Monday Morning Quarterback Part II

By BOP Staff

November 16, 2010

He's too good for Floyd Mayweather.

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Michael Lynderey: Not good, this. It's basically ended up on the level of Did You Hear About the Morgans?, When in Rome, and You Again, except with much better reviews, this time. But looking at the bigger picture: it's getting harder and harder to forecast romantic comedies, which are going all over the place at the box office lately, often irregardless of quality. Star power is tough to gauge. For example: since Jennifer Aniston's The Switch arguably underperformed, does that mean The Bounty Hunter's fairly solid success was all because of Gerard Butler? (Questions like these keep us up at night, I know). Next, considering Morning Glory's performance, does that mean that The Time Traveler's Wife was all Eric Bana? But even keeping in mind that Ford, Keaton, and McAdams are not necessarily outright draws, I think Morning Glory should have done better. As with Skyline, it's possible that the concept just felt too similar to a much bigger recent film - in this case, I'd say The Ugly Truth, for starters. All of this isn't a very coherent explanation, but then, it's getting to be more and more of an unruly genre.

Max Braden: On paper, a project like this should open in the upper teens. Imagine if Sandra Bullock had starred instead of McAdams (perhaps not this year, or perhaps this year in Diane Keaton's role), it might have opened in the mid 20s. And on paper, these aren't small time players. All you have to say is The Notebook to know who McAdams is, and Keaton and Ford have been around forever. Way back in 1998, he opened Six Days, Seven Nights in a similar curmudgeon role to $16 million. But the three of them combined, plus the teased love story with Patrick Wilson, may have ended up splitting the vote. With no real focus on one character, audiences didn't have much to invest in. That said, I don't think this hurts McAdams at all. And this being her second movie with Keaton, you can almost see her following Keaton's path in the tone of her movies.




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Reagen Sulewski: I don't really blame the mid-week opening for much other than sucking a little momentum out of the weekend - but please, please, please let this be the death knell for this ridiculous idea. It's becoming a hallmark of films that studios have run out of ideas to try and promote them. The calendar move lets them appear to have done something.

One big problem that the movie had was that absolutely nothing stood out about it. There wasn't one notable or memorable gag in the ads, so all you had was "It's Rachel McAdams! And she's doin' stuff!" While she's charming and lovable, that doesn't make for a good way to convince me to spend $12.

David Mumpower: I agree with the group think that this is a disappointment. I disagree with the assessment that the Wednesday opening was problematic. The premise behind such a move is to build buzz for a release through word of mouth. It rarely works, but there are some grand scale instances of success such as Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. There are also several notable failures wherein the Wednesday move is a Hail Mary play without the positive result the Jacksonville Jaguars had against the Houston Texans Sunday. Some of those have been documented here. In the case of Morning Glory, I feel that the data tells a story. The film starts horribly on Wednesday but then rises 44% on Thursday, doubles on Friday and rises another 28% on Saturday. It's rare in this box office era to see a movie increase for four consecutive days. That's usually an example of positive word-of-mouth enhancing awareness. While I cannot rule out this behavior being a quirk due to the anomalously low Wednesday box office, the first five days of data suggests that the Wednesday opening helped a modest production build awareness. And while that $2.6 million of extra revenue is not a huge deal, it could wind up being the difference between this project finishing the red versus the black.


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