Monday Morning Quarterback
By BOP Staff
March 31, 2015
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Jason Barney: I’m going to go out on a limb and say this is a pretty resounding success on a number of fronts. It is hard not to look at the opening weekend in the context of the overall budget, which was pretty steep for a non-franchise opener. $135 million is not cheap. However, this opening of well over $50 million can allow the folks at Fox and DreamWorks to breathe a sigh of relief. At the very least, their project did not bomb.
Home still has a long way to go to be profitable but the map is a lot clearer now than it was just a few days ago. Many of the tracking estimates I saw for this were well below the weekend number, and it points to a ground swell of support by families with kids. I continue to maintain that it is one of the most underserved demographics within the marketplace, and this large opening clearly denotes pent up frustration with the absence of kids’ movies.
Internationally, the film is already doing very well. Its prospects for the next several weekends are great. Home is going to skew younger, so the only semi-competition in that regard is going to be Avengers. Even then…is it me….or does the schedule for kids movies look absolutely dead? Home has a fairly clear lock on any family wanting to go to the movies for a long time.
Brett Ballard-Beach: Jason, it’s true. There are no out and out kids’ movies until Inside Out in June. And this result is fairly flabbergasting. I have heard the "star power" of the voice cast trumpeted but I don't buy into that. I am dumbfounded simply because the trailers made this look like one of the few family movies that have been out since I became a father five years ago, that I have no interest in seeing. It looked cheap and suggested to me an unholy cross-pollination of Lilo & Stitch and Bringing Down the House that came out a decade too late. Listening to Jim Parsons talk in out of date slang for 90 minutes (sans contractions no less) suggests aural torture that the Geneva Convention might need to recognize. I know it has been suggested that Get Hard might have done slightly better than expected because some people wanted to get it out of the way before Furious 7 opens. All I can think is that Home might have benefited as well.
Edwin Davies: This is a very strong result, and a badly needed one for DreamWorks who have had a rough time of it of late. Their last four films - Turbo, Mr. Peabody and Sherman, How to Train Your Dragon 2 and Penguins of Madagascar - all performed worse than they needed to versus their budgets, with only HTTYD2 doing well enough overseas to offset its domestic shortcomings, and the company has had to cut back on the number of projects it releases per year and fire a lot of its employees. These were all worrying signs for a company that seemed like a powerhouse back before it ran the Shrek franchise into the ground. Home's opening is their best since 2012, and should set it up for a decent run. Quality wise, it might be a step back from the likes of How to Train Your Dragon and Kung Fu Panda, but they need to make their money somewhere.
In terms of star power, I can kind of see how it might have helped, if only because Rihanna, Jennifer Lopez and Jim Parsons really went all out when it came to doing publicity for the film and really got the word out that it was coming out. None of them are associated with this kind of film either, which makes Home distinctive in at least one way.
Ryan Kyle: This is a fantastic debut for the struggling DreamWorks. It was a wise move moving it out of its original Thanksgiving release date to a less competitive March. With the field wide open until Inside Out gets released in mid-June, Home should be able to chug its way to $200 million - or come pretty damn close to it. Almost doubling some forecasts for its weekend total, Home is about as wide-appealing as it gets. Rihanna, Jim Parsons, JLo, and Steve Martin is a dream cast for marketing (albeit a strange one), and it is about as four-quadrant appealing as you can get. Sold almost as heavily on star power as its colorful animation, only Rihanna can have a kids movie and a single called "Bitch Better Have My Money" drop on the same week with no one batting a lash.
A big point missed in the forecast is that the lead of the film, voiced by Rihanna, is female and black, representing a character rarely seen in children's animation. I can't help but feel this brought out a significant amount of the audience who might have passed over the film otherwise. With the soundtrack also in the iTunes Top 10 (I wonder at what stage in Rihanna's and Jennifer Lopez's contract that DreamWorks had them obligated to contribute songs to the film), ancillary sales should be very healthy too.
Michael Lynderey: Just like SpongeBob II and Cinderella, it's a huge surprise. Are family audiences particularly starved for content this year or something? That would be one of the few explanations I can think of for this sequence of films taking in almost double what I expected for them. Home in particular is odd - bad reviews usually hurt family films that aren't sequels or adaptations. But Home cruised through and drubbed the critics who had drubbed it right back. It'll probably even inspire a sequel. I can't complain about a Steve Martin movie being a huge hit, though, and I would of course credit the film's success solely to his name.
Kim Hollis: I truly think this performance can be credited to a dearth of family entertainment options in recent weeks. SpongeBob is a little bit counter-culture and Cinderella is incredibly female-oriented. Home, on the other hand, works for kids of all movie-going ages while (I guess) offering something for the adults who might attend with them. To be honest, I find this result pretty surprising because the trailers and previews for Home were completely uninspiring, and I don’t think voice cast matters that much. See: Turbo (Samuel L. Jackson, Snoop (Dogg) Lion, Ryan Reynolds), Rise of the Guardians (Chris Pine, Hugh Jackman, Alec Baldwin) and Planet 51 (The Rock). Honestly, for me Jim Parsons was even a little bit of a turnoff, as I just felt like I’d be watching animated Sheldon (I like Sheldon fine, but don’t need him to crossover to other projects).