Monday Morning Quarterback Part I
By BOP Staff
May 21, 2013
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Bruce Hall: Domestically a tad down, internationally a tad up. On the one hand, it feels like a slight disappointment, what with Paramount having tried to trash talk the film to $100 million over the past week. But they made it clear early on that one of the reasons Abrams had been tasked with the franchise is to increase its appeal overseas. He's done that, and while the results are not quite what everyone had hoped they're solid, and there's no reason for anyone to be ashamed.
Unless they work at Paramount, and have recently uttered the words "One Hundred Million Dollars." Then, maybe a little.
Brett Ballard-Beach: I do find this ironic, considering that JJ Abrams announced "this sequel is for the mass audiences." John and Tim captured the general aura of puzzlement well in their respective columns. This is not a terrible opening, but I was (not alone in) thinking $100 million over the four days was highly doable. It is jaw-dropping when considering the well-received success that the last one was and the goodwill it created, as well as the 3D being added. My thought is that maybe a lot of the first time audience who turned out for Star Trek in the weeks following its opening enjoyed it but not enough to become among those who would rush out on opening weekend. It could show a hold next weekend, or it could get lost in the Furious Epic Hangover mess of things. One other thing to add is: does the fact that Paramount moved it to Thursday at the "last minute" suggest they were nervous about three-day to three-day comparisons and if so, why? Anticipation was there, buzz was there, and there has been no backlash that I have noted. It makes me think THe Hangover III is going to under perform next weekend.
Matthew Huntley: Back in 2009, I was in the minority when I thought the first movie wasn't all that special and its story was more reiterative than fresh. I recently re-watched it and my thoughts haven't changed, but I'm wondering, now that four years have passed, whether lovers of the original, who've since gotten a chance to see it many times over, were also starting to realize Star Trek wasn't all that it was cracked up to be. If so, perhaps they didn't feel the need to rush out and see the sequel. In my opinion, Into Darkness suffers from the same problems as its predecessor because it mostly retreads familiar territory instead of giving us something risky and original. Not that the majority of reviews are any indication of this, but maybe a lot of the audience members had a hunch.
Nevertheless, $84 million over four days is, in fact, nothing to be ashamed of, and I think the positive buzz/word-of-mouth will cruise this past $200 million for sure and guarantee another sequel. Is that as high as expectations indicated? No, but with any hope, the "lackluster" number will inspire Abrams and his team to deliver something that will really blow our minds, and if that can be conveyed in the third installment's trailer, a $100 million+ opening weekend will be in the cards.
Max Braden: I swear I'd heard some negative reviews but overall that doesn't seem to be the case, so it's not as if there was something specific keeping audiences away. Except for one: I'm watching the predecessor Star Trek on TV right now, and the lens flare is worse than I remembered. I wouldn't fault a portion of the audience thinking they don't want to go through that again. $84 million is a nice big number, but I can imagine some people were left wondering "If Iron Man can do it, why can't we?"
Jim Van Nest: Is it possible that Star Trek is simply a niche market (granted...a very large niche market...but niche nonethelss)? And that it pulled in as much as it could? I, for example, do not care for any version of Star Trek. I haven't seen the 2009 film and don't plan to see this one. This isn't an indictment of the films...I just don't care. I'm wondering if Into Darkness's total isn't as simple as the series maxing out on its audience.
Jay Barney: I think the soft start to into the Darkness can best be explained by the deflated box office numbers for the year. First, let’s keep the weekend number in perspective here, and it is not the disaster that some people are saying. The amount of money that Star Trek made on Thursday and Friday was not good, especially against the ramped up expectations. It seemed everything was going for it. The overseas markets have been embracing the film about in line with Paramount’s expectations, and the press going into this weekend was stellar. You couldn’t log onto the Internet without seeing some Star Trek related ad. I think part of the problem became the last minute push to raise expectations into the $100 million range. A lot of us expected a huge weekend, in some cases wanted one, but the numbers just aren’t there.
The weekend number is raises a lot of questions, but disasters fall more in the line of Jack the Giant Slayer ($195 million budget, $65 million domestic take) Battleship ($209 million dollar budge, $65 million dollar take) or John Carter ($250 million, $73 million domestic) than what we are seeing here. Star Trek is miles beyond these types of performances. We should keep things in perspective.
Unfortunately, this opening means that Star Trek must rely on overseas revenue more than expected to make money. It should do okay overseas, which was part of the original marketing plan, but that still does not explain the soft opening here.
It comes down to this…we are seeing some deflation at the box office. Films have become frontloaded in a way that seeing them early is an event. Titles like Iron Man 3 and Gatsby had great openings, but if you look at the entire year, Star Trek fell to what has been happening to a lot of other movies. It is tragic, too, because when such a beloved franchise puts out a superior product, you would think it would be embraced.
