Monday Morning Quarterback
By BOP Staff
March 10, 2015
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Jason Barney: This is an unfortunate opening for Chappie, as I thought the trailer had nice appeal. It seems like quieter science fiction films are becoming more rare, and the content was thought provoking. However, I appear to be in the minority, as things did not go well at all for Chappie this weekend on a number of fronts. None of these things indicate Chappie will achieve the type of success needed for Neill Blomkamp's resume to garner serious attention.
First, the early reactions appear to be in the “blah” range to outright disliking it, which does not bode well for the film’s prospects in the coming weeks. The Rotten Tomatoes score is really concerning at only 30% Fresh. This sort of reaction prevented any sort of buzz, and I would expect the drops to be pretty significant from here on out.
Also, with a budget in the $49 million range, an opening below $15 million just hurts the project’s chances of making any money in the long term. It will lose 50% or more of its audience next weekend, and with five wide releases in the next two weeks, it is going to get lost in the shuffle pretty quickly. Competing with Kingsman: Secret Service, Fifty Shades of Gray, and American Sniper for ninth or 10th on the top ten list two weekends after opening is the likely result here. Chappie is going to be gone pretty quickly.
Reagen Sulewski: I made the comparison to both the Wachowskis and M. Night Shyamalan in my forecast, in that it's very easy for a genre director to fall out of favor if they happen to catch the zeitgeist with their first (major) film. With no track record to fall back on, it's very easy for audiences to dismiss you as a fluke and turn their back on you. You can see it happening in the revisionist take on District 9, as if it didn't have some of the more exciting action sequences in some time. Now, I personally happened to like Elysium, but I can recognize its flaws. Chappie, on the other hand, seemed like a big mistake from the get-go. You hope that it boils down to him being from South Africa and not realizing what a cultural joke Short Circuit has become - because if he knew that and made the decision to make this film with that knowledge beforehand... oh boy.
Michael Lynderey: Blomkamp's films have always arrived with a certain aura of mystery, which was perhaps their appeal, initially. They live or die based on what's inside the package. District 9 got fantastic reviews and great buzz, and Elysium had a big movie star and at least pretty good critical notices. Chappie is a mystery package without any critical support or a well-known leading man, so the numbers shouldn't be that surprising (especially since Elysium wasn't particularly well received by fans). I suspect if the reviews had come in at 75% Fresh rather than the current 29% Rotten, Chappie would have opened north of $25 million. As such, it's going to be a blimp on this season's radar, like a lot of other failed genre films we've seen (pretty much all of which were also not very well reviewed). By the way, I can't help but notice how the season's calendar has shifted: the first weekend of March used to be a sort of mini-first weekend of November, and we would have a big comedy, action film, or something CGI (the 300 sequel, The Lorax, Rango, Alice in Wonderland, Watchmen, and I go back to the wonder days of Bringing Down the House and The Pacifier). Now, as other spots on the calendar get attention, the March opening seems to have been deflated in terms of importance. The first weekend of April (Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Fast 7) looks bigger these days.
Ryan Kyle: I chalk this opening up to a weak film hurt by an even weaker marketing effort. The poster ads for this film made it look like a kids movie with the block letters while the trailers focused on R-rated action. The strange decision to hide Hugh Jackman being in the film also didn't do any favors. Nothing about the campaign made Chappie seem urgent enough to see in theaters, let alone pay extra to see it in IMAX. For costing only $49 millin, this opening isn't disastrous as it fell on the low end of estimates, but it should make Fox slightly nervous in handing the Alien franchise keys to Neill Blomkamp's diminishing brand that burned bright just a few short years ago.
Edwin Davies: The confused marketing was a key problem. As Ryan said, there was a degree of dissonance between the poster and the trailers, but there was also a murky quality within the trailers themselves. At times it looked like a goofy comedy, but at other times, and especially as we got closer to the release date, the focus shifted to making it look like a very serious action movie. Audiences didn't really know what the film was about apart from it featuring a robot named Chappie.
On top of that, Blomkamp seems to have directed himself into a corner after just three films. All three of his features have a similar look and feel to them, but only District 9 seemed to really connect with audiences and critics, while Elysium seemed to use up most of the goodwill left over from that one. Maybe there is a general feeling of "fool me once, shame on you..." surrounding his work, especially when it's visually indistinguishable from his previous films.
Kim Hollis: Before the weekend, my sister texted me to ask about the movie. She has a 11-year-old son, and I'm sure she thought it was a movie that she could take him to see. When I told her that the reviews are bad and that it's actually rated R, she was taken aback. I just don't understand the marketing of this movie at all. Honestly, I don't understand the point of this movie at all. Why make a film about a robot if you're not targeting it to kids? Yes, I'm being narrow-minded, but I blame the studio here. If Blomkamp wants to make this movie, it's a limited release as he pitches it. The audience was always going to be limited, and it doesn't help much that Elysium turned people off of him after the quality of District 9. If I'm the producers of his Alien project, I am very, very concerned right now.
David Mumpower: On the one hand, it's nice to see Johnny Five updated for modern audiences. On the other hand, it's really damned strange to make a hard R-rated film about a cutesy robot. It's like Short Circuit 3: Time of the Killbots. I was actually all-in on this film after watching the first trailer. Then, every single ad since then has moved me (far, far) away from that viewpoint. This has been one of the worst marketing campaigns in recent memory, and I don't even blame anybody for it. There is such a thing as too weird. This is what a release like Birdman looks like most of the time, which is makes its Best Picture win is all the more impressive. As I told John Hamann last weekend, Blomkamp needs the Alien franchise so much more than the Alien franchise needs him. This is the first time since District 9 that I'm glad he didn't get the Halo movie.