Vulture-4 takeaways from a flop strewn summer

[DAR]

http://www.vulture.com/2013/08/4-takeaways-from-this-flop-strewn-movie-summer.htmlInteresting article

[Plain Old Tele]

Interesting, but it's absurd to put ELYSIUM in that category. And, given, its OS performance, AE as well.

[baumer]

I don't think it's a well thought out article at all. In fact, I think most of us here could write a better article explaining why certain films failed this summer.  

[baumer]

The article makes it sound like all of these films that are doing poorly were top quality films and that the money the studios spent on them was justified.  When in fact, many of the films this summer, imo, are kind of terrible.  Even the ones that did make money, many of them were kind of poor.  I know this all opinion but IM3 did well because of Avengers.  But it's not that great of a film.  And then you have the comment in the article that kind of downplays what WWZ did.  The film made 500 mill WW and more importantly it had north of a 3 multiplier here.  Who cares about the rewrites and the reshoots and so on.  Films always did that back in the 70's.  JAWS was being rewritten 2 minutes before Spielberg yelled action.

 

Sorry but that article is written by someone who imo doesn't understand the box office completely.

[Alpha]

1. They should have stuck with sequels.

No they shouldn't. That's the worst thing they should do. In fact, why should they keep milking the cow instead of making original films? Some of the biggest movies of past summers were original ideas, and the author completely ignores the basic idea that if an idea is well thought out and executed well, then it will be more successful then any "epic" sequel Hollywood can come up with. The original films that came out this summer weren't well-executed ideas (After Earth, RIPD, The Lone Ranger), meanwhile films like Brave, Ted or even Magic Mike broke out because they were films that people wanted to see. And debunking World War Z's overwhelming success ($198.3 million domestic gross) because of "production troubles" is something audiences don't care about.

 

2. U.S. audiences no longer make or break a movie.

This is just the author telling us that overseas box office is cakewalk. Why would you assume a movie's success is based only on overseas markets? Surely it makes up a large portion of a film's worldwide gross, but the US is still a HUGE moviegoing market that major studios cannot give up on in favor of others. Iron Man 3's domestic gross makes up 33% of the overall worldwide gross of the film. That may not seem like much, but look at top market China, grossing $121.2 million. Compared to the US gross, that about a third of the dom. gross. Unlike the domestic market, the overseas market as a whole is greater than the sum of it's parts as the individual countries make up a fraction compared to the US moviegoing market.

 

3. When all else fails, blame the release date — not the movie.

I at first thought this was a good point, but it just drifted into nonsense like "release movies in March because they'll be BETTER!" and "No-no to late July! BAD TIMING!" because that was not the problem this summer. The problem was what executives and box office experts keep saying; "blockbuster fatigue." There were WAY too many tentpoles this summer, and there was a blockbuster hopeful every other weekend, leaving August the only time audiences could cool off. Audiences spent tons of money on the first half of summer, and with their pockets empty for the last half of summer, there wasn't much room for more success stories. I actually believe the author would be right about this one, but instead the suggestion was to "move films to an earlier date." Sorry, but that creates a bigger clusterf--k than before, so-called box office expert.

 

4. Even when Hollywood screws up, they still break records.

Because that's really what studios should think. "Hey guys! Even if 4 of our tentpoles flop, all we need to do is release an Avengers every year and we'll be perfectly FINE!" Not really. The way studios spend these days, just one or two blockbusters can't (or barely) make up for the financial losses that every flop brings. I hate this attitude that one film's treasure can make up for another film's trash that's being said everywhere in the box office world, including these forums.

[Gopher]

Good movie, good marketing, good release date. If you have at least two of those things then I think you can succeed. 

[Ezen Baklattan]

For #2, the overseas market is definitely growing fast, and strong enough grosses can save films from worse fates, (the prime example being After Earth this year, I'll discuss it more in my preview) but there's a reason Hollywood still focuses on the states. It's clearly their dominant market, and to say that US doesn't make or break a film is a bit of a stretch.

 

I'm actually going to present some of my own takeaways from the summer in my big summer writeup.

[Jessie]

I pay £15 a month to see as many films as I want at the cinema and I've barely gone this year due to the lack of many good movies released. Also original films can make money, they just need to be good. Every flop this summer was predicted by all of us on here because we knew they looked shit and they ended up being just that.

[chasmmi]

The problem of recent times is that producers seem to be focusing too much on creating franchises straight off the boot. I saw in another thread that the Mortal Instrument sequel is basically already in production on the assumption they had a smash franchise on their hands. This is the wrong way round surely.

 

Pirates and Matrix shows that anything can be turned into a franchise if popular enough. You just need to get film 1 right and a successful 2 and 3 is almost guaranteed (even if quality drops off big time).

 

 

2013 was disappointing for blockbusters purely because  some idiots seemed to think that 

 

A) Jack Sparrow playing an Indian that hasn't been relevent since the days of black and white was a lock for a worldwide smash.

 

Shylaman can still be a big draw.

 

C) Stuff that looks a little bit like transformers but isn't will pull audiences in.

 

I can go on... but won't.

 

 

2014 may not have the obvious massive hit like Iron Man in its line up, but with First class, HTTYD, Apes, Pixar and more, it already seems like the week by week release schedule will give me something that looks pretty good to watch almost each time.