Monday Morning Quarterback Part I
By BOP Staff
July 28, 2015
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Ben Gruchow: This has got to be disappointing for anyone in Sony's accounting department, and for good reason. From the accounting perspective: I might've seen the trailer once, a while ago; I haven't read reviews and don't really know anything about the movie's plot other than the fact that it has a giant Pac-Man, a giant Donkey Kong, and they're sent by aliens to do something bad, and that it hovers between 19% and 20% on Rotten Tomatoes depending on what time of day it is. Despite this, even I know that it stars Adam Sandler, Kevin James, Josh Gad, and Peter Dinklage. Your mileage may vary on how much you like each individual actor, but they're all well-known and they all have audiences or recent projects that overlap to a degree with this kind of release.
An ensemble with the kind of conceptual hook that this one had should've easily overcome a 20% review score; the fact that it really didn't points to the idea that someone involved in planning and marketing screwed up badly along the way. The multiplier has me thinking that this is going to hit $60 million or so, but not too much more.
Edwin Davies: This is at least a step up from Blended, last year's Sandler-led disappointment, but that's not saying much. Despite an interesting premise, one which seemed custom-built to draw out nostalgic parents who would be happy to bring their kids along for the ride, a decent cast and a solid marketing campaign (the trailers weren't great, but they sold the idea and there were plenty of tie-ins related to the movie), Pixels couldn't overcome audience fatigue with Sandler and the bad reviews. Clearly the trick of matching Sandler up with more popular, or at least less disliked, actors that kept Grown Ups 2 profitable didn't work so well this time around.
Matthew Huntley: This honestly doesn't surprise me in the least because the trailer for this movie made it look loud, obnoxious, unfunny and juvenile, despite the promising premise. I would still see just to confirm whether this is the case, but it's very likely that it is. We've officially outlived the "Adam Sandler as Box-office Titan" era, I think, and hopefully now he'll take a hint and choose better, more substantive projects, because he, like the other actors in this movie, IS talented in his own way.
Jason Barney: Even I have to admit that the shine has come off Sandler. Usually I'm against putting too much stock into a trend, primarily because many of these performers are one movie away from correcting a negative career course. Sandler can still make movies, and companies will pay him, but at this point the trend means something.
Even if you take a snapshot of three or four years of his most recent work, the numbers just are not great....taking in the budgets and reviews. Critically, most of these efforts have been panned pretty hard, Grown Ups 2 got a 7% over at Rotten Tomatoes. Last year's Blended was 14% fresh. That's My Boy got a 20% rating. The problem is the only one that was a true box office bomb was That's My Boy.
Pixels may very well follow the general trend. Critics are trying to unplug audiences, but the numbers are saying this is not going to be a bomb. The opening isn't great, but if the Sandler trend continues, this film will at least pay for itself.
Michael Lynderey: I think it's clear Adam Sandler's drawing power has dimmed significantly since roughly early 2011. I still wasn't sure, but Pixels confirms it almost without question. Back in the day, a generic Adam Sandler comedy, even one with bad reviews (which they mostly all got) would still be a guarantee of over $100 million at the box office. That consistency was remarkable for a decade or so - right up there with Denzel Washington's openings, though at a higher level. Just Go With It, which was somewhat underrated, managed to etch out $100 million, but just about everything since then (Jack & Jill, That's My Boy [which to my mind is one of his best films], Blended, and now Pixels) has come in with totals unheard of for a Sandler comedy since the days of Little Nicky (I'm not counting Spanglish here).
Yes, Grown Ups 2 did very well and also crossed $100 million, but that's a sequel, with an all-star cast, and the Hotel Transylvania brand is pretty strong, although that's animation, and I'm not so sure Hotel Transylvania 2 will make $100 million this fall. But other than that, Sandler just can't seem to carry a film over $100 million anymore.
Indeed, his list of upcoming credits is troubling - other than Transylvania 2, it's just two Netflix films. Nothing in terms of live-action and big-screen. We could very well be seeing the future of Adam Sandler here: straight-to-Netflix films, which may be very successful on their own terms, and Hotel Transylvania sequels. Pixels really could be the last, or certainly one of the last, of its kind.
Ryan Kyle: This is a pretty epically disappointing result if you view it in terms of being a big-budget blockbuster featuring classic Nintendo characters with incredible marketing cache coming to life for essentially the first time on the big screen. If you view it in terms of being an Adam Sandler flick, it is a best-case scenario opening given his recent downward trend. This July looks more like August (or even September) in terms of tepid openings, so it's not as if competition was too fierce for Pixels.
