Monday Morning Quarterback
By BOP Staff
January 27, 2015
BoxOfficeProphets.com

I'm only here so I won't get fined.

Kim Hollis: The Boy Next Door, an "erotic thriller" featuring Jennifer Lopez, debuted with $14.9 million this weekend. What do you think of this result?

Jason Barney: Despite what some will identify as a soft opening, the numbers for The Boy Next Door are awesome. Yes, American Sniper deserves to get all of the attention as its performance is much larger, but Boy Next Door earned its budget back on Friday. Most of the marketing costs were swallowed up by Saturday, so we can identify pure profit before the end of the first weekend. For Universal this is great news, as it takes the sting out of last week’s Blackhat, which was a certifiable bomb on arrival. The Boy Next Door was put together for a slim $4 million and brought in over $15 million for the weekend. Is The Boy Next Door going to stick around and be a box office force for a couple of weeks? No.

This is going to get lost very quickly, but it might hang around in the top ten for a couple of weeks. If it maintains any respectable number of screens, Universal’s investment is going to bring in plenty of dough. With three wide openers next weekend it may end up in the bottom half of the top ten, but the money has been made.

Edwin Davies: This is a solid result for all the reasons that Jason said, though it's worth bearing in mind that the bar that the film had to clear was incredibly low. Even if it had done Mortdecai numbers, The Boy Next Door would have still covered its production budget. This is another win for Jason Blum, who has managed to carve out a niche for himself as a producer of low-budget genre films that keep costs low and generally eke out a profit (though he's probably a bit more psyched about his Oscar nomination for Whiplash).

The bigger question for me is what this means in terms of Jennifer Lopez's career. It's her best live-action opening since Monster-in-Law almost 10 years(!) ago, which is encouraging, but she achieved it by starring in the sort of film that looked tacky when Shannon Tweed was making them 20 years ago.

Matthew Huntley: The Boy Next Door's opening was essentially in line with my personal expectations, reason being it has "guilty pleasure" written all over it, and such films tend to do fair to respectable business on their first weekends before, as Jason pointed out, exiting quickly. One of the reasons I think it may have done as well as it did is because the same audience is gearing up for 50 Shades of Grey in just a couple weeks, so J. Lo's movie served as sort of an appetizer before the main course. I've no way to prove this, but it seems reasonable enough. Another reason is the counter-programming. Despite American Sniper being so appealing to mass audiences, it's not exactly female-centric, and The Boy Next Door offered a reasonable alternative. Overall, it's a solid performance for the third weekend in January, so Universal should be more than pleased.

Bruce Hall: The money has indeed been made. I'm not sure anyone could have predicted the 800 pound gorilla that ate another 800 pound gorilla that is American Sniper, not even people who count "American" and "Sniper" among their top five favorite words. But I'll be the first one to say it can't feel fair if you're responsible for anything programmed against it this weekend. At this point, people who wouldn't have seen a film like that in a million years are hitting the theater just to avoid being left out of the conversation.

Once your film has captured the coveted "monkey see monkey do" demographic, it can truly be said to have legs.

Still, The Boy Next Door can be held up as a blueprint of sorts. Rather than shooting for the stars, Universal and Team Lopez sought to make a steamy, low budget potboiler that appealed directly to the singer's fan base. They kept their eye on the ball, with a short production schedule and a tightly focused marketing campaign spearheaded by Lopez herself.

No, this movie is not going to reshape her career and no, we will probably never speak of it again. But it IS a resounding success, and without a doubt the most satisfying thing about it for it for everyone involved is that this was in no way an accident.

Michael Lynderey: These are almost best case scenario numbers. The Boy Next Door - from the title to the plotline to the trailer and then inevitably through to the film itself - is as generic as they get. That the film came in with a pretty good weekend number is a testament to Jennifer Lopez's remaining star power, but also to the season; cheesy thrillers do pretty well in January, even if they drop off the face of the earth in weekend two (American Sniper is an exception, of course).

I've always been really confused why Jennifer Lopez seemingly dropped out of being a leading woman after Monster-in-Law (2005). It wasn't a great film, but it was one of her biggest hits ($82 million total). She's followed that up with basically just two leading roles in studio films - The Back-Up Plan (2010), and now this. I look forward to her 2020 film.

David Mumpower: I'm not erotically thrilled by it. And did Jason really describe this as a soft opening? Why not flaccid or impotent? Sorry, my inner Beavis has been screaming all week as this shameless capitalization upon pent-up demand for 50 Shades of Grey has been marketed so...hornily? Is hornily a word? Anyway, there was a time when Jennifer Lopez and Jennifer Lopez's People would have thumbed their nose at playing Stifler's Mom in a Cinemax After Dark production. That time was pre-Bennifer. I love that Affleck is a respected director *and* Batman while JLo is sexing up a dude who was 10 when Selena was released. Based on their reputations, that's a rare example of karmic retribution in action in Hollywood. Meanwhile, Rob Cohen is left hoping that Vin Diesel can orchestrate his return to the Fast and Furious franchise they created.

None of this really has anything to do with The Boy Next Door, which speaks volumes about how much I care about this debut.