Some of you may remember when I did my weekly box office analysis over at www.craigbe.com. Sadly, with two young boys and a day job, I completely ran out of time to to that work to the level that I wanted it, and this blog is where I get to talk about movies.
Over at The Jay.com, however, our friend has done a PHENOMENAL job on calling bullsh*t on Universal and their efforts to convince us that Evan Almighty hit the not-so-magical-anymore threshold of $100 million domestically.
I've seen movies do things like this in the past, and it always bugged me (I'm looking at you Shakespeare in Love and Collateral) but The Jay has documented this film's idiosyncrasies perfectly. At the end of the piece, however, he says:
"I’m not deploring the tactic, box office tampering has been going on for decades, and in the long run who really cares anyway; I take pause with the egregiously conspicuous way in which it went down. Slowly pump up the numbers for a couple days during the week so you can prove the film was tracking higher, and then evenly distribute the money across the entire weekend. Don’t let the film do the exact amount of business expected for a full week and then dump $130k on a single day!!! That’s how you get caught. It’s just a terrible way to perpetuate a harmless fraud."
All I'll say in response is this: since no one really cares, since there are no repercussions, the studios have no incentive to do the extra work to "sneak" his by us. Yes, it's hacky and obvious, but there is no reason whatsoever for them to change their practice.
Thanks for the love, Craig! I was thinking that piece was right up your alley, but I zoned out and forgot to e-mail you. Glad to see you read it and liked it.
Btw, I looked up Collateral on Mojo but couldn't see the daily numbers, only the weekend numbers, which looked fine. Although, I have a CLEAR memory of that film limping to $100mil and then disappearing hours later.
Posted by: The Jay | September 26, 2007 at 01:45 PM