Box Office Round Up – October 30 – November 1, 2015
Changing things up, Chris Neumer gets behind the numbers of… next weekend’s box office? Neumer investigates the long road to getting The Peanuts Movie in theaters and wonders one question: who is excited about seeing this film? With tracking numbers dipping by a sizable number, experts are beginning to wonder the same thing.
Three new movies were released this last weekend and they all failed. Horribly. One was something about boy scouts and zombies (Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse) another was about American politicians running a campaign in Bolivia (Our Brand Is Crisis) and the third was about a chef who was an alcoholic asshole (Burnt). Combined, their total box offices might not have beaten The Martian’s in its fifth week of release.
Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, I’d like to turn my attention in a direction not often seen in box office round up columns: forward. I want to get inside the rationale for the upcoming Peanuts movie.
If you have a TV, a computer or have merely left the house in the last three weeks, you are well aware of the fact that The Peanuts Movie is hitting theaters on November 6th. I believe Fox’s broadcast of the NFL on Sunday actually featured Charlie Brown trying to kick the football held by Lucy. And, I should point out, that is not a joke. The promotions and advertising have been flying at Americans non-stop, like asteroids at the Millennium Falcon. Frankly, it’s kind of surprising that Fox didn’t somehow work The Peanuts into the World Series broadcast. Wait, what? They did? They had the Peanuts sing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame”? Well, then….
What’s made The Peanuts Movie’s promotion so interesting to me is twofold: 1) the target audience does not seem to be children, as evidenced by the fact that the Peanuts were singing the 7th inning stretch during the World Series and on the Fox NFL shows, and 2) there seem to be far more commercials for The Peanuts Movie airing than for the latest James Bond movie, Spectre, which is opening the same day and expected to do double the money that The Peanuts Movie will bring in. It all led me to ponder the big question lurking in the corner of the room: just who the hell does Fox think is interested in going to see The Peanuts Movie?
Properties are king in Hollywood at present. Over the course of the last 25 years, the franchise has emerged as the main moneymaker for the studios, pushing aside A-list stars and awards in the process. If you can find a successful franchise, your studio will be humming along for quite sometime. Find two or three mega franchises and you’ll be written of in deferential terms the way Universal is being written of this year with the Fast and the Furious, Jurassic Park and Despicable Me franchises all generating major cash for the company.
The trick is, of course, figuring out what franchises will hit big. Young adult titles seemed to be the way to go, until they weren’t. Harry Potter, Twilight and The Hunger Games’ series struck gold, but Insurgent, I Am Number 4, The Maze Runner and Ender’s Game all failed to capture any sort of following. In the case of The Maze Runner, Fox is actually releasing the final installment of the series in one part, rather than separate it into two parts, ala every other successful franchise out there. It makes perfect sense—why throw good money after bad?—but is a stark indication of what the studio thinks of its franchise as well.
One of the soundest bets for a getting a franchise off the ground is to adapt it from pre-existing source material. That source material could be anything: a graphic novel, a TV show, or in the case of The Peanuts, a comic strip. The logic is that the more people that already know about the franchise’s characters and concept, the better the box office will be. And it’s hard to argue with that (though not impossible). The job of the marketing department is to get audiences familiar with the title and its aesthetic and, by bringing popular source material to the big screen, the difficultly of that job is lessened considerably.
There’s only one problem with this: initial franchise offerings based upon old source material have consistently failed. The only exceptions to this list are cinematic adapations of classic literature like The Great Gatsby, The Lord of the Rings and any and all Shakespeare. Otherwise, you show me a list of the biggest box office bombs of the last ten years and I’ll show you a list of movies adapted from old source material: John Carter, The Lone Ranger, Dark Shadows, Pan, Jack and the Giant Slayer, Speed Racer, The 13th Warrior and The Man from UNCLE, to name but a few titles, are all movies based upon old source material that did not in any manner, shape or form, resonate with modern audiences.
And say what you will about The Peanuts comic strip, but it is decidedly old source material. Charlie Brown and Snoopy had spaceships named after them in 1969 and the now classic A Charlie Brown Christmas aired on TV four years prior to that in 1965. If Charlie Brown aged in real time since when he first debuted in newspapers, he’d be 76 years old today. Now that is crazy!
Fox is betting big on The Peanuts being a successful franchise for them. There’s no other deduction that can be made from the way they are throwing massive amounts of money into the film’s marketing, the fact that the budget for the film itself is upwards of $100 million and that it has a prime early-November release date. Two weeks ago, it was reported that The Peanuts Movie was tracking for a $50+ million opening weekend. Now, a week prior to its release, The Peanuts Movie is tracking some $10 million lower; it’s expected to do something in the $40 million range. I fully expect that, by Thursday, as is par for the course, Fox will have issued a more conservative estimate stating that they’ll be happy if the movie does $30 million, much the way that Sony has come out and stated that they’ll be quite satisfied with an opening weekend for Spectre of around $65 million.*
* Let me explain what will happen if Spectre opens to $65 million: Sony executives will be get drunk and worrying about being fired. You don’t spend a quarter of a billion dollars making a movie to have it open in the same neighborhood as Hancock, The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Hulk. As box office predictions have become a bigger part of the news and reporting on Hollywood, studios have begun to strike back with more and more conservative estimates about how well their new releases will do. This gives them a little bit more breathing room should a movie not hit is expected third party estimates. They simply shrug their shoulders and issue a release stating that the movie performed exactly as they’d hoped and that the public shouldn’t put much faith in outside agencies attempting to hone in on their racket. When a film, like Pan, can’t even hit the studio’s watered down expectations, then you know you’ve got a real train wreck on your hands.
In the case of The Peanuts Movie, I can’t say I’m particularly surprised that the film is tracking down some: the film has two lead characters, one of whom is the biggest loser the funny pages have ever seen, the other is a dog who fights imaginary battles against a World War I fighter pilot, The Red Baron, who fought so long ago that he originally joined the Armed Forces as part of the Cavalry! I know Fox is hoping that sentiment goes a long way to bringing people to the theaters, but having watched the Peanuts comic strip drag out to its inevitable end in 2000, the taste in my mouth is not good. I don’t want to relish in the legacy of The Peanuts, I’d like to forget the last ten years of their existence, kind of the same way I do with Michael Jordan playing in Washington. It will be very interesting to see how this turns out, far more interesting than trying to figure out why Goosebumps couldn’t even nudge The Martian off the top of the charts on Halloween weekend.