Monday Morning Quarterback Part I
By BOP Staff
May 19, 2008
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Kim Hollis: The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian was tracking in the $80 millions, but it only opened to $55.0 million this weekend. This total is over $10 million less than its predecessor, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. What happened?
David Mumpower: I am of the opinion that there are three key issues for Prince Caspian's relative failure. The first and most important is that I found the marketing campaign lazy. It was as if the advertisers involved felt that their work had been done for them by the first film and the church crowd. That last comment bleeds into the second key issue I see with its performance. Prince Caspian proudly trumpeted the fact that it was much darker in tone than the original. I think that this attempt to make it more mainstream in a Peter Jackson way was needless ($290 million should be mainstream enough) alienated some of its core audience. And the third and final reason is that The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe is a title that stands out on its own as famous. Prince Caspian, the next title in the same series, is much less well known and established. That factors in a lot in making consumers automatically want or not want to see a project.
Tim Briody: Here's another film franchise completely sunk upon the release of the second entry. I think the main thing is that later chapters in the Narnia series are much lesser known than The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I admit that that was the only one I was familiar with prior to the release of Prince Caspian.
Les Winan: We shouldn't ignore the elephant in the room, which is that The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe was a pretty terrible movie. I saw it on video and rather than making me interested in Prince Caspian, it had the exact opposite effect.
Reagen Sulewski: Even with the success of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, I felt it was kind of dicey to get all seven Narnia books on to film (even forgetting that one of them is almost entirely about horses). So this result didn't surprise me all that much except that I did think it would at least match the first film. They're not as intimately connected with a continuous story line like Rings or Potter - it's not as if you need to see all of the films to get the entire story. You can pop in and out at any point and not have neccesarily missed anything.
Calvin Trager: Completing the thought - Being able to pop in and out works against the franchise's box office potential.
David Mumpower: That's an interesting idea. Why do you think Harry Potter avoids this issue?
Reagen Sulewski: Harry Potter has an episodic feel while still maintaining a overall story across all seven books. You have your yearly adventure of the core group of characters, which you can enjoy on that level, while there's the hook of the Voldemort story to carry people along. The Narnia series, meanwhile, is so unconcerned with that, that the main characters change from book to book, and not everyone even agrees with the order that you should read the books in. Admittedly, people weren't thinking about this kind of thing when he wrote it, but it's problematic when you go to adapt them.
David Mumpower: So, moving forward, you think it would be better for Narnia to create a better arcing narrative that makes each title a must-see release? Walden Media needs to do something to establish that it is not a franchise where viewers may "pop in and out", as Calvin Trager aptly summarized, right?
Reagen Sulewski: I don't know that you can do that now - the books are already written, and trying to shoehorn that it is just going to alienate your core audience that knows the books. I mean, there is kind of a beginning and an end point (and the haze of my childhood memories tells me that the last book ends it in a satisfying way), but the middle parts are inherently 'a la carte'.
Calvin Trager: No, I think the changes to Walden's strategy will revolve around release timing, marketing and perhaps budgeting. The latter is an acknowledgment of what we've been saying about the earning potential of the other titles in the series.
Kim Hollis: I agree that all of the films excluding The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe are going to have a problem with name recognition, even with The Chronicles of Narnia attached to their names. That is why it is all the more important to do a good job of marketing the film, which Disney simply did not do here. I couldn't tell you one scene that stood out to me from the trailer, and the commercials felt too dark for a family film.
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. (Prince Caspian.) The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
Kim Hollis: If Prince Caspian could start its marketing campaign all over again, what would you do differently?
David: I would mention The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe every three seconds. Forget subliminal messaging. They should have gone into super-liminal mode. That title was well received and well remembered. Playing up the ways that Prince Caspian would be a similar experience to it would have been a huge positive. The other part that got ignored too much was the quality of the trailer. Try naming one aspect of the commercials for Prince Caspian that stands out. I can do it, but I doubt most people could. This is in stark contrast to the first film, which had three killer bits. The first was the kids crossing the gorgeous, icy bridge. The next one was the little girl biting her lip before opening the Wardrobe itself. And the final one was the shot of Aslan. Prince Caspian has that last one, which feels redundant, and one image of the White Witch breaking through ice. Otherwise, it's a completely vanilla ad.
Shane Jenkins: I was actually impressed by the trailers that I saw. I wasn't a big fan of the first one, but I thought they did a good job of making this one seem more like a real "movie." In retrospect, perhaps the intensity of the ads scared off families. The film has an adorable Puss in Boots-ish talking mouse that I don't remember seeing in the ads, and a really well-done badger. Maybe they should have taken a page from Shrek and played up the cute-creatures-with-identifiable-voices aspect more.
