Shop Talk: Summer So Far
By BOP Staff
July 23, 2013
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Jay Barney: I haven't seen all of the movies that I wanted to, but it has pretty much developed as expected. I'm surprised by how much the international box office is playing in the success or failure of films. Some media outlets don't embrace the reality of the overseas markets, but this summer's numbers show how much they mean.
Iron Man 3: $1.2 billion
Star Trek Into Darkness : $445 million
Fast and Furious 6: $700 million
The Great Gatsby: $326 million
The Hangover Part III: $346 million
Man of Steel: $619 million
World War Z: $420 million
Monsters University: $474 million
Despicable Me 2: $470 million
After Earth:$200 million
With these numbers, even if a flick under-performs in the United States, studios can have some confidence that the global box will work out for them... This is especially true of films like After Earth and The Hangover Part III. Both didn't do so will here in America but had respectable showings from viewers in other markets. This is not to say that domestic box office doesn't matter, because it most certainly does, but I have been a little more attentive to how films do outside the U.S.
Bruce Hall: It's been a big year. More so than a lot of people probably realize. June domestic box office stands at $1.25 billion, a new record. That's enough to bring 2013 back within sniffing distance of this time last year. I think the technical term for this is "a shot in the arm."
Other tidbits - laugh at Disney if you want, but they're sitting atop the heap at one billion domestically so far this year, which is the primary reason Robert Downey Jr. can now afford his own planet. Say what you want about the Man of Steel, but he's the reason Warner Bros is sitting just a hair behind at number two. Second hair back is Universal, thanks to the one two punch of Vin Diesel and a bunch of little yellow penises.
Just goes to show you, for every Lone Ranger, Jack the Giant Slayer or (sorry, I can find no bad news for Universal this year), there is also an upside.
So much for the death of cinema.
Edwin Davies: I keep being surprised at how strong this year's crop of summer films are performing. Maybe it's just that I still haven't recovered from the incredibly drab first four months of the year, or maybe it's because I still have memories from last summer playing in my head, but it seems a little subdued. Yet the numbers don't really bear that feeling out. Perhaps it's just that very few films seem to have sparked the same passion and discussion that we saw last year when everyone was jazzed about The Avengers, bitterly split on Prometheus and shocked by the success of Ted. With some exceptions, a lot of this year's blockbusters seem a tad forgettable, and do about as well as everyone expects them to. It's great from a commercial standpoint, but it hasn't been terribly surprising.
Max Braden: I think going into the summer, Iron Man 3, Fast and Furious 6, and the animated movies looked like winners and turned out that way. I think on paper, After Earth seemed like it would have been a winner because of how well Will Smith performed with the post-apocalyptic world of I Am Legend. I'd call it the bigger flop than The Lone Ranger, which despite getting slammed by negative reviews, has still made plenty of money at the box office. The Great Gatsby is still the big surprise of the summer, earning a lot more than a movie of its genre would be expected to make.
David Mumpower: I too am fascinated by the shocking differential between the awful, terrible, heinous movies released from January-to-April and the solid batch of titles saved for the summer. The depth of the top ten is so powerful that $5 million does not guarantee a title placement therein. Compare that to last July when $5 million was regularly good enough for sixth to eighth place. Not only did the May and June releases uniformly perform well but they have had staying power to boot.
As always, I believe that trumpeting the global revenue is a bit misleading since those box office receipts are so much less profitable overall (an extreme example being that Disney receives only 25% of the gross of Iron Man 3 in China, making their actual profit less than 10%). If we focus on domestic revenue, the list of winners is dramatic. Starting with Iron Man 3's spectacular May debut, we could include the following titles as surefire box office winners: The Great Gatsby, Star Trek Into Darkness (albeit less so than expected), Fast and Furious 6, Now You See Me, The Purge, This Is the End, Monsters University, The Heat, Despicable Me 2, Kevin Hart: Let Me Explain, and Grown Ups 2. Arguably, two other titles could be included in this group. They are World War Z, which I think belongs but it's close, and Man of Steel, whose ultimate fate is probably a draw since the negative cost on it borders on unprecedented and they have already ceded some of the Blu-Ray revenue in advance.
Now compare the list above with the group of middling performers. Since the start of May, I would consider the entire list to be comprised of The Hangover III and Epic. Pacific Rim will probably slot into this group or the list of bombs, depending on what happens with it overseas. Since it was designed with foreign revenue as a focus, I have to give it more benefit of the doubt in this regard than the rest of the list. The bombs over the past 10 weeks are obvious. That group is After Earth, The Lone Ranger, White House Down, The Internship and Peeples. And the latter two movies are so slight as to border on irrelevant. In other words, I believe only eight mainstream releases during the summer box office campaign are anything other than winners, and half of those are either draws or statistically unimportant. Hollywood feeds off of its revenue during late December and the summer. Based upon those metrics, this is quite possibly the greatest holiday/summer combination ever. I am not discussing total dollars when I say that but instead overwhelming volume of successes. The outlier, the part that is difficult to explain, is why the January-to-April portion betwixt the two was so atrocious.