News & Notes Inside the Week in Film

Records Are Made To Be Broken… But C’mon!

Advanced Ticket Sales are, apparently, the new metric by which a movie’s success should be measured… you know, at least, until the film comes out

by Chris Neumer

2012 has been an epic year for movies before they have been released.  This may sound strange, but the mainstream media has latched onto the concept of advanced ticket sales—buying tickets to see a movie before its opened—and is running with it.  What better way to hype an impending release than talking about how popular it is with people… before anyone has actually seen it?

Now, for the studios, advanced ticket sales make an inordinate amount of sense.  The window for pre-sales is about a month or so prior to a given film’s opening weekend; The Hobbit is going to open on December 14th and pre-sales began on November 5th.  In the coming years, I would be downright amazed if that window didn’t expand by a couple of months.  The reason for this is simple: if the studios know that the opening weekend of their film is basically sold out, they can cut down on the amount of advertising that they buy, that could potentially save them enormous amounts of money.

Studios only really care about a film’s opening weekend numbers as they get roughly 90% of the opening weekend take, the theaters showing the film get the other 10%.  After that weekend, the split drops precipitously.  By a film’s fourth weekend in theaters, the studios might only get 40-50% of the box office; after eight weeks, the studios cut dips down to something crazy like 10-20%.  (As an aside, Titanic will always bring a smile to theaters owners’ faces; while Titanic did gross $600 million during its first run, nearly $400 million of that came after the first month it had been released, $250 million of which came after it had been out for eight weeks).

Take the example of Skyfall.  Skyfall earned $117.5 million its opening weekend.  Assuming a 90/10 split, $106 million went to the releasing studio.  In its third week in release, Skyfall earned $43 million.  Assuming a 70/30 split (which seems generous in favor of the studios), only $30 million went to the studio.  So, of course the marketing dollars are going to be focused on getting people in opening weekend; that’s when the studios make their money!  If Warner Brothers knew that The Hobbit was completely sold out opening weekend, it could, with great confidence, cut back some of the estimated $175 million it earmarked for advertising.

The problem with this though is that marketing dollars need to be spent well in advance of the time the ads will run.  Print ads need to be booked months in advanced, as do some billboards and TV campaigns.  However, if the window for pre-sales extended back further, the studios would have a much better idea of what they needed to do before they had already crossed the advertising point of no return.

QUOTE:

“I’ve sentenced boys younger than you to the gas chamber. Didn’t want to do it. I felt I owed it to them.”

-Ted Knight has a very misguided sense of loyalty in Caddyshack

To anyone outside of marketing experts and studio chairman though, all the talk of advanced ticket sales numbers is simply ridiculous.  Why?  Because the ‘advanced ticket sale record’ has been broken so many times over the course of the last nine months, it’s hard to count.

The baseline for this madness started about two years ago with Twilight: Eclipse, which set the then record for advanced ticket sales.  Last year, stories then trickled in about whether Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 1 would beat Twilight Eclipse.  It didn’t.  It wasn’t until this year that things really got going though.  This was thanks to The Hunger Games.

In February of 2012, The Hunger Games advanced tickets went on sale and set records.  The media trumpeted this fact loudly.  Next up was The Avengers with its “record breaking pre-sales”.  Then came the stories about The Dark Knight Rises pre-sales “sellouts”.  Then Skyfall.  Then Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 2.  And now, The Hobbit.  And this is to say nothing of the specialty records that were broken like the IMAX 3D pre-sale record which was broken by Prometheus (what?) and then again by The Dark Knight Rises, or the first day of pre-sale record or the biggest Marvel comic book movie pre-sales, or the, gulp, DVD/Blu-ray pre-sale records and the far more irritating line of stories about movies that were “set” to break pre-sale records or movies that were farther ahead in advanced ticket sales than their genre counterparts were at X point in time.  The worst story of the year on advanced ticket sales unquestionably goes to MTV, for their article on Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 2  that stated that on Day 1 of the pre-sales period, Breaking Dawn Part 2 was doing better than Breaking Dawn Part 1.

It’s really saying something that there are now box office records that can be broken before the movies actually open.

 

And You Thought You Had A Bad Week

Lindsay Lohan had a week from Hell.  It was so bad that if her dog died, it would have been the best news she’d gotten in ages.

compiled by Chris Neumer

Sunday, November 25th

• Lindsay Lohan’s Liz & Dick premieres on Lifetime to almost universally negative criticism.  The Hollywood Reporter said her performance as Elizabeth Taylor was like, “the eighth-grade drama camp version of the iconic movie star.”

