Monday Morning Quarterback Part II
By BOP Staff
March 14, 2012
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Kim Hollis: Silent House opened to $6.7 million, and less impressively, received an F Cinemascore. What are your thoughts on Silent House?
Bruce Hall: Maybe people confused it with Safe House and assumed they'd already seen it? At least, that's what I would be telling my bosses if I'm in any way responsible for this movie. I haven't seen Silent House but the synopsis sounds pretty generic, it stars the Olsen family equivalent of Stephen Baldwin, and in general I can think of no good reason to care about it.
Apparently, America agreed with me.
Brett Beach: Um, Bruce, I think Mary Kate and Ashley were (respectively) the Stephen and Daniel Baldwin of the Olsen bunch. Great media moguls/celebrities, though. Elizabeth seems like a Jennifer Lawrence on her way up from the indies upstart to me. I saw a trailer, thought it looked freaky, heard about the F score, did my due diligence and read the plot for this and the Uruguayan original on Wikipedia. Why isn't just having a scary intruder in the house story enough? Why gussy it up with "real time" (uh-huh) and "one take" (sure) and trotting out the hoariest of plot devices and explanations (no spoilers this time). You make the horror audience angry. You won't like them when they they're angry. (Here's hoping The Cabin in the Woods delivers.)
Shalimar Sahota: I've seen the original film, and while the supposed one take look is impressive, the resulting story is not. The too stupid to be clever conclusion just doesn't work. After seeing the trailer to the remake I was intrigued and hoped that it would improve on the original. However, that Cinemascore suggests that they've gone for authenticity and the faults have been carried over. With a reported production budget of around $1 million, I think distributor Open Road planned to dupe enough audiences so that it can at least make that much back on the opening weekend before dreaded word-of-mouth kills it. While it's not exactly Paranormal Activity numbers, it appears to have worked. Even if it falls out of the top ten next week it probably won't matter so much, for so long as they didn't overspend on the marketing, I'd say it's already a small success.
Max Braden: Strung out horror isn't my type of genre, but I thought at least a niche group would appreciate it. So that F score surprises me, especially after Olsen was so good in Martha Marcy Mae Marlene. The movie that comes to mind for me is the remake of Straw Dogs - constant pressure and home invasion - which would only appeal to a small audience. That film grossed a total of $10 million last fall, so this $7 million is a stronger performance.
Edwin Davies: The one-take idea always struck me as more impressive than scary, and since it's kind of hard to put it across in advertising short of just showing an unbroken sequence from the film, you just end up with a fairly generic looking horror film. There just didn't seem to be much particularly interesting to the story of this one to grab people, and the aesthetic choice was not one that grabbed people.
David Mumpower: You know what screams action and surprise? The word "Silent." The only aspect of this film that was a strong selling point was an Olsen non-twin, which is interesting only to Uncle Jesse. And the Haute Tension premise was terrible the first time. An imitator of that is like a reboot of Homeboys from Outer Space.
See? Silent is bad!
Kim Hollis: Eddie Murphy's latest clunker, A Thousand Words, managed an equally impressive feat of hate. After 43 reviews, it is 0% fresh at Rotten Tomatoes. It also earned $6.2 million over the weekend. What went wrong here and why does this keep happening to Eddie Murphy?
Bruce Hall: The biggest irony here is that the funniest thing about Eddie Murphy used to be his mouth. So imagine my surprise when I see the trailer to this movie - it's all about Eddie Murphy NOT being able to talk? That's like a Michael Jordan biopic with no basketball. Are you kidding me? The only way to make an Eddie Murphy film disaster more disastrous is to take away the only thing that ever made him funny. Maybe that's an oversimplification, but that is the way I see it.
Now, I'll say this: Murphy is largely identified with epic failure, but I'm not sure those epic failures are quite as numerous as people think. We can argue about whether the Shrek movies, or Mulan even count. But Dreamgirls and Daddy Day Care weren't exactly bombs, and Murphy had a pretty good run in the '90s. Even most of his recent failures were simple disappointments like I Spy and Tower Heist, rather than the knee slapping embarrassments that were Meet Dave, Imagine That, and...well...A Thousand Words. And let's be honest with each other - a thousand words isn't nearly enough to explain Pluto Nash.
Yeah, I made that joke. Deal with it.
I'm just saying that when you look at the whole of things, the perceived record of earth shattering failure that surrounds Murphy is not entirely fair. Once, he was the biggest star on the planet. And when you're that guy, people assume that failure to replicate the same level of success indefinitely is failure. I'm just not sure that's true.
The analogy here is that a quarterback can own as many passing records as you please, but if you got crushed by 40 points every time you made it to the Super Bowl, it will define your career. Just ask John Elway circa 1996. Murphy's career is not entirely the abject failure it's perceived to be, but he's got some pretty crushing defeats on his record. And for better or worse, they have defined his career. A Thousand Words is now one of them. Murphy's recent reputation as a comedy hack may not be fair, but it exists precisely because of movies like this one.
Brett Beach: I come to the game late and Bruce steals all of my A-material! I was going to make a similar argument and so I concur. I stacked Murphy's films from box office heights to the dregs and he does get penalized a lot harsher for his failures than other actors who have their share of bombs. To Bruce's list I would also add 1980s films like Best Defense (his first "dud" after 48 Hrs and Trading Places) and mid-'90s misses like Vampire in Brooklyn, Metro and Holy Man (I know no one who has seen the latter). I think it keeps happening because in his defense he refuses to settle in one genre. On the flip side of that coin, he refuses to go back to the R-rated smartest guy in the room raunchy patter that made him big at the start of his career. It's like Prince going Jehovah's Witness and renouncing Darling Nikki. He will always be capable of putting out great stuff, but why tie one or both hands behind your back when you know your strengths as an artist? If he were to put out a red band fake trailer for a fake upcoming film, it would be a great viral moment. Instead he follows Brett Ratner right out of hosting the Oscars.
Reagen Sulewski: I wonder if he had it to do all over again, if he'd still make Doctor Dolittle. That's at best a Pyrrhic victory in hindsight, since it sent him down this path of family friendly films, but cost him his loyal audience in the process. I think every comedian runs out of gas at some point - even Sandler's hitting the wall, and he seemed invincible for a decade, there. The amazing thing is when you look back at his non-vocal work, there's just a great wasteland of suck for a long, long time. There are middle school students who weren't born the last time Murphy made a movie of any consequence.
Tim Briody: Luckily I saved a copy of Trading Places as a historical document. Look kids, this man used to be funny!
Max Braden: I'm not sure Murphy really needs to sweat this one. It was mostly filmed four years ago and sat on the shelf while he's done other things. He could rest on the success of Shrek, but I think what hurts him in the public's mind is that he seems unreliable - dropping the Oscar hosting gig for instance. I think you could make similar criticisms about Steve Martin's movie career, but he's played ball more often and continues to keep his name in front of the public without being associated with anything unpopular.
David Murphy: To be fair, this was one of the projects Eddie Murphy took while he was still hot from Dreamgirls. Still, Hollywood producers have this weird blindspot where Murphy is concerned. The sporting analogy is Donovan McNabb, a once great football player who continues to receive opportunities in the NFL because coaches remember what he used to be. This causes them to ignore what he has become. Murphy is similar in that his glory days are largely in the past. Sure, he'll have the occasional strong performance but there is much (much much) more bad than good these days. Nicolas Cage is the same way, only he was never as talented.