Monday Morning Quarterback Part II
By BOP Staff
July 9, 2014
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Edwin Davies: This is pretty middling for the genre, and especially when you factor in the lack of horror films throughout the rest of the summer. Either no demand had built up from having nothing scary in theaters, which might be the case since this year has been a pretty underwhelming one for horror films and people might not want to risk seeing a bad one, or it was just a case of horribly bad scheduling. I'm not sure who thought it was a good idea to release a fairly dark looking horror/detective film over the 4th of July holiday. I can't help but wonder if the film would have done better if they hadn't focused on a holiday that is so often about family and NOT about demonic possession. As is often the case with these films, the stars are negligible, so I don't feel like this can be blamed on Bana and Munn - you could have cast two unknowns and you would have got a fairly similar result.
Jay Barney: Despite the lack of screen time for the genre, I think this is a pretty disappointing result. I see pegging it to the 4th of July weekend, even if this one is a bit muted compared to others, as an attempt to get some attention, some buzz. With this result, the interest the studio was hoping to garner is not going to materialize. The best chance was a good opening, creating word-of-mouth, even just a little bit. That has not happened, and now it is going to really struggle to even approach its budget. If this is going to have any chance of being a push, it will have to have fairly strong holds over the next several week days. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes arrives next week, and the Purge sequel comes after that. It didn't get much attention during its opening, I wouldn't expect great interest over the next several days. It will be gone soon.
Bruce Hall: Supposedly, this movie cost around $30 million to produce. This means the guys who wrote it are already sitting at a dive bar in Reseda, trying to convince everyone they used to work for Jerry Bruckheimer. It's a crash-and-burn opening, but there's still an outside chance it'll turn a profit down the line, once it hits home media and VOD.
Max Braden: Not just Bana and Munn, but also Community's Joel McHale, acting as a tough cop. I know this because I heard him interviewed by Terry Gross on NPR. That right there is the double whammy you know will lead to low box office numbers. I'm surprised to see from Wikipedia notes that Mark Wahlberg was initially set to star in the lead Bana role. I think when you put it in that hypothetical framework, it helps highlight the unlikelihood for this premise to make any serious money.
Reagen Sulewski: I've never really been one for the whole “genre/time of year” debate, but it kind of has some merit here, as it just looked like it was about to get lost in the shuffle of the summer season. Low budget horror works in the fall because it has space to itself, not so much in competition with other films as much as competition with other films' advertising. Attention spans are way too divided to really get that saturation you need for low budget horror to work. That said, this really isn't too too terrible, other than in comparison to how well these typically do. And maybe it convinces studios to make fewer of these films. So cheers all around!
Kim Hollis: It’s a pretty blah result, and there’s no chance it has any legs, so let’s just throw that notion out the window. It’d be one thing if there were good reviews or even if audiences were talking about it, but instead it’s just… sort of there. This one is going to have a tough time being profitable even by the time it hits home video, and that’s a pretty tough place to be considering that there’s been no competition in the genre for a while. Horror fans are inscrutable. It has to be maddening for studios.
Kim Hollis: America, Dinesh D'Souza's "documentary" follow-up to 2016: Obama's America, earned $2.7 million during the weekend proper and $4.1 million since Wednesday. Why didn't this catch on like his first film?
Edwin Davies: I think the problem lies with the film itself and the climate into which it was released. The subject matter of the film - what would the world be like if America never existed, man? It'd be pretty trippy, right? - isn't terribly compelling and, based on the reviews, it was handled pretty abominably. Not that 2016: Obama's America was a great work of cinema, but at least it was clear about what it was: A hatchet job on a sitting President hoping to influence an election. While America is also a hatchet job, this time broadly aimed at implying that Hilary Clinton is under the influence of the devil, it can't put that in the ads or the title. It's also not being released in the middle of a contentious and divisive election season, so there isn't a keen wellspring of feeling to exploit. Personally, I can't wait for D'Souza's next film, in which he imagines what the world would be like if he had never made America. (Spoilers: it's exactly the same, except a couple of thousand angry old people went to watch Jersey Boys this weekend instead.
Bruce Hall: Because its target demographic was too busy blowing their fingers off with M-80s all weekend had better things to do than get suckered again. If you believe that people tend to get the films they deserve, then also believe that there are limits to the degree you can manipulate even the most willing audience. At some point you need to actually be good at what you do, and Dinesh D'Souza really isn't. Sometimes, we catch lightning in a bottle and create something that resonates with a certain audience, at a certain moment in history. But to repeat that, there needs to be depth and quality behind what you do, on some aggregate level. Otherwise, your movie becomes the Blair Witch Project of the genre.
True Believers stayed away from this in pathogenic droves. That kind of betrayal should tell you something.
Reagen Sulewski: His first film also had the benefit of being released at a time when people were paying attention to politics, whereas even with midterms coming up, his core audience just isn't motivated. There's also the matter of D'Souza's peculiar fall from grace within the right-wing outrage society (to which I'm referring more to his family problems than his criminal ones) - this is a guy that's been outright shown to be a hypocrite. I'd like to think that his audience is haling the wise words of a man from Texas in that "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, that's, that's, well, you won't get fooled again."
David Mumpower: In addition to the other points, I believe that a lot of the people who gave D’Souza’s previous movie a chance felt burnt by their decision. Its current score on IMDB is 5.1. Now, I am under no delusions about the legitimacy of every review posted there regarding the film. I am one of the people who watched Obama’s America, however, and I think that if anything, its atrocious IMDb score is too high. The prior documentary caught lightning in a bottle by tapping into the zeitgeist during a contentious election campaign season.
The lack of passion toward mid-terms that others have mentioned is a lot of the story, but what I said about Tammy yesterday applies here as well. If the last movie was lousy, fence sitters will not give the next project a chance. If anything, our point of view is skewed on this topic anyway because $2.7 million is a solid result for a documentary, at least if we do not evaluate the terrible per-location average of $2,403 and only consider the actual weekend take. Documentaries almost never open north of $1 million. Yes, exhibitors were mistaken in providing this many theaters to such an unwanted project but $2.7 million for a documentary is still solid in a vacuum.