Okay, here's something I don't understand. The first X-Men movie opened with a $55 million weekend and all the news said that was good.
Green Lantern opens with $52 million and they're acting like it's the biggest bomb since Gigli! What's up with that??
Replies
A lot less people went to see GL than went to see X-Men. Its just that the price of tickets went up, and then a lot of the early audience saw it in 3D, which jacks the price up even more.
Someone said that more people saw Ghost Rider and Daredevil on their opening weekends than saw GL.
Also, I don't think X-Men cost 200m to make and then had another 100m spent on marketing, as GL had, so GL has to make a lot more back in order to qualify as a success.
GL has to have another 5 'opening weekends' in order just to break even.
I think that four super-hero movies are a lot to absorb and, of course, it's Marvel over-saturating the market. Perhaps they planned it to hurt Green Lantern at the box office, though the reviews and word of mouth didn't help. GL is an average summer movie, while both Thor and X-Men: First Class were above average. We'll just have to wait and see about Captain America!
I almost had a heart attack when I got a ticket to the 3D Thor. The price! 8-O Never again!
I have a shelf-full of superhero DVDs that I got in the DVD rental shops at real knockdown prices once their rental window passed.
I got 'Tales of the Black Freighter' for $4.99 when it was for sale in the comicshops for about $60.
Yay me!
What he said. The rule of thumb is, a movie has to make two-and-a-half times its costs to break even. Which would seem to be an outstanding argument for not spending $200 million to make the movie and $100 million on marketing, but that's a lesson Hollywood never learns.
Not only that, in the case of Green Lantern, there was a noticeable dropoff in ticket sales opening weekend from the Thursday midnight shows to Friday to Saturday, indicating the word-of-mouth wasn't good.
Mark S. Ogilvie said:
That's great if you have a drive-in locally. We saw X-Men: First Class opening weekend at ours and it was a great experience. They didn't have Thor, though, and likely won't have Green Lantern for a couple more weeks. (We're going this weekend to see Cars 2 and Pirates 4!)
I know I've never been good at accountancy, but, that doesn't make sense... Maybe it makes Hollywood sense, which is a different animal.
If true, of course, GL has to make another 700m after its opening weekend.
Maybe if DC clutch their rings really hard, and really wish it....
"Hollywood sense" is a great way of putting it.
A while back, I read a fine book, Movie Money: Understanding Hollywood's (Creative) Accounting Practices, that attempts to explain such things in layman's terms. The co-authors are a Hollywood CPA and an entertainment journalist. As they were writing it, they kept fact-checking their work with the retired head of a Hollywood auditing firm, and relied on his guidance so much they insisted on crediting him as a third co-author. I see on Amazon that they've updated the book.
It's worth seeking, if you want to know why, say, a movie like Coming to America can make $300 million but is said to garner no net profits -- as Art Buchwald found out when he sued Paramount for stealing his idea.
Or why your friendly neighborhood theater charges so much for popcorn, candy and sodas. It's because the contracts are structured so that the lion's share of the money from tickets goes to the movie studio the first few weeks, and the theater doesn't make any money on the actual movie until it's been around for at least a month and a half. Of course, by then if the movie is still drawing an audience -- and many movies don't last that long in theaters -- in most cases it's far smaller than it was in the early going.
That I actually knew. Movie theaters aren't actually in the movie business they are in the concession stand business.
Creative accounting in the movie business and others fascinate me. Mark Cuban claims he loses money every year on the Mavericks.
I'm always fascinated that NBC always outbids the other networks for the Olympics, declaring all the while that it's going to lose money on them.
Time's movie critic Richard Corliss wrote that Warner may have overestimated the appeal of Ryan Reynolds, an actor with "the lightweight likability of a TV star" instead of the "sexy danger of a movie star."
Having seen "Green Lantern" -- which is an OK popcorn movie -- I have to agree. Reynolds belongs on TV, maybe in a reboot of "Baywatch" or "Knight Rider."
-
1
-
2
-
3
-
4
of 4 Next