Craig's MovieBlog

10 Best Picture Nominees?

What the flagnod?!?

I haven’t written anything in almost 3 months (oh, and how great was The Hangover?), but this news is enough to temporarily get me out of retirement.

This year’s Academy Awards will have 10 Best Picture nominees.

Craig’s theory:  Typically, when you only have 5 nominees, you are choosing high-end art films that might be the best films of the year, but are generally films that didn’t do as well at the box office.  So, if fewer people have seen the films, fewer people care who wins.

With 10 nominees, there’s more of an opportunity for films like Wall-E or The Dark Knight to make the cut (or this year, Up, Star Trek, or even, yes, The Hangover) to get in the race.  That means more people watching, which means higher ad rates and more money for the Academy.

Read about it at The Hot Blog, or In Contention.  I’m sure there will be more to come.

The Academy Award Race Has Begun

As I do every year, I’ll try to keep track of all the industry awards as they’re doled out, leading up to the Academy Awards.  Again, because I have two young children, and the last two films I’ve seen were Bolt and Wall-E, I’ll try to refrain from commenting or editorializing.  :)

So far, after just 4 award announcements, the key races look like this:

Best Picture	Best Director
Slumdog Millionaire – 2 Milk - 1 Wall-E - 1	Danny Boyle, Slumdog Millionaire – 2 David Fincher, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – 1 Mike Leigh, Happy-Go-Lucky - 1
Best Actor	Best Actress
Sean Penn, Milk – 2 Clint Eastwood, Gran Torino – 1 Mickey Rourke, The Wrestler - 1	Sally Hawkins, Happy-Go-Lucky – 2 Anne Hathaway, Rachel Getting Married – 1 Meryl Streep,Doubt - 1
Best Supporting Actor	Best Supporting Actress
Josh Brolin, Milk - 2 Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight – 2	Penelope Cruz, Vicky Cristina Barcelona – 3 Rosemarie DeWitt, Rachel Getting Married - 1

Wanted: Second Biggest #2 Debut Ever

Does that even make sense?  Wanted opened to $51.1 million this weekend, and while it wasn’t enough to beat Wall-E ($62.5 million), it was the second biggest debut ever that didn’t hit #1. 

I love stats like this.  Also, I am a dork.

Here are the top five #2 debuts of all time (via Box Office Mojo)

Rank	Title	Opening	Weekend Winner (Weekend Gross)
1	The Day After Tomorrow	$68.7 million	Shrek 2 ($72.1 million)
2	Wanted	$51.1 million	Wall-E ($62.5 million)
3	The Longest Yard	$47.6 million	Revenge of the Sith ($55.2 million)
4	Alvin and the Chipmunks	$44.3 million	I Am Legend ($77.2 million)
5	Casino Royale	$40.8 million	Happy Feet ($41.5 million)

Thank Goodness Someone Is Paying Attention

Hats off to Nathaniel R over at Film Experience Blog who beat me to the punch today.  I mean, I know math and stuff is hard since we’re all so busy watching The Hills and Living Lohan, but why is everyone in the industry so happy that the new Hulk film opened to $55 million with a $150 budget, while the so-called Ang Lee bomb from a few years ago opened to $62 million with a lower ($137 million) budget?

To recap, here’s a handy table:

	The Incredible Hulk	Hulk
Year	2008	2003
Director	Louis Leterrier	Ang Lee
Stars	Ed Norton, Liv Tyler, Tim Roth	Eric Bana, Jennifer Connelly
Production Budget	$150 million	$137 million
Opening Weekend	$55.4 million	$62.1 million
Per Screen Average	$15,810	$16,974
Industry Buzz	Yay!	Boo!

Yes, opening weekend is just one measure of success, as the 2003 Hulk suffered a severe drop off and bad word of mouth, but can we all stop salivating and crying a sigh of relief when the numbers are clearly worse? 