• Her dad tells the media that the critics who trashed Liz & Dick don’t have any talent and that Lohan proved she’s an amazing actress.

Monday, November 26th

• Lady Gaga sends out a tweet to Lohan, complimenting her performance in Liz & Dick.  It’s the only positive press Lohan’s acting receives.  Entertainment writers everywhere are curious to know whether Gaga has even seen Liz & Dick given that she A) is in Paraguay, and B) has been spending all of her free time prepping for shows.  Also noted: more than 10 times as many people read Gaga’s tweet as watched Liz & Dick.

• Lohan is quoted elsewhere as say, “I don’t regret anything I’ve done”.

Tuesday, November 27th

• US Weekly reports that Charlie Sheen gave Lohan $100,000 for tax payments after befriending her on the set of Scary Movie 5.

Wednesday, November 28th

• Word gets out that Lohan wants her own sit-com.  Why?  Because “Charlie Sheen said it would be a good idea.”

• Lohan is arrested for getting into a fight at a New York Club.

Thursday: November 29th

• Meanwhile, back in Los Angeles, Lohan is charged for obstruction and reckless driving, among other charges.  This means that Lohan was charged with four total crimes on two different coasts within the span of six hours.

Friday, November 30th

• TMZ reports that Lohan has been drinking two liters of vodka a day for the last several months.

• A CBS Affiliate in Washington DC makes headlines when it takes the pro-active measure to ban all future Lindsay Lohan stories from being reported on its airwaves.

• Word also leaks out that the woman Lohan punched in the night club, Tiffany Mitchell, is a psychic and that Lohan punched Mitchell because Mitchell was making moves on the boyband singer, Max from The Wanted, that Lohan was interested in.  Topping this all off: Max left the club with a third woman.

• Lohan’s father is quoted by reporters stating that Lohan is drowning her sorrows by doing coke and prescription drugs.

• Lohan’s own assistant, Gavin Doyle, tweets that it’s time for her to get some help.

Saturday, December 1st

• Lohan admits she called Mitchell a ‘gypsy’, but, in her defense, states she didn’t realize it was a racial slur.

Sunday, December 2nd

Lohan tells friends she doesn’t have a problem with alcohol and refuses to go to rehab.

Monday: December 3rd

The IRS freezes Lohan’s bank accounts because she hasn’t paid her back taxes.

 Red Dawn Invasion Strategy

The logic of the Russian/Cuban invasion of America in the original Red Dawn was strange at best.  Who in their right mind would single out Texas as the place to start World War III?  Well, the Russians.

by Chris Neumer

While researching the plot material from the original Red Dawn for my column, Remaking the Unremakeable, I stumbled onto the above graphic on the Dutch version of Wikipedia.  (You know you’re doing something right when your investigations of things don’t just take you to Wikipedia, but, rather, a non-English version of Wikipedia; absolutely nothing could go wrong there).  Someone had rather painstakingly created a map of World War III and the Russian/Cuban strategies that were described in the film.  This person had taken every throw away line in the movie, traced the logic behind it as far as it went and put that information into this map.  It was precisely the type of thing I’d have done if I’d thought of it.  Pouring over the nuances of the map, one thing quickly became apparent: the plot of 1984’s Red Dawn was even more ludicrous and ridiculous than I’d ever originally thought.

As a quick recap of the plot of Red Dawn: Russian/Cuban forces nuke Washington D.C., Omaha and Kansas City and then invade the United States.  Eight Colorado teenagers (a designation that includes the 32-year old Patrick Swayze) stand up to the forces of communism and learn something about themselves in the process.

Silly as it may seem, I hadn’t really given any thought as to the route that the communist forces would have taken into the United States.  It’s one of the things I pushed by the wayside while pondering the more pressing question of how an invading army’s troops would end up in Colorado on Day 1 of their offensive.  Well, when I learned what the communist troops had, in fact, done, I frowned and then started laughing: the first state in the Union that they chose to attack was Texas.

