Box Office Round Up – February 13-15, 2015

50Shades

Get behind the numbers of the last weekend’s box office. This week, Chris Neumer delves into whether 50 Shades of Grey is the most unsurprising hit of all time, looks into how you should and shouldn’t start a franchise and gets into how studio executive wanting to keep their jobs have changed the industry.

by Chris Neumer

The Scorpion King 4 came on out video in 2015. It is the sequel to a sequel to a sequel to a prequel that is a sequel to a sequel to a reboot of a remake that loosely adapted from a short story that was based on several historical events. I found that chain fascinating. Every step of the way, the studio executives that gave the approval to make every movie in that line of films had a reason (excuse) why the movie should have worked. “Don’t blame me for the choice! We had a built in audience!”

If you want to be very cynical about the nature of Hollywood—and, let’s be honest, we probably should be—you can look at the last decade’s shift from studios including some big budget original theatrical releases in their release schedules to almost none as the ultimate studio executive safety net.

In a weird way, studio executives are much like NBA and NFL coaches. They are hired to be fired. There is such a demand for the positions and they are in such a glamorous field that the people who have held their jobs for the longest aren’t necessarily the best people, but rather the people who give their bosses the least number of reasons to fire them.

Consider:

Green lighting Iron Man 4 is a no brainer. Even if the movie opens to a $6 million total, no one on the development side of things is going to be fired because of it.  The marketing side of things is a different matter.  But development is safe because Iron Man 4 is a safe choice. It’s a superhero movie based on existing source material with a built in audience. It’s as safe a choice as there can be; who could possibly be fired for championing another installment of a wildly successful franchise with a huge fan base?

Even the decision to green light some of Marvel Comics’ deep cuts, like Big Hero 6, is incredibly defensible in hindsight because of Marvel’s near flawless track record at the box office.

Green lighting something like Interstellar, even with director Chris Nolan’s reputation, is a much trickier proposition. If it fails to resonate at the box office, there is nothing defensible about the choice. The only person accountable is the person who signed off on making it. I mean, Interstellar wasn’t even a Warner Brothers release, so that removes the ability of a studio executive to explain that Interstellar was a ‘thank you’ to Nolan for his work on the Batman series.*

* Warner Brothers’ actual ‘thank you’ to Nolan came with them approving a $160 million budget for Inception.

Safe choices that can easily be defended to a board of directors are now en vogue. And thus, it shouldn’t come as much surprise that the rights to the novel 50 Shades of Grey were quickly snatched up by Universal Pictures and Focus Features and turned into a movie.

50 Shades of Grey was released to theaters this last weekend and came away with one of the most ho-hum $85 million openings you’ll ever seen. It’s not that an $85 million take isn’t good—it’s downright fantastic, especially for a film that is reported to have a $40 million budget—it’s that this isn’t surprising in any manner, shape or form as 50 Shades of Grey only exists because it’s popular; it is the Kim Kardashian of entertainment, so to speak.

The history of 50 Shades of Grey is unique to say the least. Let’s start at the beginning. The author of the Twilight series, Stephanie Meyer, got an idea for a story in a dream about a vampire who falls in love with a girl whose blood he also yearns to drink. That story ended up being the basis for the series Twilight. The Twilight books were immensely popular amongst young adults and were soon turned into motion pictures. The Twilight movies were seemingly even more popular than the Twilight books. As a result of this popularity, numerous fan fiction sites were inundated with new and updated tales of Bella and Edward (and Jacob).

One of the most popular of these fan fiction stories was by a British woman, Erika Mitchell. Mitchell’s Twilight fan fiction was heavy on the sex, lust and bondage between Edward and Bella, topics that the Mormon Meyer specifically left out of the original books. Mitchell’s Twilight fan fiction proved to be so popular that she changed some names around, adopting the pen name of E.L. James and began calling her stories 50 Shades… releasing them on their own site. That site proved to be so popular that the 50 Shades trilogy was picked up for publication and then sold in bookstores.

Despite receiving reviews that would make Uwe Boll cringe, book stores could not keep the 50 Shades of Grey books in stock. (My favorite criticism of James’ writing came courtesy of Salman Rushdie who said, “”I’ve never read anything so badly written that got published. It made Twilight look like War and Peace.”) To date, James is the most popular author in the United Kingdom. 50 Shades of Grey alone has sold more copies on Amazon UK than all the Harry Potter novels… combined.

On the heels of this success, Universal and Focus Features nabbed the film rights to 50 Shades of Grey for $5 million.* The cinematic adaptation of that story was released this weekend and—gasp!—pulled in $85 million its opening weekend.

* If I was a studio head, you know who I’d fire? The executives that didn’t make a bid higher than $5 million for the rights to 50 Shades of Grey.

It’s doubtful that there has ever been a safer release choice than 50 Shades of Grey. It was born of Twilight, lifted up to print thanks to overwhelming online support, became one of the biggest selling books of all time and now is making waves at the box office, taking in $85 million in its first three days.

Yawn.

The only other major new release this week was Fox’s $80+ million potential franchise, Kingsman: The Secret Service. Kingsman took in $36 million over the normal two day weekend. That’s great for February, but not that impressive for a film of Kingsman’s ilk. My projections show that Kingsman will probably make around $120 million, give or take. That’s a nice little chunky of change, but not something that would necessarily give rise to a franchise.

I’m torn whether it was silly for Fox to release Kingsman the same weekend as 50 Shades of Grey—going into the weekend, they had to know that roughly 10 million people would be seeing another film—or genius—of those 10 million people seeing 50 Shades of Grey, how many were in Kingsman’s target demo of comic book guys? Is there a number less than zero?

Whatever the case, as always, I find it fascinating that a studio would try to launch a new franchise in a down part of the year… and mid-February is definitely a down part of the year. In a weird way, it seems like studios should be extra careful with when they release potential franchises given how valuable a franchise is to the company’s bottom line. If you believe in a new title, particularly one like Kingsman that has a director with a lot of comic-book street cred in Matthew Vaughn and is based upon respected comic itself, it seems like there might be a better time to do that than Valentine’s Day weekend. C’est la vie…