First, the caveats: 1) I love reading The New York Times. 2) I haven't seen Flags of our Fathers, and really have no opinion about whether it should/could win an Academy Award this year, or do well at the box office.
Having said that, once again they wade into the box office waters without any context around what they're saying. This happened a few weeks back when trying to show off the "extreme patience" that Warner Bros. showed around the horribly low opening of When Harry Met Sally... Yes, they're very artist friendly - box office be damned.. it's the art that matters!
The New York Times neglected to mention in the article that the aforementioned film only opened on 41 screens.
But in today's edition [via Market My Monkey] they make the same mistake.
They claim that Flags of our Fathers had a terrible opening ($10.2 million) this weekend. I will give them that. A $10 million opening for a $90 million film with Oscar aspirations is not necessarily kicking things off in the right direction.
The problem is that people read that and say... "wow - Pirates of the Caribbean 2 opened to like $120 million or something. Shoot, The Grudge 2 made $20 million last week. $10 million? Flags of our Fathers must totally suck."
What isn't here, of course, is that Flags of our Fathers only opened on 1876 screens. (Just to be complete, The Grudge 2 opened on 3211 screens.) So let's do some apples-to-apples comparisons, shall we?
First of all, Flags of our Fathers is the 99th widest opening of 2006. That's right - it barely cracked the top 100 this year alone when you look at how wide movies are opening. I mean, it was only the third widest opening this week alone with Flicka at 2877 screens and The Prestige at 2281. Again, as a comparison, Pirates 2 opened on 4133 screens, more than twice what Flags opened on.
So, given that it made $10.2 million, putting it at the 72nd biggest opening of 2006, at least it's doing better than the screen count is setting it up to do.
In fact, if you look at the top 100 box office openings of this year, the average number of screens that a film is being released on is 2776 - almost 1000 screens more than what Flags of our Fathers chose to open on.
Next, let's look at other films that opened similarly, on approximately 1876 screens. Twenty four movies have opened this wide since 1999 when I started tracking screen counts, and the average box office take for those films on opening weekend is just $6.9 million. So... Flags of our Fathers beat the average there as well.
Let's look at the top 6 films on that list of similar openings. See if they ring any bells for you:
- Remember the Titans - $20.9 million - 1865 screens - 2000 - $115.6 million final total
- Pitch Black - $13.5 million - 1832 screens - 2000 - $39.2 million
- Drumline - $12.6 million - 1836 screens - 2002 - $56.3 million
- Bounce - $11.4 million - 1918 screens - 2000 - $36.8 million
- Flags of our Fathers - $10.2 million - 1876 screens - 2006 - ??????
- Crash - $9.1 million - 1864 screens - 2005 - $54.6 million
That last film sounds kinda familiar... my memory's a bit hazy, but I think it won Best Picture last year. (That was smarmy sarcasm for any of you not paying close attention.)
Again, I'm not saying Flags of our Fathers is going to be a box office hit, make its money back, or win any Oscars, and I honestly don't care either way. I'm just looking for the press to consider all the information before reaching a conclusion - don't they have that responsibility? Or at the least, give us the data, so that we can make our own decisions.
UPDATE - An hour after I made this post, Anne Thompson also slammed the NY Times for this (and she slams a Paramount exec as well). I'm thrilled to be even remotely on the same wavelength as her.
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