BYOB Monday 101711

David Poland, your wife gave birth to a child 21 months ago. What are you going to do?
I’m going to Disneyland!
(wondering if I bill Disney for the $50k or if they just send a check…)

DP/30: The Ides of March, producer/co-writer Grant Heslov

Weekend Estimates by Real Loose Klady

So, two big stories this weekend. First, Real Steel reaffirms that it is a family-choice movie and could end up holding a lot stronger domestically than expected from opening. Still, the film’s real profit potential is overseas.

Second, executives who couldn’t get a handle on selling their movies this weekend need not be worried for the industry… there wasn’t a veteran release in the Top 10 that dropped by more than 41%… and 4 of the 6 were between 25% and 31%. This is extraordinary.

Don’t get me wrong… unless Real Steel toughs it out, there still will not have been a film released since The Help, 2 months and a week ago, that has done or will do $100m domestic. (Whatever pressure Dreamworks may be feeling, right now they have the high bookends of the last 2 months, with War Horse next into battle… which they should be comforted by.) Puss in Boots and Tower Heist have a shot at cracking $100m, but we may have to wait almost another month, until Jack and Jill… or even Twilight-est : Episode One/Happy Feet 2 to get there again.

Is this cause for worry? No. Because most of the product in the last couple of months has been dumped. Contagion overcame. Warrior did not. Fox threw out two comedies as though they had a contagious disease and both were unsurprising flops. Footloose will be fine, like The Ides of March, Moneyball, and 50/50. A bit better than “fine” are (probably) Real Steel, Dolphin Tale, and Drive, in spite of the media wish that it had done better.

The biggest winner of the last two months was The Lion King 3D. Count on Titanic 3D doing great business as well, another mega-hit from over a decade ago. This will not save ubiquitous 3D… so stop writing headlines. (Tintin and Hugo can also be big 3D hits and not “save” thirty-five 3D releases a year.)

The only big bombs in this period, financially, were Dream House, Warrior, Bucky Larson, Sex & The Shitty, and the two Fox comedies. Not terribly unusual run of (fiscal) stiffs.

It’s lovely that Nikki Finke’s “been reporting how younger males — which used to be Hollywood’s target audience — have been no longer consistently (and indiscriminately) going to the movies since August.” But this is the same lie that comes out every single year after and right before the summer. It’s simply idiotic. Young males and females are still Hollywood’s target audience. They have never been indiscriminate. They may have crap taste, but they make clear choices. Or have we already forgotten the first quarter of 2011?

Apparently, some people think there is a switch on a satellite somewhere that makes teen boys stop and start going to bad movies. It’s not that there is a massive difference between the pitch on Hall Pass and the pitch on Horrible Bosses. It’s A Change In The Industry!!! You see, they were indiscriminate when they chose Captain America and Rise of the Apes, but forgot to be so in the week in the middle, when Cowboys & Aliens launched.

And if you want to point at a single movie that really works for this audience since Apes, be my guest.

What was this, the biggest, most consistent audience supposed to go see? Couldn’t sell them 30 Minutes or Less. Okay, what else ya got? Retreads. Conan, FD5, Fright Night… a shock-thriller-sell remake of a movie no one under 40 knows in Straw Dogs (which would have done better sold as a thinking man’s thriller). Did anyone really expect bigger numbers for a cancer dramedy… even a good one? Statham’s numbers are about right, given a new distributor. $25m on ABduction is a miracle and over $30m on Drive is a downright hit. As noted earlier, Real Steel went younger and succeeded in that goal.

So what exactly was supposed to bring out those young ticket buyers? In all of that mess, was the a single film that targeted young women well? Was there a single real hit for young men in the offing?

Show me the movies.

I am sick to death of people who have no interest in box office pretending to have insight, fed mush by people who clearly know better but spend every weekend of a failure erasing their tracks and every weekend of a hit taking too much credit.

In any case, thanks to Box Office Mojo for launching the Pedro Almodovar page, so we can see that The Skin I Live In is having a very solid opening for an Almodovar film. Because of screen counts and ticket pricing, it can be like comparing apples and oranges, but this looks like his best start aside from Volver, which came to market with months of Oscar-nom inevitability attached to star Penelope Cruz.

Friday Estimates by Six Degrees Of Klady

Paramount has found some long legs in October for films like School of Rock and Paranormal Activity… and will hope for the same after a soft, but not bad opening for Footloose. Experiential reports are all over the place on the film, from ecstatic to disinterested. Don’t know…

The Thing seemed like somewhat unenthusiastic launch for Universal. It’s unlikely to get past $9m this weekend. Still, in what seemed to be a very, very narrowly focused campaign, it could have been worse.

