Gary Dretzka
Leonard Klady
David Poland
Douglas Pratt
Ray Pride

WEEK TWO
Mea Casha Culpa

The following e-mail arrived on Wednesday...

"I think it would be really interesting if you took last year's chart predictions and compared them to actuals and explained what you think happened in terms of the discrepancies. It's always entertaining to read your charts, but they are always so far off."

Well…

It wasn't my plan for this week's column, but it seems like a pretty good idea to me. The fact is that these charts, like my Oscar charts, are not expected by me to match the exact answer to what happened at the end of the summer. I process the facts as I have them, and the spin as it occurs. Those elements, obviously, change as the season progresses.

Just in the last week, the ad campaign for Poseidon has caused me to consider whether the film will open even better than I projected last week, leading to a $120 million projection for its total. Some people already thought that was a high number. But now I'm thinking that a $60 million opening weekend isn't impossible and if the film is good, that could easily lead to more like $180 million than $120 million.

I can't say that even I know what my specific formula is to make the analysis, but I do know that there are five basic food groups (not necessarily in this order):

1. The Movie
2. The Marketing
3. The Date
4. The Genre
5. The Intangible

So last year's first chart, published on April 21, had eight films on it that ended up not being released during the May-August summer season. (This allows me to avoid the disastrously wrong call on xXx2.)

Of the remaining 42 movies, I was within $10 million of the final actual gross on a dozen of the films. That leaves 30 movies on which I ended up being less accurate.

My biggest misses, by percentage, were the films that performed significantly better than I expected. Two of the films were late season films that offered no clear signals of being nearly as successful as they were… until I actually saw them. Those would also be the two films I was furthest off on, Four Brothers (off 185%) and The 40 Year Old Virgin (off 142%).

Three of the seven movies that grossed over $180 million last year were underestimated by me. Mr & Mrs Smith more than doubled my expectations (109%). The film, which is one of the rare cases of a real-life romance pushing the interest in a theatrical release, also scored big by feeling like an R rated film, but being rated PG-13. The film also had the advantage of an unusually lame June with titles like Bewitched, Land of the Dead, Cinderella Man, and the slow-starting Herbie: Fully Loaded coming up short before War of the Worlds and then Fantastic Four and then Wedding Crashers stormed the box office.

I was only half way there on Wedding Crashers (99%), which I estimated at $105 million. New Line hoped, I think, that the real number would be more like $140 million. You could have made a lot of money betting people "in the know" that it would hit $209 million. Still, I probably should have estimated the number a little higher given the amount of buzz that was coming off very early screenings with a lot of the media.

Charlie & The Chocolate Factory (87%) was a giant question mark, even after it opened. The family film opened to $56 million... opposite Wedding Crashers, in fact. I estimated $110 million back in April and the opening pretty much assured $150 million, though reviews were a bit mixed. There was still some concern about whether young kids would turn up. They did. Big time.

The other two winners I missed by a significant amount were losers as movies, The Dukes of Hazzard (105%) and Fantastic Four (98%). On Dukes, my estimate changed on the June 26 chart, once I saw how aggressively WB was selling the movie. I remained conservative in my estimate, going from the original $39 million to $80 million… which turned out to be the only film of the summer on which I hit my estimate exactly. So I'm not going to beat myself up on that one.

Fantastic Four, I simply never believed in based on the footage that was coming out or the outdoor advertising campaign, the giant burning 4. But Fox was right and I was dead wrong on that, obviously. The film opened to $56 million and passed my $80 million estimate on Day Eight of release. Each year, there are films that hit my blind spots, which each year I try to make smaller with experience.

This year, the film I have been most challenged on - based on my first chart - is The Da Vinci Code, which people see as being much bigger than I do. And I am open to an improved estimate based on what happens around the movie. What isn't overwhelming me are the Time and Newsweek covers. My current estimate is a big number for an adult movie in the summer. What it suggests, however, is that the under 25 audience has not yet been enticed. If Sony can do that, it could well be a $200 million movie. With due respect, even with long hair, Tom Hanks is not The Firm's Tom Cruise with the post-Basic Instinct Jeanne Tripplehorn and a supermodel on the beach and Gene Hackman and Holly Hunter. But if Paul Bettany's dark, dangerous villain gets hot, the film can get stronger.

