Monday Morning Quarterback Part II
By BOP Staff
April 12, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Kim Hollis: Soul Surfer, the faith-based inspirational movie about a surfer who gets her groove back after a shark attack, earned $10.6 million. What do you think of this result?
Brett Beach: With the a tie for the best per-screen average in the top 10 (and nearly the top 20), and a decently close finish to the #2 spot, this is another win for faith-based films in the mainstream. Between this and Hanna, it was a fairly incredible week for films with unconventional female protagonists. I think this will hold up better in the long run than Hanna as it is a family film and a film that young girls may choose to see en masse, but with a smaller budget than that film, it is already a winner. With this opening and the shockingly small dropoff for Insidious, it's been a good couple of weeks for FilmDistrict.
Josh Spiegel: I knew...oh, next to nothing about this movie, so it's clearly a win. I saw no ads, no posters, and once I read a couple of reviews, I figured it would just vanish, because despite having a faith-based target, there would be no interest. Obviously, I was wrong. Big win for FilmDistrict, even if it just passed $10 million. There's a market for faith-based movies, and there's clearly a market for young girls, so it was smart to combine the two.
Edwin Davies: First off, I don't think we can stress just how good the last two weekends have been for FilmDistrict, which had gone from being a distributor that I had never heard to a studio which has had its first two releases become hits on consecutive weekends. That's really pretty astonishing for such a young company.
In terms of Soul Surfer, this result demonstrates once again the power of marketing a faith-based film to a Christian audience. Appealing directly to church youth groups, rather than trying to appeal to everyone (I'll freely admit that I had not even heard of this film until it was listed in the Weekend Forecast) seems to have paid off in a big way.
David Mumpower: Unlike the rest of you, I’d seen ads for this including a couple in front of some recent DVD rentals. My primary thought was that the attempts to hide the disability rather than play it up were counter-intuitive. They seemed to realize this late in the game as the ads went from doing everything they could to avoid showing her missing her arm to highlighting it in the final week. Was that a key aspect of its triumphant weekend? Probably not. I simply found the whole thing odd.
I am not stunned by the result, which I attribute less to the church going crowd (remember that 2008’s Fire Proof opened much lower at $6.8 million) and more to the paucity of surf films. Blue Crush opened to $14.2 million in 2002, as an example. I would be lying if I said I expected Soul Surfer to do this well, but there is that historical precedence. To a larger point, AnnaSophia Robb is building up quite the film resume for a 17-year-old. She can count Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Bridge to Terabithia, Because of Winn-Dixie, Jumper and Race to Witch Mountain on her film biography. All of these are relative hits. She is someone who could be a factor over the next few years.
The royal wedding will probably be funnier
Kim Hollis: Your Highness, the medieval comedy featuring James Franco, Natalie Portman and Danny McBride, earned $9.4 million. Why did this Universal release fail?
Brett Beach: For all the focus on Portman's hot streak, Franco's high visibility, and marketing this as being from the director of Pineapple Express, this is a combo of two genres that, with a few exceptions, never open that big and never wind up with high grosses - films set in medieval times and pot comedies. Throw those two styles together and you get a result such as this, probably this year's Year One.
I do wonder two things: Did featuring Danny McBride overtly in the ads (I understand he is the lead) turn potential viewers off? I like him in small, small doses, but not in every scene. Second: Is David Gordon Green ever going to go back to All the Real Girls and Undertow-type films or is this his future?
Josh Spiegel: Based on the interviews I've read, Brett, the only way Green's heading back to those kind of movies is if he has to. This result is clearly a failure, but I don't know what people expected at Universal. It's telling that the reviews here were almost universally awful, even from the demographic you might think would like a movie like this. I like Franco, Portman, and McBride fine, but I grew more and more skeptical of this movie being worth my money. Suffice to say, I'll wait until Netflix for this one.
Edwin Davies: Comparing this result to that of Pineapple Express, which opened to $23 million and finished with $87 million back in 2008, I wonder if the film would have done better if Seth Rogen had been cast in the Danny McBride role. Many of the same components from that film were in place for this one, but I get the feeling that in that instance having someone like Seth Rogen, who is a pretty cuddly presence in most films he's in, at its center made that film more appealing than one starring Danny McBride, whose persona is much more abrasive. (I love his work on Eastbound and Down, but his strength seems to lie in playing characters who are pretty much irredeemable.) Perhaps, like Arthur, it is a film which has failed by putting someone who fits more comfortably into supporting roles center stage.
David Mumpower: Shaving with Occam’s Razor here, the film failed because it looked heinous. Brett mentioned Year One and that is exactly the title I have been using as a comparison. It was the last unforgivably awful looking comedy that had big enough names in the cast to maybe earn a better fate than it deserved. And that film’s $43.3 million feels like a pipe dream. We’re probably talking about a $25 million finish for a movie that stars the Black Swan. If we break this down to its basic essence, a proven comedy box office and the reigning Best Actress were just deemed the inferior comedy to a pointless, needless Arthur remake.