The Hot Blog Archive for February, 2012
Weekend Estimates by Forgotten Klady
Well… I certainly had more conservative expectations of the whole weekend based on Friday’s estimates than turned out to be the case. I still expect these estimates to come down a bit tomorrow, though still stronger than I would have projected. For The Vow to beat Dear John by over $11m in 3 days after being separated by $1.5m on their respective opening Fridays is a surprise. Likewise, Safe House started $1.1m ahead of Denzel’s The Book of Eli‘s Friday opening and is now estimated $6.5m bigger for the 3-day. And Journey To The Center Of The Earth did a pretty normal 3x opening day in its first weekend. Journey 2 is estimated at 4.2x the Friday estimate. Of the four openings, only the Star Wars 3D re-release is estimated at under 3x Friday… which would not be out of the norm.
In any case, even with these estimates, this is still only a record-breaker in obscure records. 2010 opened three movies on Valentine’s Day to $120m. 2012 opens four movies to an estimated $132m. So yes, a “record-breaking” Valentine’s Day. We are also at six $20m+ openings in February for the first time ever. But again, those six films opened to $174m. In 2010, the then-record five $20m+ launches opened to $191m.
I don’t want to piss on the garden here. It’s an excellent weekend and every one of these movies will be in profit… no Wolfman holdovers that require writedowns. (There also isn’t a hit holdover like Shutter Island.) The Vow is a cash machine that will not only buy houses for people associated with the film, but if Sony can convert Channing Tatum to a non-chick opener with 21 Jump Street, this mine will be even richer. Safe House could well keep doing business on good word-of-mouth from under 35s and become the 4th $100m grosser of Denzel’s remarkable career.
But one must keep their sanity in the best of times, the worst of times, and all in between. Really nice weekend… but not a game changer in any way whatsoever. Teens are not “coming back” to the movies. They never left. They just didn’t have things they wanted to see in numbers that held up to Avatar.
In Oscar scoring… Searchlight’s push for The Descendants continues to be effective. It’s already Alexander Payne’s #1 film worldwide and should become his #1 domestic hit sometime this next week. The Artist has settled into 800 screens and is now on the descent at $24m. This must be frustrating. Hugo‘s out there again on 700 screens, closing in on $65m, but still seen as a commercial disappointment in most quarters. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is quietly going to top out around $35m. The Iron Lady , doing similar numbers to The Artist for The Weinstein Company has got to be frustrating in a different way… a bigger than expected US audience… but all Meryl at awards time. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is also lingering in the low 20s, a very strong player in limited release, but never finding a wider base. And War Horse may have the quietest $78 million domestic in the race, passing up Moneyball and The Descendants, but somehow seen as old-fashioned tainted goods. For the record, DreamWorks/Disney has the #1 and #2 highest grossing films in the Oscar BP race this year.
Meanwhile, Sony Classics is getting A Dangerous Method past the $5m mark in spite of Oscar snubbing the film. And A Separation is doing some strong business. Rampart finally opened… and not badly… but I’m not sure that the low-budget-release wad hasn’t been shot there with Woody Harrelson doing all the rounds last week. And it’s nice to see Magnolia going out with the Oscar shorts on more screens to more business than in the past.
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Friday Estimates by Klady
Analysis by Poland
It’s a good looking weekend, though not a record breaker. Until 2003, February was a bit of a dead zone. There would be one big grosser, but it was not a heavily programmed month. That changed with Daredevil, which scored a $40m opening a weekend after How To Lose Guy in 10 Days established a Feb rom-com beachhead opposite Shanghai Knights, also just under $20m. 50 First Dates, Hitch, Fool’s Gold, He’s Just Not That Into You, Valentine’s Day, and Just Go With It continued the rom-com slot streak. Constantine, Ghost Rider, Jumper, Friday The 13th, The Wolfman, Percy Jackson, and Chronicle have continued the comic-culture slot streak.
2010, with Avatar still doing strong business, delivered the first February ever with five $20m+ openings, led by Valentine’s Day, the biggest February opening ever, aside from the singular phenomenon of The Passion of The Christ. We’ll be at five again this weekend. This won’t be as strong a quintet of openings… nothing to match VD’s $56m launch and in 2010, none of the openings were under $31m. On the other hand, the budgets are – overall – lower this year, both production and marketing.
