Box Office Round Up – August 28 – August 30, 2015

Stumped-Magazine-We-Are-Your-Friends-Zac-Efron

Get behind the numbers of the last weekend’s box office! Zac Efron’s We Are Your Friends hit theaters and no one came. Chris Neumer gets behind the nature of stardom, investigates 2014’s Neighbors and wonders what having 30 million social media followers means if you can’t use them to get more than a $1.7 million opening weekend.

by Chris Neumer

This last weekend, Straight Outta Compton took its third box office crown in as many weeks, a Christian themed film surprised the, yes, hell out of box office pundits and writer/director Max Joseph’s film, We Are Your Friends opened to one of the most miserable receptions in Hollywood history.* So, naturally, I want to talk about a movie that opened in early May of 2014, Neighbors.

* This is not an exaggeration: We Are Your Friends had the third worst opening ever for a wide release. To put this in perspective, Ben Affleck’s Gigli more than doubled the opening weekend take that We Are Your Friends did. Yikes.

Neighbors was an enormous success for Universal Pictures. Its budget was just $18 million and it took in $268 million worldwide. It was an impressive haul. It also perfectly matched the type of performance I’d look for if I were a studio head. Low budget, high concept and big name actors (Seth Rogen and Zac Efron). If This Is The End was 2013’s highest profiting movie, it stood to reason that Neighbors would be 2014’s. Since Universal Pictures hasn’t been hacked yet, we’ll just have to go on spec that since Neighbors cost $14 million less to make and grossed almost $150 million more worldwide it would have been even more profitable than This Is the End.

Neighbors was such a success, it immediately caused Hollywood insiders and entertainment journalists alike to begin figuring out why it had done as well as it had… and then how that could be recreated going forward. A similar activity took place two weeks ago when Straight Outta Compton opened to $60 million. It didn’t take long before people started attributing the movie’s two stars, Efron and Rogen, for its financial prosperity. Hitflix wrote that “Seth Rogen and Zac Efron[fueled] Neighbors to a $50 million opening.”  The LA Times referred to the film as “Rogen and Efron’s Story”. The USA Today went so far as to suggest that Efron was going to blow up to box office going forward because of Neighbors’ success. They quoted senior media analyst for Rentrak, Paul Dergarabedian, stating that, “Rogen’s seal of approval will add immeasurable street cred to Efron.”  Rogen agreed with Dergarabedian’s statement, concurring, “I think if [Neighbors] does well then that will happen.” One notable website actually referred to Neighbors as “Zac Efron’s Neighbors”.

Based on the popularity of Efron’s work Neighbors, The Hollywood Reporter actually labled him one of the new Kings of comedy, putting Efron’s name into the headline along with Kevin Hart and Amy Schumer. “Hollywood’s New Comedy Kings and Queens: Kevin Hart, Amy Schumer and, Yep, Zac Efron”, the magazine’s article screamed. The mainstream media had spoken: the arrival of Zac Efron was finally and officially complete. After years as a teen heart throb, he was now an in-demand adult actor. More than just that, he was a member of the new A-list.

Well, let’s fast forward 15 months. Efron’s new movie, We Are Your Friends, opened on Friday. It was Efron’s first starring turn since Neighbors. Deadline reported three days before We Are Your Friends’ hit theaters that Warner Brothers was hoping for an opening weekend “in the low double digits”. They didn’t expect it to hit $15 million, but something close to that was well within the realm of possibility. About that…

We Are Your Friends opened and so severely under performed that it’s hard to come up with apt metaphors to describe the scenario. Warner Brothers estimated that We Are Your Friends would make roughly $12 million; it didn’t actually make $2 million. With a $1.7 million weekend, We Are Your Friends did worse than the train wreck that is Fantastic Four did in its fourth week in theaters and barely bested the Meryl Streep flop, Ricki and the Flash, which was also in its fourth week. We Are Your Friends grossed about $250,000 more than Adam Sandler’s Pixels did… and the latter film was in its sixth week in theaters and playing on 1,300 less screens!

As I mentioned above, when the dust settled, We Are Your Friends ended up with the third worst opening weekend for a film in wide release in history. Or, if you want to make it more dramatic, We Are Your Friends had the worst opening weekend for any live-action film in wide release ever. Literally, no live-action film ever did worse. Ever! EVER!!!!!

When your friends groan and talk about Efron being the worst, they’re not kidding! He actually is! And so, with a resounding thud, Efron’s film flopped and with that, he instantly dropped off the A-List.* It was, all things considered, one of the more interesting career turnarounds ever. In the span of just over a year, Efron had gone from being an directionless actor who might not ever become a leading man, to a huge A-list movie star, to a horrific underachiever, all with the release of just two films. It really is a what-have-you-done-for-me-lately world we live in.

* I’m not 100% sure what criteria needs to be met to be on the A-List, but I can assure you that headlining the biggest live-action bomb of all time will remove you from said list.

One of the biggest changes to the Hollywood landscape over the last 20 years has been the disappearance of stars; leading men and women who will put asses in the seats. It used to be the case that the presence of a certain actor, like Arnold Schwarzenegger or Tom Cruise, would draw people to the theaters. It didn’t matter what they did—if they played action heroes or bartenders or a twin of Danny DeVito’s—their movies still made money.

In 1992, Premiere Magazine, predicted that Cruise’s movie Far & Away would be the second highest grossing movie of the summer. The summer of ’92 wasn’t a great summer, but it did feature huge releases like Batman Returns, Lethal Weapon 3, Patriot Games, A League of their Own, Sister Act and Unforgiven. And the people in the know thought that Far & Away would trump all of them, save for Batman Returns.

The reason this is worth noting is because of the subject matter of Far & Away. Here is Wikipedia’s plot synopsis for it: Joseph and Shannon travel from Ireland to America in hopes of claiming free land in Oklahoma. The pair get sidetracked in Boston, where Joseph takes up boxing to support himself. When he loses a pivotal fight, the two are left penniless. Now faced with poverty, the two must find new ways to scrape by.

This movie—a depressing, Angela’s Ashes-like, period piece about immigrants dealing with poverty—was expected to do hundreds of millions of dollars. Why? Because it starred Cruise. That was the way things worked! When Far & Away tanked, it still ended up making $60 million domestically (and a $60 million budget, no less).

Now, a newly minted A-List star like Efron can have a leading role in a film that hits theaters with no real competition and it/he can’t even muster an $800/theater average. To put We Are Your Friends’ per theater number in perspective, Far & Away, which was ultimately considered a pretty big flop, took in $1,045/theater in its eighth week of release, more than 23 years ago.

The starkest number of all is this: 6. That’s how many people, on average, went to see each showing of We Are Your Friends. And when your star can’t get more than 6 people on average into a given showing of his film opening weekend, I think it’s time to start re-investigating that ‘star’ label.

The interesting element of this story is that we know how things are going to turn out for Efron. He will remain firmly entrenched in ‘washed up’ territory and ‘loser’ territory on all year end lists. Things will start to turn around for him next May though when Neighbors 2 comes out and he will be gloriously reunited with his A-List status.

We can get into the issues surrounding the fact that We Are Your Friends‘ male and female lead, Efron and Emily Ratajkowski, have over 30 million combined Facebook and Instagram followers and they apparently didn’t help at all at a later date.