Craig's MovieBlog

12/22 - Box Office Report

I know I'm way behind (I took a few days off this weekend), but there really isn't any good news for the King Kong folks.  Just the 8th biggest debut of 2005, the 50th all time (behind Van Helsing?  behind 2 Fast 2 Furious?  behind Scooby Doo?), and it's even below the average for a film opening on 3568 screens.  How warped is it when a $50 million opening is below average?  Anyway, someone can say that it's the 4th best December opening ever, but that's never a terribly interesting statistic to me.

Perhaps Universal underestimated the power of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, which is up to $113.2 million ( 14th best this year) and made $31.8 million in week 2, good enough for the 32nd best week 2 ever.

Rank	LW	Week #	Title	Weekend Total	% Change	Cumulative Total	Screens	Per Screen Average
1	New	1	King Kong	$50,130,145	--	$66,181,645	3568	$14,049.93
2	1	2	The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe	$31,837,683	-51.4%	$113,169,644	3680	$8,651.54
3	New	1	The Family Stone	$12,521,027	--	$12,521,027	2466	$5,077.46
4	3	5	Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire	$5,952,452	-42.0%	$252,598,259	3185	$1,868.90
5	2	4	Syriana	$5,605,167	-52.2%	$22,462,362	1775	$3,157.84
6	4	5	Walk the Line	$3,688,031	-35.7%	$82,607,528	2664	$1,384.40
7	5	4	Yours, Mine and Ours	$3,511,110	-30.5%	$45,202,963	2723	$1,289.43
8	15	2	Brokeback Mountain	$2,508,494	358.2%	$3,474,311	69	$36,354.99
9	7	4	Just Friends	$2,080,852	-45.4%	$29,572,142	1882	$1,105.66
10	6	3	Aeon Flux	$1,751,220	-61.6%	$23,215,672	2058	$850.93
11	8	6	Pride and Prejudice	$1,579,825	-38.8%	$29,237,853	1141	$1,384.60
12	14	2	Memoirs of a Geisha	$1,302,331	90.8%	$2,274,320	52	$25,044.83

King Kong Slipping at Box Office Already?

I don't care what you read in the press... someone at Universal is getting fired over this:

Wednesday estimates from Box Office Mojo...
1. The Chronicles of Narnia - $4,940,386
2. King Kong - $4,870,320

Seriously, King Kong was not only just the 8th biggest debut of 2005, but its opening even did worse than the second weekends of Return of the Sith and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

Don't get me wrong, King Kong will make plenty of money, but there were people talking Titanic numbers.  Forget that - we're probably talking War of the Worlds money.  Not shabby, but not record breaking.

Roger Ebert's Top Ten of 2005

Read Roger's commentary on his website:

10. Millions
9. Yes
8. King Kong
7. Nine Lives
6. Me and You and Everyone We Know
5. Brokeback Mountain
4. Junebug
3. Munich
2. Syriana
1. Crash

Golden Globe Nominations

The Globes have spoken.  Biggest news is that Munich nor King Kong, nor Memoirs of a Geisha got any Best Picture nominations.  George Clooney got 3 nominations himself, and this won't preview the Best Actress race since favorite Reese Witherspoon is in the Comedy/Musical category, not Drama. 

Brokeback Mountain is becoming the clear favorite across all the pre-season awards.

Nomination Leaders: Brokeback Mountain (7), Good Night and Good Luck (4), Match Point (4), The Producers (4).

Also, why in the world are there six nominees for Best Actor in a Comedy/Musical?  Was it that important to give Johnny Depp a nomination for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory?

Best Picture Drama
Brokeback Mountain
The Constant Gardener
Good Night, and Good Luck
A History of Violence
Match Point

Best Picture, Musical/Comedy
Mrs. Henderson Presents
Pride & Prejudice
The Producers
The Squid and the Whale
Walk the Line

Best Actor, Drama
Russell Crowe, Cinderella Man
Philip Seymour Hoffman, Capote
Terence Howard, Hustle and Flow
Heath Ledger, Brokeback Mountain
David Strathairn, Good Night, and Good Luck

Best Actor, Musical/Comedy
Pierce Brosnan, The Matador
Jeff Daniels, The Squid and the Whale
Johnny Depp, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Nathan Lane, The Producers
Cillian Murphy, Breakfast on Pluto
Joaquin Phoenix, Walk the Line

Best Actress, Drama
Maria Bello, A History of Violence
Felicity Huffman, Transamerica
Gwyneth Paltrow, Proof
Charlize Theron, North Country
Ziyi Zhang, Memoirs of a Geisha

