Historically, October is a hit-or-miss month for new movies. In some years it’s a freakin’ dead zone, in others it’s when the Hollywood studios start stirring up some excitement before the big hitters arrive in November. The past couple of Octobers have been better than usual. Led by the trio of Gone Girl, Fury and Annabelle, 2014 witnessed the highest-grossing October in film history. That was partially a result of the studios switching gears and targeting the month as a prime launching pad after October of 2013 delivered three surprisingly huge hits in Gravity, Captain Phillips and Bad Grandpa and October 2012 had Taken 2 and Hotel Transylvania.
Based on that recent history, the studios didn’t hesitate to stuff October 2015 full of new movies. Fox and Sony were sure that audiences would greet The Martian and The Walk as must-see cinematic experiences. WB hoped Pan would prosper after being moved out of its original summer release date. Universal and Lionsgate opted for word-of-mouth-building platform releases for potential awards contenders Steve Jobs and Sicario, respectively. Universal thought a mid-October release for Guillermo Del Toro’s Crimson Peak perfectly set it up to become the must-see horror movie of the month, and Sony hoped for similar results for its younger-skewing horror comedy Goosebumps. Disney figured those movies left an opening for a serious adult drama and opened the Tom Hanks/Steven Spielberg collaboration Bridge of Spies, and coming in behind all of them was Woodlawn, a faith-based movie.
The only true breakout hit in the bunch, though, has been The Martian. Pan, Crimson Peak and The Walk bombed. Relative to its budget, Sicario will probably struggle to break even, and while Goosebumps has likely kick-started a new film franchise it’s not exactly posting eye-opening numbers (give it time, especially overseas). Bridge of Spies is holding well, but it is easily the weakest-performing Hanks/Spielberg collaboration to date, even trailing the mostly forgotten 2004 comedy The Terminal. Woodlawn is out of the top 10 after one weekend.
There’s been one movie everyone had to see, The Martian, and a bunch we swear we’ll get around to eventually, which is partially why Bridge of Spies and Sicario posted such strong holds throughout the month.
Then all hell broke loose this past weekend with five new wide releases, all of which either disappointed or outright bombed in historic fashion:
Jobs Makes Sony Look Good For Letting Danny Boyle Take the Project to a Different Studio
The Last Witch Hunter Reminds Us That Vin Diesel Is Not Really a Film Star Outside of Fast & Furious
Paranormal Activity: Ghost Dimension Marks a Franchise Low With An Asterisk
As BoxOfficeMojo summarized, “The film will arrive on VOD once it’s playing in fewer than 300 theaters. With that comes an agreement to share a portion of the VOD sales with participating theaters up to 90 days from its theatrical opening. The problem now is Paramount most likely didn’t plan on the film playing in so few theaters to begin with. After all, it’s one thing to open in 2,800+ theaters, as did The Marked Ones, and dipping below 300 theaters in your fifth weekend in release. However, opening in nearly half the number of theaters means cutting that theater count much sooner, widening the number of days the studio will be splitting VOD profits with participating theater chain.”
By refusing to play ball, the other theater chains are more or less killing this experiment for Paramount, and we can expect similar results for Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse next week.
Rock the Kasbah Is No St. Vincent
Jem and the Holograms Makes Jason Blum Sad
Blumhouse’s Head of Motion Pictures Cooper Samuelson chimed in to explain that the standard operating procedure in Hollywood after a failure like this is to run away from it, “I think part of the challenge is that when movies are very expensive jobs are on the line. When you have a commercial failure and it could cost people their jobs, no one’s gonna be like ‘hey can we just bring up The A-Team again?’” That theoretically should mean that Blumhouse is better situated to react to this failure instead of moving on and making the same mistakes over and over again, “When you have low budget, we don’t have to worry we’re going to get fired if one of them fails, so we can talk about failures [openly].”
While Blum concedes financial defeat, he will not give in to the many, many, many people who seem to have a straight-up hostile hatred of this movie. “People in Hollywood I feel like have a tendency to retreat from financial failure and I think it is important to separate financial failure – and by the way, Jem I feel like the movie came out terrifically well. It was just a financial failure, but I still stand by the movie, I’m proud of the movie. I’m obviously sorry it didn’t do better.”
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Into this smoking tire fire of a marketplace for new movies comes three new wide releases next weekend, all three of which have shaky box office prospects: Bradley Cooper’s Burnt, Sandra Bullock’s film festival pick-up Our Brand Is Crisis and Scout’s Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse. Rock the Kasbah and Jem and the Hologram‘s just set the bar for failure pretty damn low, though.
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