Box Office Trends: September

So for some reason, people always seem to be obsessed with comparing the box office numbers of this year to other years, as if that's somehow relevant. Box Office Mojo, one of my favorite resources/time wasters, always makes it a point to say whether business is up or down from the same weekend last year- because we all know the third weekend in September never changes in national movie-going affinity. Duh.

So I figure I'll only recap the months-that-were by relating the performances of one movie to another: inflation and changing economics in Hollywood will probably render these numbers meaningless in a couple years, but the relative grosses of different movies is a good indicator of contemporary taste, if nothing else.

1. Staying Power

3:10 to Yuma has to feel good about its long-term chances. It opened with a modest $14 million, but never dropped more than 36% week to week, which is pretty extraordinary, no matter the release pattern.

Consider this: 3:10 and Shoot 'Em Up both opened on September 7th- Shoot 'Em Up pulled in a lower than expected $5.7 m. But while 3:10 only took modest hits and stayed in the top five all month long, Shoot 'Em Up dropped 54, 69, and 80 percent in consecutive weeks, and will probably stop being tracked before October's out with a meager $17 million.

Hopefully James Mangold's winning western will continue to stay around this fall, and make a Million Dollar Baby-style push over $100 million after Oscar nominations are announced.
2. The Game Plan vs. The Kingdom

I wasn't really sure which one of these to root for last weekend, which is to say I was rooting for neither, but America has decided: we'd rather see The Rock have an allergic reaction to strawberries than see some hypothetical Saudi Arabian terrorists get blown up. The Game Plan made $22 m to The Kingdom's $17 m. This almost makes me feel better, in a way.

Also, as I said I love b.o.m. for reference, but they employ the worst professional film critic I have ever read on the internet. Ever. Most of the reviews for The Kingdom felt uneasy about the sort of xenophobic, country-full-of-terrorists undertones, but this guy (Scott Holleran) thinks it wasn't racist enough. The title of his review? "The Kingdom: Action Blaster Suggests Osama was Right."

3. Good Luck Chuck opened higher than Stardust

Yep. And people ask me why I'm an atheist.

Other than that, people liked zombies, and sort of liked Jodie Foster shooting people, but September is traditionally a slow month, I hear. A bunch of award hopefuls did okay on a handful of screens, but October will be the big test, when everything goes wide.

What makes a Blockbuster?

The term 'blockbuster' means several things, but usually it means a financially successful film.

Some say this is a reference to long lines that used to gather for popular stage productions, lines inherited by the event films of the eighties and beyond. Others think it was inherited from a type of bomb capable of leveling an entire city block (a paltry measure of destruction in this day and age).

But regardless of the etymology, the classification of films as blockbusters was for many years very simple: if it grossed $100 million in the U.S., it was a blockbuster. If it didn't, it wasn't. But what do people mean when they use the term these days, thirty years after the first of the blockbusters hit the screen?

As it was recently pointed out to me, inflation renders past box-office figures essentially moot, and so it does to that $100 million benchmark as well. But finding an appropriate new one is difficult: there are movies that gross $200 million, but cost $200 million (like Superman Returns), and even a couple (reported) $300/$300 million club members (Spiderman 3, Pirates 3). So the rapidly inflating movie budgets (and public interest in them) is a factor.

This is not to mention the tracking of foreign grosses clouding the picture. There are plenty of films that disappoint in the States, only to break the bank overseas: Troy, for example, mostly flopped here ($133 m), but amassed nearly $500 million overall.

And then there's movies that don't break any records, but have a phenomenal budget to earnings ratio. The most famous example of this is the Blair Witch Project with $248 million on a $60 thousand dollar budget, but this summer's Knocked Up ($200 million on a $30 mill budget) and Superbad ($119 m on $20 m) both broke $100 million on relatively cheap expenses.

So I think, for movie nerds like me at least, when we say 'blockbuster' what we're really getting at is profit, and we need a benchmark for the 'blockbuster' that keeps that in mind.

I propose that to be referred to as a blockbuster, your film needs to make $100 million or more over its budget domestically, with the addendum that a $200 million worldwide profit also qualifies. This takes care of obvious hits on reasonable budgets (like Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, which cost $150 m and made $289 in the US alone), and our more problematic features with escalating costs (like Batman Begins, which barely outdid its $150 m budget here, but made $371 m worldwide).

A further sub-clause for films smaller in scope entails that if you gross five times your budget, it gives your film tentative blockbuster status, or at least makes it a "box office hit."

Glad we got this settled. These are the sorts of things that keep me up at night.

Weekend Box Office

Just for the record, my friend Dave, who'll be contributing a bit to this blog in the near future, emailed me this at 3:42 pm on Wednesday:

"3:10 to Yuma and Shoot 'Em Up are getting good reviews. I'll go with 3:10 to Yuma to win the Box Office battle this weekend with about $14-16 million."

Well, Box Office Mojo is estimating it at number one with $14.1 Million.

So let that put to rest any doubt about Dave's credibility. Personally, I sort of wondered if Shoot 'Em Up might replicate the success of 300, which made $27 million on a traditionally slow weekend in March with a similar all-violence ethos, but I guess people want there to be a little bit of a plot after all. It was a distant sixth with $5.45 mill.

So, let that raise doubts about my credibity.