It seemed like something of a bad joke: what military commander in his right mind would single out Texas as the place to start an invasion?  It makes sense, I suppose, if you want to begin your invasion by fighting the people who have the most weapons, believe in protecting their own state at all costs and hate, hate, hate the idea of foreigners trying to change their way of life.  I wouldn’t be surprised if this scenario—foreign troops invade Texas from the south—was actually a fantasy of a fair number of Texans.  “Wait, I finally get to shoot people coming into this country illegally from Mexico?  And it’s okay?  Wait, I might get a medal for it and be considered a hero?”

Yet, this was precisely what the geniuses in the Russian/Cuban command center planned.  They avoided New Mexico like the plague—why go through the liberal bastion of the southwest when you can instead go through Houston?—and instead went through Texas to get to Colorado.

Also worth noting: the second state the Russian/Cuban forces invaded?  Alaska.  Why?  Because, um, it was, uh, close, I guess?  Ostensibly, Alaska was attacked to allow Russian forces a direct line to the northern continental United States, but it seems like there’d be a much better way to do that than by going through Alaska: send the troops directly into Seattle.  Avoid Alaska, avoid Canada and just go straight to the end goal.

We’ll talk about the brilliance of using warm weather troops (the Cubans) to invade mountainous American states in late fall at another juncture.

 The Photo of the Week

On Any Sunday

The 5 Things I Learned This Week

Fascinatingly true things to broaden your mind

 

1) The Japanese use of kamikaze pilots on suicide missions in World War II is well known. What isn’t as well known is that the Japanese also employed suicide torpedos.

2) There were also Japanese suicide divers. The divers would have a stick with a large bomb on the end of it, swim (or walk) up to American ships underwater and then explode the bomb.

3) And the Japanese had suicide swimmers too, though information on them is scarce.

4) The Battle of Okinawa featured nearly 1,500 kamikaze pilots attacking US ships on one day.

5) The Nazis also had a kamikaze aircraft division, The Leonidas Squadron. It was used extremely sparingly and only during the very last days of World War II.

This Week’s Stories

New Releases

Butter

THE PLAYERS: Starring Jennifer Garner, Yara Shahidi, and Ty Burrell; written by Jason A. Micallef; directed by Jim Field Smith;  Released by The Weinstein Company. Rated R.

THE PLOT: A young girl faces off against an established woman in their local butter carving contest.

THE SKINNY:
– This is ostensibly a sweet movie about sweet Midwestern people that ultimately serves only to make fun of them.  I have no problem with this, but this movement peaked in the late nineties with both Fargo and Drop Dead Gorgeous both absolutely nailing it.  Butter just feels about 15 years too late.  The subject matter parallels between Butter and Drop Dead Gorgeous are so similar—the investigation into a small town series of competitions—that it’s hard to get the feeling that Butter doesn’t owe a lot of its inspiration to Drop Dead Gorgeous.
– The casting of Butter is a little… off.  Jennifer Garner should be a good choice for a wholesome lead, but with her prim wardrobe and almost over-the-top Midwestern accent, it feels like a hot woman is trying to play prudish.  The same holds true for Olivia Wilde as the stripper.  The trick to casting Midwestern yokels is not to find the most attractive people you can and then give them bad haircuts; it’s to find somewhat normal looking people (ahem, Rob Corddry does very well in Butter) and let them take it away.
+ Alicia Silverstone!!!  And she barely looks to have aged since Blast from the Past.
+ Features a character named Destiny and a stripper… who are not one and the same.
– I don’t know… Nothing about this project grabbed me in any way.

YES, IT’S TRUE: The earliest documented butter sculptures date back to 1536 in Europe.

The Dark Knight Rises

THE PLAYERS: Starring Christian Bale, Tom Hardy, and Anne Hathaway; written by Christopher Nolan and Jonathan Nolan, directed by Christopher Nolan. Released by Warner Bros. Rated PG-13.

THE PLOT: Batman (Bale) tries to stop Bane (Hardy) from taking over Gotham City.