Best Actress, Musical/Comedy
Judi Dench, Mrs. Henderson Presents
Keira Knightley, Pride & Prejudice
Laura Linney, Squid and the Whale
Sarah Jessica Parker, The Family Stone
Reese Witherspoon, Walk the Line

Best Supporting Actor
George Clooney, Syriana
Matt Dillon, Crash
Will Farrell, The Producers
Paul Giamatti, Cinderella Man
Bob Hoskins, Mrs. Henderson Presents

Best Supporting Actress
Scarlett Johannsson, Match Point
Shirley MacLaine, In Her Shoes
Frances McDormand, North Country
Rachel Weisz, Contant Gardener
Michelle Williams, Brokeback Mountain

Best Director
Woody Allen, Match Point
George Clooney, Good Night, and Good Luck
Peter Jackson, King Kong
Ang Lee, Brokeback Mountain
Fernando Mereilles, The Constant Gardener
Steven Spielberg, Munich

Best Screenplay
Match Point
Good Night, And Good Luck
Crash
Munich
Brokeback Mountain

King Kong Rave Reviews

Wow - King Kong is getting raves across the board.  How many consecutive great movies can Peter Jackson make?

• Entertainment Weekly gives it an A.
• Variety says, "It's the Return of the King all over again, and he's got a dazzling Queen."
• David Poland says, "Kong is a brave new world. I can't wait to see him again."
• Even Jeffrey Wells, who hates all things Peter Jackson, relents, "Kong ... is still the most thoroughly pulse-pumping, rousingly kick-ass film Jackson's ever delivered, and respect needs to be paid."

How to Sell a Movie (or Fail) in Four Hours

There was a fantastic article in Sunday's New York Times covering the complete insanity that it requires to try and make money selling movies.  Really well done, but I don't understand why this was written by Adam Leipzig, the president of National Geographic Feature Films.

Below is not the whole article, but enough to get across the key points:

It's bad enough that a movie's box-office gross revenues will decline about 50 percent each week and that the time between a film's release in the theater and its debut in the home-video market is shrinking rapidly. (That window is less than four months now, down from six months just a year ago; some industry leaders predict it will soon shrink to nothing.) Even more vexing, success or failure in theaters, often a break-even proposition at best, will be determined with near-certainty by early afternoon of the opening Friday - and then by the turnout at a few bellwether theaters like Loews Lincoln Square and AMC Empire 25 in Manhattan.

Things get really scary when the studio chief puts his or her movie, often years in the making, on the legitimate home-video market - and becomes a hero or a goat in a fraction of a day.

The DVD release of a film is all-important because it is truly profitable, and studios have thus far been largely successful in keeping these profits to themselves. A typical studio movie costs nearly $100 million: an average of $63.6 million to make and $34.4 million to market. Theater exhibitors - Regal, AMC, Loews, and the like - generally keep 50 percent of their box-office sales, which means that a movie must sell nearly $200 million worth of tickets worldwide to return $100 million to the studio and thus break even in its theatrical release.

Since few movies earn that much at the box office [craigbe note: this is true, but he's ignoring international box office, where it gets a little better], the studios have increasingly relied on the home-video market, where the equation is much more in their favor, to help recover losses and make a profit. For example, a DVD costs about $2 to manufacture and $2 to market. It is then sold wholesale to retailers at $16 a unit, amounting to a $12 profit. Since manufacturers' suggested retail prices are usually $20 to $30 a DVD (typically discounted by 20 percent), a DVD can return tens of millions of dollars in profit to the studio.

More than a third of all DVD's (and more than 50 percent of some titles) are sold at Wal-Mart stores, so you focus a lot there. Part of the genius of Wal-Mart's distribution system is its ability to keep track of every detail; Wal-Mart computers know exactly where every individual unit is, in which store, at any given time. This lets the chain maintain inventory at optimum levels - neither too much on hand, nor too little.

In today's world of computerized supply chains, the whole process of releasing a movie on DVD has become one in which success can be measured nearly instantly. At 8 a.m. Tuesday, you arrive in the Southern California office of Universal or Sony. Already, Wal-Mart stores in the East have been open for four hours; based on the number of sales in that short time frame, their computer programs will calculate projections, accurate to within 5 percent, of how many total units will be sold in the first week, the first month, the first six months.

If your movie is performing below expectations, by the time you arrive at work Tuesday morning, already the unsold units are being loaded onto trucks to be returned. Something like this happened with DreamWorks Animation's Shrek 2. The movie was a hit by any measure, but last May, when DreamWorks reported that it had sold fewer DVD's than it anticipated, its stock tumbled 17 percent over two days.

