Monday Morning Quarterback Part II
By BOP Staff
June 3, 2015
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Edwin Davies: This is an impressive start, and strikes me as a "two great tastes that taste great together" situation. People love The Rock and they love disaster movies, and combining the two seems to have reaped dividends this weekend. The spectacle promised by the trailer probably would have roped a decent number of people in regardless of who the star was, but I think that Johnson's charisma, coupled with the fact that he is a genius when it comes to using social media to promote his projects, and the afterglow of Furious 7's dominance, meant that he was the perfect choice to entice people into a movie that could have been blandly generic.
It also helped that, unlike Tomorrowland, the ads for San Andreas laid out the story in incredibly simple terms. They showed that a whole lot of destruction was going to happen, but also sold it as a story about a family trying to survive in extraordinary circumstances. The same tactic worked for The Day After Tomorrow and 2012, and it worked again this weekend.
Felix Quinonez: I think this is a great result and because audiences seem to like it, San Andreas has an actual shot at decent legs. But more importantly it is a big win for The Rock.
Michael Lynderey: It's Dwayne Johnson's biggest opening outside of all the pre-established franchises he's helped maintain (The Mummy, Fast and the Furious, Journey, and G.I. Joe). I think a lot of people underestimated the film, which had one major factor going for it even outside of Mr. Johnson: it's a disaster movie, a genre that is almost totally failure-proof at the box office (as long as you don't set your expectations too high). I remember some were surprised at how big Deep Impact opened in early May 1998, and I personally was shocked by how well The Day After Tomorrow and 2012 did. A disaster movie basically guarantees a large scale and a lot of special effects, and that's what San Andreas and the rest blatantly deliver (Into the Storm's shaky-cam style, while interesting, defeated that basic point of the genre - its grandiosity). As I said about Pitch Perfect, I think San Andreas would have been better served opening over Memorial Day, where its scale would have been better appreciated.
Ryan Kyle: Edwin hit the nail on the head with his analysis. People love the Rock. People love disaster porn. Why would people not love disaster porn starring the Rock? Competently shot and animated, although the same can't be said for the script, San Andreas is another serviceable entry into the sub-genre of mega disaster flicks. In fact, the only surprising thing about the standard fare is that the genre's modern-day godfather Roland Emmerich didn't helm it. Without much competition on the horizon until Jurassic World, San Andreas shouldn't struggle to clear $150 million and reap a bounty overseas.
Jason Barney: Put simply, The Rock and San Andreas are the definition of a summer popcorn film, and I was thrilled to see this did better than expectations. Going into the weekend there were several predictions it would not break $30-35 million, so scoring above $50 million is a huge win.
The budget numbers are starting to look really nice at this point. An opening this large ensures it is going to do just fine domestically, and The Rock's overseas appeal is growing. Even if the film sees a decline in the 55% range next weekend, it will be approaching the cost of production. It will have some work to do, but in the end this will be a good investment.
David Mumpower: What I find most interesting about the debut is that The Rock was already the biggest box office performer in the world according to Forbes. Since then, he's starred in Furious 7 and now this. With the recent announcement that he'll portray Jack Burton in a Big Trouble in Little China update, it's clear that he's phenomenal at choosing projects that fit The Rock brand. Macho films that aren't supposed to be taken seriously are his wheelhouse, and he keeps finding new ones. He shouldn't get a lot of the credit for Furious 7, but San Andreas is basically ALL him. There was another disaster porn flick released just last year, Into the Storm, and the entire universe not only ignored it but has already forgotten it. They'll watch a movie that looks no better if Dwayne Johnson stars in it. That's kindest statement someone can make about an A-list actor.
Kim Hollis: Aloha, Cameron Crowe's latest film, debuted with $9.7 million this weekend. What do you think of this result?
