Box Office Blather: Princess Dividends and Per Screen Averages

The box office for New Year's weekend was little changed from Christmas weekend when Jeff Bridges double dipped and I had a creepy 90s flashback (that whole post still applies) so instead of sharing their grosses in that banal way you can get anywhere, let's share their gross minus their budget. This is an inexact science for sure. It doesn't include the $$$ of worldwide grosses but it also doesn't include the $$$ of advertising costs so we like it as a vague snapshot of how the movies are doing.

Top Ten Box Office
key: red (budgets way too big) black (passed their budget) green (heading towards significant profits.)

1. Little Fockers + $2 million (second week)
2. True Grit + $48 million (second week)
3. Tron Legacy -$39 million (third week)
4. Yogi Bear - $15 million (third week)
5. Chronicles of Narnia -$69 million (fourth week)
6. The Fighter + $21 million (fourth week)
7. Tangled - $93 million (sixth week - not as disastrous as it looks since Disney is its own franchise. People really like this gargantuanly expensive movie so it might restore some faith in the faltering "brand" and help the next movie. Plus it adds another "princess" to their merchandise line. Ka-ching!)
8. Gulliver's Travels -$85 million (second week)
9. Black Swan + $34 million (fifth week)
10. The King's Speech + $7 million (sixth week)

This is far less depressing than just regular ol' box office reporting right? The good movies aren't as expensive to make and they're making significant money. [Tangent: Let True Grit (review) and Black Swan (plentiful posts) be a lesson to filmmakers and studios: these movies look sensational and feature movie stars. How on earth is your movie so much more expensive?]

One more list. How about the best per-screen averages? Naturally this favors movies in very few theaters that have withheld themselves for several months of buzz whilst waiting for Golden Globe and Oscar fever to kick in. From my throne armchair that looks like distributors just throwing money away while people talk about product they can't spend money on for 3 to 12 months. This only increases the likelihood of piracy and/or likelihood that people might be sick of you in the abstract when you're finally available for tangible purchase. Yes, I live in NYC and seeing movies is easy but I remember quite well what a trial it was before I moved here. I'm still, I'm still Jenny from the block.

That list goes like so...

Top Per Screen Average

1. Blue Valentine (4 theaters) $48,000+ (debut)
2. Country Strong (2 theaters) $20,000+ (2nd week)
3. Another Year (6 theaters)  $18,000+ (debut)
4. Somewhere (8 theaters) $17,000+ (2nd week)
5. The Illusionist (3 theaters) $15,000+ (2nd week)
6. The King's Speech (700 theaters) $11,000+ (6th week)

They must be partying at the Weinstein Co. right now (#1 and #6)

I can't fathom why Country Strong, built to appeal to an enormous market of people who love country music, didn't just open wide? If the film isn't very good -- which they keep saying -- why not make all your money up front before word of mouth doesn't kick in? Naturally this chart is very good news for The King's Speech since it's already gone wide and it's still filling plentiful seats wherever it plays. But here's the sad news: It's rough going out there for Rabbit Hole which has only a $4,000+ average on 34 screens in its 3rd week. Now that's a better number than most of the top ten movies but it's not generally enough to get distributors excited about spending more money to release you winder. Sniffle. Rabbit Hole is not half as depressing as Blue Valentine so if the "depression" factor is keeping people away, they're being silly. It's a really good movie. Why can't Nicole catch a break? Sigh.

What did you spend your money on over New Year's? (I mean, besides booze)
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Box Office Blather: Jeff Bridges Double Dips

A weekly box office series, in beta, to see if we like. To remind you that you're here and not elsewhere and we can't just do things normally, we'll come at it from weird angles when we can.

Jeff Bridges stars in TRON GRIT

1. Little Fockers $30 NEW
2. True Grit $24.8 NEW
3. Tron Legacy $19.5 (cumulative: $87.3)
4. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader $9.4 (cumulative: $62.5)
5. Yogi Bear $7.8 (cumulative: $35.8)
6. The Fighter $7.6 (cumulative: $26.6)
7. Tangled $6.4 (cumulative: $143.6)
8. Gulliver's Travel $6.3 NEW 
9. Black Swan $6.2 (cumulative: $28.6)
10. The Tourist $5.4 (cumulative: $40.8)
11. The King's Speech $4.4 (cumulative: $8.3)
12. How Do You Know $3.5 (cumulative: $15)

With Little Fockers and True Grit topping the charts and we experience an unexpected flashback. Bridges & Babs haven't dipped into the top box office together since The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996). And this time Jeff is double-dipping.

♪ this is it... OHHHH i finally found someone... someone to share my life ♪♫

The first thing to note is that Jeff Bridges is hogging the higher altitudes of the chart as both True Grit's grizzled Rooster Cogburn and the god/father figure for Garret Hedlund (and cross-generational computer geeks) in Tron Legacy. I haven't seen the latter picture but it's good to see Bridges back in sleeker form again after those last two sloshed rundown beer-bellied men in Grit and Crazy Heart. The new old western is is now the Coen Bros' best opening narrowly beating Burn After Reading (2008) which, had almost exactly the same budget but more stars to sell itself with. No Country For Old Men (2007) is their highest grosser though. Will Grit surpass it?

art by Daniel Foez

Couple other things.

