We have made it to July, so now is as good a time as any to provide an update on what has been happening with the latest movies at the box office in North America.
The big news last week was the release of Eclipse, the third movie in the successful Twilight series that has been such a big hit over the past couple of years at theaters. Its opening last Wednesday drew the predictable big crowds at cinemas throughout North America, drawing $68 million in its opening day.
Its six-day total, including the Monday following the July 4 holiday weekend, was $175 million. That's great, but The Dark Knight opened to $222 million over the first six days when it rolled out two years ago. And the previous Twilight movie, New Moon, did slightly better over six days as well, at $178 million.
We also didn't see Eclipse set a lot of new records this weekend, though it did set records for both a Wednesday opening and for a midnight-movie haul of $30 million.
These are good numbers for Eclipse. But it is nothing spectacular compared to the last few summers where we have come to expect blockbuster movies to rewrite the box-office record books.
Two years ago, The Dark Knight was the "hot" release that wound up opening to a North American weekend haul of $158 million, the biggest domestic weekend haul in history. It ended up grossing a domestic total of $533 million and smashed a number of records in the process. That followed on the heels of $300 million-plus grosses for Iron Man and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and some big results for a number of other movies as well.
Last year was another big year for Hollywood at the box office, though much of the money was made outside the summer months, thanks in large part to the December release of the 3-D Avatar, which ended up shattering the all-time box office record worldwide, earning $2.7 billion.
Since Avatar's triumph, however, it's been pretty "meh" at the box office. The biggest hit movie that came after Avatar was Alice in Wonderland, which did excellent business. Since then, really impressive box office showings have been few and far-between. The summer movie season has been particularly dismal, with the usual May-to-August "blockbuster" season serving up one disappointing movie gross after another.
The sign of things to come came in early May when Iron Man 2 debuted to a weekend total of $128 million - a better opening than the first Iron Man movie, but far short of what was expected. A lot of people were hoping for big record grosses and the like. The headlines you saw everywhere that weekend said it all: "No Records for Iron Man 2."
The following weekend, May 14 to 16, produced the first sign of big trouble for the summer with the expensive Robin Hood pulling in $36 million - a huge disappointment. The next week, Shrek: Forever After debuted to a weekend haul of $70 million - a good performance, but lower than the records set by the previous two movies of the series.
The following weekend produced a shocking disappointment: Sex and the City 2, which was expected to absolutely clean up, opened soft with a weekend haul of $31 million - not even enough to beat Shrek's numbers for the weekend. Another movie, The Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, also flopped with a $30 million haul that same weekend.
Since then, the flops have kept on coming. Knight and Day, starring Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz, was one of them. Its opening-day $3.8 million haul was the lowest-grossing opening day for a Tom Cruise movie since 1992. Another disappointment was The A-Team, a revival of the famous 1980s series that starred Mr. T. Maybe if Mr. T had starred in the movie, it would have done better. It made only $25 million in its opening weekend.
Those movies look like huge triumphs, however, compared to Jonah Hex, which opened to a terrible $5.3 million despite a lot of hype and the presence of heartthrob Megan Fox in the cast. I guess the fan boys are over her.
There have been some successes: the 3-D animated Toy Story 3 opened to $110 million, the best opening in that series' history, and The Karate Kid was a bigger hit than anyone expected. But the disappointing performances have outweighed the hits. In fact I don't remember a summer that has seen this many flops since 2005, when it seemed Hollywood couldn't do anything right.
What's to blame? Chicago Tribune columnist Michael Phillips has said part of the problem is that the public isn't getting "sequels that rise to the challenge. They're getting business propositions with numerals." Clearly, that's part of the problem. Hollywood seems to be putting out there a bunch of movies that they think will make money based on their "brand" and star-power and the like.
There's an expression for that: "mailing it in."
Another factor might be at work. Maybe the vaunted "Great Recession" is finally catching up to Hollywood. Thanks to the economic downturn and a crippling writers' strike in the last couple of years, we've had a number of expensive projects delayed until well into the future. A lot of big-name franchises (ie. Batman, Spider-Man and the like) aren't rolling out this year, so summer movie season isn't as spectacular as movie fans have come to expect. Fans expect to be dazzled by "popcorn" movies with lots of CGI and special effects, and you aren't getting very much of that. In fact, I think movie fans are really jaded by the junk they have gotten from Hollywood lately, with all the usual sequels starring the usual people. Yet prices for movies keep on going up. For 3-D movies it is absolutely through the roof, up to $19 bucks in some places.
It's not as if audiences have a lot of money themselves. The US economy is still the pits. Yet Hollywood still seems to regard the movie-going public as a bottomless pit of money. That attitude has to change in a big hurry. People don't have a ton of cash to spend these days, and with the chains hiking theater prices this year and showing a lot more expensive 3-D movies, the fans are less willing to part with their money unless there's a good chance they'll see decent entertainment.
Hollywood needs to stop thinking about the bottom line and start thinking about providing good quality entertainment. If that happens, we'll be back to regular record-setting hauls again in no time, and the crowds we saw last week for Eclipse will happen a bit more frequently.
