Monday Morning Quarterback Part II
By BOP Staff
August 28, 2012
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Kim Hollis: Hit and Run, allegedly an action-comedy starring Dax Shepard and Bradley Cooper, earned only $5.7 million in five days, including $4.5 million this weekend. What went wrong here?
Bruce Hall: This looked like the sort of forgettable dreck we've come to expect from Gerard Butler and/or Jennifer Aniston, only they replaced Butler with a guy who looks like Adrian Brody's nose married Dave Grohl's face, and swapped Aniston with the only person who interviews less well than she does. Now, there's no reason for anybody to see it. Even scruffy Bradley Cooper in a supporting role couldn't soak up this mess.
Jason Barney: Again, I just don't think there was anything here. I saw the trailer for this one only once, and going to see it didn't even cross my mind. I went to see over 25 films this summer, but there was nothing about this that looked interesting. When you aren't dealing with huge stars, or story concepts that really aren't entertaining, I think it is a tough sell to get people to spend money on movies that are "meh". It is expensive to go nowadays. People aren't just going to pay to see anything. They are hoping to be entertained and want some assurance of that before they put their hard earned money down. They didn't get that feeling with this week's openers.
Felix Quinonez: Again, this just doesn't look good and according to the reviews, it actually isn't. I think this is the kind of movie that actors with box office draw can actually trick people into seeing. But instead it stars Dax Sheppard and Veronica Mars, so yeah, the opening sounds about right.
Matthew Huntley: Kim asks, "What went wrong here?", as though anyone ever expected anything about Hit and Run to go right. Honestly, this performance doesn't surprise me in the least. Bruce, Jay and Felix all summed it up quite well that the trailer for this movie simply made it look bad, and from what friends have told me, it lives up to that impression all too well. This feels like one of those movies that was made a long time ago and released now just to squeeze a few bucks out of moviegoers. But Open Road wasn't fooling anyone. If we ever hear about this movie again, I'm guessing it will only be on Razzie night.
Edwin Davies: If you're looking for an answer, I think it's contained in the phrase "action-comedy starring Dax Shepard". I like him in Parenthood and he's pretty funny in Idiocracy, but he's pretty much the last guy you would expect to be able to headline a movie, and if he hadn't written and directed it I'm sure he wouldn't have been the star in the first place. No one knows who he is, so there was no marquee draw there, and the film itself never looked interesting enough to make up for that central issue. It also doesn't help that action-comedy is a tricky genre that rarely delivers good films, let alone big hits. If even Tom Cruise failed to make Knight and Day a hit a few years back, what luck did Dax Shepard have?
Max Braden: A couple years ago, Dax made a mockumentary about himself as he tried to make the transition from struggling comic actor to martial arts star. It's called Brother's Justice. It's a lousy, lousy movie. High school, fooling around with a camera and your buddies bad. Bradley Cooper is in it. Hit and Run looks like another of their backyard projects. I like both of them, but you can't just throw stuff at the screen and say "let's see if this sticks" and hope to come out looking anything more than amateurish.
Reagen Sulewski: I'm sort of sympathetic to Dax on this one, to be honest. By all accounts the movie is no good, but it was made for $2 million, and more than doubled that on its first weekend. It's no blockbuster and something you'd probably not even bother with when it comes up on cable, but he's living his own dream and just happened to get someone to finance it for him, and made sure he got them their money back.
David Mumpower: Warning to Kristen Bell: your significant other spends far too much time thinking about prison life. First, there was Let's Go to Prison and now there is the prison rape humor of Hit and Run. I would wager Dax Shepherd's favorite scene in The Shawkshank Redemption occurs much earlier in the film than the prison escape/reunion most of us would choose.
Hit and Run's commercials were among the worst I've seen since Freddy Got Fingered. Its failure is not a surprise. The better question is why someone believed that ad buys for this project were a good investment. To a larger point, I would make a passionate plea to the supremely talented Kristen Bell. PLEASE fire your agent and stop agreeing to projects with your boyfriend. You should be a superstar, not a punchline.
