Monday Morning Quarterback Part II
By BOP Staff
October 28, 2015
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Edwin Davies: This is not great, and it's hard to figure out just went wrong here. It could be that Universal erred and chose a bad weekend, one saturated with product, or they underestimated how strongly adult audiences would respond to The Martian and Bridge of Spies. It could just be that people aren't as interested in Steve Jobs as filmmakers are, or that the film lacked the wow factor to make it a must see on its first weekend in wide release.
I think it's a mixture of these, but primarily its problem was that the ads didn't do much to make the film stand out like those for The Social Network, another Aaron Sorkin-penned story about a potentially niche story. The ads for Steve Jobs made it look like a pretty standard biopic with little of the crackerjack dialogue people expect from Sorkin, or the energy expected of director Danny Boyle.
As for its Oscar chances, I think they're still relatively strong given the people involved - Boyle and Sorkin are both winners who have been nominated multiple times, as is Kate Winslet, while Fassbender was nominated for 12 Years a Slave and many felt that he should have been nominated for Shame - and the reviews. However, those chances become dimmer if the film doesn't have any legs. It's possible that it will pick up a bit of steam as older moviegoers check it out in the weeks ahead, but without that it could easily get lost in the shuffle.
Ben Gruchow: Last month, Variety published the results of a Piedmont Media Research tracking poll of 3,000 people, to find which films were the most anticipated of the fall. It's an interesting article, if something that you might want to take with a grain of salt (if it's totally accurate in its correlation with grosses, then Mockingjay Part 2 is about to outgross both The Force Awakens and Age of Ultron). Still, though, it's a small grain of salt. In the seventh paragraph of this report, the Variety article gives us the movies that fell toward the low end of the Piedmont tracking system, and they're all titles that have (so far) underperformed or bombed. In decreasing order of anticipation, there is: Pan, Steve Jobs, Burnt, Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse, and Jem and the Holograms. I'll be interested in seeing if the third and fourth titles in that list open somewhere between $2 and $7 million, by the way.
Anyway, in the latter part of that article, there's a mention of how anticipation for December's Macbeth actually went down once prospective viewers learned about Michael Fassbender's attachment to it. I think there might be a possibility that some of the reduced gross is attributable to his presence here, too. Just hypothesis.
Ryan Kyle: I think Steve Jobs went too wide too soon. Platform releases are an art form that very few without the last name Weinstein understand the intricacies of. While it did gangbusters in limited release, too few saw it (less than $2.5 million worth) to get the word-of-mouth buzz to a fever pitch when going wide. The trick will now be keeping it in enough theaters through the end of the year when the awards buzz starts coming into play to convince those reluctant ticket buyers to see it. The less than $3,000 per theater average is troubling in terms of its staying power. Given that the film's opening comes in towards the lower end of Sorkin's resume (this is his film almost as much as Fassbender's), I'd call this opening a disappointment. However, the big picture might be different once we see how the film holds in the upcoming weeks.
David Mumpower: In addition to the other thoughts, there were a couple of key issues going against the film. It was the second Steve Jobs film in two calendar years, and people ignored the first one. While this one looked better, it didn't look THAT much better. Also, this project was among the hardest hit by the Sony leak, which gave it the stink of failure ahead of time. All things considered, this was about what I expected and possibly even on the upper side. As for its Oscar aspirations, it doesn't have any right now.
Kim Hollis: Rock the Kasbah had one of the worst openings ever for a film that debuted on more than 2,000 screens (although it wasn't the worst of the weekend on over 2,000 screens). What happened here?
Edwin Davies: Every few years, someone makes a film which is marketed solely on the fact that Bill Murray is in it, and which seems to assume that Bill Murray is still the massive star that he was in the '80s and early '90s. That approach worked precisely once, with last year's St. Vincent, but the rest of the time it doesn't, because Bill Murray is now known as a comedy icon, a consistent character actor, and a living meme. You need to do something more than say "Hey, Bill Murray is in this!" to get people excited, otherwise the film becomes nothing more than an excuse for Murray to be weird on talk shows.
The ads for Rock the Kasbah were unfocused, not especially funny, and gave little sense of what the film was about, other than that it seemed weirdly like Ishtar (which, for me, isn't the worst association in the world since I quite like that film, but I am in the minority on that one). There was nothing to the advertising (what little there was) to suggest that this was a film worth watching, and that was reflected in its performance.
Ryan Kyle: I'm not sure how you can analyze something when there is nothing even there to analyze. The opening is absolutely terrible and another flop for newcomer Open Road Films, who doesn't seem to know how to pick 'em or release 'em. The cast should remain fine, but director Barry Levinson, who is in desperate need of a hit, or just a film that will break-even, will take the biggest hit for this.
David Mumpower: Bill Murray almost seems to pick projects based on how likely they are to bomb rather than succeed. A luck at his recent filmography proves this. Ignoring the one unlikely Wes Anderson hit, The Grand Budapest Hotel, and a couple of cameos like Zombieland, Murray has only selected one commercial project over the past decade. Amusingly, that film, Monuments Men, bombed relative to expectations. I see the performance of Rock the Casbah as a career decision rather than any kind of surprise.
Kim Hollis: Jem and the Holograms threw under Rock the Kasbah and opened with just $1.4 million. Say something funny about Jem and the Holograms.
Edwin Davies: This is really going to hurt the chances of my script for a Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors film getting made.
This should probably be a lesson to Hollywood that if you want to make a film version of a cult property with lots of cache for a specific audience, it's probably not the best idea to rush a super-cheap version of it into production which seemingly goes out of its way to alienate the only people who actually care about the property in question. Instead, they will probably just assume that making films aimed at young women is a waste of money, ignoring that this version of Jem and the Holograms was a disaster from the moment it was announced.
Ben Gruchow: I just can't believe they rebooted Josie and the Pussycats so soon after the original came out.
Ryan Kyle: LOL. Is there anything more to say?
Ben Gruchow: At least the movie fits into Jason Blum's wheelhouse now.
David Mumpower: I have a 30-year-old niece who looooooves Jem and the Holograms. Like, Pete Kilmer sent her a gift batch of comics last year, and it made her cry she was so happy. When she saw the film on opening night, she expressed outrage over it. As she said, the people who made the film clearly had no clue what fans love about Jem and the Holograms. This entire project was a mistake from the greenlight to the release, and it's a blueprint example of the perils of making a movie because you have the license rather than a good idea for a story.