Monday Morning Quarterback Part II
By BOP Staff
March 25, 2015
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Ryan Kyle: Sean Penn poorly pretended to be Liam Neeson. And audiences are tired of Liam Neeson as shown by last week's sorry debut of Run All Night, so what really could have been expected? Open Road Films has had a pretty poor roster of films so far in terms of box office and this one didn't look to right the course. The $5 million debut is on par with the other major bombs from this year, but in this case, nobody expected much more than this to begin with. It's always exciting to see an actor out of their wheelhouse, but no one was really clamoring to see Sean Penn pick up a gun.
Edwin Davies: Sean Penn has rarely been a huge draw, and this looked like such a generic and blatant Taken rip-off, right down to that complete blank of a title, that no one was that excited even before the reviews started coming in. Once it became clear that the film was bad, any interest that people might have had vanished. If the last two weeks have taught us anything, not to mention the slew of these kind of films that have appeared since 2009, it's that the "aging actor makes an action movie" gimmick isn't strong enough on its own. The film needs a great hook, good reviews, or both to really break out. That's why John Wick became something of a sleeper hit, and The Gunman will be bundled with Chuck Norris movies within a few years.
Max Braden: This was less than half of Neeson's opening for Run All Night. It could be that these two recent old-guy action pics didn't hit because they weren't part of franchises like Taken, but we saw The Expendables 3 suffer similar lack of interest. On the other hand, The Equalizer opened to $34 million less than six months ago. I think a lot of the blame here has to land on the casting of Sean Penn. Firstly, this kind of action isn't his audience's typical genre. They typically want to see his dramatic skills, not his physical prowess. And secondly, is there any actor who looks less interested in being in a movie like this? I liked grumpy Timothy Dalton as James Bond, but grumpy old Sean Penn just isn't going to get me to go to the theater.
Bruce Willis may be able to get a larger audience to go see something like RED 3, but we may just have to wait for Tom Cruise to age another dozen years (if he's even capable of aging) to deliver a worthy old-man action movie. Or we can just go see the next Mission: Impossible movie, which looks great. (The kicker: Sean Penn is only two years older than Tom Cruise.)
Michael Lynderey: Sean Penn has historically never carried this kind of generic thriller (or generic anything, for that matter) - never really tried to. And the rare Sean Penn movie with reviews on this level and no discernible awards attention was never going to do very well (in fact, good critical notices are just about the only thing that could have sponsored a solid box office run for The Gunman). I don't know why people keep referring to Penn's and Neeson's ages, though, which to me seem totally irrelevant, especially because Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Charles Bronson, John Wayne, and most of the rest were starring in action movies well into their 50s (and I don't even mean the recent comebacks of those first two actors; Stallone was 51 when he did Cop Land in 1997, and Schwarzenegger was 55 when T3 came out in 2003). Plus, who are all these young action stars they're competing with? I assume it's not the Hemsworth brothers.
David Mumpower: Sean Penn mastered the art of beating people up many years ago. Most of the victims were paparazzi. As probably the least likable actor in Hollywood today (if not ever), he has never been a box office draw. His reputation as a thespian is overstated in my opinion, as I don’t consider a lot of his work to be acting inasmuch as him finding roles that allow him to demonstrate different douche-y aspects of his loathsome personality. In a way, he’s a true artist since he has built a career upon turning an extreme negative, his terrible attitude, into a high-profile career. I almost admire him for that, but he never was and never will be a box office draw. Attempting to steal Liam Neeson’s bit was a clever gamble, but Keanu Reeves did it oh so much better.
Kim Hollis: Do You Believe?, a religious-themed film from the same people who produced God's Not Dead last year, earned $3.6 million for the weekend. What do you think of this result?
Ryan Kyle: For a movie marketed by only a grassroots campaign and made for pennies, this is a fine debut. This Christian sub-genre seems to have a ceiling for its opening weekends in the single digits. Only a few films like last year's Heaven Is For Real and Son of God broke through to pull blockbuster numbers for Church-approved pix, but those were backed by major studios. Opening to double digits is the exception, not the rule, for this genre.
Edwin Davies: A lot of people have been making the comparison between Do You Believe? and God's Not Dead, but despite sharing a production company and some personnel, I think that's a little bit unfair. God's Not Dead not only was marketed through grassroots campaigning, there was also an activist quality to it. It was pretty shoddy and exploitative in the way it used the sort of stories that get sent around in emails (college professor fails students for believing in GOD!!!!!@!@) but which have never actually happened, but that evangelical quality got people fired up and made them tell their friends to go and see it (or send them idiotic text messages). Do You Believe? was a bit more amorphous, and it didn't feature a villain as mustache-twirlingly cartoonish as Kevin Sorbo to base its story around. Without that culture warrior angle, there wasn't much to distinguish it from the likes of Moms' Night Out.
David Mumpower: A friend of mine who is the target demographic for this, having watched several of the high-profile 2014 religious titles, mentioned to me that he was unaware of the existence of this one. That's in stark contrast to last year's slew of titles, most of which seemed to garner headlines well before their releases. Do You Believe? strikes me as a rather obvious cash grab rather than a movie that needed to be made, which identifies it as an unwelcome de facto sequel. It's the Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous of religious releases.
But it's always nice to see Lee Majors working.