Monday
06Jul2009
Box Office - 'Fallen' Rises, Officially Takes Weekend
Monday, July 6, 2009 at 4:37PM
The dust has cleared from the knock-down-drag-out brawl between Transformers: Revenge of Michael Bay and Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs. Yesterday, we reported a tie in the race for box office supremacy,
as if this is some damn soccer game where nobody wins, but now the numbers have been notarized and Transformers won
the three-day weekend, but lost the five-day frame.
Colin Boyd | Permalink | in Box Office, Ice Age, Transformers | Print Article | Email Article | 6 Comments | Share Article
Reader Comments (6)
Is it fair to draw audience fallout comparisons between R-rated and PG-13 films? It seems to be a given that R-rated films are destined to never compete at the same box office level as their PG-13 brethren. The latter of which is more on par with G and PG rated flicks in terms of pulling in the widest band of moviegoers. R-rated films, while not under the seeming death knell that an NC-17 rating would impose, are only going to hit a narrow swath of the total number of ticket buyers. As such, wouldn't it be better to compare the audience fallout from Watchmen to that of films like Tropic Thunder or Wanted?
I don't know that it's patently unfair, especially in the case of Watchmen, which had a bigger marketing budget than anything else released before the summer. Especially when you consider how big the drop was for that movie in its second weekend against relatively low numbers put up everywhere else, the sophomore slump is particularly pronounced.
A 67% drop is massive for anything. R-rated movies don't usually slip that much or even that much more than films with other ratings. Hell, Hannibal didn't even tank that hard.
Didn't Watchmen need a bigger marketing budget to make a relevant imprint to the masses? We're talking about a film based off a well known and revered graphic novel that most average moviegoers knew nothing about. That it was rated R automatically meant that most average moviegoers probably wouldn't go near it anyway. More marketing was necessary if just to get close to a breakeven point on total sales.
Unlike Hannibal, Watchmen was a relative unknown outside of those familiar with the book. While that 67% drop is massive the film had more things to potentially go against it than for it. It was never going to do insane numbers to begin with, it's overall audience appeal was niche at best and to sustain itself in week 2 would've required repeat business plus new business. There just wasn't enough of either making the rather precipitous drop more likely than not.
I think you hit it in your second paragraph - it was never going to do huge business overall because of its limited appeal, but that's not an R or PG-13 consideration. Even without blue penises, it wouldn't have appealed to twice as many people because it's not a comic book movie the way audiences are trained to perceive them. And regardless of the marketing and blue penises, the opening weekend crowd didn't "get it."
Contrast that with The Hangover, which is a much easier sell and had great word of mouth. I don't think the rating is responsible for a drop either way.
The Hangover is an exception to the rule unless you could possibly show where R-rated films on average break the $200 million mark domestically. From what I've seen most R-rated films don't come close to cracking that ceiling in domestic grosses. If the rating was so easily dismissed as a non-factor in how well a film does or doesn't do, why do so many filmmakers cut their films to avoid the R?
I'm not saying that Watchmen did abysmally just because of the R but the rating is a limiter to overall grosses that PG-13 films don't have. Next to a good many other R-rated films Watchmen's domestic gross doesn't look nearly as bad and if the film's production budget was half of what it was it would've been a success. If it had a PG-13 rating it would have made more money but not by much. Interestingly enough, a head-to-head comparison of Watchmen to the somewhat more accessible V for Vendetta has Watchmen ahead by $37 million in domestic sales. Of course that's quickly negated by the difference in production budget. Still it goes to show that on average R-rated films compare to one another far more favorably than they ever do next to PG-13's.
You're arguing a point about percentages with evidence about grosses. They're two completely different things.
The Hangover is not an exception to the rule that a movie that surpasses audience expectations tends to do well for a longer period of time. Taken had some of the best week-to-week numbers in a long time for the same reason, just as a Pixar movie holds up for a month or so.
I'm saying that the percentages from week to week aren't based on the film's rating. Its overall reach can be, whether or not it can hit $200 million or whatever, but if a movie drops 35% or 60% in its second weekend is not symptomatic of being PG-13 or R. It happens in the horror genre a lot, true, but to the PG-13 flicks as much as the R ones. An R-rated comedy or action movie is no more or less likely to lose half its audience in seven days than one that's PG-13, on the whole.
Terminator 2 crushed Salvation by every measurable but opening weekend numbers, and that's only because it was in 1,500 fewer theaters. The comparison isn't what's the ceiling for these movies but rather how much of that audience is strictly there for the opening weekend. Again, even if you look back at the past decade, only Spider-Man 3 dropped over 60% among the top ten films in a given year, including the R-rated movies.
As it relates to Transformers, it's a steep not steady decline, so Watchmen is a fair comparison because very few R-rated blockbusters fall into that same category. Look at the top 20 R-rated movies ever and count how many of them lost 60% (much less 67%) of their audience in the second weekend. It's less common than the other way around.