• You'd think the Narnia series would die as its box office descends with each film but it's still popular globally and the budget on this one dropped considerably. Does it show?
• Christmas was the first wide weekend for The King's Speech, arguably the only major film relying entirely on Oscar buzz to sell tickets. (You can't really count the films that have barely even tried to open and they are unfortunately many.)
• Tangled is holding well, despite losing some theaters to Christmas fare, demonstrating long legs to accessorize that golden hair. It'll need them. For some reason it cost $260 to make -- which is at quite a bit more expensive than the three animated films which have outgrossed it this year. Was it the frequent retooling that made it that expensive? It'll presumably be awhile before profits once you factor in marketing costs.

Speaking of animated fairytales... Does anyone else remember The Last Unicorn? Is that even on DVD? Here's Jeff Bridges (as the charming Prince) serenading/romancing Mia Farrow (the unicorn)



 It's not some sick interspecies romance because somehow she's a beautiful woman and not just a unicorn. No, I don't remember the story at all.

Three questions to send you on your way: 

1. The Mirror Has Two Faces? Go. (even if you haven't seen it you MUST read this awesome review of it by Glenn at Stale Popcorn. It's laugh out loud funny)
2. Aren't you glad Jeff's musical talents improved before The Fabulous Baker Boys and Crazy Heart?
3. What did you see over Christmas?

Barbra Streisand

Links: True Grit, Spidey, Gay Rugby, and "Original" Films

Movie|Line celebrates a year of "The Verge," their great up-and-coming actor series.
Cinema Blend goosing the sales of True Grit (the novel)
Today One of the Fantastic Four will die in the comic's #587th issue. Does anyone still believe in these marketing ploys? I'm sure they'll come back to life within 3 years. That's how comics do.
MUBI The great Michel Piccoli is 85 today. Has anyone seen La Belle Noiseuse (1991)? That's such a good one.
CineEuropa international actor Armin Mueller-Stahl will receive a lifetime achievement award at Berlinale this year.
The Guardian talks to Andrew Garfield about Spider-Man (with audio)
Blog Stage an informative and weird animated bit describing what's going on with Spider Man's Broadway disaster.
Towleroad Mickey Rourke to pay gay rugby legend Gareth Thomas in a sports bio. We've had a lot of sports bios at the movies but you can't say we've had a lot of rugby films, gay or otherwise.
Scott Feinberg, fine Oscar pundit, delivers his top ten.

Finally, the New York Times has a totally bizarre article called "Hollywood Moves Away from Middlebrow Movies" which is about the new quality edict in Hollywood. I never understand these articles which seem to find all sorts of bizarre trends that the box office data doesn't actually support like "originality sells!" Er, no... I wish! I knew the article was in trouble when it says that Hollywood is going for quality and Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland is referred to as "arty" example of directorial artistry. Let me get this straight, in an article praising studio interest in Quality Original Films one of the prime examples is a messily 3D converted 2D film of a story that's been adapted literally dozens of times for the movies back to the days of silent film?

sigh

I swear to the cinematic gods that that one 2010 junkpile is going to be the death of me. It will not go away. I'll even have to be dealing with it in 2011 for the Oscars. Nooooooooooooooooo
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Box Office Blather: Spectacles, Star Vehicles, Subtitles and Easy $

Year in Review Pt 1 of Many
It's time to wrap up 2010. You'll have to have patience since The Film Experience likes to do this piecemeal... and often! Let's do it every day at 10 AM or 10 PM or both when we magically have free time. How about that? We'll start with the US box office.

Box office hits get much coverage in the media so let's just dispense that basic "smash hit" list quick-like and move on to more interesting less covered seat-filler topics. All figures on all lists are up until the December 18th. And please go easy on any errors as I am unskilled at math is not my strong suit.



US Top Dozen

1. Toy Story 3 $415
2. Eyesore in Wonderland $334
3. Iron Man 2 $312
4. The Twilight Saga: Eclipse $300
5. Inception $292
6. The Commercial For Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Pt 2 $265
7. Despicable Me $250
8. Shrek Forever After $238
9. How to Train Your Dragon $217
10. The Karate Kid $176
11. Clash of the Titans $163
12. Grown-Ups $162

The list proves again - as in every year - that the American moviegoer has an extremely limited palette. There are only four types of films he/she will go to in droves: animated features, sequels/remakes (i.e. "franchises"), action/visual spectacles and broad comedies. It doesn't get more diverse until much further down the list. The only film in the year's top 25 that doesn't fit neatly into one of those four categories is Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island. So well done, Marty. That is a true accomplishment.

