Monday Morning Quarterback Part II
By BOP Staff
February 11, 2015
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Jay Barney: The Jupiter Ascending story is an interesting one, and you would have to think the decision to pull it from a prime summer weekend was the writing on the wall. If a movie is bad, and this one appears to be with a 22% fresh RT rating, a summer release would have made more sense. Perhaps moving it to February was necessary from an editing standpoint; maybe they did need the extra time. I can’t imagine what the studio was thinking.
First, if you just look at the numbers, summer just gives you more of a chance at earning money. Sure, there is more competition, but it is pretty rare for a film to break out in January or February. I think when they moved this they were probably just trying to get the project behind them and be done with it. It is going to be an expensive miss though, up there with some of the other major flops over the last couple of years. Put this one in the category of Jack the Giant Slayer ($195 million budget, $27 million opening), Battleship ($209 million budget, $25 million opening), 47 Ronin ($175 million budget, $9 million opening), and R.I.P.D ($140 million budget, $12 million opening). Jupiter Ascending has no chance of earning its budget back.
Felix Quinonez: I'm not very surprised at this opening. To me it almost felt that they were trying to get a flop. As has already been mentioned before, its move from Summer to February seemed like they were dumping the movie. But the movie itself seemed so weird that one has to wonder who not only greenlit this project but gave it an almost $200 million budget.
It seems like the studio really thinks the Wachowskis will hatch another Matrix golden egg. But I think this will probably wake them up to the fact that it's not going to happen again. I'm really curious to see if the Wachowskis ever get another big budget project off the ground. I'm also curious to see what the siblings will do next. Maybe they need to go back to stealing from Grant Morrison; that seemed to work really great for them on The (first) Matrix.
Michael Lynderey: I think it's very surprising a major studio agreed to finance this film. While we must always support artistic endeavors, a science fiction action spectacle with this plot and background is an incredibly risky proposition. I've seen both Jupiter Ascending and Seventh Son referred to as "fanboy" movies, but the whole problem with both is precisely that they aren't. There's no established base of fans for either film (perhaps minimally for Seventh Son). It's SpongeBob that's the real fanboy movie of the weekend, and once again we see brand names and the get-out-the-base strategy work at the box office. Between Jupiter Ascending's premise, which is difficult to explain and is perhaps even somewhat confusing, and the reviews, which were not favorable, $18 million doesn't even seem that bad a number. It's what's on the other side of the ledger, the budget, that needed to be reigned in.
Edwin Davies: This is pretty awful in terms of the huge budget, which all but guarantees that the film will lose a lot of money unless it becomes a huge sensation internationally. That's not impossible, since this is exactly the kind of huge spectacle that can play well with overseas audiences, but the Wachowskis seem to have used up their goodwill with global audiences in much the same way that they have with domestic audiences.
Probably the biggest thing that hurt Jupiter Ascending was the decision to delay its release from last summer to this weekend. I don't know if the film would have broken out due to other factors working against it - the ads, which didn't really convey the plot and instead emphasized the (very pretty) visuals and the Wachowski name chief among them - but it would have made more sense as a summer release, particularly in what turned out to be a pretty week summer for blockbusters. Meanwhile, Warner Bros. couldn't push it even further back to this summer because it'd get crushed by this year's much heavier hitters, so it was left to fend for itself at a time of year when audiences tend not to be drawn to science fiction epics. As such, it had the stink of failure hanging over it for months and months, something which was confirmed when the bad reviews started rolling in.
In a wider sense, this confirms that the Wachowskis have become cult filmmakers who, thanks to their earlier success and some clever co-production deals, have been able to command huge budgets. They have their ardent defenders (myself included) but it's getting to the point where the scale of their projects is becoming untenable since they're clearly not interested in making films that fit into commercial categories. Unless their Netflix show, whatever form that ends up taking, is a huge success that revitalizes their standing, I find it hard to believe that studios will be willing take such huge risks on their projects after so many costly flops.
