Monday Morning Quarterback Part I

By BOP Staff

September 27, 2011

Dogs everywhere rejoice.

New at BOP:
Share & Save
Digg Button  
Print this column
Tim Briody: Is this a bad time to introduce our new box office analysis metric, Dollars Above Replacement Movie (or DARM)? How about we add in the revenue from concessions to the per screen average of a film and call it CPS? Who's with me? Anyone?

Max Braden: I see Moneyball more in the coach's genre than tech genre like Social Network. The comparison that comes to my mind is Miracle, which opened to $19 million in February 2004. For a baseball movie with more talk than play or comedy, $20 million is good opening. (I am now surprised to see that For Love of the Game is 12-years-old this month). Consider that Miracle was based around an event that is part of American sports lore, and Facebook affects pretty much everyone. An egghead movie about one team that hasn't been in the World Series in two decades is bound to struggle for a wide audience, which makes this result that much more impressive.

Reagen Sulewski: Consider that this is a project that by and large was considered a fool's errand to try and bring to the screen and went through several attempts at the script stage to get it this point. It's a testament to Brad Pitt's perseverance and belief in the project, as well as his ability to sell just about anything - this is towards the lower end of opening weekends for his films, but it's also about a topic that a very, very small percentage of even baseball fans care about. This is a success by any reasonable measure.

David Mumpower: I would add that anyone who has seen this movie realizes that it’s a very talky film without any real villains of note. Films of this ilk rarely achieve box office popularity; then again, they rarely star legitimate A-List actors. Moneyball’s name awareness probably helped some this weekend, but Pitt himself helped more. It also helped that the trailers had a lot of funny moments such as “Who’s Fabio?” It was important to market those to coax the viewer beyond the dry, esoteric subject matter.




Advertisement



Don't call him Flipper

Kim Hollis: Dolphin Tale, which seems to be some sort of Free Willy film with dolphins, earned $19.1 million over the weekend. Be honest. This is a lot more than you were expecting, right? How did Warner Bros. pull this off?

Edwin Davies: Way, way more than I was expecting. Every time I saw the trailer for this, I felt like I was watching a parody of exactly these kind of animal-centric family films.

Maybe that is the key to the success of the film; where someone as jaded and cruel as me saw something laughable, others might have seen something that looked like the most pure-hearted and uplifting film ever. Warner Bros did a great job of appealing to the faith-based audience in much the same way that FilmDistrict did with Soul Surfer, and the marketing was sure to feature the dolphin as much as possible and play up the family elements (light comedy, parent-child relationship, people being healed by healing an animal) that were sure to appeal to as broad an audience as possible.


Continued:       1       2       3

     


 
 

Need to contact us? E-mail a Box Office Prophet.
Friday, March 29, 2024
© 2024 Box Office Prophets, a division of One Of Us, Inc.