I am so sick of the ignorance of otherwise intelligent journalists about theatrical and the box office and the potential future. And I am exhausted by responding as often as I do… though it’s not nearly often enough to be effective. The “theatrical is dying” meme speaks to so many constituents, from the aethetes to the morons, that it just keeps going.

Today’s WRONG Writer is Claude Brodesser-Akner. Honestly, it’s hard to write about “A Proposal for Fixing Hollywood’s Box-Office Problem” without insulting the man over and over again. He states his notions as fact – clearly, he read this shit somewhere, which is why I rail when the NYT runs mythology about the movie business as fact recklessly – spewing such blather as “How was your summer? Hollywood’s was terrible” and then proceeds to mix and match micro ideas and macro ideas as though context is irrelevant. In his brain, he can’t differentiate between Dark Shadows, Total Recall, and Battleship. He suffers the most insidious infection that entertainment reporters suffer from, intellectual herpes that disallows people from understanding that just because people use cumulative numbers, each of the stories is a weather event, not nature itself.

Classic “I’m going to make my point, whether the math makes sense or not,” is this gem, “domestic ticket revenue dropped 8 percent in July and 10 percent in August.” Well. I guess it would shock you to know that we’re UP for the year and down about 2% for the summer. And this leaves out international, which continues to boom… but people who want to scream about the end of theatrical don’t want to think about how international is a big reason for the choices re: “tentpoles.”

Dark Shadows did 2/3 of its $238m worldwide gross overseas, were Depp is nearly unstoppable. Battleship did 3/4 of its $300m gross overseas. And Total Recall will get about 2/3 of its $170m+ worldwide gross from international.

The problem for all three of these movies had NOTHING to do with the box office. Yes, it would have been covered by bigger box office success. But the price tags – the very thing that the agents feeding CB-A this hogwash are moaning about – are the problem, not the revenue created. Do you know which Tim Burton films did more theatrical dollars than Dark Shadows? The 2 Batmans, Alice, Charlie, and Apes… all franchise characters so well known that anyone can recognize them with one word. And Shadows? What percentage of people know the name “Barnabas Collins” in any real way?

Get it?!

Don Murphy, God bless his angry little soul, is dead on right about Transformers being different than many other properties being converted to feature films. What Transformers also had that was more important (in my view) than anything else Murphy mentions to CB-A is Michael Bay and the moment of CG improving to meet the mission of the film. I think the first film is mediocre at best… but succeeds brilliantly at the visual, visceral experience that audiences LOVE.

The problem with Battleship is that no one has any expectations of what it is, so it’s almost worse than starting without that branding. Did anyone have a clear idea of what a movie based on the game would be when they heard the idea of converting it to a feature film? The movie needs some serious cutting, but even so, if it had been called Water Fight or some such stupid title, I think it would have done more business on effects alone. Universal had to almost unsell “Battleship” and then also sell a new idea. Add to that, Peter Berg picked a relative unknown to be his lead… so there was nothing much to push off of when things went sideways.

That said, it didn’t matter than John Carter was based on a classic sci-fi novel with all kinds of history behind it.  Only a sliver of the potential audience for the film knows the book… a lot smaller percentage of the potential audience than those familiar with Battleship as a game.  But in the end, the failure of the movie was two-fold. First, the sell wasn’t big enough to protect the movie from needing long legs to succeed. And second, the movie, once it was sampled, didn’t inspire very many people to engage in positive word of mouth that would give it those legs. You can have a huge success with a bad movie if you sell an idea people really want really well, even if it doesn’t accurately represent the film. And you can bomb with a great film if you can’t sell what’s great about the film.

The financial failure of both of these films was based on their cost, not the films. Didn’t matter what the legacy of the titles was going into release. $283m and $303m. Those were the worldwide grosses. The theatrical take for those films to break even is about $400 ww… which only 9 films did that number this summer, 6 of which were sequels + Ted, Brave, and The Hunger Games. So the only truly “new,” uninsured title to get there was Ted… a phenom. Two films betting against that trendline lost. Not shocking. Certainly not because exhibition and distribution are split.

But back to CB-A…

He has all kinds of basics wrong. For instance, the 90-80-70 thing for exhibitors paying studios from ticket sales is 7 or 8 years from being the norm. Studios have been seriously trying to shorten the theatrical window for 15 years, seeking a shorter route to Home Entertainment revenue. It doesn’t have a good G*d-damn to do with avoiding rentals at a lower percentage. Likewise the rise in average ticket price, which is not a very complete stat these days, has grown faster than in the past almost exclusively because of 3D. Prices have always gone up every summer, starting particularly in the days of Jurassic Park. But the bigger leaps are about 3D pricing.. which is not being driven by exhibitors in any way.

I don’t know what Terry Press said to CB-A, but her theory is not really quoted in the piece. Based on the example CB-A uses, Magic Mike, all I can do is call “bullshit.” What the hell is he talking about? Yes, the movie played better in “red states.” How does this keep WB from making choices about showing the movie? Do we fantasize that they weren’t going to release it in LA? Are we bitching about the cost of grossing $114m domestic on a film with a $7m budget that the studio picked up after it was paid for? Apparently no one told CB-A that the studio didn’t produce the film… or he would know that “devot(ing) resources to other productions” made no sense… and that the film was massively profitable, even if WB was making most of its money on distribution.

But then CB-A comes around again to the GIANT LIE… that the studios didn’t create the short window by their own will and AGAINST the will of exhibitors. And now they want to circle around and claim this was done to them?!?! What utter bullshit!

DVD is dead. The studios fucked up their cash cow in record time. And they hamstrung exhibition in the greedy race for those DVD dollars, keeping it from being an ongoing area of growth. And now, they are scrambling for dollars… and as I have been writing for many years, exhibition is the only window that will create financial differentiation of significance between big hits and modest successes as we move into the future. So now “They” want full ownership again.

That is, I think, the story under this story. Whoever spoonfed this crap to CB-A represents the interests of the studios and the studios, which are now carefully looking at the margins they make on everything, and now want to own the profits from this part of the business again. There’s money in it… not for them as distributors, but for them as owners of exhibition, which is not going anywhere and which will become more and more successful in the next decade and onward.

Personally, I don’t care if “They” buy out exhibition. I know some people love their business, but buy it for a fair price and hey, okay by me. It’s going well enough overseas, whether they own a lot of the new movie theaters.

But don’t bullshit us. And don’t make Claude bullshit us just because he isn’t knowledgeable enough to know he’s being completely played. It’s not nice.

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