Monday Morning Quarterback Part I
By BOP Staff
September 27, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Kim Hollis: The long-in-development Moneyball opened to $19.5 million this weekend. Do you view this as a good result for a baseball movie or a lackluster result for a movie with so many surface similarities to The Social Network?
Brett Beach: I see nearly a half-dozen ways this is a success and none that it is a failure: Another (near) $20 million opening for Brad Pitt. One of the best openings for a baseball-themed movie (and this one doesn't even have that much action) as well as for any sports-themed movie in general. A successful launch for a film long caught in development hell. Best opening for director Bennett Miller (true, he only has two prior films). And a film successful and acclaimed by audiences and critics. I also noted the surface similarities with TSN (as I am sure we all did) and I see no reason why it won't have equally strong legs, perhaps making it to $100 million if Oscar nominations are forthcoming. If a return trip to the Oscars is in the cards for Aaron Sorkin (who receives credit along with Steven Zaillian) then it's a testament to his ability to enter a milieu filled with technical lingo and make it sing and entertain. I wouldn't look at the near tie with Dolphin Tale as taking the shine off this curveball, but as evidence of the kind of rare September weekend it was - where three movies, two of them family-themed, could make close to $20 million or more.
Edwin Davies: I'm struggling to view this as anything other than a good result. You could only find fault with it if you were expecting it to open to more than $30 million, which it was never likely to do owing to the type of film that it is. It wouldn't have taken much for this film to have gone completely off the rails. The wrong script or a different director and this film never makes $20 million in its entire run. Instead, we got a film about a very technical aspect of baseball that wouldn't really mean anything to people who aren't aware of the original story that somehow manages to be not only accessible - which is no mean feat - but genuinely uplifting and rousing. Much like The Social Network before it, the mere fact that the film works is a staggering success in itself, and that it has opened to a solid figure and will most likely have decent legs, based on the reviews and the A Cinemascore, strikes me as a fine start to Moneyball's Oscar campaign.
Bruce Hall: As usual, I failed to get up early enough in the afternoon to keep Brett from making all the good points first. I do think that this is a very good result for a baseball film whose fundamental premise was not entirely clear. And considering how long this thing really had been toiling in the ninth level of development hell, we certainly can't discount that. But I love Brad Pitt and Philip Seymour Hoffman enough to overlook the fact that Jonah Hill is in this, so perhaps I'm biased. I'm not expecting a lot, but considering the good word-of -mouth Moneyball is getting, I'm very curious to see what kind of second frame it has.
Tim Briody: Is this a bad time to introduce our new box office analysis metric, Dollars Above Replacement Movie (or DARM)? How about we add in the revenue from concessions to the per screen average of a film and call it CPS? Who's with me? Anyone?
Max Braden: I see Moneyball more in the coach's genre than tech genre like Social Network. The comparison that comes to my mind is Miracle, which opened to $19 million in February 2004. For a baseball movie with more talk than play or comedy, $20 million is good opening. (I am now surprised to see that For Love of the Game is 12-years-old this month). Consider that Miracle was based around an event that is part of American sports lore, and Facebook affects pretty much everyone. An egghead movie about one team that hasn't been in the World Series in two decades is bound to struggle for a wide audience, which makes this result that much more impressive.
Reagen Sulewski: Consider that this is a project that by and large was considered a fool's errand to try and bring to the screen and went through several attempts at the script stage to get it this point. It's a testament to Brad Pitt's perseverance and belief in the project, as well as his ability to sell just about anything - this is towards the lower end of opening weekends for his films, but it's also about a topic that a very, very small percentage of even baseball fans care about. This is a success by any reasonable measure.
David Mumpower: I would add that anyone who has seen this movie realizes that it’s a very talky film without any real villains of note. Films of this ilk rarely achieve box office popularity; then again, they rarely star legitimate A-List actors. Moneyball’s name awareness probably helped some this weekend, but Pitt himself helped more. It also helped that the trailers had a lot of funny moments such as “Who’s Fabio?” It was important to market those to coax the viewer beyond the dry, esoteric subject matter.
Don't call him Flipper
Kim Hollis: Dolphin Tale, which seems to be some sort of Free Willy film with dolphins, earned $19.1 million over the weekend. Be honest. This is a lot more than you were expecting, right? How did Warner Bros. pull this off?
Edwin Davies: Way, way more than I was expecting. Every time I saw the trailer for this, I felt like I was watching a parody of exactly these kind of animal-centric family films.
Maybe that is the key to the success of the film; where someone as jaded and cruel as me saw something laughable, others might have seen something that looked like the most pure-hearted and uplifting film ever. Warner Bros did a great job of appealing to the faith-based audience in much the same way that FilmDistrict did with Soul Surfer, and the marketing was sure to feature the dolphin as much as possible and play up the family elements (light comedy, parent-child relationship, people being healed by healing an animal) that were sure to appeal to as broad an audience as possible.
Brett Beach: I was predicting no more than single digits. In the plus column, an actor I like - Charles Martin Smith of American Graffiti, The Untouchables and Never Cry Wolf - as director. In the negative column, everything else, including that horrible TV spot I saw which I thought at first had to be an SNL skit spoofing a family movie, a direct to On Demand sounding title, and that haphazardly assembled cast.
Although I didn't know it in advance, I have heard that this was sold as a faith-based family movie similar to how Soul Surfer was last spring. WB obviously got the word out to the right parties, as cute dolphins alone don't pull in the crowds. Worth mentioning for historical purposes: with this opening weekend, the film has grossed nearly 90% of what Smith's 1997 opus Air Bud, did in its entirety.
Bruce Hall: Uh...I'm pretty sure it wasn't Harry Connick Jr. Maybe my theory that Morgan Freeman can make anything look credible is true. I remember recently seeing an early '70s television spot he did for Listerine. It was a terrible commercial but because of Freeman's calm, avuncular presence I was ready to drink the stuff right out of the bottle.
Seriously, though, I wonder if this wasn't due to the fact that the only other family friendly fare available this weekend was a 17-year-old film that every loving parent should already have in their DVD collection. Plus, as cheesy and maudlin as the trailers made this thing look, it's been getting very favorable reviews. It may actually be - dare I say it - a decent film. I'll never know, because I was busy watching Jason Statham NOT kill people. But it's no small feat to earn back most of your $37 million budget on a weekend where everyone wanted to party like it's 1994. I think this is a big win for Warner Bros, calm, avuncular actors, jazz pianists, and people who enjoy amusing double entendres like "Dolphin Tale".
Get it? It's a "tale" about a Dolphin with a mechanical "tail"!! Bwahaha! Be still my beating heart. Who says Hollywood is out of ideas?
Max Braden: That's about four times more than I would have expected had I even thought it was going to make an appearance. Clearly we have underestimated these cyborg dolphins and their genius marketing skills. Also: (cute animals) + (Morgan Freeman) = (big balls of money). Just casting Morgan Freeman could turn a remake of Old Yeller into the feelgood movie of the year.
David Mumpower: I am not stunned that the movie is appealing to the masses in that it’s thematically similar to Free Willy, one of the most unlikely films ever to get a sequel (along with today’s Viking Night subject, Highlander). If you had told me two months ago that this movie would open to this level, however, I would have laughed in your face. Literally and certainly. Relative to scale, this is one of the most shocking debuts of 2011.
Reagen Sulewski: First, Lisa Simpson rescues one from a pop can ring and now this. C'mon humans, fight for your spot at the top of the food chain!