Expectations must have been god awful to celebrate this way…

Oh, and as David Poland rightfully points out, the new Hulk film “faces Wall-E, Wanted, and Hancock while Hulk faced Charlie’s Angels 2, Legally Blonde 2, and Terminator 3.”

Let’s not break our arms patting ourselves on the back, shall we?

Craigslist

• I don't love Noah's writing, but his Summer Movie Preview is pretty complete, if nothing else.  I find myself looking forward to Iron Man, Speed Racer, Indiana Jones, Get Smart (why open this on the same day as another huge comedy, The Love Guru?), Wall-E, Wanted, Hancock (could be Will Smith's first misfire in some time), The Dark Knight, Step Brothers, The X-Files sequel, Choke, Pineapple Express, Tropic Thunder, The International, Towelhead, Hamlet 2, and finally, Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 (no, not really).
• David Poland handicaps and predicts the box office of the summer hits.  If Hancock hits $250 million, I'll be stunned.  Also, I think he's underestimating the geek quotient on Wanted.  I mean, if 300 can hit a massive opening weekend, then don't you think Wanted will gross more than $62 million all up?  Finally, if Sex and the City only makes $60 million, someone's getting fired at New Line Cinema.  Oh, wait - nevermind.  See David's full box office chart here.
• Dilbert author Scott Adams hated No Country for Old Men and proposes a new system for reviewing movies.
• The first full-length movie has been launched on YouTube, and the creators have an interesting business model behind it.  And by interesting, I mean "no way in hell will this work."
• David Poland again, talking about the Juno Blu-ray DVD.  It comes with a "bonus digital copy" that you can put on your iPod, PC, etc, etc.  This is brilliant, and I'd love to see every DVD come with this.  I mean, if I buy the DVD, and I want to put it on a different platform - can the studios save me some frustration and do the extra work for me?  I don't want to go find special ripping software, potentially breaking several laws... I want to put 17 Curious George episodes on my laptop or iPod for the airplane trip with my kids, but there's no convenient way to do this today.

Disney Update: Wall-E Trailer

Bob Iger spoke yesterday about a range of topics, including Disney's purchase of Pixar in January 2006... that $7.2 billion purchase.

"No, we didn't overpay," he said, in response to a question. "It was clearly fully priced," he added, jokingly. "Maybe that's a euphemism.

Can we all agree that buying Pixar for the innovation-less Disney was completely, totally, unambiguously worth it?  It put Steve Jobs on their board, made gabillions in merchandising from Cars alone, (he even announced rolling out a MMO video game environment based on the Cars universe), and the stock is up 9 points since he took over. 

Oh, and Pixar happens to make incredible movies.  Not only do they have a deal for Toy Story 3, but here's the newest Wall-E trailer.  Can't wait.

He also discussed something else that caught a few eyes around the industry.

Iger said that since hooking up with Apple's iTunes a year and a half ago, consumers have downloaded 40 million-50 million episodes of Disney-generated TV shows and 4 million movies.

Now, most journalists just say, "whoa... those are big numbers," and leave it at that.  I like to call that lazy journalism.  Silicon Alley Insider, however, decided to do some homework... and I quote:

• Pali Research's Rich Greenfield estimates that Disney (DIS) is getting about $14.50 for each movie sold through Apple (AAPL). 4 million x $14.50 = $58 million.
• We estimate that Disney gets about $1.44 for each video it sells. 45 million x $1.44 = $64.8 million
• Grand total: $122.8 million: In other words, a little less than 10% of the $1 billion digital revenue goal Iger has laid out for his company this year -- and a rounding error for a company that generated $35 billion in sales last year.

Now... $123 million is truly nothing for a company of Disney's size, but it is all incremental revenue, as SAI reports.  The net is that digital sales of TV and movies aren't going to be moneymakers anytime soon.  I am curious though... how much does a Comcast make from VOD sales?  Is it dramatically more than this... or generally on par?