Monday Morning Quarterback Part II
By BOP Staff
January 28, 2015
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Jason Barney: Perhaps the 11% rating at Rotten Tomatoes had something to do with it. The budget numbers for this one are difficult to find, but you have to think that with the pocket book of Disney, this had some resources put into it. This reception is pretty bad considering the only real kids' competition is Paddington and while well received, that one isn’t bringing in every kid under seven years old to the movies. This film and this sort of opening will be totally forgettable. While we usually talk about new openers lasting in the top ten for a few weeks, this one may be out of the top ten in a couple of days. Putrid opening.
Edwin Davies: The reviews didn't help, especially since the positive word-of-mouth for Paddington probably made it more of a draw for family audiences, but I think the bigger problems lie with the film itself. The ads for Strange Magic made it look bizarre and confusing, with no clear sense who the characters were and what the story was about (and even if they had done that well, I'm not sure that there's a huge demand for a reimagining of A Midsummer Night's Dream). Probably the biggest hurdle the film had to overcome was the way it was sold as being "from the mind of George Lucas", a sentence which is meaningless to kids and an active disincentive for adults who have been burned by Lucas quite a lot over the last 16 years or so.
Matthew Huntley: A putrid opening indeed. In fact, it reminds me of another animated bomb from 2014, Legend of Oz: Dorothy's Return, albeit from a much higher-profile studio. I think Edwin and Jason summed up the issues with Strange Magic perfectly, but one other thing to take in mind is Disney "inherited" this film when it acquired LucasFilm, so to their credit, the story didn't spring from the Disney folks' minds. Even so, if the studio seemingly had so little faith in it, why did they choose to release in theaters vs. going directly to DVD/Blu-ray? By foregoing the former, at least they could have saved on the P&A costs. I think this movie reiterates that families really do respond to positive reviews and a clearly defined story.
Bruce Hall: Let me put on my parent hat for a moment.
I want to take my kids to see a movie this weekend. What's out there? Well, there's a Clint Eastwood movie about snipers - that's out. Here's Jennifer Lopez...hubba hubba...but...if I want to see her I don't need the kids. A simple Google image search will suffice. Taken 3 is right out...oh look!
Here's a movie about Paddington bear, the most inoffensive creature imaginable! It's well reviewed and has earned well over $100 million worldwide! Let's put a pin in that. What else do we have here...
Benedict Cumberbatch, you are not Khan...The Hobbit...too intense...ah....Strange Magic. Disney movie, check...written and produced by...wait, what? Lucas? Lucas!!! You! The man who singlehandedly defined and then destroyed my childhood! You got to me, but you won't get my kids, you bastard! Plus, I see this movie has gotten only slightly more love than Bill Cosby over the past week. Forget it. Paddington it is.
That's my theory and I'm sticking to it. The target audience for this movie has parents who still bristle at the thought of Lucas and his maladaptive storytelling skills. And since the film has no other pedigree attached, reviews matter - and in this case they weren't enough to entice any sane, self respecting adult to spend $90 dragging the whole family to the theater.
On the upside, this will be on Netflix before you know it, and if my kids want to see it they can, without dragging me down with them. Yay, internet!
Michael Lynderey: It's one of those movies where even I wasn't sure two weeks ago if it was going to get a wide release or not. And it had really, really, negative reviews. Critics have shown no mercy. But hey! They beat Mortdecai and were just short of overtaking American Sniper, too, give or take a few million...
David Mumpower: Never has so much been made over so little as the world has done with the storytelling talent of George Lucas. I literally laughed out loud when I saw him complaining about Star Wars 7 not including his ideas. Disney should put that quote on the poster to enhance box office by 50%. With regards to Strange Magic, I'd sooner watch Practical Magic. (Google it, kids.) This movie's existence is akin to having to hire that creepy kid as an intern because his uncle is your boss' boss. To get the Star Wars toy revenue, Strange Magic had to be made. Nobody likes it yet here it is in all of its flailing glory.
Kim Hollis: Mortdecai, a comedy featuring Johnny Depp and Gwyneth Paltrow, earned just $4.2 million this weekend. What went wrong here?
Jason Barney: For Lionsgate, this is going to be a pretty serious misfire. Usually I am not one to pile on and take shots at an actor going through a bit of a dry spell, but it is hard to ignore that audiences are no longer embracing Depp’s projects. Mortdecai was made for around $60 million, so this opening is almost as bad as last week’s Blackhat. It isn’t as awful, but the reception is just as horrible. A film made for so much opening in the range of less than $5 million? Ouch. No scenario exists where any positive news can be found in the ashes of this failure. It opens in ninth? Going up against films that have been in theaters for weeks? Mortdecai will be a non box office factor by the time people read these words.