Edwin Davies: The two main thoughts that I keep coming to when thinking about this result are that Paramount made a blunder by changing the release date to Thursday so late in the game, and that perhaps the first Star Trek reached as broad of an audience as the series is likely to without some huge wow factor to compel people to see it. On the Thursday front, I don't think that Thursday openings are an across the board terrible idea, but moving the release date of a film from a Friday to a Thursday with only weeks to go is because there's no guarantee that the word will get out to everyone. That seems to be the case here, and I firmly believe that the overwhelming majority of people who saw the film on Thursday would have seen it on Friday or Saturday if the original date had been kept, which would have given the film a $80 million plus three-day total, which is not a great improvement on the first film but does make for a neater, more positive like-for-like comparison.
On the second point, this strikes me as being a bizarro version of what happened with Iron Man 2 in relation to its predecessor. In that situation, the sequel opened significantly higher than the first one, but the lukewarm response resulted in it finishing within several million despite that strong start. At the time, I thought that this meant that the audience for Iron Man was about as big as it was going to get without something to really get people excited in the same way that the appearance of The Joker had for The Dark Knight. That "something" obviously came in the form of The Avengers, which has now given us the stellar performance of Iron Man 3. What I think we're seeing here is the same thing but with the opening weekend, rather than the final total.
Star Trek is an iconic franchise, but it's always been a fairly niche interest, which is what made the success of Abrams' first film such a pleasant surprise, but it also means that the series has to do something to draw people other than the hardcore fans. Whatever else it has in its favor, I don't think that Star Trek Into Darkness has that because it doesn't have such a readily identifiable villain like The Joker or the promise of being a genuine event like The Avengers was. Without those, the film managed to draw a pretty similar number of people on opening weekend as the first one, and at this point its best bet to match the final total of that film lies in hoping that Fast and Furious 6 flames out after next weekend.
Kim Hollis: It's weird to say that a movie with more than $80 million in revenue after four days is a disappointment, but it definitely feels like one. The first film is well-loved and there was absolutely nothing about the second film that should have sent up any warning signs. The reviews are terrific and the Cinemascores are top-notch. Word-of-mouth should be a positive. And yet, the audience didn't expand much, and perhaps that's the real problem. The audience is somewhat niche, and in the time since the release of the first film, it held steady. I think we even have some evidence that points to this when we look at demographic breakdowns and see that 73% of the audience was over 25.
David Mumpower: Ever since Friday numbers included a dramatic turn from the projected $28 million to $22 million, I have been debating logical explanations for the underachievement. And make no mistake. This is a disappointing total. I've seen some nonsense trying to paint this as a slight improvement over Star Trek. Those calculations isolate the four-day tally of Star Trek Into Darkness against the three-day weekend of Star Trek. If we add in Star Trek's fourth day (as we should), it earned $3 million more, which is 3.6%. That is without box office inflation included.
I do not agree with Matthew about the perception of Star Trek. As I chronicled with the weekend forecast (which I overestimated by $21 million), Star Trek is the best reviewed movie in the franchise. It also has the highest grade on IMDb, a whopping 8.0. Personally, I watch the movie whenever it's on because I think it's one of the smartest scripts in recent memory. Of course, in disagreeing with Mr. Huntley about the perception of Star Trek, I run into another issue. BOP always maintains that the quality of the first film directly impacts the opening weekend performance of the sequel. We know from recent history that the premise is sound. So if all of the measurables for Star Trek are great and the sequel is not savaged by heinous buzz, what happened here?
The answer I would like to give will have to wait a period of time since it is spoiler-ish in nature. What I can say without addressing those specifics is that Star Trek Into Darkness was not given the ubiquitous advertising penetration that is ordinarily the case for a tentpole title. There was almost an arrogance to the fact that fans of the first one were presumed to return for the sequel. They believed that selling a mystery was better business than plainly identifying anything about any character in the film. I say this with complete hindsight right now so I felt a twinge of guilt as I say it. I generally dislike hindsight criticism but since the sequel's performance is so enigmatic, I am paying more attention to the minutiae than usual.
Keeping this in mind, I would ask everyone who has seen the advertising of Star Trek Into Darkness to answer me this question. What is about? The trailers show Kirk and Spock jumping into the water, Benedict Cumberbatch looking like an albino (his natural look, apparently) and Alice Eve in her underwear. Does any of this identify an aspect of the movie that is engaging beyond the fact that it is a sequel to Star Trek? Upon (a LOT of) reflection, I believe Paramount got too cutesy here. In tomorrow's discussion, I will explain exactly what I believe the ads needed that wasn't delivered.
Reagen Sulewski: Perhaps this is coming from someone who was pre-sold, but I thought the ads - the trailer at least - did a good job of showing the exciting aspects of the film (although the Alice Eve moment could have been given a 40's-style splash of "BOOBS!" across the image for how obvious it was as an attempt to sell to nerds). That said, I did have some concerns about how generic the dialog portrayed in the commercials were - "I believe in you, Jim" is not a tagline.
On some level I do wonder if what Jim brought up isn't a factor - there's only so deep that the Star Trek audience goes and it's a Nerd Bridge Too Far for some. The relative lack of under 25 audiences also points to the damage from there not being a new television series for it in over a decade. That's a crucial market segment that just doesn't have a connection to Trek, particularly old-school Trek.