Box Office Round Up – March 13-15, 2015

CINDERELLA

Get behind the numbers of the last weekend’s box office. This week, Chris Neumer delves into hidden franchises, how Disney’s live-action adaptation of their earlier films is going to impact Harry Potter, the popularity of princesses and why Liam Neeson might be a little late in quitting action films.

by Chris Neumer

I’m 39. One of the great benefits to being an entertainment writer in your late thirties is that you’ve mellowed considerably from your twenties. Anger at Hollywood’s capitalistic tendencies slowly turns to acceptance and a shrug of your shoulders. That’s the way it is! What can I do about it? Am I supposed to claw and bitch and moan and fight and tell the studios that they’re supposed to be focused more on quality than profit? As if on cue, this is where the thirty-something me rolls his eyes and turns his attention onto something that has a chance, however remote, of actually happening… you know, like Democrats and Republicans getting along.

That said, even I have my moments where I can’t swallow what the studios are doing. The last time this happened was early January, 2010. That was the time when Sony announced that rather than proceed with their plans to make Spider-Man 4, they were going to simply reboot the series and start over.

The reason this impacted me was because it gave me a scare looking forward: at that moment it seemed entirely possible that studios would have their movies on an eight year loop. Make a trilogy and then, three years after the last film was released, just start making ‘em again. It would certainly save the studios money on source material and screenwriters fees.

When I think of this phenomenon, the Harry Potter series always comes to mind. It is the most profitable franchise of all time and it isn’t even close. Harry Potter’s films have not only topped all the Marvel movies, but they’ve more than doubled the box office receipts of the Batman movies. I rubbed my eyes when I saw the latter stat; I couldn’t believe it. Harry Potter’s films have done $7.7 billion worldwide and Batman’s films have only done $3.7 billion.

At present, Warner Brothers is sitting on one of the most impressive properties in history and completely unable to do anything with it. Sure they can release special edition Blu-rays or re-release the movies to theaters for Harry Potter Day, but those endeavors won’t be able to add anything beyond a couple of million to their corporate bottom line. Remaking the movies, however, would.

Fortunately for the movie-going public, Warner Brothers hasn’t yet been able to pull the trigger on rebooting that series, instead choosing to turn author J.K. Rowling’s 42 page book, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, into a trilogy. Mark my words though, I would bet good money that the first film in a new Harry Potter franchise will be in theaters by 2024.

This brings me to this week’s big release, Cinderella. Starring Downton Abbey’s Lilly James and Cate Blanchett, Cinderella pulled in a whopping $70 million at the box office this past weekend.

Cinderella is a fascinating title to me because, upon closer inspection, I realized that it is part of what I’m going to describe as a hidden franchise. That designation might sound odd—a hidden franchise almost seems like an oxymoron—but that’s precisely what Cinderella is: a franchise. And an enormously popular one at that. Why only Disney has recognized that little girls (and their parents) love going to movies about princesses is completely beyond me. If I was the head of a studio and had a 12-picture slate per year, you can rest assured that every year at least one of those 12 pictures would be a princess movie.

Well, the only thing better than a princess movie is a princess movie that people are familiar with… and people are definitely familiar with Cinderella. Since Disney’s first animated Cinderella movie came out in 1950, an astounding 36 different movies have been made about her.  This number is made all the more impressive because it does not reflect Cinderella’s bit roles in movies like Shrek or reimagining’s of the Cinderella story from the perspective of other characters like Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister. It does contain a film I am now curious to see, The Tender Tale of Cinderella Penguin. According to Wikipedia, that film, “comically adapts the tale of Cinderella with penguins.”

From Ella Enchanted to Ever After to Cinderella starring Brandy or Hilary Duff to Cinderfella starring Jerry Lewis to an erotic version of Cinderella where Prince Charming is smitten with Cinderella because of her prowess at an orgy, the Cinderella story is one story that continues to delight time after time.   Disney keeps churning out Cinderellas and people keep eating them up with a spoon.

