Monday Morning Quarterback Part II
By BOP Staff
August 19, 2015
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Jason Barney: I think we will have to wait and see until the end of its run. At this point it is one of the true surprises. I don't think it is up there with Jurassic World, but it’s big.
Edwin Davies: I don't think it was a completely out of the blue success because the film had a lot going for it, but the extent to which it has caught on with audiences thus far says a lot about what can happen when quality and a strong subject matter are boosted by something harder to predict like social relevance. I would say that it was not as big a surprise as the success of Jurassic World or American Sniper, which both blew away even the most positive expectations, but in the same ball park as Fifty Shades of Grey, in that a film which looked like it could do well exceeded expectations by a decent, but not impossible, margin.
Felix Quinonez: I definitely think it's a very big surprise. And if it holds up well, I believe, it could be among some of the year's biggest box office stories.
Ben Gruchow: Again, I parrot Edwin. It's going to fare no worse than Fifty Shades of Grey in terms of what it opened to relative to expectations, and it'll almost certainly close with a higher opening-to-total multiplier. Its Friday-to-Sunday declines were slightly higher than those of Pitch Perfect 2, and it's far better-reviewed than that, so it may turn out being more impressive as a surprise success than either of the two films.
Kim Hollis: I don’t know that I rank this that highly on the list of surprises. It’s a story that keeps being told again and again – as studios do more and more micro-targeting toward demographics, they’re finding more and more successes. Because these films become “events,” they all tend to break out to some degree and surprise us. Straight Outta Compton was tracking for $40 million ahead of its release, and tracking has been pretty notoriously low this year for potential surprise films. I’d say this was a mild surprise but don’t really like what it says about the media that we’re all so surprised by it.
Ryan Kyle: This will end up in many year-end recaps as a success story, but I wouldn't rank it above Pitch Perfect 2, Furious 7, and Jurassic World, which are all, of course, from Universal. Maybe I am the only one thinking since mid-July when the marketing campaign started hitting its stride that it would open between $40-50 million, so I am a little jaded to the shock of the opening, but it is still an extraordinary amount. It’s within the same vicinity of films like Ant-Man, Mission: Impossible 5, and San Andreas. That’s pretty terrific for a music biopic, where the previous high mark was $22.3 million for Walk the Line back in '05.
Kim Hollis: The Man from U.N.C.L.E. earned $13.4 million this weekend. What do you think of this result?
Jason Barney: If the number one earner is all sparkle and jazz, it is the exact opposite for The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Warner Bros is going to take a significant hit on this one and I don’t see a groundswell of support materializing from international markets either. $75 million is a massive budget for a film like this, and while it has a bankable star, sort of, this opening against that budget is not good. It probably doesn’t help that there have been quite a few spy films of late. Going back to the spring there was Kingsman: The Secret Service. Already this summer we’ve had Spy and Mission: Impossible. People are aware of Spectre coming this fall. So people were willing to pass.
Edwin Davies: This is not a great start, and coming in the doldrums of summer when people might be blockbustered out and looking for something different (something like Straight Outta Compton, say) means that it's not going to get many opportunities to build up support domestically. I think it could do okay internationally, thanks to Guy Ritchie's name recognition, but the lack of star power probably means that its prospects are not great. I think a best-case scenario is that it winds up a small loss for WB, but any hopes of this being a franchise (at least with this creative team) have probably been snuffed out.
Felix Quinonez: I think this is a really bad result. Even with its relatively low budget, this is a very weak start. And it has almost no chance of finding legs domestically. It's definitely going to have to rely on overseas grosses for hopes of seeing a profit. But I think any chance of franchise is pretty much dead.
Ben Gruchow: It's about where it should be, although it's worth noting that expectations probably had to be revised downward significantly once Rogue Nation was rescheduled, and then again once it became a critical and commercial hit. Everything U.N.C.L.E. does, Rogue Nation did better two weeks ago, and I think that was the biggest factor in its performance here. The biggest letdown is that this was probably meant to prop Warner up until Pan. They've had an exceedingly "meh" summer, with their two biggest performers (by a commanding margin) having come out in May, and neither one was a smash relative to its budget.
Ryan Kyle: Just because a film is expected to open poorly doesn't take the sting away when it actually does. $13.5 million against a budget somewhere between $75-85 million for an action film is not good business since it's a genre that usually finds its audience upfront. I thought U.N.C.L.E. had a slight chance of swinging upwards from its mid-teen projecton given the complete lack of competition from Fantastic Four, but it appears that those potential ticket buyers took a chance on Straight Outta Compton instead. Overseas should be decent, but it looks like WB will take a loss for this one. Cavill has Superman to fall back on, but this is another strike for Hammer, who seems to have wasted his goodwill from Social Network.
Daron Aldridge: It makes me sad because The Man from U.N.C.L.E.'s failure just means my big budget reimagining/adaptation of Buck Rogers from 2010 with Armie Hammer (as Rogers) and Taylor Kitsch (as Twiki) looks even bleaker now. Seriously, I feel bad for Hammer because people keep trying to make him this summer movie headlining star and this just adds to the argument that he's not that person.
Michael Lynderey: Makes sense. Tom Cruise was originally slated to play Henry Cavill's role (he dropped out to do MI5), and I have to wonder how the film would have done as a Cruise-Hammer vehicle. Pushing it back from January and releasing it this late in the summer may have been signs that Warner Bros. didn't have that much confidence in the film, though it's pretty good and many critics like it. As for Armie Hammer, he's a pretty deft comic actor, and having liked both The Lone Ranger and this new film, I think it's too bad he keeps finding himself in box office disappointments. Maybe he should appear in a more conventional comedy. That could work quite well.
Daron Aldridge: I really like that career path for Hammer, Michael. And off-topic and purely speculative, I suspect that if the 5' 7" Cruise had stayed in this picture, it's unlikely he would have allowed himself to be sharing multiple scenes with the 6' 5" Hammer. A one-off scene for comedic effect (a la a fight in Rogue Nation) is one thing but not the bulk of a film. I may be wrong and his ego wouldn't have prevented the pairing.