Weekend Estimates by L.A. Klady
Not a lot to add.
Looks like Rango found a younger audience for whom word-of-mouth made the film safer.
Good number for Battle: Los Angeles. The real test for Sony on this one is overseas, where they did pretty well. The idea seems to be to make a smaller effects film that has enough juice to make money on a $70m budget. (I have no inside info on budget and don’t trust Mojo’s budget numbers, but for the sake of this discussion, even if it ended up higher, the idea is what interests me.) So $100m here… $150m international (the studio is estimating $53m overseas this weekend), and you have a profitable film. The real hope is $150m here and $250m over there. Not this time. But they can keep trying this without the threat of a big loss. (Of course, too much success and the pressure is on to hire a $20m name for the next one… which pushes the budget back up to $100m and probably doesn’t pay off at the box office. The circle of dumb.)
The Red Riding Hood number would be a success for Summit… not so much for WB, which probably doubled (or tripled) Summit’s Letters to Juliet ad buy. The first big question for WB now is whether they can get the title past the 3x multiple that took Juliet to $53m domestic. Will this movie have great girl word of mouth, even if critics hate it? Second big question is international, which is where WB has an advantage over Summit and won’t expect the film to do half of domestic, like Juliet did, but more like 150% of current projections of domestic at minimum. Warner’s international machine is one of the very best, so expect the international campaign to lean even less heavily on Seyfried, to show more action, and try to push Gary Oldman harder. Summit pulled off a 30% improvement on domestic with the last Twilight movie. That would put Hood at $115m or so worldwide, which is just about where the red-to-black ink border is on this film.
Disney 3.0 will absorb the Moms blow by blaming Disney 2.0. Zemeckis came with them. The dance, however, requires some finesse, as the studio is still expecting to push out Yellow Submarine this year and Zemeckis is also involved with the Murphy/Montford-produced DreamWorks title, Real Steel, though perhaps not in a very hands-on way. Point is, the business relationship continues… so a car wreck like this gets very political.
Jane Eyre is a decent opening, but can’t be spun out into any specific expectations. The only Focus release to open with a single-digit screen count that got to $10m domestic was The Kids Are All Right. Otherwise, it’s anywhere – for an opening like this – from $3m to $9m.
Yeah I’m not sure how the “Mars” opening is anything short of disastrous…the worst since “Nutcracker 3D” last year. Basically reset what had been a good start to the year for Disney.
Puzzled by this token release for “Black Death” which has been VOD available for months…the excellent director Chris Smith (Creep, Severance, Triangle) continues to get shafted.
GREAT numbers for Eyre/Irishman
Mars needs BOMBS.
I think people are too harsh on how Mars looks. I’m not too hot on it myself but I would not go with a blanket dismissal either.
Then again, I never really had a problem with Polas Express.
P.S. I wouldn’t be suprised if most money invested didn’t come from Disney though.
I liked the other mocap movies to one extent or another but mars needs moms looks painful purely from the trailer. Just really unappealing. There’s also just a glut of cg animation with a new one opening seemingly every three weeks or so.
“Warner’s international machine is one of the very best, so expect the international campaign to lean even less heavily on Seyfried, to show more action, and try to push Gary Oldman harder.”
Is Oldman a box-office draw at all?
He’s of more value overseas, Gustavo. He’s one of those spices that associates a film with bigger films.
Spending 70m on an FX heavy flick should be the future. Seriously, we have enough TV stars on enough well watched shows, that those folks seem like the perfect cast for this type of an FX film.
That aside, Mars Needs Moms totally and utterly failing makes me wonder what this means for Tin Tin in this country. Seriously, if this is about the mocap technology turning people off, then that’s not good at all since Mocap is not going away anytime sooon.
If it’s not the mocap, then it’s Rango. If that is indeed the case. YAY FOR RANGO! If it’s both, YAY FOR RANGO AGAIN and boo on the mocap hating people.
a day after seeing battle la and i liked it even more than i did yesterday. i’d see it again for that freeway sequence alone.
and rango blew me away — the bit with him wandering thru the dessert while emotionally devastated with Explosions in the Sky playing on the soundtrack and then the bit with the cars on the highway — that’s when I immediately knew that Verbinski had made something cool and special.
I kinda loved RANGO too but the middle bogged down. Which was baffling seeing as it’s a pretty cut n dried “unlikely hero” story. Then again, aside from being “adult” funny (Hunter S, Thompson made me LOL), the opening scene is pretty useless in terms of character development and thus, useless in general.
And since we’re talking animation…I did’t feel inundated with ads and commercials for MARS NEEDS MOMS and I wonder if they backed off on advertising or I just missed it all. Maybe it’s because my TV doesn’t have baseball on it yet, but usually those kinds are films feel forced down my throat and with MARS kind of forgot it was even coming out this weekend.
The opening establishes the entire conundrum that is Rango as a character. Finding that pretty useless is weird in context of that film.
The unaddressed story here is the healthy showing for I Will Follow and nice launch of Ava DuVernay’s new distribution company AFFRM.
nice to see ‘making the boys’ took in more on a single screen than ‘elektra luxx’ did on four…a terrific documentary ostensibly about the creation of the play/movie ‘the boys in the band’ but really a gay 60’s/70’s history time capsule…should be nominated when awards season rolls around….
Having worked on both “Mars Needs Moms” and “A Christmas Carol” the folks at Image Movers Digital were plagued with problems, the biggest one being a lack of leadership. Whoever said you reap what you sow wasn’t lying cause it was a real shitty place to work. Good riddance!
Agree with IO; the opening scene is actually brillant at establishing ‘who’ Rango is and more importantly why he is the way he is, as well as his motivations for heading out into the desert.
The aerial chase scene was genius (although I find it wierd that children all over will be introduced to Ride of the Valkyrie through this. was acutely aware of Johnny Depp throughout though.
Elektra Luxx is terrrrrrrible…except for Julianne Moore’s cameo as the Virgin Mary and Timothy Olyphant’s general hotness.
But the vanity project-ness of it all; see Carla cry, hear Carla sing, see someone tell Carla how beautiful she is in every other scene. Ugh.
So apparently everyone who post here is busy in Austin today?
Nikki didn’t believe the $70 million figure, either, but think about it: no-name director, no-name writer, and a cast consisting of a couple of B-listers and the rest working stiffs. If the total above-the-line was even $10 mill, I’d be staggered.
Battle: Los Angeles was not a good movie, but it wasn’t the abomination many have made it out to be. the first 20 minutes is rough. and the whole thing plays like a 90 minute fan film/FX demo reel.
But i think people are crucifying the film unfairly.
i’ve seen a lot worse.