Ryan Kyle: Warner Bros. did put their best foot forward trying to make this thing a hit with an IMAX release and a heavy advertising campaign that seemed to be prevalent everywhere. It was rather shocking when the July to February date change happened, since the advertising campaign already started with the summer release date with the trailer for "Jupiter Ascending" playing in front of the big blockbusters in May. The sudden pull appeared to be out of fear as the trailers did not translate well with audiences. Then when the campaign ramped back up, but with seemingly not any changes in terms of how it was being marketed, the writing was on the wall.
This is a disastrous start and overseas prospects seem questionable as well to make up the humongous deficit that the US box office will barely make a dent in covering.
David Mumpower: I think we've all known since the criminally underrated Speed Racer, at a minimum, that the Wachowski Brothers style had grown stale with most consumers. Personally, I have continued to enjoy their films up to and including the thought-provoking Cloud Atlas. And *I* had no interest in Jupiter Ascending. I think this is the first Wachowskis movie I haven't seen on opening weekend since Bound (!). That statement alone is telling. Even if it was trying but failing to counter-intuitively target fanboys as Lynderey suggested was the issue, that didn't happen. To me, these trailers looked eerily similar to The Chronicles of Riddick, which is not a good thing. I actually consider its opening weekend about a best case result, all things considered. People are so much better at sniffing out clunkers in the social media era.
Kim Hollis: Seventh Son, the long-delayed and troubled film from Legendary Pictures and Universal, earned just $7.2 million this weekend. What went wrong with this one?
Jay Barney: This one also has an interesting history, but the numbers are equally as bad as Jupiter Ascending. While the overseas box office has actually been quite good with over $80 million so far, an opening of seven million in the United States is terrible. Sure, it is opening in a crowded field, but coming out of the gate in fourth place barely ahead of weak films like Project Almanac or Black or White is awful. The budget was in the $95 million range so its domestic run is going to be pretty terrible.
Felix Quinonez: I think this is terrible but not at all surprising. When a movie is released so long after production, its fate is pretty much sealed. It seems to be doing well overseas and maybe has a chance to break even, but I don't see much of a chance for this to make any profit.
Michael Lynderey: It's really too bad that another fantasy film didn't do well. This genre has really faltered at the box office outside of the obvious mega hits. It's also odd that Jeff Bridges has essentially staked out his own somewhat Depp-like territory, playing the same bizarre character in a series of underperforming action-fantasy-science fiction movies. On the other hand, between Eddie Redmayne in Jupiter Ascending and Julianne Moore in Seventh Son, we did get to see the two Oscar lead acting frontrunners play villains in hammy genre films this weekend, which is a pleasure of its own.
Ryan Kyle: If your film costs over $100 million to make and the opening weekend can't even crack double-digits, you can't call this anything other than a complete disaster. Being on the shelf for nearly three years, at least Legendary Pictures got some kind of return on their investment, but I'm sure Legendary and Warner Bros. this weekend would have preferred to put these two turkeys straight-to-VOD and bypass the critical and commercial drubbing.
What I find most fascinating is that for a movie based off of a YA-novel, the exit polls accounted for more than half of the audience being 30 years of age or older. Either Jeff Bridges has a passionate group of fans or the marketing really failed to identify and connect with its target, and this statistic highlights it.
David Mumpower: With regards to box office, we frequently mention how much more a film has to gross overseas relative to domestic box office in order to turn a profit. The numbers on Seventh Son will have to be historic for it to break even. It's going to need at least $350 million overseas, so $83.6 million is only a nice start rather than a sign of future solvency.
As for the movie, my primary thought is that Kit Harington's attempts to leverage Game of Thrones into a movie career thus far have been jaw-dropping failures. On the plus side, it's always nice to see Jason Scott Lee to come out of seclusion long enough to appear in a film. I wish he enjoyed making movies more, because he has the talent to be a superstar.