The decision to start turning Disney fairy tales into live-action films isn’t exactly new—there was a live-action Beauty and the Beast released in 1946—but has started to come to a head of late because the movies have a very high probability of making money. And thus, in a very short time, we’ve seen live-action versions of Alice in Wonderland, Snow White (Snow White and the Huntsman), Sleeping Beauty (Maleficent) and now Cinderella. The coming years will feature many more, including, most notably, a live-action Beauty and the Beast (not to be confused with the French live-action movie from 2014) and two different versions of The Jungle Book. I can only hope that a live-action Lion King is on the books for 2018. If Disney could keep the budget for that under $150 million, I think they’d have a monster hit on their hands.

What’s most apparent from this last weekend’s release of Cinderella is that the studios are now aware of how to handle this genre of films. After a couple of missteps, ahem Snow White and the Huntsman, it seems like the studios have now perfected the art of releasing these films.

For me, what stood out the most for Cinderella was its $95 million budget. $95 million is a lot of money, but not when compared to Oz The Great and Powerful’s $215 million budget, Maleficent’s $180 million budget and Snow White and the Huntsman’s $170 million budget. One great way to add extra profit to your bottom line is not to spend it. Not enough attention is paid to this aspect of profiting. Given that the studios see about half of the money their films pull in domestically (and less from over seas), they would need to essentially to see a return of $2 million at the box office for every $1 million they spend just to break even. Please note, looking at this financial statistic in this way does so in a vacuum. It effectively ignores the possibility that there are other ways for studios to make money, including in home video, cable rights and video on demand, but does so in the interest of simplicity. It also ignores the fact that some of the money that is targeted to be spent on the budget goes right back into Disney’s pocket as the owner of the different pieces of equipment and locations that need to be rented.*

* This is a topic for a different day, but it absolutely fascinates me that Disney can own a soundstage and then charge Disney productions money to use them. This means that if a movie has a $50 million budget, there’s a good chance that $20 million plus of that total has gone right back into its own pocket. If you’re confused as to how this works, imagine this scenario: you buy a house outright and then charge yourself rent to live in it.

The budget for Cinderella was $85 million less than Maleficent’s budget. That means that Cinderella already has a $170 million step up on Maleficent at the box office. In other words, Maleficent would need to gross $170 million more than Cinderella just to bring in the same profits as Cinderella because of its significantly larger budget. This is the question at the core of green lighting projects with astronomical budgets: do we expect that this additional cost will bring in three or four times the amount spent in sales? If the answer to that is ‘yes’, then spend away! If the answer is ‘no’, then start cutting things back, because it makes no financial sense to do so otherwise.

By casting smaller stars and cutting back on scenes requiring extensive CG work, Disney has kept its budget low and its profit margin high. Given that Cinderella had a bigger weekend than Maleficent and did so on a random weekend in March as opposed to over Memorial Day weekend, the folks at Disney have to be very happy with themselves at the moment. It also spells only great things for a live-action Little Mermaid.

In other news, Americans are officially sick and tired of shitty Liam Neeson action movies. Neeson’s latest actioneer, Run All Night, came out Friday and earned just $11 million. In a way, I feel sorry for Neeson. He burst onto the crafty-veteran-kicking-ass scene with 2009’s Taken, creating an entire genre as he did so. Since then, he has appeared in major roles in 18 live-action films, only three of which received ‘fresh’ ratings on Rotten Tomatoes; The Grey (79% fresh), Non-Stop (60% fresh) and A Walk Among the Tombstones (65% fresh). When you look at his filmography, the only good things Neeson has done are documentaries (which he narrates).

The beauty of Taken was its simplicity. Neeson had to find his daughter. He did what he had to do in order to do so. Since then, his movies have gotten substantially more complex and, if we’re going to be honest, convoluted. To save my life, I don’t think I could tell you how the bad guys’ plan was conceived in Non-Stop. At one point, their plan—this is the bad guys, mind you—consisted of having Neeson kill a colleague by accident at a specific time.

Run All Night doesn’t sink to that level of disbelief, but is filled with a lot of holes and interesting choices by the characters. On the heels of this latest flop, Neeson has stated that he is going to hang up with ass-kicking spurs in a couple of years. I had to laugh at that story. If the box office returns of his latest action flicks are any indication, I think Hollywood will have already made that decision for him. I’m not saying that this is akin to quitting after you’ve been fired… but it’s close.