Timing is everything.
Kim Hollis: 2016 Obama's America expanded into 1,091 theaters this weekend and earned $6.5 million. How did Rocky Mountain Pictures accomplish such a solid weekend performance for a documentary?
Bruce Hall: If you have influence over people, the easiest way to motivate your followers is to demonize your opponents. There's a segment of the population that wants their opinions handed to them, because thinking is hard. And even if the economy wasn't still in the tank, there are a lot of people who will never accept Barack Obama's presidency just....because. Things are never as bad or as good as they seem but if truth is the first casualty of politics, logic is the second. All of these things make it easy for a conservative themed opinion piece to flourish in an election year. Hooray for fear!
Jason Barney: I hadn't even heard of 2016 Obama's America until this week, so I don't think this one is going to have any staying power. Still, it is a headline, and politically leaning documentaries have made money in the past. One of the reasons this probably won't catch on very much beyond the people that really need to see it is that folks are really fed up with politicians right now. It is almost as though you and I and the average person in the street know that the system is broken, but the people involved in the system don't realize they are part of the problem. So why will this film be a flash in the pan? The market for this is extremely small, and anyone who wants to see this message can just turn on Fox News at any point in the day, anyway.
I hope the people who really need to have their perceptions reinforced by a film like this go and see "The Campaign". I saw that flick a few weeks ago and was disappointed. The humor was kinda childish and very raw.
Felix Quinonez: I don't think they really "did" too much to get this performance. As crazy as some of us might think this movie is, there are a huge number of people willing to buy what the documentary is selling. I don't think anybody went in hoping to learn something. I think they went to reaffirm what they "already know." The audience was already there, the movie just gave them something to flock to.
Edwin Davies: By preaching to the converted and playing to their fears. It's a bit of agitprop designed to appeal to a specific audience who flocked to this weekend because it suddenly became available to them, at which point they went along to have their opinions confirmed. Now that they have had that opportunity, I don't think that 2016 Obama's America will have much staying power, or that it will bring in a particularly wide audience beyond the people who have already seen it.
Reagen Sulewski: I think anytime you can get a documentary into the top 10, it's a notable situation. Subject matter wise, it reminds me a bit of things like Fireproof and Courageous -very specifically targeted films where the producers went full court press on making sure they got as much of their audience as they could. That Friday-to-Saturday drop is telling about what kind of staying power it'll have, and I don't think it tells us much politically, since we already knew there were people amazingly passionate about hating Obama.
David Mumpower: This is a tremendous combination of timing and luck in that the film only reaches the top ten due to weak existing titles, pathetic new films and the impending Republican National Convention. Still, we are talking about a weekend that is better than all but two managed by The March of the Penguins. So the scale of this is impressive. No, it is not anywhere near Fahrenheit 9/11, a title that had four consecutive weekends larger than this, but I don't see the point of that comparison anyway. We are eight years down the road in terms of box office behavior. Few other documentaries have performed at this level. To wit, $25 million in final box office would beat An Inconvenient Truth, Bowling for Columbine and Sicko, three movies that many conservatives despise. There is a real chance that this happens, presuming solid box office weekdays during the RNC. I have to hand it to Rocky Mountain Pictures. Their team selected the perfect time frame for expansion.
Kim Hollis: I actually think that Rocky Mountain Pictures pulled off a pretty impressive feat here. This is a movie that needed very little advertising or marketing outlay to arrive at this weekend total. They effectively got free advertising from Fox News and the like. That they were able to convert that into a top ten finish is best-case scenario. Like David, I think this film should play well throughout the week as the Republican National Convention takes place (unless the convention siphons viewers away from the film), and the buzz/afterglow from the convention should carry over to a decent second weekend as well, I'd imagine. If nothing else, it's a good way to build excitement in a campaign that frankly hasn't offered much to energize anyone other than the base.