Sony Pictures CEO Says Nothing Good Has Come From The Internet
These studio executives, they've had a good month. First Fox Sweden's CEO says ratings promote piracy. Now the CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment says nothing good has come of the Internet. At a recent panel on the future of filmmaking, CEO Michael Lynton said, "I’m a guy who doesn’t see anything good having come from the Internet. Period." He further goes on to claim the Internet has "created this notion that anyone can have whatever they want at any given time. It’s as if the stores on ...
The Strangers Left Me Wanting For A Refund
There's somethin' wrong with the world today I don't know what it is Something's wrong with our eyes -Aerosmith, Livin' on the Edge The are few things that have gotten as tedious for me as watching horror movies. It seems all modern horror movies fit the same mold. There's an interesting idea. A half-assed attempt to make us care about the victims (there aren't really protagonists in horror movies any more, just victims and iconic psychopaths). There are a few atmospheric scares. Then the filmmakers run out of ideas and begin painting with bazookas, becoming more blunt and violent until the movie ...
Piranha 3D: Is There A Horror Movie They Won’t Remake?
It's a serious question, is there a horror movie that won't be remade? You'd figure there would be some movies so revered that no one would attempt a remake, but we've gotten recent remakes of Halloween and Friday the 13th, two of the most iconic modern horror movies. Not to mention Psycho, Dawn of the Dead, The Omen, etc. You'd also figure there would be movies that gained a little notoriety by ripping off the plot of a famous horror movie that wouldn't really be worth the effort to remake. Logically, ...
Weekend Predictions: 05-29-09
So far this year, the biggest overall weekend at the box office was back on January 16 when Paul Blart: Mall Cop took the world by storm. The total spent on movies that weekend was $192,903,837. There's a chance this weekend could top that. Up is the widest release this weekend, in 3,766 theaters. It's also the tenth feature put out by Pixar, and their name has basically become the gold standard in computer animation. And they're really trying to make a point that their name is bigger than the subject of whatever movie they put forth. Cars was about a ...
Yahoo Knows How To Make A Movie List
Movie lists are nothing new. In fact, I'd dare you to find a movie website that doesn't contain one. The most well known movie list manufacturer is probably the American Film Institute. Those bastards just love turning out lists, most likely with a goal of putting every movie ever made on some type of list. AFI's biggest list is the 100 Greatest American Movies. Not to be outdone, others have come up with their own 100 movie lists, such as Time's All-Time 100 Movies. These ...
Featured Article
The Growing Importance Of Opening Weekend
Since starting this site, I’ve had a growing fascination with metrics by which movies are measured. Being mathematically inclined, I guess it was a nice fit. Plus it’s more interesting to look into the numbers behind some of these movies than it is to watch them.
My history delving into movie numbers only goes back to last September, so I don’t have a long history of knowledge to draw from, but it seems to me that even since just last year, there’s been a noticeable increase in the importance of a movie having a big opening weekend. Sure, having a big opening weekend should always be the goal of a movie, but it takes several weeks for most movies to get near breaking even, that’s generally not even close after one weekend. It follows that of course the first weekend is important, but maximizing the box office of the entire theatrical run should be paramount.
But that isn’t the reality. In practice, as time has gone on, the opening weekend has become the sole focal point and anything after is icing on the cake. The picture in this post isn’t just a nice graphic to visually convey the topic, it’s actually the graph of the weekend totals for Watchmen.
The Holiday (Fall-ish) and Summer movie seasons are when the moneymaking movies are generally released, so we’ll look at those two periods over the years. For the Holiday season, during the 1980’s, …
Popularity: 46% [?]
Tags: hype, money, numbers, opening, weekend
Recent Articles
Weekend Report: Things Are Looking Up
So much for my thoughts on having a $200 million weekend. It was the fourth biggest weekend of the year, but it fell $10 million short of last week, with $166 million overall.