Edwin Davies: Depp's involvement was probably a big problem since his brand has been damaged pretty terribly by a string of bad choices, but for me the marketing was a real problem. There's a great article on Vulture taking apart how obnoxious the Mortdecai campaign was, particularly the way that the ads seemed to assume that everyone knew who the character was, and therefore they should be excited to see Johnny Depp playing him. That level of presumption, of assuming that people are on board when no one has heard of the character or the books the film is based on, meant that the ads did a terrible job of selling what the story was or even the general tone of the movie. There was probably a ceiling on how well the film could do on account of Depp's involvement and the bad reviews, but a campaign that actually tried to introduce the character to the audience might have helped.
Matthew Huntley: Thank you, Edwin Davies, for summarizing the Vulture article and the idea that Lionsgate's marketing campaign "assumed" audiences knew who this character was, even though we didn't. Seriously, watching the trailers for Mortdecai made me feel like I was the only one who didn't know about this guy, as if I was ignorant or not up-to-speed on popular culture. The advertisements kind of made me angry as a result, and if I wasn't the only one who felt this way, no wonder the movie bombed. On top of that, I think the R-rating had something to do with the puny numbers since this cuts the potential audience down significantly. Not that making the film accessible to viewers 16 and younger would have necessarily generated a solid opening, but it may have allowed the studio to save more face.
Bruce Hall: I'll go one step further and say that not only did the marketing seem to assume we knew who this character was, it assumed that since Johnny Depp was playing him, it didn't matter.
Well, anyone who wanted to see how well that strategy works had to look no further than Dark Shadows.
I'm not going to get too in depth in my thoughts on Depp, because it looks like we're going to have that discussion later. But I can say that the shine is off him, and even casual moviegoers seem to have had enough, for the time being. Mortdecai will do nothing to remove the stench of death from his current career trajectory. And while I'm sure he's in no danger of losing his house(s), if he wants to remain relevant as an actor, it's time to make some changes - and I'm not talking Pirates 5.
Michael Lynderey: I think I'm reasonably certain in saying Mortdecai is Johnny Depp's worst film as a lead actor (and I liked The Lone Ranger - quite a bit, actually!). The odd thing is that the trailer for Mortdecai looked kind of fun. It seems many did not share my sentiments on that, although more agreed with my view on the film itself. Once the reviews started crawling in on Wednesday, the fix was in and they killed any chance the movie had of hitting even double-digits (ever).
David Mumpower: I knew the movie was in trouble when I saw the trailer and was thoroughly amused. I've become some sort of anti-bellwether with regards to comedies lately. I thought Horrible Bosses 2 looked great, too. Anytime a commercial makes me laugh, that movie's accountants should brace for the worst.
Kim Hollis: What has happened to Johnny Depp over the last five years?
Jason Barney: For Depp, this is concerning. The only project he has been involved with in the last four years that gets any sort of praise is Into the Woods. He was nicely cast in that, but was a background character. Transcendence was totally rejected by American audiences, but somehow made $80 million overseas. Everyone points to the Lone Ranger as the center of the earthquake that has become Depp’s career. Dark Shadows wasn’t the huge failure many make it out to be, but it didn’t light the world on fire. You have to go all the way back to Pirates 4 for any sort of relevance. Even that one was the weakest entry in the series, although it did make over $1 billion worldwide.
Will Depp get back to form? Will he return to the lofty levels of his earlier career? Probably not. There have been 19 films worldwide to earn a billion dollars and he was the star of three of them. He’s got a nice track record behind him, but he probably peaked years ago. That is not to say he still can’t be in good projects that make tons of money, but we certainly aren’t seeing that now.
Edwin Davies: You know you're in a bad way when you look back on the opening weekends of The Lone Ranger and Dark Shadows with nostalgia. For me, the rot set in around the time of his last undisputed hit, Alice in Wonderland. While that film made a staggering amount of money, it was not well-liked by critics (in fact it was the first of his collaborations with Tim Burton not to be certified fresh by Rotten Tomatoes) or audiences, and it seemed to be the tipping point after which Depp's affectations became empty shtick. In the years since, the qualities that people used to praise Depp for - his outlandishness, his willingness to take on weird roles that others might balk at - are now derided, to the extent that Mortdecai's ads made it look like he had fallen completely into self-parody.
