At Summer’s End, Hollywood Counts The Money
After the orgy end, the hard work begins. There are vomitoriums to be scrubbed and receipts for Transformers 2 to be counted. The summer belonged to Michael Bay and Megan Fox, but this week belongs to the accountants.
• For the second year in a row, Paramount and Warner Brothers led the summer box office derby, fuelled by Transformers 2 and Star Trek for Paramount and Harry Potter and The Hangover for Warners. Universal landed at the bottom of the heap with a string of disappointments including Bruno, Land of the Lost and Funny People. Variety cautions, however, “Market share and profitability don’t necessarily go hand in hand, since market share doesn’t account for how much a studio has spent on production and marketing.” Meaning just because they took in a fortune, doesn’t meed they made a dime. [Variety]
• The Hollywood Reporter credits this year’s four percent uptick in receipts to the higher ticket prices Hollywood conned America into paying for 3-D movies. [Hollywood Reporter]
• A tepid last weekend of the summer box office race was again won by last weekend’s winner, Final Destination 3-D which took the crown with a paltry 15.4 million. To no one’s shock, this weekend’s releases Gamer and All About Steve both failed to catch fire. [Box Office Mojo]
• The Telluride Festival closed with strong reviews for at least a pair of films. Last year, the festival first brought Slumdog Millionaire to the world. This year, Jason Reitman’s Up In the Air and Tolstoy biopic The Last Station won strong reviews. [Variety]
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Comments (AU Comments | US Comments)
But what about Max Tucker’s film?
skymotel
@DahlELama: "Harry Pothead and the Hangover."
snugbug
@DahlELama: I also liked, Bruno, Land of the Lost, not for its awesomeness however, but for its spot on truth.
Spirit Fingers
Harry Potter and the Hangover actually sounded like a pretty awesome movie until I reread that sentence.
DahlELama
@Spirit Fingers: I enjoyed Land of the Lost and Funny People for very similar reasons.
@skymotel: It's exclusively screening at vomitoria across the nation.
snugbug
Re: "Market Share"
I would think that making 10 to 20 movies with $10M budgets, that each bring in a 5X to 8X return would be "better business" than betting the farm on a $100M to $200M crapfest that brings a "hopeful" 1X to 2X return.
What is not readily evident in this picture? Is it about the promotion? Are the PR costs spread over many movies just too expensive for the studios?
It seems really lazy.
That still looks like some kind of bizarro Christina's World.
@TroisFilles: Absit iniuiria verbis.. but yeah. Point well taken.
snugbug
Pssst - "vomitoria." Veni, vidi, correcti.
Semper ubu sub ubi.
TroisFilles
@PaisleyPajamas: This idea of yours was touted as the future when the dvd boom revealed that genre content was, in fact, quite viable. However, instead of lots of great low-budget fare in several popular genre-styles we got execrable direct-to-video horror movies with cgi monsters that clog up the shelves of Schlockhustler Video.
I don't know what happened, but my guess is the challenge of pulling off a good, cheap movie is greater than can be imagined. Probably more due to the cost of quality production than content.
For example, I saw the latest Final Destination movie, and the movie clearly had to cost upwards of $30 million, but it looked like a $10 million movie to me. Not one location was dressed in a manner that made me feel like it was a real place/event. Maybe "the system" just won't let you make a movie inside the pipeline without just setting money on fire.
LutherHonduras