Up easily made it to first place by about $44 million. Pixar’s tenth movie pulled in $68,108,790, about $7 million more than my prediction. Up also set the new standard for 3D openings, with just over $35 million coming from the extra-dimensional showings. It followed the recent weekly record-breaking trend and took the biggest 3D opening crown from 10-week old Monsters vs Aliens. I’m not exactly a slavish fan of everything Pixar does, but it’s heartwarming to see that the they’ve become so successful without always packing their movies full of quasi-celebrities and pop culture crap.
Even though Drag Me to Hell promised R-rated thrills to a PG-13 audience and had no competition in the horror genre, …
Popularity: 27% [?]
Tags: competition, opening, Pixar, record, weekend
Weekend Predictions: 05-29-09
So far this year, the biggest overall weekend at the box office was back on January 16 when Paul Blart: Mall Cop took the world by storm. The total spent on movies that weekend was $192,903,837. There’s a chance this weekend could top that.
Up is the widest release this weekend, in 3,766 theaters. It’s also the tenth feature put out by Pixar, and their name has basically become the gold standard in computer animation. And they’re really trying to make a point that their name is bigger than the subject of whatever movie they put forth. Cars was about a car that got arrested and had to repave a road, Ratatouille was about a rat that wanted to be a chef, and WALL-E was about a robot cleaning up the garbage left behind on an Earth abandoned by humans. Those aren’t your usual topics for big-budget animated movies …
Popularity: 35% [?]
Tags: competition, Horror, Pixar, prediction, weekend
Weekend Predictions: 05-22-09
The combination of a scifi action movie, a family movie, and a comedy has been pretty popular with Hollywood. So far this year we’ve seen the combination on February 6th, May 1st, and April 10th. Oh, and again this weekend.
Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian plays the role of the family movie. The difference between this movie and the original is that it takes place in SURPRISE! the Smithsonian. Other than giving the museum more advertising than it’s ever had during it’s entire existence, I suppose all it really means is that there will be different exhibits to rankle Ben Stiller’s character, which is probably all people really want out of the movie: Ben Stiller overacting.
The first Night at the Museum made $250 million domestically. It opened to $30 million, but the second weekend shot up to almost $37 million. It’s pretty rare to see the …
Popularity: 45% [?]
Tags: buzz, museum, prediction, SciFi, weekend
Battleship Movie Heads To Drydock
It’s been, golly, like a couple weeks since any news of a board game movie has surfaced. I hoped that people finally realized what stupid ideas these movies were and quietly axed them all. Yeah, it was naive of me to think that.
Hasbro finally broke the board game radio silence, announcing they’re getting close to convincing Peter Berg to direct the movie adaptation of Battleship. Obviously, since there is no plot in the game, details on a possible story are nonexistent, unless saying they’ve going for an epic naval action adventure-y type of movie counts as plot details.
Berg is a passable enough director, but it’s going to take a hell of a lot more than his middling talent to craft an interesting story out of a game that’s basically a glorified version of Bingo. Jon and Erich Hoeber …
Popularity: 49% [?]
Tags: adaptation, board game, commodity, Hasbro, Plot
Weekend Report: Angels Keep Star Trek At Bay
It was a contentious battle for first place at the box office this weekend. The Hollywood big shots faced off against the scifi spectacle, with millions of dollars hanging in the balance.
Angels & Demons managed to hold off Star Trek and claim first place, pulling in $46,204,168. My prediction was only about $18 million high, but I’m not upset- it’s always good to get knocked down a peg after a string of successes. It was a little hard to know exactly what A&D was going to do because 1) The Da Vinci Code had a huge opening weekend and 2) it was the first big non-scifi movie in a couple weeks. Both of those factors made me think it could be a big weekend, but a lack of buzz and controversy hinted at an average weekend. Before I had adjusted my prediction, the calculated total was $42,741,461. Sometimes it’s best …
Popularity: 49% [?]
Tags: box office, controversy, opening, super bowl, weekend
Sony Pictures CEO Says Nothing Good Has Come From The Internet
These studio executives, they’ve had a good month. First Fox Sweden’s CEO says ratings promote piracy. Now the CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment says nothing good has come of the Internet.
