Box Office Round Up – November 6 – 8, 2015

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Get behind the numbers of the last weekend’s box office! Chris Neumer investigates whether The Peanuts Movie’s $44 million opening is good or not and found out something that goes against the grain of everything that is known in Hollywood: animated movies with built in audiences have done worse this year than completely original animated works. What? Are we living in Rand McNally?

by Chris Neumer

Last week, I made the unprecedented decision to write up a box office round up that focused on the future. I’d been starring at billboards and commercials for The Peanuts Movie for the better part of October and curiosity finally got the better of me: just who was Fox hoping would go see the film? Would it really be worth the untold millions that they had spent acquiring the rights and whatever type of profit sharing agreement they had with the Charles Schulz estate?

* My own opinion on this matter is that if the question is being asked, the answer is more than likely ‘no’.

I’m just going to do some cocktail napkin math here: if Fox paid $10 million for the rights to The Peanuts—and I have zero idea whether this is an accurate figure, it just seemed on the low end of reasonable—and agreed to pay the Schulz estate a chunk of the profits, they did so in hopes that their multi-million dollar investment would translate to a box office take that would be significantly higher than it otherwise would have been. Like $100 million higher. Otherwise it wouldn’t be worth the headache of dealing with all the extra cooks in the kitchen. Given that The Peanuts licensed merchandise “has annual sales of more than $2 billion”, according to the Dallas News, there would be a fair amount of extra cooks. And, if there’s one thing that studio executives hate, it’s extra cooks; particularly and especially those cooks who will take a chunk of their profits.

If a studio executive were offered the opportunity to choose between spear-heading a film that grossed $250 million that was based offer previously existing source material or a movie that made $200 million but was an original title, I would surmise that the majority would take the latter, despite the fact that it made $50 million less. They’d be in complete control of the property, its merchandising rights and all subsequent sequels. The profits would all be the releasing studio’s.

In the case of The Peanuts Movie, the film itself is basically serving as a giant commercial for Peanuts toys. This would be great for Fox if they owned the merchandising rights to The Peanuts characters, but they don’t. Those are owned by the Schulz estate and a company called Iconix Brand Group.

All of this is simply a prelude to the fact that The Peanuts Movie, with its incredibly well known characters, huge built in audience, expansive P&A campaign and prime November release date, brought in $6 million less than Fox’s completely original animated film, Home, took in its opening weekend earlier this year in March, $52 million to $44 million. It’s not anything that you’d have expected to see coming.

The one thing that the Schulz estate and family does not need to fret over though is whether they will be rewarded handsomely; sure their profit sharing might be down a smidge over what they’d have received if the movie opened at $60 million or more, but they got a lot up front. Not only did the Schulzs get a cut of the money Fox paid for the movie rights to The Peanuts, but 3 of the 4 writers credited on the movie are Schulzs. So are 2 of the 5 producers. If there is one thing that the Schulz family knows how to do, it’s get paid. And, I say this as a compliment, but I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen any group of people repeatedly squeeze more money out of their one idea as the Schulzs! Somewhere, Gary Larson and Bill Watterson are looking at each other cock-eyed and wondering if they made the right choice to get out when they did.

As an aside, one of the funniest things that I encountered while researching this column was the way that journalists went out of their way to treat the legacy of The Peanuts comic strip as artistic. After they’d get done writing that Charles Schulz has licensed The Peanuts characters to appear on everything from greeting cards to snow cone machines (seriously) and that 20,000 new Peanuts products are licensed every year, they’d then explain that no new comic strips have been drawn since Charles Schulz died to keep the legacy of the strip pure and untainted. It’s good stuff!

As I continued thinking about the discrepancy between Home and The Peanuts Movie, I began wondering how The Peanuts Movie would compare to other similar movies.

Interested in seeing what the normal range of box office openings was for film based on comic strips, I learned something intriguing: not many comic strips have been turned into animated films. I instantly thought that Garfield would have been a similarly veined movie as The Peanuts Movie, then I realized that while the character of Garfield was indeed animated, the rest of the cast was not. As I began scrolling through the list of comic strips (not comic books) that were turned into features, I saw that the extreme majority of them were live-action. Dick Tracy, The Addams Family, Brenda Starr, Dennis the Menace, Popeye and Marmaduke all feature real actors and, in the case of Marmaduke, an actual dog.

The only comparison for The Peanuts Movie that I could find was Over the Hedge, which opened to $38 million in 2006. Talk about a small sample size.

Then I decided to compare The Peanuts Movie to the other animated movies that were released wide in 2015, a list that includes just six films: Strange Magic, Home, Inside Out, Minions, Hotel Transylvania 2 and Shaun the Sheep. (Yeah, I hadn’t heard of the last one either!).

The average opening weekend for those six movies was $52.75 million, a figure The Peanuts Movie is well behind. For what it’s worth, the current average domestic gross of those films is $177.1 million, a figure I think The Peanuts Movie will also have a hard time reaching.

However, as I looked at the stats a little bit more closely, something positively bizarre popped out: the movies based on previously existing source material (or sequels) basically opened to the same amount as the original works did; the animated movies based on previously existing source material opened to an average of $53.1 million while the original works opened to an average of $49.3 million. Even stranger yet? The original works actually grossed more cumulative money ($181 million on average) than the works based on properties ($172.3 million). It has actually been better business in 2015 to release an original animated movie than one that has a built in audience. So that means… something.

If A-list actors and built in audiences no longer hold much weight, it’s going to be an every crazier crap shoot at the top of the Hollywood power rankings. My god, no one really does know anything!