Subtitled Features
(I've included worldwide figures too for the sake of provenance)

1. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo [Sweden]  $10 (worldwide: $104)
2. The Girl Who Played With Fire [Sweden]  $7 (worldwide: $66)
3. The Secret in Their Eyes [Argentina]  $6 (worldwide: $33)
4. I Am Love [Italy] $5 (worldwide: $10)
5. The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest [Sweden]  $4 (worldwide: $40)
6. My Name is Khan [India]  $4 (worldwide: $41)
7. A Prophet [France] $2 (worldwide: $17)
8. Dabangg [India] $2 (worldwide: $3)
9. Kites [Miscellania] $1.6 (worldwide: $3)
10. Raajneeti [India] $1.5 (worldwide: $12)
11. MicMacs [France] $1.2 (worldwide: $16)
12. Golmaal 3 [India] $1 (worldwide: $2)

Beyond interest in the Swedish "Millenium" trilogy -- which dropped steadily with each film here and elsewhere in equal percentages -- it was tough going for international fare yet again. It seems like a different world entirely than when we regularly had a couple of substantial breakout hits a year (as recently as the mid Aughts). The only steady market seems to be Bollywood features, which regularly gross about a million with barely any media coverage. Oscar nominees are a far less stable subcategory. Despite more media coverage their grosses tend to be all over the place, ranging anywhere from $10,000 (Peru's Milk of Sorrow) to just over half a million (Israel's Ajami) to the $2 million range (France's A Prophet and 2009 holdover Germany's White Ribbon) to $6 million (the winner, Argentina's The Secret in Their Eyes). In other words it's a bit hard to imagine that the Oscar nomination does all that much more for the films than they could have managed on their own... unless they win. It's tough to quantify so it's aggravating that the studios seem to think that the first quarter is the only time to release the high profile foreign contenders. (It's like how the English language Oscar contenders all have to compete with each other for the same limited seasonal dollars from November through February. It's so weird.)

Next...?
Well, I was going to do a list based purely on original material but the list was so depressing (it was basically original material that could easily be confused for a remake) that I screamed abort! abort! and changed course immediately. Let's try this. Which DRAMAS, i.e. the things audiences mostly only want to see on their TVs now, were hits with moviegoers?

Top 12 Dramas (reality based i.e. no supernatural, genre or primarily action-focused stuff)

1. Shutter Island  $128 [debatable classification - remove it if you will]
2. The Town $92 [an action movie in a sense but mostly a drama]
3. The Social Network $91
4. Eat Pray Love $80
5. Dear John $80
6. The Last Song $62
7. Why Did I Get Married, Too $60
8. Secretariat $58
9. Letters to Juliet $53
10. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps $52
11. For Colored Girls $37
12. The American $35

On this list we see that quality matters far less than having a star in your movie; just don't expect big returns on investment since big stars cost $10+ million. Also: Amanda Seyfried and Tyler Perry are good bets for non-gargantuan but sturdy profits. The Social Network, a film without any action sequence, gooey romance or crime-angle, is a true anomaly. It's only here because it's awesome and topical. But being awesome and topical will only get you to around $90-100. It's interesting that The Social Network's box office is so similar to Brokeback Mountain's, another anomaly that had quality as its chief selling point. (GASP. What a crazy thing to bank on!)

Best Return on Investment???
This list is haphazard / insufficient using only production budgets vs. US distribution returns from box office mojo. In other words it's not so accurate (merchandising, foreign markets, DVD sales and the potential windfall of sequels all contribute to insanely costly movies making a lot of money... eventually. While marketing costs subtract from that profit margin all the while.) But I think the following list is interesting as a very blurry snapshot as to what films are profitable even before you factor in these other things.

1. Paranormal Activity 2 $84 gross = 28 times its budget.
2. The Last Exorcism  $41 gross =22.7 times its budget.
3. Easy A $58 gross  =7.25 times its budget.
4. Jackass 3-D $116 gross = 5.8 times its budget.
5. The Kids Are All Right $20 gross = 5 times its budget.
6. Twilight Saga: Eclipse $300 gross = 4.4 times its budget.
7. The Karate Kid $176 gross = 4.4 times its budget.
8. Diary of a Wimpy Kid $64 gross  = 4.2 times its budget. 
9. Despicable Me $250 gross = 3.6 times its budget. 
10. Dear John $80 gross  = 3.2 times its budget.

Black Swan, budgeted at $13 million may well join this top ten since it's already earned $15 million and it's only just finished its first weekend of wide release and once it wears off its opening week energy, presumably it'll get that Oscar nominee boost to keep it going.

If you include worldwide revenues and franchise potential the numbers would change. How to Train Your Dragon, for example, which cost $165 million to make and grossed $217 million doesn't sound that profitable until you factor in the foreign gross (another $277 million) and the eventual sequels ordered up, which will come into the world market with the most cost efficent marketing tool possible: familiarity. And some movies are far more profitable overseas: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo was budgeted at $13 million and has grossed $104 million worldwide, so only 10% of its gross is coming from America. But I was trying to make this as easy on myself as possible hence the US totals.

The year in box office. Crazy numbers. I'd be happy just making a really crappy "per screen average" figure this week. How 'bout you?

Finally..

It would... oh never mind. This post is long enough. What's the last movie you paid to see? Did you get your money's worth?