At a recent panel on the future of filmmaking, CEO Michael Lynton said, “I’m a guy who doesn’t see anything good having come from the Internet. Period.” He further goes on to claim the Internet has “created this notion that anyone can have whatever they want at any given time. It’s as if the stores on Madison Avenue were open 24 hours a day. They feel entitled. They say, ‘Give it to me now,’ and if you don’t give it to them for free, they’ll steal it.” This coming from the former President of AOL International.
Yes, yes, we all know that movie piracy is one of …
Popularity: 52% [?]
Tags: CEO, Internet, piracy, revenue, studio
Weekend Predictions: 05-15-09
You’d think that Hollywood studios are always competing against each other, but this month’s evidence shows that it’s really a coordinated dance. The big movie season kicked off with X-Men Origins: Wolverine on May 1st. That was a Fox release. The only new competition that weekend was from Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (Warner Bros.), which aimed for a totally different audience than Wolverine. The next weekend Paramount released Star Trek, the only other new wide release was a tiny comedy from tiny distributor Summit Entertainment. This weekend Sony is releasing Angels & Demons, the only wide release. Next weekend has Paramount releasing a comedy, Fox a family movie, and Warner Bros. a big scifi actioner. The last week of May brings a Disney animated movie and a Universal horrorfest. All the studios get their chance to have a week to themselves without any new competition.
Sony’s big chance comes in the …
Popularity: 54% [?]
Tags: competition, prediction, South Park, Tom Hanks, weekend
Weekend Report: Star Trek Got Beamed Up
I’m not sure what to make of it, but I’ve been getting pretty close on my predictions lately. Is it just luck or is it my secret blend of 11 herbs and spices I call Adjustments? Logic tells me it’s the former. My ego insists it’s the latter. I’ll go with my ego. Who better to trust than the voices in my head?
A week after X-Men Origins: Wolverine saw the biggest opening of 2009, Star Trek sidles right up behind it in second place. It hauled in $75,204,289 for the weekend, my prediction off a minuscule $5 million, easily becoming the biggest opening in the franchise and will probably become the overall highest-grossing next weekend. But what does that really mean? It’s not like this Star Trek has a lot to do with anything that has come before. If it weren’t for the names of people, places, and things, you …
Popularity: 57% [?]
Tags: box office, franchise, opening, Star Trek, weekend
The Strangers Left Me Wanting For A Refund
There’s somethin’ wrong with the world today
I don’t know what it is
Something’s wrong with our eyes
-Aerosmith, Livin’ on the Edge
The are few things that have gotten as tedious for me as watching horror movies. It seems all modern horror movies fit the same mold. There’s an interesting idea. A half-assed attempt to make us care about the victims (there aren’t really protagonists in horror movies any more, just victims and iconic psychopaths). There are a few atmospheric scares. Then the filmmakers run out of ideas and begin painting with bazookas, becoming more blunt and violent until the movie ends. There’s no actual ending, the movie just ends as the centimeter deep well of ideas is long past empty.
The Strangers was no different.
The interesting idea is what got you in the theater: a couple of people stuck in a house being assailed by masked assailants. That’s the …
Popularity: 34% [?]
Tags: bazookas, ending, Halloween, Horror, scares
Weekend Predictions: 05-08-09
Though we’re still six weeks from the start of Summer, the Summer movie season is well under way. The latest contender for biggest movie o’ the year is Star Trek.
Without knowing much about the movie, you can tell by the fact there’s no subtitle that this is a do-over rather than any kind of a sequel. They’re taking Captain Kirk and the gang all the way back to the Starfleet Academy and making you forget everything you know about Star Trek. Those old farts just weren’t relevant to today’s sensibilities. It needs more special effects, more monsters, more sex, more dramatic camera angles, more contrast, more things whizzing past the camera, etc. And it’s relying on these modern crutches to bring in the crowds: the cast, though occasionally recognizable, lacks big names and the franchise pretty much wore out it’s …
Popularity: 33% [?]