Audiences have smartened up a bit (well, $24 million worth of people still need to learn) after Sandler's past few bombs and even Josh Gad (aka Olaf) and Peter Dinklage's presence couldn't help trick people into thinking this is a quality project. Overseas results should be stronger than usual for Sandler given that this is more of an action flick than a "comedy" so this film can churn some kind of coin. However, I think the biggest career ding from this flop will be to director Chris Columbus, who has gone from Harry Potter and Mrs. Doubtfire to I Love You, Beth Cooper and this.
David Mumpower: Adam Sandler's career has fallen and it can't get up. Pixels is the most commercial (non-animated) thing he's done in ages, and people still soundly rejected it. I thought the teaser opened the door to a redemptive blockbuster. Then, the full trailer showed at least some comic potential. As release approached, people seemed gleeful about treating Pixels like a pinata, and then there was that other theater incident that didn't help matters. In the end, Pixels has bombed domestically, and it's going to need a sturdy international run to counteract the stink of failure here. It's a shame, because this premise killed on Futurama. It should have worked as a movie.
Kim Hollis: How much impact do you think Thursday night's movie theater shootings had on the weekend?
Ben Gruchow: My heart stopped when I got the initial notice on my CNN app, which basically just said that police had been called to the scene of a shooting in a movie theater; it got a bit of a relief when an update noted injuries but no deaths (save for the gunman himself), and then the reports that some of the injured had died started to come in. I think that it's an easy and understandable thing to get frightened of putting yourself at risk when it's just you going to the theater; by putting myself in the headspace of a parent who was planning on taking their child to see Pixels or allowing their teenager to go out and see Paper Towns, I'm honestly surprised the numbers this weekend weren't lower.
I remember something that was said on BOP a few years ago with The Dark Knight Rises, about not letting fear control your actions. The only film I saw this weekend was Paper Towns, and sitting in the theater, did the thought cross my mind that something like this could happen? Of course it did. Unfortunately, we are in an environment where it could also happen next weekend, or the weekend after, or the weekend after that. The alternative, of not going to the theater ever again, shows the people who have the urge to commit these actions that they've won or they'll win. But that's me, and my own headspace...and I don't have children. If I did, I can't guarantee that it wouldn't have had an impact on my decision.
Edwin Davies: It probably had some effect, but the comparatively smaller nature of the crime compared to the Aurora one - and the fact that we all have the memory of that one in our minds so it is less shocking, if not less horrifying - probably made it have less of an impact than the 2012 shooting. I'm sure that some people decided not to go to the theater this weekend as a result of the shooting, but it was presented as such an isolated incident that it probably wasn't a huge number.
Jason Barney: It had a negative effect, but I am not sure how much. It is sad and when I heard the news I thought back to Batman and thought, "Not again". Well, it happened again. A guy killing people at a venue where friends and family want to be entertained? I'm sure that skewed the numbers lower for the weekend.
Michael Lynderey: This is not definitive evidence, but the film at which the shooting occurred, Trainwreck, dropped only 42.6%, much lower than Ant-Man's 56.5% and even lower than Minions. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think Trainwreck was the film most likely to have been effected by the shooting. Since it doesn't look like it has been, perhaps we can surmise that the other films' box office didn't change all that much, either. It's sad that we have to have this conversation again, though.
David Mumpower: While the points here are well taken, I think we should mention that Trainwreck dropping 42.6% is much worse than prior Apatow films. The 40-Year-Old Virgin fell 24%, Knocked Up declined 36%, and This Is 40 gained 8%. Funny People is the exception since it dropped 65%, but the point remains that Apatow films largely don't fall a lot in their second weekends. There's a tricky aspect to gauging Trainwreck relative to The Dark Knight Rises in that one could only suffer from the negative attention while the other may even benefit from the media attention. I for one strongly considered going to see the film even though I have no interest in it simply because I wanted to perform an act of defiance. My indifference to Amy Schumer is what stopped me. For these reasons, I consider what Trainwreck did a bit of a false signal overall.
The conclusion I draw is something Ben mentioned above. It reinforces other conversations I've had with BOP staff members since last Thursday. No matter how much we movie lovers don't want the psychos to carry the day, it's impossible to sit in the theater without thinking about it some. While I don't think it's as devastating a turn of events as Aurora due to the combination of much weaker films and a less heavily saturated media cycle, I absolutely believe that the major new releases, Paper Towns and Pixels, both suffered. Nobody feels good about taking their children or letting their teenagers go to the movies right after something like this. We'll see if it shows in the legs any, although the aforementioned stink of failure with Pixels limits its hope there.