Edwin Davies: This is in line with the openings for Crowe's last two narrative features, Elizabethtown and We Bought a Zoo, which suggests on first glance that he's maintaining a certain level of consistency. However, Elizabethtown came out 10 years ago, and We Bought a Zoo came out at Christmas time, so it had a somewhat deflated opening (reflected in the fact that it wound up grossing $75.6 million, a number that Aloha is unlikely to make half of). As such, it seems likely that Aloha is going to struggle to make its presence felt over the next few weeks, and will probably not even make it to $30 million.
As to why it is probably DOA, that's a combination of a bad marketing and (by most accounts) a bad film. The trailers for Aloha were woeful, failing to get across what the film was about other than a lot of famous people hanging out in Hawaii. While that has a certain appeal, they also didn't contain any particularly good jokes or compelling story beats, which suggests that most of its opening came from people who were just looking for something that didn't have explosions. That might benefit it over the next few weeks if it manages to stake a claim as counter programming, but the extremely negative critical response will probably keep people away since this is exactly the sort of film that needs decent reviews to get people to pay attention to it.
Felix Quinonez: I think this is a really bad opening for Aloha. With the star power alone, it should have gotten close to $20 million and I believe it could have if they had put out an even halfway interesting trailer. I consider myself a big Cameron Crowe fan and I give him the benefit of doubt, but even I thought the trailers were terrible. I wanted to see the movie simply because Crowe directed it but the trailers put me on the fence and the abysmal reviews were the last nail on that coffin for me.
Michael Lynderey: As some critics have noted, Aloha is an iteration of Elizabethtown, and it's basically going down the same road at the box office. Movies such as this - big-star drama/comedies with exotic and inviting locations - can do gangbuster business over the summer, and Aloha could have, too, especially with Bradley Cooper, who certainly ought to be on anyone's list of the top five male movie stars of the decade. But as Edwin said, if the reviews aren't there, a movie like Aloha usually ends up as a non-starter. This is also true one way or the other of Tomorrowland, Mad Max, and at this point of just about anything else without a brand name or a brand genre like a disaster movie.
Ryan Kyle: This is a bad start; however an almost $10 million opening on a $37 million budget isn't that big of a disaster, especially for this genre, which tends to be a bit more leggy. However, with the names involved with this project, it really should have debuted to double the size. Age of Adaline even came out a few million ahead than this flick. And while Aloha is packed with stars, it is quite possibly the most social media-adverse lack of A-list actors there are. While the Rock's gigantic following helped boost San Andreas, Aloha didn't receive any support from its non-posting cast, which is what it needed given the negative stink it had surrounding the release since the Sony email hack. Debuting the first eight minutes of the film on YouTube was an interesting marketing strategy, but it was too little, too late for Aloha. Next week's drop will indicate if Aloha will sink to a low-$20 million finish or a more relieving final cume in the $30 million range.
Max Braden: Given the pounding Aloha took from reviews on Friday, I think Sony should count its lucky stars that this movie managed to pull in double digits over the weekend. Maybe the crowd was aroused by the pile on and wanted to go see the trainwreck for themselves? What never ceases to amaze me is that you can take two huge stars (Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence) put them in a poorly reviewed limited release drama (Serena, still in theaters) and it struggles to gain any attention even from the film festival circuit crowd (less than $,2000 per screen on its opening weekend). But take a handful of fan favorites - Cooper/Stone/McAdams/Murray/Crowe - and add them to a nice but nondescript dramedy, with equally lousy reviews, and it can draw 100 times as much box office as the small film. Should a movie like this with great reviews earn $20 million opening weekend? I'm not so sure; it's not a straight up comedy. But then The Descendants (which I may be comparing simply because of Hawaii) can earn $41,000 per screen its opening weekend and go on to wide release and gross $82 million. Is the movie quality really that vastly different? The numbers make me think the audience is as messed up as Aloha's script. I really wouldn't be surprised if this movie could have earned even more starting in limited release or maybe with a holiday release instead of summer. Still, although I want to point the finger at the audience a bit, Crowe is certainly going to take the fall for this. And that's a long way down from the heights he reached in the public's and critic's eyes during the 1990s.