, even with a true artiste at the helm. I am a little saddened as this is a Tarsem film I have no interest in seeing (and I love both The Cell and The Fall in equal measures for their vastly different tones and sad beauty). A film that came close to making half of what 300 did on its opening weekend, without the novelty or the lineage of that film, filled some kind of audience craving.
David Mumpower: If Mr. Huntley hadn't posted the Real Steel comparison, I would have. What we have seen with both of these titles is that in the absence of quality action films, anything other than Green Lantern is good enough for some consumers. Immortals is as vanilla an action movie as we'll ever see open to $30 million. Everything about it exudes low budget knockoff rather than inspired new idea. Yes, the opening weekend performance has been bought to a certain extent (I feel like I've been seeing commercials for this since March), but a new property has debuted to a good enough number to secure a strong first place finish. That's an impressive feat for Relativity Media.
Will to live...fading...fading
Kim Hollis: Tyler Perry's Jack and Jill opened to $25 million over the weekend, which strikes us as a cry for help from a lot of North Americans. How did Sony pull this off and who can we blame?
Edwin Davies: The simple fact of it is that Adam Sandler has reached the point in his career where his fans will turn out for absolutely anything he does no matter how lazy and terrible the films themselves look. I mean, everyone has been making fun of the Jack and Jill adverts for months now. It says something about how unfunny they are that only cutting them into a long-forgotten George C. Scott film was the only way of making them entertaining. Yet it still pulled in this much because Sandler doesn't have to try anymore and, as the shit sandwich of Grown Ups, Just Go With It and Jack and Jill will attest, he no longer is. The question is whether or not Jack and Jill will be his thirteenth $100 million earner in 13 years, and I have to think that it won't be (if only to stop myself plummeting into a pit of deep, dark despair) since this is one of the lowest openings of his recent career. The film of his this most reminds me of You Don't Mess With The Zohan, which barely scraped $100 million despite opening $12 million higher than Jack and Jill has, so unless Jack and Jill has a robust multiplier of 3.9, I don't see it making that much. Maybe it won't crater and wind up in the $50 million range the way that Funny People did, but this probably (hopefully?) won't prove to be one of the successful Sandler offerings and I doubt it'll cover its $80 million (yeah, I know, it's insane) budget, at least domestically.
Tim Briody: From the moment the first trailer hit, we were all expecting Adam Sandler to finally have another Little Nicky. He's long overdue. While Jack & Jill is his lowest live-action comedy opening since Little Nicky was released this weekend 11 years ago (really?), it's still way better than we figured. His fanbase has been shockingly loyal through the years, and not even the double barrel distraction of Modern Warfare 3 and Skyrim (I'm only level 10!) didn't hurt this opening. It's going to crater hard from here, but it's certainly not the epic flop we were hoping for.
Bruce Hall: This is me sighing. Do I really have to talk about this? I have no idea how this happened. Maybe Tower Heist was too intellectual for everyone. With all these earthquakes, trouble in the Middle East, global social unrest, maybe the Apocalypse is coming.
Stock up on creamed corn and zombie repellant, I guess.
Either way, Sandler's man-child routine never did it for me. I don't begrudge him his success; if someone was willing to pay me that kind of money to make movies for head injury patients, my moral compass would stop working, too. But I have to give it up for him, because while this is not one Sandler's more impressive openings, unless you're one of his mutant fans, this probably beat your expectations. Jack and Jill might make do with sloppy fourths, sevenths or ninths over the next few weeks until it mercifully returns to Hell, where it belongs. Then it will clean up on home video and somehow be profitable. And then the earth will probably explode. It seems you've won again, Mister Sandler.
Matthew Huntley: It was only this week that I realized Jack & Jill was rated PG, instead of Sandler's usual PG-13, so this may have something to do with the larger-than-expected opening. Perhaps parents who already took their kids to see Puss In Boots needed another family-friendly movie to turn their brain off at, but if that's the case, is this what what they really went and saw?! Granted, I, like most people on this thread, am judging the movie before I see it, but it doesn't take a rocket scientist (or even a half-witted high school dropout) to realize this is probably garbage. How did Sony do it? By front-loading the marketing with two pictures of Adam Sandler (their number one star) and focusing on the holiday theme. We all know how hard it is to sell a movie, but in this case, it seemed fairly easy. Too easy.
Reagen Sulewski: While it's easy (and proper!) to make "fall of the culture" jokes, it pays to remember here that for most people, Adam Sandler has never failed them, Two and a Half Men's ascendency to the top of the TV ratings is justified, and Spam is a mighty fine meal. The broad, desperate strokes of this film were a selling point, not a deterrence. Now, maybe after this he's going to take a hit, but Sandler gets the benefit of the doubt from the public because of how many hits he's given them.
Brett Beach: To follow up on Reagan's explanation, in "defense" of Sandler, it is true that when he is giving the audience a Sandler comedy, everyone who is already a fan knows what to expect and with the exception of Little Nicky, they all perform wonderfully to superwonderfully (is it any surprise that I like Little Nicky more than just about any of his earliest films?). What he has done is w/o "growing up", managed to mature ever so slightly the Sandler brand to encompass at first being a kind of sort of role model to a kid (Big Daddy) to eventually having a family and kids (Grown Ups and Jack and Jill). He has also allowed himself to become the butt of the jokes whether getting kicked in the balls many times (in Just Go With It) or having a Sandler proxy take the beating (Jill). I have no desire to see this film, but I have to credit Sandler with being shrewd (if slightly cynical) at eternally tweaking his formula to grow with the 20-something frat boys who loved Billy Madison and are now nearing 40.
David Mumpower: Even as a self-professed Adam Sandler fan, I was taken aback by the sheer horror of the Jack & Jill commercials. This is an abomination and yet its opening weekend box office exceeds that of Funny People, a movie that, you know, tried. We live in an era where dumb comedy is not only safer but also more lucrative. As a character stated in Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, in the battle between art and commerce, art is getting its ass kicked. Jack & Jill is the latest proof of this. The fact that this happened only a short time after I had finally gotten over Dave Matthews' coconut handling in Just Go With It only makes the situation worse.