Monday Morning Quarterback Part I
By BOP Staff
August 10, 2009
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Kim Hollis: G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra opened to $54.7 million in an ultra-wide release of 4,007 venues. Should Paramount be happy with this result?
Josh Spiegel: Absolutely, Paramount should be happy...with THIS result. I would not be surprised if this movie doesn't hit $175 million domestically, though, based on the Cinemascore rating, and the drops the movie had from its opening-day gross. Still, considering the extremely bad buzz, to the point where major newspapers were only writing about G.I. Joe to discuss how terrible it apparently was, the number is pretty good.
Scott Lumley: They should absolutely be thrilled. This film had the worst buzz I had ever seen, a B-level cast and some sub-par effects. That this was over $30 million at all has to be considered a solid victory. I guess this isn't that surprising. I really expected a fanboy rush to at least make this marginally successful, but this is more than I was expecting by a wide margin. This film may also be benefiting from some reverse buzz on this, as the group that I watched it with indicated that they also had heard that it was supposed to be terrible yet they went anyways.
Tim Briody: Sure, they should be thrilled. But I wouldn't be surprised with a final domestic take of around $110 million or so. And I might be high.
Max Braden: That's the fourth highest opening weekend for an August release, and the first two placeholders were sequels. That's a great result for something that was widely panned.
Sean Collier: If we ever see a movie get a bad-buzz bump, it'll be this one. As Scott pointed out, early word about GI Joe was so bad that some portion of that audience may have gone just to laugh at it; the vast majority, of course, were likely fooled by the full-court press by the marketing department, but still. Whatever the reason people are buying tickets, Paramount should be thrilled. The question, though: in a summer full of gigantic drops, will we see the biggest next weekend?
Reagen Sulewski: To borrow some gaming parlance, Paramount made a saving throw with the switch up in the tone of the ads in the last couple of weeks. Early on, it looked ridiculous, like nothing anyone over the age of 13 would want to be caught near. They managed to rebrand it as a testosterone-fueled action film by de-emphasizing some of the things like the super-suits, etc. Compared to Transformers, this probably feels like a loss, but there's something inherently sillier about this kind of action with humans than with robots. Long term, I think Tim is right on target that it'll be lucky to double this weekend total.
David Mumpower: There is this quirky little phenomenon in the movie industry where the entirety of North America occasionally gives a studio a mulligan, for lack of better terminology. For whatever reason, the occasional well established property breaks out almost in spite of the way that it looks rather than because of it. A really good example of this was Fantastic Four, a film everyone was certain would fail due to its terrible buzz. Fox correctly made the determination that they should focus on Chris Evans as the anchor draw, and the film opened huge, stopping an epic box office slump. With G.I. Joe, a new commercial was cut that did something truly amazing. Almost the entirety of the dialogue from previous clips was eliminated. They released what was effectively a videogame cut scene with hard rock musical accompaniment. It was a cynical move that smacked of desperation, but I think that it proved to be a successful Hail Mary pass. This was never a film I considered anything other than a woefully misguided joke of an adaptation. The $54.7 million opening is remarkable, even if Tim is right about the film's Dorf-esque legs.
It's all Ashton Kutcher's fault, really.
Kim Hollis: We've been talking about the "Twitter Effect," the immediacy of word-of-mouth in the social media era. Isn't G.I. Joe a blow against that notion?
Tim Briody: G.I. Joe had a 2.5 multiplier for the weekend, which is still kinda lousy. While it could have been worse, I think the "Twitter effect" was essentially canceled out here by the fact that it wasn't screened for critics. The crotch-kicking it would have gotten in the papers would have contributed highly to people staying home this weekend and perhaps lowering the weekend multiplier a notch or two.
Josh Spiegel: Tim's right about that multiplier; when you consider the fact that Paramount hoped the movie would appeal to kids as much as it does to the fanboy, that number becomes a lot worse. A movie that could be an action movie for the whole family (if such a thing truly exists outside of the studio execs' minds) would hopefully have a better multiplier, and better Saturday and Sunday grosses in general. Also, I wonder how much of an effect Twitter has, if any substantial one at all. We can guess, but it's the least scientific thing out there in terms of box office predictions, so far.
Scott Lumley: I can't even gauge a Twitter effect, but I'm not going to be surprised at all if this drops more than 50% next weekend. I say the $55 million opening is fanboy rush and it won't be sustainable.
Tim Briody: 60% drop easy. I wouldn't exactly call it a "fanboy" rush, Scott, since I'm not exactly sure there are G.I. Joe fanboys. Sadly, there's just a group of people who like their movies loud and with lots of 'splosions.
Sean Collier: I would wonder if people who get their movie reviews in 140 characters or less would really be affected, positively or negatively, by word-of-mouth. I can't imagine anyone was tweeted out of buying a ticket. About all you can fit in the format is "GI Joe was terrible," and we all already knew that.
David Mumpower: Any time there is a newly developing behavior such as the immediacy of word-of-mouth, a couple of notable exceptions quickly occur. G.I. Joe is absolutely one of them. I don't think many of the people who bought tickets were deluded into thinking they were going to see an Academy Awards contender. What was done here was a variation on the Mel Gibson playbook. By showing the film in America's heartland and emphasizing the populist military aspect of it, Paramount redeemed the biggest mistake on the film, globalizing it in order to give it a chance at bigger worldwide box office. It was a way of saying, "We changed it, but we didn't really mean it." That message struck a chord and it led to a re-establishing of trust that was sorely needed. Effectively, the Twitter Effect isn't much of a factor for hard working folks who don't spend much time on the Internet.
Kim Hollis: I would also contend that because G.I. Joe skews pretty young, the Twitter Effect was negated to some degree. What we're seeing about the demographics of Twitter is that it's not even close to being as youthful a group as you would believe. It really wasn't even a strong trending topic over the weekend - Julie & Julia was right there with it, anyway. I do think District 9 might be a good one to watch for the social media impact.