The problem now is that people no longer associate the name Johnny Depp with quality. Looking over his filmography over the last few years, the thing that leaps out at me is not that so many of his films lost money, but how bad they are. He starred in plenty of films that made no money in the 1990s, but they were, barring a few exceptions, critically acclaimed, which is why he was such a cultishly adored figure, and why his success with the first Pirates film seemed deserved. Now, he's seen as someone who makes bad films and he's bad in them. At this point, I think he needs to do what Matthew McConaughey did a few years ago and start taking on smaller films that might help rebuild his reputation with critics, since I think it'd take a lot for him to win back the affection of audiences at this point.
Bruce Hall: Well, it looks to me like over the last five years Johnny Depp has been involved in a lot of profitable films - at least on the surface.
Granted, what constitutes "profitability" in Hollywood is a pretty big, gray area. But going back to 2009 - if we're strictly talking box office - the only "high profile" projects Depp has been involved in that didn't make money are The Rum Diary, The Lone Ranger (and that was close), and Transcendence (even closer).
I think part of the problem is that some of these films - like Public Enemies and Dark Shadows - earn so little domestically in comparison to their budget, people automatically call them out as disasters. I could see that, if it was still the 1990s and nobody cared about international dollars.
That's not to say that when The Tourist earns $67 million domestically against a $100 million budget that it's not cause for concern. But the fact remains that worldwide, that film earned $278 million. And Dark Shadows, widely considered a 20-megaton nuclear bomb, earned $236 million worldwide against a $150 million budget. The last time I checked, a dollar spends the same no matter where it's earned. But the fact remains that despite the final numbers, and no matter how you spin it, so many of these films under-performed so badly on this side of the pond that there's no denying it...
Johnny Depp has a problem. But let's forget about the money and focus on something Edwin said, which is that "people no longer associate Depp with quality." I couldn't agree more.
Depp HAS been playing weirdos his whole career - but Edward Scissorhands is a really good movie. Ed Wood is freaking fantastic. On the flip side, I don't care how much money Public Enemies made or where it happened - that was a solidly mediocre film. So was Alice in Wonderland. I think most of us would agree that Dark Shadows was a steaming pile of dog vomit. And while I know people who argue that The Lone Ranger gets more hate than it deserves, it also didn't come anywhere close to living up to that massive budget.
And while I am apparently one of three people on earth who hates the Pirates of the Caribbean films more than Brussels sprouts and cancer combined, even the people who DO like it seem to like it less each time they see one. Lately, even his most successful films seem to divide his biggest fans on a critical level. There truly is a common perception that Depp has taken to exclusively playing androgynous weirdos in funny hats - which is neither entirely accurate or fair. But the term "perception is 99 percent of reality" applies nowhere better than it does in the entertainment world.
Literally moments ago I asked the Missus - who doesn't watch a lot of movies and had no idea Johnny Depp was in a new film this week - whether she knew Johnny Depp had a new movie out. She said she did not. But when I asked her to guess what his character was like, she said - and I quote:
"That same guy he always plays?"
Ladies and gentlemen, I rest my case. Johnny Depp has a problem. Too often, when people think of him they seem to think about vaguely effeminate oddballs prancing around in candy colored clothes, simpering and mugging - but not ACTING. What happened to Donnie Brasco Depp? Ed Wood Depp? I want to see Johnny Depp the actor, not the inveterate nutcase who seems to phone in his performances and reminds me more and more of Nicholas Cage with every passing year.
And, I'd venture to say, there are an increasing number of people who agree with me.
Michael Lynderey: Well, Bruce, Depp has Black Mass coming out later this year, which has an A-list cast, a rising director, and it's about gangsters, who are inexplicably popular. Joel Edgerton is in it, too (I believe he's playing the Egyptian ambassador), and so is Benedict Cumberbatch (his pitch-perfect Boston accent has already been praised by anonymous reviewers who haven't seen the film). In short, Black Mass is at least somewhat likely to be well reviewed, gross north of $65 million, and be a noted awards contender, with Depp possibly up for Best Actor.
And if all that doesn't happen, well, at least they tried. After several years of bad career choices, it's a step in the right direction for Depp. Now, if he could only do about three of those for every half-hour of the upcoming Pirates sequel...
David Mumpower: I think that the issue works in reverse of how we are all answering it. Everyone has provided salient explanations for his recent struggles. For me, the explanation is something different. The Jack Sparrow era when Depp could do no wrong is the exception. What happened before and since is the rule. For that one period starting with Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl and ending with Alice in Wonderland, Depp suddenly became a box office draw and, in fact, demonstrably the number one draw in the world. What we've witnessed since then is a second batch of Blow/The Astronaut's Wife/From Hell releases where audiences seem to be going, "Ohhhhh. Johnny *Depp*!" The oddity is why what he had done throughout his career suddenly became so captivating when he did it as a pirate, even in Chocolat.