I’m so bored with the constant box office attention being paid to the most notable “blockbusters” this holiday season, especially King Kong. The most recent culprit (recent, at least, in terms of my readership) is Fishbowl LA which manages to both continue the trend of criticizing Kong‘s box office and Universal’s comments on its prospects while also make the incredibly astute comment that the media coverage of the film’s commercial success or lack thereof is possibly more entertaining than the film itself.
Nobody’s “coverage” has been more annoying, however, than the just plain stupid comments of Jeffrey Wells in the “Wired” section of his site. Jeffrey: We know you hated the first 70 minutes and loved the rest. We also are aware that you apparently sit at your computer hitting refresh for the box office prognostications at Movie City News and Box Office Mojo. But you know what? The nearly three-hour Munich‘s $5.7 Million take on 532 screens for a $7,706 per screen average during the most crowded Christmas box office weekend in recent memory with five films entering the fray on Sunday in no way signals trouble at the box office as you seem to think. I happened to catch Munich this weekend. It was the third screening I tried to get into because the first two (at different theaters) were sold out, as was mine. I’m not saying it will be a huge hit, nor am I making any comment (at least not right now) on whether or not it’s a good movie (I have major issues with it, and they’re not political ones), but your own little problems with the movie does not mean that’s it’s just barely holding on. I know that two downtown Manhattan theaters on Christmas Day aren’t representative of the rest of the country, but come on. If you use that average and boost it to a wide release of 2500 screens, you’re still talking a potentially $25 Million take during a crazy crowded weekend with two other blockbuster films grossing over $30 Million each in the mix. That’s basically unheard of.
Everybody is trying to make sense of the box office this winter and the fact is, we can’t. There is too much competition at the box office. There is nothing normal about the past weekend, and the real determination about what did well versus what didn’t won’t be able to be made for another two to three weeks as people play catch-up and see the things they really wanted to see Christmas weekend, just not as much as the other movie they really wanted to see. And then, once the Oscar nominations are announced and the Golden Globes are handed out and some films get boosts while others don’t.
Fishbowl LA said that King Kong is “still not quite a hit.” That’s absurd. Any other film that had grossed $118 million in 13 days would be celebrated for its quick race above that $100 million mark. The problem here is simply one of expectation. Narnia has done much better than most people expected; Kong has not – commercially – lived up to its hype. But has it done poorly? Everyone is making fun of Universal’s comments, but they are all fair excuses to be made. Kong may not have opened to Spider Man like numbers, but there’s nothing wrong with a $50 million weekend. It got hurt by the popularity of Narnia for sure, and chances are that, especially in those red states, if parents were choosing whether to allow their kids to go to Narnia or Kong, the ape was losing out. Additionally, Universal’s choice of release date seemed pretty poorly thought-out to me. Kong came out on a Wednesday of a non-holiday weekend. Schools weren’t out yet, and for that matter, many colleges were in the middle of finals. The natural audience that would turn-out for a Wednesday release simply wasn’t available yet. That’s why the grosses plummeted on Thursday only to kick back-up on Friday of it’s opening weekend.
The three hour explanation also isn’t simply an excuse. A three hour movie has a harder time grossing high because theaters will have at least one fewer screening per day. Narnia in comparison, I believe, has benefited in this way too as Disney’s film runs just a bit over two hours. One extra screening per day for seven days in 3000 theaters? That’s 21,000 extra screenings per week. Let’s assume every theater only held 100 seats (and that’s probably the least amount any one theater actually holds); that’s $2.1 million extra possible seats to sell. The average ticket price in the US right now? I think it’s somewhere around $6.50. That comes to potentially $13,650,000 more that Narnia could conceivably gross each week if both films sold out every single screening.
Obviously, that’s a non-scientific (and very conservative) estimate, but my point is still valid. Narnia has grossed about $50 million more than Kong and has been in release for just five more days, but why even the mainstream Hollywood trade publications can’t acknowledge that this whole argument is simply one film exceeding expectations while another is doing perfectly fine while not necessarily living up to its own Titanic-like hopes is beyond me.
Lay off already. The fact is, Kong is still likely to gross over $200 million, maybe even $250 if it holds on through this onslaught of other new releases, and there’s nothing wrong with that whatsoever. And as for the praise/backlash see-saw that is Munich — geez, let it open wide already before anyone makes utterly ignorant comments on how “this doesn’t portend an ecstatic reception when it plays Boobville.”
Out of Focus 