THE SKINNY:
– This movie, while good, was significantly better when Batman/Bruce Wayne wasn’t on screen… and, trust me, there was a surprisingly large amount of time without Batman/Bruce Wayne on screen.
+ The Dark Knight Rises is a staggeringly ambitious movie that, once again, seems as if it focused on the wrong character.  I realize that it’s somewhat ludicrous to suggest that Warner Brothers make a Batman movie and not make it about Batman (though it didn’t stop Tim Burton in ‘89’s Batman), but this is the case here.  Christian Bale’s Wayne is such a whiny, depressed, self-pitying martyr that it’s hard to root for him or want to do anything other than get away from him.  His misery is contagious! However, that said, everyone around him is fascinating.  Bane, Catwoman and even Alfred (the butler) are all far more compelling characters than Wayne.  And Bane’s unique terrorist plot to take over Gotham City was so believable (to a point) that I wanted to see more.  Instead I got to see Wayne trying to crawl out of a cave.  Director Chris Nolan’s scope in The Dark Knight Rises is so grand, it is truly intriguing to watch.
– I gave up trying to understand what the character of Bane was saying after about fifteen seconds.  Thanks to a combination of bad sound editing and a mask that shielded me from seeing Bane’s lips when he spoke, I honestly couldn’t understand anything that he said.  How more hasn’t been made of this fact—that the bad guy in a huge budget, summer blockbuster with copious amounts of dialogue was incomprehensible—is anyone’s guess.
+ Anne Hathaway is fantastic as Catwoman.  She displays precisely the right amount of coquettishness, standoffishness, vulnerability and sex appeal to make the character absolutely hers.
+ I am a sucker for anything involving Joseph Gordon-Levett.

YES, IT’S TRUE: Since the movie was filmed in Pittsburgh, many of the Steelers players including Ben Roethlisberger and Heinz Ward appear as players for the Gotham Rogues footbal team.

Hope Springs

THE PLAYERS: Starring Tommy Lee Jones, Meryl Streep, and Steve Carell; written by Vanessa Taylor; directed by David Frankel. Released by Sony Pictures.  Rated PG-13.

THE PLOT: An elderly couple visits a relationship therapist to breath life into their stale marriage.

THE SKINNY:
– This may make me ageist, but I’ve never been able to get into romantic-comedies featuring characters in their sixties and seventies.  Particularly and especially those romantic comedies featuring characters in their sixties and seventies who are having problems with their sex lives.
– I also have never been able to really commiserate with stubborn people who refuse to believe that, even though their spouse is telling them that they are unhappy, their spouse is actually unhappy.
+ That said, no one in Hollywood is better at playing the stubborn, near-emotionless male than Tommy Lee Jones.
+/- It is weird to think of Meryl Streep (or a character that she plays) as an object of sexual desire.  Great for her as an actress, weird as I watch it.  I mean, her last few on-screen characters have included Margaret Thatcher, Julia Child, a nun, the boss from Hell (in The Devil Wears Prada) and another middle-aged woman whose (ex) husband lost sexual interest in her,
– That said, it is strange to think that Streep chose this project given how similar it is in broad plot strokes, to her 2009 film, It’s Complicated.  That film was about an aging couple rekindling their sexual relationship…  What is it about men being with Streep and slowly losing their sexual desire?
+/- Not to be confused with the TV show, Hope Springs.  Or the 2003 movie with Colin Firth, Hope Springs.  Or the Sandra Bullock movie, Hope Floats… none of which I’d recommend watching either.

YES, IT’S TRUE: According to a Janus report 81% of men ages 51-64 have sex at least one a week comapared to 72% of men ages 18-26.

The Odd Life of Timothy Green

THE PLAYERS:  Starring Jennifer Garner, Joel Edgerton, and CJ Adams; written and directed by Peter Hedges.  Released by Disney.  Rated PG.

THE PLOT: A young boy who grew out of the garden changes the lives of a couple who are unable to conceive a child.

THE SKINNY:
+ When I first read the plot description of this movie, my first thought was, “My God, how high did somebody have to be to come up with this?”  Then I looked in the credits and saw that Ahmet Zappa came up with the story.  It’s funny because it’s true.
+ Jennifer Garner appears a lot more relaxed and believable her than she does in Butter (which is also being released this week).
– I fucking hate little kids who know all the answers.  I really fucking hate little kids who know all the answers in Disney movies where they also have magic powers.
– This movie is basically a story that Garner and her husband (Joel Edgerton) tell to an adoption agent.  I’m not a fan of this narrative structure on any level.
+ The supporting cast of this film is extremely solid.  Dianne Wiest, Ron Livingston, M. Emmet Walsh, David Morse, James Rebhorn and the beautifully named Shohreh Aghdashloo all do yeoman’s work here.

YES, IT’S TRUE: This movie was filmed in the same house as Halloween II.

The New Releases were written by Chris Neumer and Kevin Withers