editor's note: it's up to you to figure out whether this piece reflects the actual opinion of the Cap'n on box office numbers, or whether pieces from earlier this summer do. I can't tell you what to think...It occurs to me that sometime tomorrow or Monday the box office figures will either tell the world what movies succeeded and failed in the open market. I used to really follow that kind of thing, because it seemed like some kind of pseudo-scientific system to give you an idea of how people responded to movies. But while watching
A Decade Under the Influence and getting some idea of just how much box office changed the way movies are perceived, I decided not to pay attention to them anymore.
The "Blockbuster" had a lot to do with the change from letting a movie happen to turning filmmaking into calculated gambling. If a movie could open on as many screens as humanly possible, making a ton of money on the first weekend of its release, the studio could recoup their investment quickly. Somewhere along the way, every successive weekend became less and less relevant. The race was to get the big money up front and minimize the "in theatre" time. DVD's been compounding this, and if you've listened to many commentary tracks, you'll notice that more often or not they're being recorded BEFORE the film is in theatres. That's how quick turn around is now.
I worked as a projectionist in a movie theatre for a few summers, and it was explained to me that we could expect a movie to play AT MAX for four weeks, and only if it did really well the first two weeks. After that it got split billing or was packed up and sent back to the studio or the bargain theatre. It wasn't merely the influx of new releases, but the mentality that people weren't interested in seeing a movie two weeks into its run, as though we suffered from cinematic ADD.
There was a movie that proved this wrong, and not surprisingly, that's because it operated on the old system. In 2000,
God's Army, the first film financed, written, directed, and starring Mormons got a "premium" slot in our theatre (one of the big screens) and no one was concerned about first weekend numbers.
What happened instead was that over the next two months, every day or so another bus would come from somewhere in the South East United States (we were the only theatre playing
God's Army in the South) and the screen would sell out. It wasn't making $100 million dollar weekends, but
God's Army did it the old fashioned way: word of mouth and a dedicated audience.
That's the same way films like
Easy Rider and
Halloween did it: week by week, person by person. In fact, that's also how something like
Deep Throat became the cult legend it is. Most modern horror classics, including
The Evil Dead,
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and
Night of the Living Dead also played the slow way, moving from drive in to drive in and building an audience by word of mouth. None of them were "failures" because they didn't recoup their budgets in three days.
Nowadays, if you hear any kind of word of mouth about a movie, you're usually going to be waiting for the dvd to come out. Odds are by the time it gets to you, there's no chance of seeing something on the big screen.
Grindhouse was a "bomb", so before I could even get anyone to come see it at Mission Valley again (and you have to see that movie on the big screen to really get what Tarantino and Rodriguez are after) it had been pulled by the panicking Weinstein brothers.
Well before my time, a movie would play in theatres for at least a month, allowing people to see it over and over again before the next film came in. This, at least, is what professors and family tell me, because that's the exception and not the rule these days. Nowadays
Speed Racer and
The Golden Compass are judged by their opening numbers, and both, regardless of the actual movie, were failures based on opening weekend.
Of course,
Donnie Darko was a "failure", and
Freddy Vs. Jason was a "success", strictly by the numbers. The remake of The Grudge was a huge "success", while
The Assassination of Jesse James was a "failure". Why I bring this up is because somehow the stigma of box office numbers now bleeds over into the perceived "quality" of a film. Since anyone can open up their newspaper and see the Box Office results, they can now say "oh, well movie X didn't do so well, so it must not be good". This leap doesn't always hold up, and if I did some more digging, it wouldn't surprise me at all to find out some of my favorite movies were "bad" because of the arbitrary Box Office figures.
Remember that a movie like
Trainspotting is never going to open on as many screens as
The Phantom Menace, or get the kind of advertising blitz that we're seeing for
Indiana Jones right now. I've seen probably fifty ads for
Crystal Skull in the last five days, and only two for David Mamet's
Redbelt. Does this make one movie better than the other? Will
Crystal Skull be better than
Iron Man if it does better numbers? Will it be worse if it doesn't?
All I'm saying is that maybe we should step back from the numbers game and not let it stand in for actual opinion on a movie. Good and Bad alike can do good numbers, and the same goes for low performers. Give a movie some more time than "right now" to see if it has legs, and remember that almost every film has drop off from one week to the next, so that doesn't mean that everyone was duped and it actually sucks. Audiences are a fickle lot, like pretty much everything else in the market.