Will that be a blind spot? We'll see.

The 23 middle misses are wildly varied. Only three were underestimates.Sky High was a case of just not knowing what was coming and once I saw the film, I was hopeful about a bigger upside. I had Monster In Law at $65 million and people laughed at me for being so high. It came in at $83 million. And The Brothers Grimm really eluded me, all the way to opening. I have to give great kudos to the Weinsteins for opening a movie that was basically a dump so successfully, with only Matt Damon as box office bait. I estimated $23 million and the film did $38 million.

Four of the 20 films left were also four of the big hits of the summer. Star Wars didn't crack $400 million and War of The Worlds didn't make it to $250 million, much less $300 million. I was off by $30 million on Batman Begins, which I consider negligible. And Madagascar was probably kept from my $265 million estimate because it sucked (late info) and because both Charlie & The Chocolate Factory and March of the Penguins turned out to be so strong.

Genre failures were significant in my misses. In horror, Dark Water barely opened and never really found teen girls. George Romero got the best reviews of his career (on initial release) for Land of The Dead… and no one showed up to see the film. The film actually did better than any of the Lions Gate horror films, other than Saw, had done in the three previous years… and I think that the advertising and the Romero legacy kind of stalled in trying to reach beyond that level of the marketplace. Also, there was no girl draw, which proved to be critical in horror film sales, with few exceptions. Screen Gems pretty much dumped The Cave.

In "urban" films, Hustle & Flow barely crossed over to white audiences. And Paramount basically dumped The Honeymooners. The year before, Johnson Family Vacation did $31 million for Fox Searchlight. Paramount did less than half of that.

The kids movies had some real dogs. Robert Rodriguez' second 3D movie was hurt by a Miramax/Dimension in the process of shutting down and a concept that just didn't connect with kids in the way that Spy Kids had. The Bad News Bears was a major miss that marketing couldn't buy its way out of. Rebound was a bad movie that never caught the imagination of families, as Martin Lawrence just doesn't feel kid safe. (Ironically, kids love Big Momma's House, which was not targeting them.) And Hilary Duff had a career low with The Perfect Man.

In a strong summer for comedies, a couple came up well short. Kicking & Screaming was a truly unfunny Will Ferrell comedy and was fortunate to get to $47 million. Universal had a good May slot and if the movie was any good, my $101 million estimate would have probably been low. Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo had a major Wedding Crashers problem. The film wasn't that far off of the original in its opening, $9m to $12m, but with Wedding Crashers still making big bucks as an R rated comedy, the same jokes just weren't enough to inspire audiences not to wait for DVD.

Finally, The Island, Stealth, and Kingdom of Heaven. How much can I say? Two of the three recovered to be profitable thanks to the international box office. Kingdom of Heaven was by far the worst opening in the first weekend of May (aka the first weekend of the summer) since DreamWorks' Deep Impact established the slot in 1998. Number 2 was Gladiator with $34.8 million. Kingdom of Heaven proved that the slot could still be trouble with just $19.6 million… which was better than the other two films in this paragraph.

My two cents on both The Island and Stealth was that they went down on marketing. Both films opened on more than 3000 screens. Only six films all year opening on that many screens launched to lower numbers (Fever Pitch, House of Wax, Bad News Bears, Because of Winn-Dixie, Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo and Cheaper By The Dozen 2). Like films that have huge openings, films that have unusually weak openings are, well, unusual.

And so it goes. There are all kinds of reasons why perception and reality don't match. And surely, my April estimates will not last for all movies all summer. But that's kind of the fun of it, no?

THE BOX OFFICE CHART
Week Two - 4/20
Week One - 4/13

THE COLUMN
Week One - 4/20
Week One - 4/13

- Email David Poland