New at BOP: Review: Matrix Resurrections Movie Review: Moonfall Movie Reviews: Scream The #1 Movie in America November Forecast The Many Saints of Newark October Forecast New Trivia Question All site updates Share & Save   Tweet Print this column

Disney is currently growing the Next Big Thing in a carefully cultivated test lab

Kim Hollis: Should we be focusing on the fact that a movie from a band no one over 18 cares about made more than $10 million or should we be concentrating on the fact that Disney Channel films, including the Jonas Brothers and High School Musical 3, seem to be performing below tracking and expectations?

Brandon Scott: A bit of both. The easy answer is to simply lower expectations. High School Musical 3 still did $90 million against an $11 million budget. I don't see why that is any sort of failure. I think that's an absurd notion. Pundits are wrong sometimes. Hannah Montana did $65 million. Jonas might end up doing $25-30 million. Even so, it's a concert movie...keep proper perspective. Jay-Z's Fade to Black did $700,000! Seinfeld's comedy doc movie didn't do anything. The Jonas number is still a big number by comparison. That cant be discounted.

Joel Corcoran: I think we need to focus on the tracking and expectations portion. Movie attendance is up significantly this year already, so you'd think that with more people, tracking would be better and lead to more solid expectations. And from what I've seen, tracking estimates for most other movies have been fairly accurate. So, what is it about Disney Channel films? Are these two movies - High School Musical and Jonas Brothers - just aberrations? Is there some reason why tracking for children's films isn't as accurate as that for films directed at teens, college students, and adults? Or is there something else going on?





Reagen Sulewski: The thing with teens is that ... ooh shiny!

David Mumpower: I feel Joel is asking the right question here. Maybe we have been expecting too much of films that launch from basic cable programming into theaters. For the longest time, no American Idol artist could make a dent on album sales charts with the logic being that what was fun for free wasn't worth paying for. It's entirely possible the same phenomenon exists with these Disney properties. Even so, I disagree with Brandon that High School Musical 3's assertion that there should be no complaints about its box office run. If ever a film should have made $150 million, it was that one, but Disney got it out too late in Reagen's Shiny Saturation Cycle of Tweendom. With regards to the Jonas Brothers concert film, I am confident we would be looking at this in a much different light had there never been a Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour released into theaters. If not for that, we'd be saying, "This is more than double what a Martin Scorsese/Rolling Stones concert movie made in its entire domestic run." So, I find the question of whether Hannah Montana should be removed entirely from the discussion a fascinating one with no real right or wrong answer.

Continued:       1       2       3       4       5