Tags: franchise, prediction, remake, Star Trek, weekend
Weekend Report: Wolverine Defeats The Pirates
The big question going into the weekend was how much the leaked copy of X-Men Origins: Wolverine would impact the box office of the movie. With movie studios launching up sob stories about how all these illegal copies of movies are stealing their profits, a nearly finished copy of a blockbuster hitting the Interweb a month before the release was their worse nightmare.
And…
Wolverine became the biggest movie of 2009, taking in $85,805,003. It was just $3.75 million short of my prediction- a veritable bullseye. Not only did it dominate every other movie in terms of total box office, but also in per theater average. That big fat number also made it the 19th biggest opening in the history of cinema, only $500,000 behind X2. Obtaining an illegal copy of a movie is wrong, but it’s hard to take all the studio whining seriously when the first real test …
Popularity: 27% [?]
Tags: box office, bullseye, piracy, weekend, X-Men
Fox CEO Claims Ratings Promote Piracy
The Swedish Board of Film Censors gave X-Men Origins: Wolverine a 15 classification, the highest rating the board can give, which prevents anyone under 15 from gaining admittance to the movie. Fox Sweden CEO Hansi Mandoki was obviously upset about the decision since now all those violence-hungry Swedish teenagers can’t get their blood and gore fix.
But Mandoki couldn’t just stop by saying “it is sad that so many fans won’t be able to see the film.” No, he had to keep on whining by claiming “I’m certain the decision will mean more illegal downloading of the film.”
Hearing a studio exec bitch and moan about someone not being able to see a movie, that’s nothing new. No, they’d probably serve up porn to preschoolers if it could turn a profit. They really don’t seem to care who’s …
Popularity: 32% [?]
Tags: crime, piracy, Swedish, violence, X-Men
Weekend Predictions: 05-01-09
X-Men Origins: Wolverine is going to kickoff a string of big weekends at the movies. Until the middle of June there will be one movie a week that’s going to be aiming for $50+ million. But this May 1st weekend will be one of the most interesting.
When the all but finished print of Wolverine was leaked at the beginning of the month, it set the stage for us to get a real test of how much piracy impacts ticket sales. Despite all the bitching and moaning by Hollywood and the FBI and X-Men fanboys, research is showing that interest in the movie is actually increasing after the calamitous leak. Isn’t there some old saying about there not being any such thing as bad press? For some reason, people have heard so much of all this Wolverine ballyhoo that it’s actually piqued their interest. I think it’ll …
Popularity: 31% [?]
Tags: opening, piracy, prediction, weekend, X-Men
Weekend Report: And You Thought You Were Obsessed
Take from this what you will, but currently on Rotten Tomatoes, The Soloist has a 60% rating, Fighting has 36%, and Obsessed has 20%. A rational person might conclude that the money earned by the movies would follow a similar pattern, with the most favorably reviewed movie earning more money. But no, the inverse is true: the lower the rating, the more money the movie made. And then you’ll notice that Crank: High Voltage has a 62% rating and probably ask yourself if those ratings really mean anything at all.
Obsessed, in spite of generally poor reviews, came out big this weekend, to the tune of $28,612,730, $9 million more than my prediction. Now, I’m wondering whether the bigger draw was Beyonce Knowles or the promise of a huge catfight. I’m thinking it may have been a little of …
Popularity: 28% [?]
Tags: box office, catfight, opening, shrug, weekend
Why Would Anyone Want To Remake Videodrome?
Sometimes you just shake your head in disgust and ask yourself what the world is coming to. For many people, that may have happened when they first saw Videodrome. For me, it happened when I read that Universal is remaking Videodrome.
The movie, well I guess I should say the original Videodrome, was about sleazy TV producer Max Renn, always on the lookout for some new trash to feed his audience. He thinks he’s found the program of his dreams when he’s introduced to Videodrome. Torture, murder, no plot. It’s got it all. And best of all, it looks so real. Max becomes obsessed with Videodrome and he soon learns his recent hallucinations are an intended side-effect of Videodrome’s brain tumor-inducing signal. It’s not long before there’s no longer a distinction between reality and hallucination, culminating with Max sporting …
Popularity: 32% [?]
Tags: Horror, remake, science, Technology, TV
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