Screen Gems’ The Vow opened about 10% higher than Screen Gems’ Dear John did last year. I guess audiences are slightly more interested in watching Mean Girl Rachel McAdams suffer through a great love with Channing Tatum than they were in watching Mean Girl Amanda Seyfried do likewise. (Sadly, Lindsay Lohan could be playing the mother in these movies at this point.) If the number holds, $33m is the weekend.
Denzel is incredibly consistent. The number on Safe House is a little higher than normal – not a record for him – but he has been on an upward trajectory as of late, the character here looks really cool in ads (and is, in the movie), and Ryan Reynolds should and probably is adding actual dollars to the total… a couple of million. You can be a tiny bit surprised, pleasantly, with this start, but if you are SURPRISED, you aren’t really paying attention. There is a good chance that Safe House ends up on top by the end of the weekend.
In both of these cases, the irony of tracking’s weak spot in finding out trends with teens is in play when it comes to expectations. I am almost of sick of mentioning how many idiots are now sizing up box office based on the unreliable expectations of others as I am with the phenomenon infecting box office coverage.
Episode 1:3D will do better than Episode 5’s February re-release in 1997… but nothing compared to Episode 4’s $36m re-release a month earlier. It looks like the series of 3D re-launches will each do in the $50m range domestically, though there could be a bump up for the original trio. The potential big money for Lucas will be overseas, where 3D is still hot and the first trilogy hasn’t been as endlessly exploited on the big screen as they have here.
Journey 2 – named as though Journey To The Center Of The Earth was so important that we all abbreviate it when we talk about it… which “we” never do – is opening to almost the identical number the first film opened to in 2008. And it is the first of two films in the “Take Borderline Franchise, Add The Rock… pretend he was always there – genre this year. It worked so well for Fast Five that The Rock is now the movie’s answer to TV’s Heather Locklear.
The not so happy story in the reverse-slump story – equally moronic – is that Chronicle, The Woman in Black, and The Grey are definitely paying for the amount of product pouring into theaters this month. We should be reminded that the shortened window, pushed tighter and tighter by the studios – not by ticket prices or popcorn prices or home theater or iPads or the internet – remains the biggest danger to theatrical. Teen boys are going. Teen girls are going. 50something journalists are not going… because people over 30 go tot he movies a lot less than those under 30… as has been true for decades.
25 Comments »Ticket Prices… Tickets Sold… Slumpy The Whale
So… NATO (National Association of Theater Owners… the other NATO) has come out with their Q4 and 2011 Year End figures on ticket prices at US movie exhibitors.
And the answer is…
Inconclusive.
What we know from this exercise is that, in theory, movie tickets were more expensive in Q2 2011 than any other quarter. Of course, this makes no sense. So what we actually know is that ticket prices are static in most quarters and almost always go up – when they go up – at the beginning of summer, when the big movies are about to land.
Next time you read a story about “increasing ticket prices” driving away audiences, remember than the “average ticket price” went up 4 cents in 2011 from 2010. Yeah… that kept people at home.
Of course, these price fluctuations from last year have no clear correlation to rising tickets for a normal movie experience and almost everything to do with the amount of 3D being sold in the marketplace in any quarter. These numbers also fail to account for children’s admissions, which are a big part of the annual box office. Conversely, these numbers don’t count “adult only ” hard-R movies either.
The quarterlies themselves don’t really make an extreme amount sense either.
Q1: $7.86
Q2: $8.06
Q3: $7.94
Q4: $7.83
Q3 was where most of the 3D heat was, with Transformers 3 and Harry Potter 8 both doing over $350m domestic, plus Cars 2 holdover, Captain America, and The Smurfs. That’s over $1.1 billion in 3D-available gross in a quarter. Q2 did around half of that amount. Q1 did under $350m in 3D-available biz. And Q4 did a little over $500m in 3D-available.
However… Hangover 2 and Bridesmaids were both rated R and represented a big chunk of the revenue of the quarter… in adult-priced tickets. Fast Five also probably skewed a bit towards adult-priced tickets.
