Box Office Round Up – March 6-8, 2015

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Get behind the numbers of the last weekend’s box office. This week, Chris Neumer delves into what it takes to fail in Hollywood, the Demi Moore Razor, why Warner Brothers has no future with American Sniper and the strange career path of Chappie’s writer/director Neill Blomkamp.

by Chris Neumer

Occam’s Razor is unquestionably the most famous philosophical razor on the market today. Positing that the the simplest of several theories about an occurrence is probably the correct one, Occam’s Razor has single handedly been keeping the ‘razor’ alive and well for a number of years. That said, there are numerous other indie razors out there that are worth investigating. By far, my favorite is Hanlon’s Razor, which states; “Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity.” Good words to live by.

I feel like there should be a converse to Occam’s Razor though, something to the effect of: Just because something unfolded in a logical and rational manner doesn’t mean it was supposed to. Call this the Demi Moore Razor, if you will.

In the mid-90s, Moore was at the height of her stardom. She may have become better known as Ashton Kutcher’s wife in the 2000s, but her box office draw was at its zenith around 1994. On the heels of a co-starring role in the classic film, A Few Good Men, and then starring roles in the hits Indecent Proposal and Disclosure, Moore was atop the Hollywood star pyramid. Sure she had some diva moments—she once required a second private plane to fly from Idaho to New York City because she didn’t want to stack her suitcases on top of one another—but the studios tolerated this because Moore’s films were making money and they wanted to stay in her good graces. Dropping $5,000 – $10,000 on a second chartered plane to keep an A-list star of Moore’s magnitude at the time happy was nothing.

Then things turned south. Moore starred in an adaptation of The Scarlet Letter that now seems like a joke; in Moore’s version, Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale end up living happily ever after. Lost in the liberties taken by the filmmakers was that Moore’s on-screen husband was played by Robert Duvall, a man 29 years her senior. She then starred in The Juror. The Juror was a wretched excuse for cinema, garnering a 15% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes and causing Lisa Schwarzbaum to write that it was “a movie that assumes the viewer is incapable of enduring suspense without incurring grievous mental strain.”  Moore followed that up by starring in Striptease, a move that somehow turned out to be even a bigger mistake for her. It won the Golden Raspberry that year for Worst Picture and failed to hit even $35 million at the box office.

At the end of that run of critical and financial abominations, Moore’s career as a big draw was over. She made GI Jane in 1997 and then basically hung up her spurs. And it made perfect sense. Because Moore was given the chance to be the star and she blew it by choosing to make The Scarlet Letter, The Juror and Striptease. It was the type of thing that you see in sports all the time: a heralded rookie is given the opportunity to crack the starting lineup and, after numerous failures to live up to expectations, he is then unceremoniously shown the door.

The issue at hand though is that Moore’s situation as described above is so far from the rule in Hollywood, it is almost forgotten about as a non-significant outlier. When Mark Wahlberg, Sandra Bullock or Sylvester Stallone star in disappointments, it doesn’t severely limit their future choices. For Moore, it most certainly did.

I happened to think of the Demi Moore Razor while starring at the box office estimates for this last weekend and seeing writer/director Neill Blomkamp’s film Chappie atop the charts with an abysmal $13.3 million opening weekend.

Blomkamp’s tale begins well before his first movie. Blomkamp had produced a series of short films while working as an animator in Vancouver. These shorts (and some work Blomkamp had done for the Halo video game series) got into the hands of The Lord of the Rings’ writer/producer/director, Peter Jackson. Impressed by what he saw, Jackson offered Blomkamp the reins of a project he was producing, a Halo movie. Blomkamp said yes.

After countless months of in pre-production hell on Halo, the financing for the project fell through and Blomkamp was again free. As a ‘thank you’ for his work on the since shelved Halo project, Jackson gave Blomkamp a $30 million budget to make any movie he wanted to make. Blomkamp chose to make a feature film out of one of his earlier shorts; he called it District 9.

