Box Office Round Up – June 26-28, 2015

Stumped-magazine-ted-2-mark-wahlberg

Get behind the numbers of the last weekend’s box office! Jurassic World takes the top spot at the box office again. Yawn. Chris Neumer changes things up and looks at how hard it is to talk negatively about a dog who joins the Marines, why Ted 2 was dated before it opened, why it took Cinderella eight weeks to earn less than $4 million and investigates the unfairness surrounding Boaz Yakin’s directorial career.

by Chris Neumer

Well, here we are again. For a third straight month, one movie has absolutely dominated the theatrical box office. Furious 7 took care of April, The Avengers: Age of Ultron handled May and Jurassic World has cast its spell over June. These three movies have finished first at the box office for nine of the last thirteen weekends, starting when Furious 7 was released on April 3rd. (On another note, Furious 7 was released thirteen weeks ago? Man, is time going fast). And this is probably the most difficult aspect of writing about the box office: continually finding new perspectives to write about the same enormous achievements.  Because, no matter how you frame it, Furious 7, The Avengers: Age of Ultron and Jurassic World are all basically the same from a box office perspective.

Jurassic World has proved especially challenging in this respect because the entirety of its success can be summed up in the following statement: audiences love to see people being eaten by dinosaurs. How do you get 4,500 words worth of material out of that? The answer is that you don’t. The best way out of this been-there-done-that issue is to simply turn your sights to the second place finisher and investigate that, praying like hell that it’s not something you’ve written about seven times previously like a well made, well-reviewed, financially successful Pixar film.

Naturally, this week the second place finisher was Inside Out.

Desperate times call for desperate measures and thus, I introduce, Stumped’s Box Office Bullets!  Let’s begin!

• SETH McFARLANE PICKED THE WRONG WEEK TO RELEASE TED 2*

* Yes, I realize that McFarlane is not the entity who actually chose to release Ted 2 on this weekend.

From the release of Ted 2’s first trailer in January, it became apparent that McFarlane’s latest film was a not-so-thinly-veiled attempt to show audiences that gay marriage was the correct path for the United States and the world to follow. Sadly for McFarlane and joyously for the country, the very day Ted 2 opened, the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage.  The movie was dated from its first showing on.

It must have been odd for McFarlane to campaign hard for gay marriage to become legal—here’s a quote supporting it that he gave in August of 2010—to champion the institution, to make a movie designed to highlight why it’s a good idea… and then to have it ultimately bite him in the ass.

Sure, Ted 2’s poor opening wasn’t entirely due to the legalization of gay marriage (in all honesty, if we’re going to break it down percentage wise, I don’t think it’s even the biggest reason for the film’s $33 million opening; that would probably be the overwhelmingly negative reviews it received), but you have to wonder whether McFarlane wasn’t at home on Saturday night asking why the decision to legalize gay marriage couldn’t have been put off for just a couple of weeks.

• WHERE ARE THE PEOPLE WHO ARGUE THAT FILMS CAN’T EARN MONEY ON HALLOWEEN WEEKEND NOW?

Every year, when a series of cheaply made and critically reviled movies is released on Halloween weekend, box office pundits come out of the wood work to explain that of course the movies didn’t earn much money that weekend, the kids were out trick-or-treating!  They have much better things to be doing than sitting in a dark theater watching movies, so of course the box office took a hit!  It’s the Halloween Curse!

If it were mathematically possible, I’d label this phenomenon a 200% media driven creation. I say this because no one ever makes this argument on Christmas, Thanksgiving or, in this case, when a movie with an equality theme opens during gay pride week hours after the Supreme Court has ruled on the biggest civil rights case in the last 40 years. You don’t think the people with a liberal, equality bent had something better to do this weekend than go see Ted 2?

Now that I’m thinking of it, I wonder whether Ted 2 will see the normal 50%-60% second week box office drop.

On one hand, I just suggested that large amounts of Ted 2’s target demographic missed out on seeing it last weekend because they were celebrating the legalization of gay marriage. The logical counterpoint to this is that they’ll potentially see the movie next weekend, contributing to a less than usual drop.

On the other hand, it’s also entirely possible that having missed Ted 2 opening weekend and having seen the less-than-stellar reviews and ugly word-of-mouth it’s been getting that these same people will just shrug and rationalize that they would have seen it, but now it’s not worth their time.

C’est la vie.  We’ll just have to cry into the new and substantially more equitable world we now live in.

• OTHER MOVIES OPENED AND DID SUBSTANTIALLY WORSE THAN TED 2

Another movie opened wide this week, Max. Max opened in just under 3,000 theaters (2,855) and earned a total of $12 million. Its $4,200 per theater average was less than half of Ted 2’s and less than a third of Jurassic World’s and Jurassic World is in its third week in theaters.

The reason that no one is saying anything negative about Max is twofold: 1) Max’s budget couldn’t have been more than $10 million, and 2) Max is about a dog. Check that, a heroic dog. Double check that, a heroic dog who is actually a member of the United States Armed Forces. The tagline of the film is: Best Friend. Hero. Marine. Warner Brothers stopped just short of running an ad campaign for the film that was centered around the slogan, “Support the Troops. See Max.”

Max’s $12 million opening was behind fellow dog movies, Snow Dogs, Turner & Hooch (which was released in 1988), Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore and something called Good Boy! It was an auspicious beginning.

There was one take away I had from Max. Poor Boaz Yakin.

Yakin is Max’s director. Yakin directed the $100 million hit, Remember the Titans. He also was one of the screenwriters behind another $100 million hit, Now You See Me… Today, Yakin is directing dog movies.

If you ever want to think about the uniquely unfair nature of Hollywood, Yakin’s directorial career should make you very angry. He started out writing and directing the insanely well-reviewed film, Fresh. Fresh had a $3 million budget and made $8 million at the box office. After writing and directing The Price of Rubies, Yakin struck gold and was hired by Jerry Bruckheimer to direct a movie about 1960’s high school football, Remember the Titans. The film went on to do $116 million domestically.

And then Yakin got hired to direct Uptown Girls, where Brittany Murphy learns something about life while baby-sitting the then precocious Dakota Fanning. Blah blah blah, now he’s directing dogs. Most directors would kill to have a $100 million hit to their name. Yakin has one… and it didn’t seem to matter.

CINDERELLA FINALLY CROSSED THE $200 MILLION MARK

Cinderella was released in mid-March to much success. It had a $67 million opening weekend. The film hit $196.3 million eight weeks ago and just sat there. Disney refused to pull the movie from theaters because it knew, sooner or later, it would pull in another $3.7 million, crossing the magical $200 million threshold. That looks a lot better on a DVD/Blu-ray case than does $198 million.

After pulling in $300,000 this last weekend, Cinderella finally made it to the Promised land. Its total is now at $200,306,000. It will be interesting to see how much longer it stays in theaters.

Thus concludes the first installment of Stumped‘s Box Office Bullets!  The second installment can be counted on the next time one movie takes the box office crown three weekends in a row.