In between the two, it looks like a solid hold for Reel Steel, which could even overcome Footloose to win the weekend, if last week’s family-style weekend repeats. The drop should be in the low 40s by the end of the weekend.

Meanwhile, Fox has got another throwaway in The Big Year. The problem is, we all knew it was a throwaway based on a late, sluggish marketing push. The trio of comedy stars in the movie gamely worked the circuit (and Twitter) in the last 10 days, but it was already too late.

The happiest story of the weekend is at the arthouse, with Almodovar’s The Skin I Live In looking at $30k-per or better on 6 screens this weekend. This is on the high end of Almodovar openings in the US. It also happens to be a great romp of a movie.

(Note to Box Office Mojo: Perhaps it’s time to list the man who has a film in the US almost every year and is one of the most revered directors in the world. You list guys like Steve Antin… I think you might want to spend an hour creating a listing for a living legend.)

DP/30: The Ides of March, actor Evan Rachel Wood

Other Ides:
Paul Giamatti

How Netflix Kept Hulu From Being Sold

Same coin, opposite side.

When the prices Netflix started playing for content went nuclear, suddenly Hulu seemed to have a lot of value, in spite of being a minor success financially. If Netflix as spending all that green on content, the thinking went, there must be a lot of money in streaming. The owners, no dummies, figured they could make a killing selling off Hulu and still, in the next few years, go into the then-matured business of self-owned streaming distribution under another name.

When Netflix stock took a dive, so did the opportunity to sell Hulu for a monster profit to a sucker who’d only have a couple of years of content before having to wildly overpay like Netflix… and really, they’d need to fight for content sooner, as programming the right shows/networks is ready to define the battleground.

You can be sure that Fox/Disney/ComcUniversal would have preferred to sell and to enjoy a nice profit in these wild west years of streaming. But they aren’t going to just sell off an asset (or another asset, if you count Miramax) for the sake of getting it off their books. Hulu has a HUGE audience… and only a small fraction – about 1 million – paying customers. Why? Because the initial value proposition of Hulu-Plus has turned to mush. The Criterion Collection of films has become, with the Comedy Central political comedies, the only consistent “new” content on the system.

So now, instead of being lavishly overpaid for having built something early, 3 of the 4 major networks are going to have to make it work. And there is no reason why it should not. The biggest challenge is the content that each net airs, but on which they do not control streaming rights. But aside from that, they should lay down the law. Exclusive access to reruns from ABC, NBC, and FOX, aside from on-air, 24 hours after network air, for 4 – 6 months on Hulu-Plus. Plus the libraries. Plus Criterion and other films libraries. Try to bring WB in, if only for a short time. Bring in Viacom if you can. Play the content to all platforms for the same $7 a month.

I say they hit $150m a month in revenue sometime in the first six months. No outsider buying Hulu could make that happen.

And we’re about to find out if these three mega-companies can make it happen without trying to cut the pie into a million slices before they bake the damned thing.

But back to the headline… if Netflix’s stock price was where it was 8 months ago, Hulu would have been sold for an insane price. But it seems like everyone’s time to get sane.

Oh That Netflix… Oy That Hulu

So Netflix continues its steady move towards being Hulu-plus-plus.

$250 million a year, according to the NYT, for reruns from a second-tier network that has great demographics.

They took what they were allegedly offering STARZ for Sony & Disney… and spend it on CW reruns for 4 years and in the case of each show, 4 years after the show goes off the air.

It’s exclusivity is a question mark. CBS’ press release states, “The CW content can also be made available via traditional syndication windows, electronic sell-through services and, on a partial-season basis, through authenticated cable providers.” The NYT story says that syndication can only occur after the 4 year window.

$250 million a year represents 2.6 million streaming customers a year paying $8 a month. With a generous projection, $250m is about the amount of Netflix’s next income for the entire year of 2011.

This tells us a few things.

1. Netflix HAS to increase subscribers by the millions to make is a good deal for them. It may turn the media’s head for a while, but it needs to be paid for in the long term and its a big gamble.

2. Time-Warner and CW partner CBS will be popping champagne on this deal… massive and massively overpriced.

3. Netflix, on a strategic level, is getting out of the studio movie streaming business. The only exception is their current deals with Paramount and Lionsgate, as well as the Relativity deal. These will all expire in the next 4 years. Their focus now seems to be clearly on doing TV deals.

4. Studios are getting out of the Netflix business for newer feature films. In spite of recent setbacks, Netflix remains the spendthrift in the streaming content market. Why are all but one of the majors pricing themselves out of the streaming market for Netflix, leaving Netflix to go out and cherry pick demographically compelling product to try to keep a young base of committed subscribers?

Of course, Netflix still offers DVDs, so that is something Hulu doesn’t do and has never done. And if you want to stream what’s on Netflix, $8 a month is still a very good deal.

