Monday Morning Quarterback Part II
By BOP Staff
May 14, 2014
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Edwin Davies: First off, I think I need to commend the makers of the film on their correct use of an apostrophe in their title, even though it seems like the only thing they got right about the film.
Compared to the run of faith-based successes we've seen so far this year, this might seem a little mediocre, even though it's actually pretty solid when you compare it to the majority of films targeted at a Christian audience. Why did Moms' Night Out not catch on to quite the extent that similar films have? I think the main problem was that the ads weren't shameless enough in pushing the fact that it's a faith-based film. If you compare its ads to those for God's Not Dead and Heaven is for Real, those films put their religiosity up-front and center, so it's hard to mistake them as anything other than preaching to the choir. Moms' Night Out, by comparison, just seems like an intensely mild comedy starring people you sort of recognize. It didn't have any star power, a particularly strong premise or trailers that were funny/preachy enough to really break out, but it only cost $5 million so Tri-Star will probably walk away from this with relatively little damage.
Matthew Huntley: Wow, prior to reading this post, I didn't even realize Moms' Night Out was faith-based, and I'm guessing that most other people didn't, either. I honestly thought it was a raunchy comedy targeted toward middle-aged females. Clearly there were some advertising holes (or maybe it was just me), but in the end, I think this movie just had too low a profile to be a major player this weekend--Mother's Day or not. Still, as Edwin mentioned, it cost very little to make, so it will likely end up in the black.
Bruce Hall: No Matthew, it wasn't just you. I saw the title of this movie and assumed Cameron Diaz was double dipping.
Films like this one are, ironically, not unlike slasher pictures. If you can keep the budget below ten million, your target demo alone is often enough to make the project profitable. Everyone's emphasizing what a financial beating this film took compared to the top finishers, but Moms' Night Out cost $5 million to make. It has already earned back 80% of its production budget and the Faithful will ensure that figure at least doubles before all is said and done. If you took the time to see a film like this in theaters, odds are you're picking it up on video as well. I don't see this result as anything but a success.
Max Braden: An important element of that number is that it opened at only a thousand theaters, which gives it an okay average. (Heaven is For Real opened with a much stronger $9k per theater.) Reviews of the movie are pretty poor, though. I think if faith-based movies have a box office challenge, it's that if you just preach to the choir, they may be the only ones to sit through the sermon. I think the argument could be made that The Best Man Holiday was a faith-based movie despite its R-rated nature. Faith-based movies don't have to be stuck with a niche audience if they start with the same type of character and plot approaches that sell mainstream movies to mainstream audiences.
Kim Hollis: There is not a thing wrong with the box office performance of Moms’ Night Out. It was barely marketed and I assume that audience was driven by the same sort of grass roots/social media efforts of the other films that we’ve seen this year. But whereas those films appealed to a wide demographic (families, men, women… really, anyone of faith), Moms’ Night Out is targeted to a demographic *within* a demographic. If you look at it that way, earning more than $4 million is pretty stellar.
David Mumpower: Moms' Night Out is more along the lines of what has been the historic expectation for the opening weekend of a faith-based film. I do think it's telling that several people here did not realize that was the subject matter, which speaks to how difficult it has become to differentiate the various niche films thus far in 2014. As is the regularly case when a slew of blockbusters are released in a short period of time, something gets lost in the shuffle in a saturated marketplace. This movie has done quite well relative to its budget. It's just that people have gotten a bit jaded about our expectations for faith-based cinema due to its unprecedented hot streak.
Kim Hollis: Legends of Oz: Dorothy's Return, a $70 million budgeted animated film, earned a dismal $3.7 million this weekend. Say something funny about Legends of Oz: Dorothy's return.
Jay Barney: A black and white film would have done better.
I guess I am surprised that this didn’t catch ANY traction. The biggest problem here is the massive $70 million budget. I tried to do some research on the studio involved, and while there are a couple of different threads, I believe this was an ambitious effort to put animation on the summer schedule and it failed miserably. Part of the creative team behind this had some success with last year’s Planes, and they will open Planes, Fire and Rescue later this summer along with Disney.
But this is an awful opening. This joins the biggest bombs of 2014. Transcendence, I, Frankenstein, Pompeii, and the Legend of Hercules have a little more company. A $3.7 million opening against a $70 million budget. Ouch.
Edwin Davies: Whoever greenlit this is probably clicking their heels together, desperately hoping to wake up and discover this is all a horrible dream.
I also have to assume that the majority of that $70 million went to the catering budget, because I saw the ads for Dorothy's Return and it looked like cut scenes from a game released in 1998. Legitimately one of the ugliest animated films I've ever seen, and I saw Doogal in the theatre.
Matthew Huntley: Perhaps the studio should try and re-sell it by inserting clips from the HBO series Oz and making it look like Dorothy returns to the prison to try and restore order. It could ride the success of Orange is the New Black.
Bruce Hall said, esoterically:
I assume the Scarecrow greenlit this one, right? Right?!
Anyone? Really?
And come on Edwin, let's not be too hard on the animation. I'm literally looking at the first trailer for the original Toy Story (1995) as I write this, and Legends of Oz doesn't look any worse than that.
I guess I just don't understand the level of ambition here. Did this movie really need to cost $70 million? I feel like Disney could have made the same movie for a pittance, released it straight-to-video and made several million dollars without breaking a sweat. And it would have looked much, much better.
This is an embarrassment of major proportion and there's no way to spin it and nowhere to hide. Heads will roll over this.
Max Braden: Like most legends, evidence of the existence of this one will be lost to the sands of time... I was going to dispute the comparison to Toy Story's trailer, but a quick look leads me to back off my knee-jerk indignation. Still, with trailers for movies like this, I wonder why they make any effort to release them in theaters. I have trouble imagining adults would want to go see it (unlike the Toy Story series), and it's just expensive to take the kids. Why not go direct to video?
Kim Hollis: Were people terrified of zombie Judy Garland when they saw “Dorothy’s Return” in the title? I honestly have no idea why anyone thought it was a good idea to make this film, or how any person in the development process imagined it would make money. A random person off the street could make better decisions than the people who chose to make Legends of Oz: Dorothy’s Return a reality.
David Mumpower: I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that I did a double take when I saw the production cost for this film a few months ago. John Hamann received a few libelous insults a couple of months ago when he suggested that this film would bomb. If anything, he was too generous with his commentary. This Oz movie will be in the conversation for biggest bomb of the year when it's all said and done, right there with Transcendence.