..Gary
Dretzka
..Noah
Forrest
..Leonard
Klady
..David
Poland
..Douglas
Pratt
..Ray
Pride
..Kim
Voynar
..Michael
Wilmington
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Week 11: Part II
Has July 4 Weekend Been Terminated?July 4 weekend is turning out to be every bit as ugly as I expected. The 3-day for the holiday looks right now like it could be the second worst performing weekend of the summer. The two new openers, Terminator 3 and Legally Blonde 2, look to generate together enough to outperform last year’s Men in Black II 3-day… by less than $10 million. However, MiBII will outperform Terminator 3’s 5-day opening by as much as $20 million.
Legally Blonde 2’s 3-day will probably not match its predecessor’s $20.4 million off-holiday opening. Even giving the film the benefit of the doubt and comparing the Wed-Fri 3-day versus the original, LB2 can only boast a $1.5 million improvement on the original 3-day… and that is still based on estimates.
The shocking thing about this weekend is not, as it turns out, that there are too many movies. Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle has been kind enough to step out of the way with a 77% drop from Friday to Friday. The Hulk is down 65 percent from last Friday. Finding Nemo is still holding well, but its 3-day holiday gross will be less than last year’s Lilo & Stitch. (Lilo was only in its third weekend, while Nemo is in its sixth.) In fact, the top five holdovers this weekend will gross at least $15 million over the 3-days of the weekend than the top five holdovers from last July 4 weekend did.
So what is the problem?
I would point to two major factors. First, there is Mediocrity Fatigue. I don’t have the attitude about Hulk or Matrix Reloaded or even 2Fast 2Furious that some people do. But there is a general sense out there that at least a few of the big summer movies have been disappointments.
This summer, more than any summer before, has seen audiences rolling the dice weekend after weekend after weekend. Six out of eight of the first weekends of summer featured $50 million openings. We will now be without a $50 million 3-day for two weekends in a row for the first time all summer. And the titles that “failed?” Charlie’s Angels 2, Terminator 3 and Legally Blonde 2.
I promise you that on Sunday and Monday, there will be stories about Sequel Fatigue. Bzzt!!! Wrong! I would bet cash money that a Full Throttle opening in place of the X2 opening would have generated no less than $65 million. Put T3 in the Matrix Reloaded slot and you are looking at tens of millions more.
And allow me to propose this flip side… if The Matrix Reloaded opened July 4 weekend, it would have still had a $135 million 5-day gross.
This brings me to the second major factor, Marketing Trouble. And by that, I do not mean bad marketing. I mean that a domestic distribution system that is now predicated on marketing above all else still fails to recognize its own, perhaps unfortunate, transformation.
Would any other industry attempt a major new brand launch for 10 consecutive weeks? Of course not. Even in television, which is a whole different ballgame in many respects, Fox figured out that in order to get traction, you have to have some space. People remember that Fox programmed for black audiences when they launched, but generally forget that they also started running their new programming in the summer, during the network rerun period. Now, new summer programming is a must-have, even at the major nets (which now include Fox).
Another problem is that most periods of the year have some ebb and flow in advertising buys. A high profile film can get rolling a month out and really get to a crescendo by release. In a summer like this, Warner Bros. had to lie a little low with T3 buys until two weeks ago, since there was no point in fighting the onslaught of Hulk and Full Throttle. Hulk and Full Throttle had to find non-traditional marketing ploys to get buzz started while Nemo and 2Fast and Bruce Almighty were birthed. And Nemo and Bruce, in particular, had to tap dance until Matrix Reloaded was out of the way.
Each week, we in the media and you at the water cooler, fight the battle of subjectivity. A film did great because it was great… a film did badly because people didn’t get it… a film did well even though it sucked because they “tricked” the public. The truth about opening a movie is far more objective than that. The truth about Weekend Two is not. If you can’t open Terminator 3 to an $80 million 5-day, there is a problem. And while some of it may be in the marketing, the majority of it seems to be in the current system.
Chuck Viane could afford to skip Memorial Day weekend with Finding Nemo, even though he could have easily pushed Universal out of that slot and increased its opening weekend number significantly. But my bet would be that he and his team figured out the cost of being in that heated slot versus the knowledge that they had a leggy movie that would play for a lot longer than most films and said, “We don’t need the hassle.” But Nemo may be the only film of this summer that deserves to be that cocky.
The Memorial Day/4th of July centered summer has been over for a few years. Now, it looks like the 1st weekend of May/Memorial Day/4th of July/1st weekend of August mindset might be passé as well.
It looks like there is only one “It” date in the summer anymore. The first weekend of May. That doesn’t mean that mining summer is still not a good idea. But that weekend is the only open territory of the summer. And with due respect to X2, The Mummy Returns, et al., Spider-Man is the only movie to hit that slot in years that has raised the bar for the slot and not the other way around.
In 2004, the slot will be May 7, where Universal’s Van Helsing shoots for Spider-Man-level success, combining a $90 million-plus opening with longer than normal legs. And right now, it looks like it will have some open room. Garfield looks more like a kids movie than a generation-bending Scooby-Doo. Troy, Brad Pitt or not, is still a sword-n-sandals movie. I am a big Wolfgang Petersen guy, but it has to prove itself before we can put it on the Gladiator box office mantle. The Day After Tomorrow and Harry Potter 3, in back-to-back weekends, looks like the power slot of the summer, though Roland Emmerich has some ‘splainin to do himself. And Spider-Man 2 is likely to make July 4 weekend look important again, with a $100 million 5-day.
I would suggest that someone jump into the April 30 slot and take the lead. But no one seems to have a movie that is big enough to eclipse Van Helsing and that needs the help. Hell Boy is too odd. Harry Potter doesn’t need the help. I, Robot won’t be ready.
This year, we had six $50 million-plus openers before July 4. Next year, I would project only three or four… and a lot of stories about the power outage.
And after we all read a slew of “What happened?” stories about this weekend, extrapolated to “this summer,” Pirates of the Caribbean and Bad Boys II will each open over $50 million. I know that Pirates will be very leggy and I am guessing that Bad Boys will be too.
The point is… it is the movie. Betting on dates is old school. Betting on movies and dealing with each one in a truly unique and specific way is the future. More on this in the next 15 Weeks…
.Summer Movie Chart
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