Meanwhile, The CW is getting almost $1 per Netflix customer every month, whether they watch CW shows or not. As I keep asking… if the consumer valuation on The CW is that high, how much is the value of one of the Big 4’s programming? And what is the value of the cumulative Warner Bros pool of content?

Netflix will be defined in the next 5 years not by its pricing issues, but by how it programs itself and how much it pays for that programming. The studios will keep the prices on content in as much flux as they can for as long as they can because they are hoping there are more suckers out there willing to pay insane prices to make impact. And sometime… around that 5 year mark… pricing will settle in. But until then, “Yippee Ay O Kayay!”

DP/30: The Skin I Live In, actors Antonio Banderas, Elena Anaya

SPOILER WARNING!!! We try not to talk about the surprises in the movie too much… but it’s impossible.

Isn’t It Time For Studios To Act Like Partners To Exhibition Again?

Would you dare say to your spouse, male or female, “Hey! I’ve decided that if I only receive oral sex, it’s not really cheating and it won’t have any effect on my sexual desire for you… so I’ve just decided to institute the plan, even if you don’t like it.” (That is, unless you were President?)

This seems to be the studio attitude towards the ongoing dream of improving revenues by breaking down the windows for the wide release of feature films.

And let me say, here and now, if I believed for a second that breaking down windows would improve overall revenues, I could not, in good conscience, argue against it. But every single bit of history tells us that shortening windows does NOT improve overall revenues. And there is a lot suggesting that it does exactly the opposite.

But here we are… again… praying that the future will be better because it’s The Future.

The studios are led by and loaded with a bunch of very, very smart, motivated people… people who expect to be able to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. But DVD is dead. I believe that a subscription-based future is coming, which will increase revenues and reinvigorate the value of libraries. But it’s not going to come from eating away at theatrical. Home Entertainment as the dog, not the very profitable tail, is not the future. It is the past. The recent past of DVD sell-thru. And it died a rather quick death, by evolutionary standards, because the industry got too eager.

I am quite sure that cablers and satellite operators will find a business model that fits in well with an internet streaming future. Likewise, exhibition can adapt to a post-theatrical universe that is going to look very different in a few years.

Telling exhibitors what you are going to do is not partnership.

And exhibitors not allowing an inch for experimentation is not partnership either.

Digital projection is a giant win for distributors and will eventually be okay for exhibitors, opening up some interesting possibilities. But the studios are the ones that win and win immediately, saving a fortune – hundreds of millions a year, soon to be billions) on prints and the distribution of those physical prints. It took years, but the two interested parties figured it out.

Now we have this new digital opportunity. And any reasonable viewer would agree that the goal of the studios is to undercut and consume a part of the theatrical business… as well as to potentially expand the audience at a higher price point than DVD or eventual streaming.

But exhibitors don’t trust distributors because they have experienced window creep for decades and one of the really attractive things about digital home distribution for the distributors is that they don’t have to have a partner or pay for brick & mortar theaters with 45% of their revenue. Both sides know this. I don’t know if they say this to each other and try to negotiate from there… but they should.

When a studio comes up with a 3 week window for a Ben Stiller/Eddie Murphy comedy and a $60 price tag, how could it not spur mad paranoia? it’s SUCH a stupid idea. So why would Universal try it? Just to fail? Just to make an excuse to try something more invasive… more likely to succeed?

Back to your marriage. If you tell your spouse that you’re hiring a more attractive assistant because you don’t feel good about yourself and having some attention from someone really hot who you have no chance with sexually will make you feel better, your spouse is going to assume all kinds of nasty things. And they should. You may really mean it… but it opens up all kinds of weird doors.

Weird doors and staying married don’t tend to go together too well.

Another Look At Scorsese’s Hugo

The New New Avengers EW Cover

At least this time, the black guy makes the cover!

(inspired by Matt Warshauer)

BYOB Tuesday 101111

Paramount Starts Screener Program “From The Year 2000”

Very happy to get word this morning – via press release – that Paramount is going to stream some awards candidates for a specific voting group via a new streaming system by Deluxe.

One can only hope that it’s a test run for the full season to come.

The question – I’m waiting on an answer from the studio – is in what ways the digital screeners can be seen on real TVs. This is critical to make this program Academy friendly and a good quality home entertainment experience.

Trailer: The Avengers

I get a very “Iron Man & The Avengers Take NY” vibe from this.

And how ’bout those exploding cars! Did Emmerich or JJ have some leftover footage to sell them?

Fine as a teaser. Looks like a slightly more animated version of the photo releases.

DP/30: Tree of Life, Senior Visual Effects Supervisor Dan Glass

Other The Tree of Life DP/30s:
producers BIll Pohlad, Dede Gardner
Jessica Chastain.