Box Office Round Up – January 23-25, 2015

Mortdecai

Get behind the numbers of the last weekend’s box office. This week, American Sniper continues its impressive performance and, more notably, Johnny Depp’s Mortdecai suffered through one of the worst openings of all time. Chris Neumer looks into Depp’s box office performance of late and investigates the concept of Actor Carry-Over.

by Chris Neumer

Let’s get this out of the way so that we can focus on other things: American Sniper is surpassing every possible expectation that one could have for it. It had one of the 30 best openings of all time and now has one of the 10 best second weekends of all time. It will hit $300 million at the box office in the next few weeks with an outside possibility of getting $400 million. And, it’s still somewhat mystifying how/why it’s doing as well as it is.

Okay, moving on…

There is a phrase that I first heard Dr. Drew Pinsky use that I have become fond of. It is, “Random events tend to segregate non-randomly.” Just because you go on three dates in three weeks with three different people who all have cats named Ringo, it doesn’t mean anything. You might not ever meet another person who has a cat named Ringo. Random elements of life like that are not spaced evenly apart. This phrase also nicely explains why small sample sizes don’t offer any lasting insight into the way things work.

I happened to recall Pinsky’s statement this week when looking at the latest box office numbers Monday morning. It was then that I learned that three of the 178 worst openings of all time have occurred in the last 9 days. Blackhat, Mortdecai and Strange Magic combined to take in $12.5 million their first weekend in wide release.* $12.5 million is not good opening weekend for one film, let alone three.

* Strange Magic actually had the 7th worst opening weekend ever for films released in 3,000 or more theaters, just ahead of the Olson Twins’ New York Minute (co-starring Pinsky) and just behind Eddie Murphy’s Imagine That. It’s not good company.

The connection between the three films, other than their January release dates, is that they all are terrible. I mean, they suck. Like suuuuuuuuuuuuck. If you combined the Rotten Tomatoes scores of Mortdecai and Strange Magic (12% and 14% fresh respectively), they still wouldn’t beat The Wedding Ringer’s Rotten Tomato score (33% fresh) and The Wedding Ringer also really sucks.

What was most interesting to me about the three though is the way that all of them seemed like good bets to make money regardless of their quality.

First, an aside.

It’s a noble idea(l) that quality is what separates box office successes from box office failures, but not an accurate one. While I haven’t done any statistical research on this—good movies probably do tend to do better than bad movies—bad movies can still make obscene amounts of money, as evidenced by the Transformers series, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series, Kevin Hart and Adam Sandler’s careers and the fact that the Wayans’ are still viable power players in Hollywood. Quality can’t hurt a movie’s chances for box office gold, but lack of quality isn’t the deal breaker one might normally assume it to be.

Of the Blackhat, Mortdecai, Strange Magic trio, the one that confuses me the most is Mortdecai.

I have long stopped believing in the power of the A-list star. Whenever I hear some actor trumpeted as the next big thing, I scoff and shake my head; there hasn’t been a next big thing like that in more ten years. Despite this fact, the media has loudly been trumpeting the rise of the next generation of stars like Jennifer Lawrence, Chris Evans and Blackhat star, Chris Hemsworth, and heralding the last remaining A-listers still working: namely Denzel Washington, Leonardo DiCaprio and Mortdecai star, Johnny Depp.

For a while, during the mid-aughts, Depp was considered by many to be the biggest star in the world. He starred in huge hits like Charlie in the Chocolate Factory, Pirates of the Caribbean and then more Pirates of the Caribbeans. He was also nominated for Best Actor Oscars for his work in Pirates of the Caribbean, Finding Neverland and Sweeney Todd. He was a can’t miss machine! He was huge! He was a star of his own making! Only contrarians pointed out that Depp was only able to excel at the box office in roles with a built in audience.

Fast-forward to 2015 and we are now looking at man who has spent the last few years headlining some of the biggest flops in Hollywood history. Consider Depp’s starring roles since 2009

2015 – Mortdecai (budget: $60 million; $4.1 million opening)

2014 – Transcendance (budget: $100 million; $23 million domestic)

2013 – The Lone Ranger (budget: $215 million; $89.3 million domestic)

2012 – Dark Shadows (budget: $150 million; $79.7 million domestic)

2011 – The Rum Diary (budget: $45 million; $13.1 million domestic)

2011 – Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (budget: $250 million; $241 million domestic)

2010 – The Tourist (budget: $100 million; $67.6 million domestic)

2009 – Public Enemies (budget: $100 million; $97.1 million domestic)

Now, Depp’s name is still good overseas—The Tourist made $200 million there, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides  $800 million and even The Lone Ranger did $170 million—but no one in Hollywood green lights a $150 million movie like Dark Shadows hoping to do $80 million domestically and  making the vast majority of their money overseas. So, while most of these movies might have gotten back a large portion of the studios’ original investment in them,* it’s ridiculous to look at that series of numbers and think that the lead in all of those projects is a huge star. What’s more, Depp is now seemingly unable to do much with projects like Dark Shadows and The Lone Ranger that had built in audiences.

* It was expected that Disney would actually take a $150 million loss on The Lone Ranger.

With the incredibly poor opening of Mortdecai this last weekend, I’m at the point where I ‘m having trouble figuring out how Depp’s name isn’t at least able to guarantee a movie a $5 million opening weekend. Mortdecai’s per theater average was lower than The Hunger Games: Mocking Jay Part 1’s average the same weekend and that film has been out for 10 weeks now! Mortdecai‘s per theater average was identical to Big Hero 6’s and Big Hero 6 has been out for 12 weeks. If you’re telling me that Johnny Depp’s name and face can’t get more people per theater than Big Hero 6 as it enters its four month of release, something is very, very wrong.

If Mortdecai proves anything though, it’s that there are much better ways for studios to spend their money than on leading mean with big names. I mean, what’s the point of paying Depp even $8 million, if you can get someone like Matt Dillon or Ethan Hawke for $1.5 million or some unknown for pennies? Are you telling me that the film is going to somehow do worse? How the hell would that even be possible?

I think the question at this point has to become about an actor’s carry-over. It seems wildly unreasonable to think that Johnny Depp would bring 50% of the Pirates of the Caribbean audience over to his next movie, but logic suggest he might be able to bring over, you know, a couple of people.

I first began thinking of this concept in regards to the stars of Twilight. As the media crowned Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson and Tyler Lautner the new princes and princess of Hollywood, I started wondering how much of their Twilight audience the three would be able to carry over to their next projects. While there isn’t any statistically reliable way to measure this, it was intriguing to see that, after Twilight was released, Stewart’s next four films opened in a combined 2,100 theaters and change, the lion’s share of which was attributable to Adventureland opening in almost 1,900 theaters. If anyone thought that Stewart had the ability to bring even a fraction of one percent of her Twilight fans to her next projects, I think the movies would have played in more theaters. Consider: The Yellow Handkerchief was rated PG-13 and opened in seven theaters, making $37,000 that first weekend.

Frankly, with a total like that, it’s hard to think that Stewart’s name helped that film at all. However, that said, how can starring in one of the world’s biggest franchises not in any way help the stars going forward?

And this is not just a question that Stewart is asking herself. This Monday, Depp, Hemsworth and Lucas are asking themselves the very same thing.