Monday Morning Quarterback Part I
By BOP Staff
May 14, 2012
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Kim Hollis: Dark Shadows, the latest collaboration between Tim Burton and Johnny Depp, opened to $29.7 million. What do you think of this result?
Edwin Davies: Even though no one was expecting Dark Shadows to manage Alice In Wonderland or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory numbers, since to describe its source material as a cult property would be putting it mildly, this is still a pretty disappointing start. It's possible to spin this result and say, "Hey, who else but Tim Burton and Johnny Depp could get a Dark Shadows film made and open to almost $30 million?" but the reality is that this cost a lot of money to make, and despite the A-list talent involved it hasn't done very well. I think it's easy to blame this on the obscurity of the original show, but to be honest, I think the problems lie in the trailers, which had a few amusing gags but did little to dissuade people from thinking that the film was damn weird. Also, despite its success, Alice In Wonderland was pretty indifferently received by a lot of people, so there may have been fewer people willing to give Depp and Burton the benefit of the doubt this time around.
Bruce Hall: Who else but Tim Burton and Johnny Depp would even have MADE this movie? I admire the two men for thinking they had the cachet to make a blockbuster film out of something that exactly the same number of people who can fit into my back yard even remembers being on television. Tim Burton is a little bit Walt Disney, and a little bit Wes Craven. I can't ding him for lack of ambition.
Alice in Wonderland did some solid, if not earth shattering business. Part of the reason was Tim Burton, and part of the reason was Johnny Depp. But part of the reason was also Alice in Wonderland, one of the most ubiquitous stories in the English language. It's not that I don't see the logic here. The man made a version of Lewis Carrol's classic fever dream that almost nobody liked, yet it brought in $300 million. Why not let him have Dark Shadows? But I doubt even the combined success of Alice and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory implies that the Gothic version of Falcon Crest required a $150 million budget. And since so few people are familiar with the source material, it didn't help that trailers made Dark Shadows look like a cross between The Addams Family and Celebrity Home Makeover.
If they make this movie for $75 million - and believe me, they could have - this is a different story. I'm not sure enough help is coming from overseas to make this anything other than a disappointment. Either way, I feel certain that the majority of people who were interested in Dark Shadows have now seen it. If it wasn't irrelevant when I began writing, it definitely will be by next week.
Max Braden: I was expecting a lot more for its opening weekend. Burton/Depp isn't always my favorite style, but there were enough laughs in the trailer that I was planning to go see it. Any interest I had in seeing it came to a screeching halt when I heard the most favorable reviews calling it uninteresting. I usually find it hard to believe that a significant wave of people will catch reviews in time to change their minds on opening night, but in this case, if audiences were like me, the reviews killed the box office.
Shalimar Sahota: So it's like The Adams Family, except it's based on a TV show you've never really herd of called Dark Shadows and it concerns a witch and a vampire. I thought people would still flock to this given the involvement of Tim Burton and Johnny Depp, and so expected a $40 million opening. Given its huge production budget and an opening below $30 million, I would consider this a disappointment. Similar to Edwin, there was something about those ads and trailers. While I'm often drawn to the weird, they just didn't put across any actual story. Man cursed to become a vampire wakes up in 1972. Cue "fish-out-of-water" style gags. And that's it. Maybe there's more to it than that, but from the reviews I've read so far, probably not.
David Mumpower: Given that the analogy to The Addams Family has been mentioned, here is something to consider. The Addams Family opened to $24.2 million in 1991. Adjusting for 2012 ticket price inflation, that is a $45.5 million debut. Factoring in that the biggest star of that film was Christopher Lloyd (I guess), what we can draw from this data point is that there is an audience for a macabre family comedy. The problem Dark Shadows faced is that this struck people as the really out there Mars Attacks Tim Burton rather than the ultra-commercial one. I mentioned in a recent edition of Trailer Hitch that I believed one of Frankenweenie or Dark Shadows would be a hit while the other would be a head scratcher. North America has clearly voted that Dark Shadows is far too strange. If Frankenweenie suffers the same fate (and it might), Burton will not have his pick of projects in the short term. $29 million is nowhere near a good enough result for a $150 million production, overseas revenue be damned.
Kim Hollis: I would echo Max's comments. I thought the trailer looked fun, and I am one of the few people who actually watched the source material, if not when it originally aired (I'm not that old), on the Sci-Fi Network (hey, that's what it was called at the time). When I saw that the reviews were middling at best, my enthusiasm waned significantly. I like Tim Burton as a director and am a fan of a number of his movies, but at the same time, he has directed some movies that are really bad (Planet of the Apes, Alice in Wonderland) and some that are really difficult to watch (Sweeney Todd). I have to think that a lot of people have the same feelings about the duo of Depp and Burton, and that reviews did have an impact in this case. I don't always believe that to be true, but I think for certain projects, they make a difference.
Reagen Sulewski: This looks like we've found the functional limit for both nostalgia and star power. While both Burton and Depp have very effectively gone to bat for one of their childhood favorites, the rest of us have been left to just smile and nod like we know what they're talking about. I suspect there was some banking on the idea that the Twi-hards would follow along because of the vampire related content, but they forgot that that group is by and large humorless.