Calvin Trager: This seems obvious in retrospect even if it may have been deemed needless during production, but why not title this movie "The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe: Prince Caspian"? I guess that's my way of saying I agree with David's super-liminal comment.
Les Winan: I can't help but wonder if audiences are turned off by the prospect of seven films to finish the story. This isn't Harry Potter, after all. In most people's eyes, it's a second-rate Lord of the Rings knock-off.
Kim Hollis: I have to agree that talking animals would have helped here. I'm not sure I believe that people won't be up for seven films in the series, though. This is a beloved series that specifically targets Christians in a big way. It's been proven that they will lend their support to projects such as these. I just wasn't feeling that same grassroots effort that existed for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
These children make Aldo Nova sad.
Kim Hollis: Considering the disappointment of Prince Caspian, The Spiderwick Chronicles and Stardust as well as the abject failures of The Golden Compass and The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising, is it fair to say that fantasy films are on the outs?
David Mumpower: John Hamann drilled it with his comment in the wrap that having Frodo or Harry Potter in the title is the key to a successful fantasy film. I certainly believe new projects can do just as well, as was demonstrated by the first Narnia movie. They simply need to give potential consumers hyper-awareness of the product as well as an innate understanding of why the project is for them. The Golden Compass failed to do this on an epic scale. I'm not sure The Seeker even bothered to try to market itself that way. Stardust and Prince Caspian are perhaps the best examples that a good fantasy film (and both of them had A Cinemascores) needs more to break out. To a larger point, in this day and age, no film can excel without a great ad campaign.
Calvin Trager: I think it goes beyond marketing. The most successful fantasy movies have received the benefit of multi-generational appeal of their source material, built either over time like Lord of the Rings or virtually overnight like Harry Potter. None of the failures you mention have done that - Golden Compass as a story is relatively popular but that only gets you so far in building an audience for a movie. The Spiderwick books came out like five mintues ago. Prince Caspian becomes an interesting case study because while it benefits from being part of the Chronicles, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe stands alone in the series as having made itself a part of the cultural fabric. I actually think Caspian's numbers were about where they should have been considering this. I bet a small but meaningful percentage of the people that have read The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe have not read the other books in the Chronicles.
Reagen Sulewski: Prince Caspian only really suffers in comparison to The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, and some of those other films were made pretty cheaply. Don't forget there was Bridge to Terabithia, made from a book I'd never heard of, and came away with $80 million, which isn't too shabby. I think we just have to adjust our expectations downwards for the rest of this series. If Wardrobe made $290 million domestic, and this one makes about $200 million, well, that's not too shabby.
Calvin Trager: Bridge to Terabithia is a great example of what I'm talking about. I read it in fifth grade, my wife read it in fifth grade, my kids read it in fifth grade, and when the movie came out they got five paying customers in the theater as a result of the nostalgia effect. Contrastingly, only my kids have read the Spiderwick Chronicles and that one didn't get us into the theater. But a Spiderwick movie in 30 years might have a decent chance of getting my kids and their kids into the theater, or holoplex, or probably by then everything will be downloaded wirelessly right to your cerebral cortex.
Regarding $200 million, I do think Caspian's legs might be better than expected. May weekends are tough on families.
Kim Hollis: I think there might be some degree of fantasy fatigue, though if something looks truly special, it has a chance to break out. Kids movies are notoriously difficult to judge, anyway. What is fresh and exciting now is old and moldy in a year.
$200 million buys a lot of fauns.
Kim Hollis: As we mentioned here a couple of weeks ago, Prince Caspian's budget is in excess of $200 million. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe earned $291.7 domestically. What odds would you give that Prince Caspian can even manage $200 million, a number that would not put it in the black, at this point?
David Mumpower: Before answering, I would like to point out that a key aspect here is that international receipts are why Walden Media was comfortable with a production budget in excess of $200 million. 60% of the first Narnia's money came from overseas receipts. So, it's not just about what the film makes domestically. This is important because based on what we have seen of demand so far for the project, it ain't making $200 million. In fact, I'm not ceding $150 million at this point. The first film's legs were dramatically boosted by being a Christian allegory released near Christmas. So, it had the dual benefits of being a December release with a holiday-appropriate theme. Prince Caspian is not going to have that sort of holdover. I only give it a 10% chance of making $200 million, and that "optimism" may be out the window by this time next week.
Reagen Sulewski: Why I'm more comfortable with that figure than you are is that it's the top kids film out during Memorial Day Weekend. Yeah, Indy's going to rule over all by a ridiculous margin, but we've seen in the past that multiple films can do well here because people have the free time to see their second choice at some point.
Kim Hollis: It is fortunate to have Memorial Day Weekend as its second frame, but it's going to fall off very quickly after that as more family-appropriate films like Kung Fu Panda arrive. I think it's going to finish somewhere around $160-170 million.