District 9 ended up a massive success. It grossed $115 million domestically and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay. It was hard to conceive of how anything could have gone better for Blomkamp’s debut.

For his follow-up film, Blomkamp made Elysium. Elysium had a $115 million budget and an A-list star in Matt Damon. The film garnered luke warm reviews and only managed a $93 million domestic take. Following Elysium’s unspectacular release, Blomkamp went back to the well and decided to turn yet another of his early career shorts into a feature film. The result this time was Chappie, a movie with a $50 million budget and another A-list (ish) star in Hugh Jackman. The results so far are significantly more underwhelming than they were for Elysium. The critics have royally panned Chappie (30% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes) and the movie’s opening weekend was less than half of what Elysium’s was ($13.3 million to $29 million).

By all logical and rational measures, Blomkamp’s career should be, if not already there, headed directly into the toilet. His films have not only got much worse quality wise as he’s gone along, but they’ve also taken in less and less money. As I mentioned earlier, District 9 earned $115 million; Elysium topped out at $93 million; Chappie is going to have an uphill battle to get to just $40 million. This type of sinking job performance seems like it should have Blomkamp calling the SyFy Network begging for work on T-Rex Tsunami. Except, in reality, nothing could be further from the truth. Blomkamp’s next project is one of the biggest movies currently in production; he is working on the fifth (and possibly sixth) installment of the Alien series.  Just because it seems like logic and rationality would point in one direction doesn’t mean it will happen that way.

On another front, American Sniper became the highest grossing movie of 2014 this last weekend. Due to some interesting accounting methods—when a movie makes its money doesn’t matter, only when it’s released does—American Sniper is the #1 film of 2014, despite making roughly 99.7% of its money in 2015. (And, please note, that 99.7% figure is not a joke. American Sniper seriously has made 99.7% of its box office in 2015).

Lost in a lot of the semantics about what a 2014 movie is and whether American Sniper’s box office would help it at the Oscars—it didn’t—are all the whys and whats surrounding this title. I think at this point, American Sniper has surpassed The Passion of the Christ as the all time greatest “What the fuck?” box office champ.

When The Passion of the Christ came out in 2004, it took experts by complete surprise. No one had ever really tried the marketing-by-church-group approach before and, by the conventional standards of Hollywood, it seemed laughable to think that one individual filmmaker, Mel Gibson, was setting up the wide release of movie in a dead language with no stars and no real ad campaign. And then it opened to bonkers numbers—$84 million its first weekend—and the laughter stopped. In the eleven years that have passed, numerous companies have tried to replicate the success  Gibson had with The Passion of the Christ and failed miserably.  At this point, The Passion of the Christ, like Moore’s career bottoming out, is looked at like a Hollywood anomaly.  It’s not something that can be understood.

Nothing about American’s Sniper’s release was in any way laughable—if anything, its platform release followed the Hollywood blueprint for such things—but its nearly $340 million (and counting) box office wasn’t and dare I say couldn’t have been predicted by anyone anywhere. Frankly, I’d be surprised to learn that anyone thought it would do even half that much. Lest we forget, director Clint Eastwood’s highest grossing film prior to American Sniper was Gran Torino with a $148 million total.

Today though, American Sniper is the highest grossing film of 2014, pulling in more than the latest installments of The Hunger Games and Captain America and will end up with more than $100 million more than the latest Transformers and X-Men movies… And no one has any idea as to why this is the case. Attributing its success to Eastwood, star Bradley Cooper or even the subject matter of special forces soldiers seems short-sighted because those points can quickly be debunked. Wait a minute, Cooper played another special forces soldier in The A-Team and that did about a quarter of what American Sniper is doing!

In the end, I don’t know what caused American Sniper to blow up the way it did. I don’t even have any theories. It could be the first viral movie; a cultural zeitgeist that just struck right. (SPOILER ALERT) However, saddest of all for Warner Brothers, with American Sniper’s lead character dead at the end, it doesn’t seem as if a sequel will be forthcoming, or even could be. I suppose we can call that the Titanic Corollary.