But, if your movie does better than expected, you still get no rest: Instead, you must immediately begin production of more units - studios can manufacture up to half a million a day - so retailers will have fresh stock by the weekend.

Working backward a bit, the equation now comes down to the following: The movie business turns on DVD sales. Strong DVD sales are generally propelled by strong theatrical box office. And what propels theatrical box office?

In most cases, nearly half of a movie's total audience turns out in the first week of release, which means there has been very little or no word of mouth motivating most of the audience. In other words, many people go to a movie without any real information about it - without even reading a review. Or, put most cynically: Most of the time, there is no relationship between how good a film is, and how many people turn out to see it [craig's note: on opening weekend that is... then word of mouth spreads.].

So what makes people go to a movie? Generally, it is awareness - or now, in Hollywood parlance, pre-awareness. Since studios cannot spend enough on advertising to buy awareness (there is so much advertising noise in the marketplace these days), there is a tendency to make movies with familiar titles, characters and stories: The Dukes of Hazzard, Spider-Man, War of the Worlds, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. In the past decade, most box-office revenue has come from pre-aware titles, which includes sequels (X-Men 3, set for a May 2006 release) and remakes (King Kong, Dec. 14).

When word of mouth does happen, it moves with lightning speed: teenagers will send a text message to friends during the first show on Friday about whether a film is good or bad. While it might not be true - yet - that most people decide on the Thursday before a movie opens if they will see it in a theater or buy it on DVD, certainly 24 hours after a film's theatrical opening most of the audience has in effect made that decision.

What does this all mean? Other than the fact that the movie business is riskier than high-stakes Texas Hold 'Em, it means that the economics of the industry are being propelled by sweeping technological changes. Among them are digital projection (which allows films to be broadcast to theaters from secure servers, even possibly allowing different versions to be shown in different communities); shrinking distribution windows in which more films will open simultaneously in theaters, on home video and on cable television (on Jan. 27, the Steven Soderbergh film Bubble will be released at the same time in theaters, on cable television and DVD); and new forms of delivery (soon satellite radio services will be able to transmit video to cars). But the underlying business model of the motion-picture industry has not yet adjusted to the momentum or velocity of change.

Oscars 2006

It's November 7th, 2005, and it's very possible that we have not seen a single film that will be nominated for Best Picture.  Sure, there's been Capote, Good Night and Good Luck, A History of Violence, Crash, Jarhead, and Cinderella Man, but there's a good chance that none of those will hit their mark, and all five nominees will come from the remaining pool of movies that haven't yet been released (and there are only 8 weekends left in 2005) to qualify.

Frankly, I think this sucks.  We end up with crappy movies all year long, then the studios cram everything into November and December, but if those films don't get the boost of a nomination, they're gone... dead on the vine.  Good luck seeing them in a theater versus Blockbuster.

Anyway, here's a piece in the New York Daily News from Jack Mathews about the movies to come this year.  Also, I'm including Jack's top 10 hopefuls:

1. Munich, directed by Steven Spielberg, starring Eric Bana
2. Brokeback Mountain, directed by Ang Lee, starring Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal
3. Memoirs of a Geisha, directed by Rob Marshall, starring Ziyi Zhang and Ken Watanabe
4. The New World, directed by Terrence Malick, starring Colin Farrell
5. The Producers, directed by Susan Stroman, starring Nathan Lane, Matthew Broderick, Uma Thurman, and Will Ferrell
6. Mrs. Henderson Presents, directed by Stephen Frears, starring Judi Dench and Bob Hoskins
7. Walk the Line, directed by James Mangold, starring Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon
8. King Kong, directed by Peter Jackson, starring Adrien Brody, Jack Black, and Naomi Watts
9. Syriana, directed by Stephen Gaghan, starring George Clooney and Matt Damon
10. Match Point, directed by Woody Allen, starring Scarlett Johansson and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers

If You Thought Award Shows Were Bad Before...

...then this just takes the cake.

You know how people complain about the Oscars, when movies that they haven't seen yet get nominated (since they just open in NY or LA for a day to qualify)?  Well, the Hollywood Film Festival actually gave awards to films that they had never seen.

The Producers, Memoirs of a Geisha and King Kong were honored, despite the fact that the festival selection committee hadn't viewed the films, which will not be released until December.

When asked how films such as Producers and Geisha were deemed winners, considering they were unfinished at the time of voting, [founder Carlos] de Abreu said his committee had received "intelligence" from people who had seen footage of the films as they were being edited.

What a load of hooey.  For those of you who thought Hollywood was fake before, now you have proof.