2011 Average Ticket price: $7.93
It’s interesting… according to NATO, we say a 33¢ price hike – the biggest ever, at that time – from 2006 to 2007. Another 30¢ from 2007 – 2008. 32¢ more in 2009. And then a “massive” 39¢ in 2010. So from 2006-2010, the average went up $1.38 per ticket or a 21% increase in the average in this period… which is unprecedented.
So, in trying to expand my thinking, I asked NATO. And I was reminded that these numbers do not necessarily reflect price changes at all. They are equally, if not more influenced by the kinds of movies that are doing business. So, more tickets being bought by adults means a high average price per ticket sold. And conversely, a quarter with a lot of tickets sold for a family title can bring down the average. Similar issue with the 3D bump.
There are some years with actual ticket price changes, particularly in the mid-2000s, when more high-end multiplexes were opening or re-opening. (Another factor are “luxury theaters,” like Arclight or Gold Class, that have more expensive basic tickets.)
So when you ask, “Are tickets cheaper today than they were last year,” the answer is, “No one knows.” Why? Because it depends where you are going to the movies, what kind of movie you are seeing, whether you are going to 3D or IMAX, matinee or prime-time, etc, etc.
Our own Len Klady will soon publish his year-end analysis of the box office and it’s – forgive me – the same old, same old. “Kids are turning to other interests. Will they come back?”
They haven’t left. What’s remarkable is that as hard as the studios have tried to develop other revenue streams that will allow them to dump theatrical, the theatrical business is not only healthy, but thriving. If you eliminate Q1 from the year-to-year comparisons – Q1 2010 was pumped up to an unmatchable extreme, $550m more than Q1 2011, by Avatar holdover business and Alice in Wonderland – 3/4 of 2011 did better than 2010 by almost 2% with tickets sold almost even.
If you look at what sold in 2011, it was all the stuff that teen boys love… same as it ever was.
There are lies, damned lies, and statistics. Beware those who claim to know exactly what any given stat means… or you might end up owning the Brooklyn Bridge… and believing that theatrical is in serious decline.
8 Comments »17 Days To Oscar: A Thin Line Between Win & Lose
This is the time of the season when things start lining up and one starts gathering perspective. As a result, I find myself endlessly pontificating about what could have been done, what should have been done, what would have been done had there been the money or the will.
And so, a few basic rules that are guaranteed to broken almost immediately.
YOU MUST BE PRESENT
Yes, there are exceptions… every year. But those exceptions are for the Sean Penns and Supporting Actors of the world.
Why are you suddenly seeing Brad Pitt everywhere? Because someone convinced him that he could win. Of course, he’s still only doing the A-list stuff and softball blue card safe stuff like Actor’s Studio… which is why he has no chance of winning.
George Clooney has been the frontrunner for months… again. And it’s looking like he will lose… again. Why? Similar to Pitt, Clooney breathes only in the rooms that Stan Rosenfeld can control completely. And God bless them, that’s their prerogative. But while no “lower” outlet availability is going to win George an Oscar, there has become a disconnect – much as we all love George and find him endlessly charming and bright – between the movie star and the people who might vote for him.
The exceptions this season look to be Viola Davis and Christopher Plummer. Ms. Davis has been around… but not really very accessible. But she is the rock around which The Help revolves. In a way, I don’t really think she is the lead of the film… but she may well win Best Actress for her muscular stoicism. And Chris Plummer, who is a very funny, charming guy, stayed out of the fray this year after getting himself nominated by dipping in for The Last Station. But he has been the frontrunning in Supporting for 5 months now and somehow, that category has a recent history of being cemented in early.
Of course, being present doesn’t guarantee anything. Ken Branagh was very generous with his time this year and isn’t going to win. Albert Brooks is a living legend who has never gotten his due from The Academy and made himself available this year… and didn’t even get nominated. Tilda stumped hard for her movie.
And who knows? Rules are made to be broken. Meryl Streep has been more present this year than in nomination years past… but she’s also remained hidden behind the coattails of 60 “We Don’t Ask Celebrities Real Questions” Minutes and more recently, Pete Hammond. When voters feel like they know a little something real about Meryl Streep is probably when she wins her next Oscar. In the meantime, it’s an honor to be nominated.
YOU MUST NOT BE EMBARRASSING TO VOTE FOR
The rest of the column…
