Sigh...
It's one of those weekends where "I told you so" has an odd personal reverb because I don't really know who I told what...
My sense on Team America has been that Paramount had its head turned by the high percentage of critical support. But I knew School of Rock, sir, and Team America is no School of Rock.
Team America is a movie that Bob Weinstein could have opened to double the gross, much as he handled the far superior Bad Santa last year.
Why didn't you see Retard Matt Damon or Alec Baldwin - F.A.G. or Susan Sarandon being insulted as an aging actress losing her skills and her looks in the advertising? After all, this is a movie that not only has no real stars, but is populated by puppets. Because Paramount has a Susan Sarandon movie coming out in a few weeks (Alfie) and would like to have Matt Damon and Alec Baldwin and Sean Penn and George Clooney, etc, etc, etc movies coming out in the future. The movie may cause these people some discomfort, but that’s on Parker & Stone. Making these stars into objects of ridicule in commercials is another thing indeed. Of course, Miramax/Dimension, which markets with balls of steel, would just barrel forward and sell what they had to sell.
Remember, as I have always said, opening weekend is about marketing, not the movie. So even though I don’t think the movie pays off as richly as anticipated, this weekend was just about the message coming out in ads and publicity. And isn’t it ironic that after the crashing thud of Thunderbirds, Paramount decided to sell Team America as a parody of Thunderbirds (which it mostly is), with dancing puppets at cocktail hour and monuments whose heads peel back like the Batcave switch, instead of emphasizing the stuff, most of which is not R rated, that makes you go, “Oh my God, I can’t believe they did that.”
If you want a marketing lesson, look at The Incredibles, which is also primarily a satire on Bond movies with some oversized elements that makes it about “supers,” but is selling the hell out of the notion of a family of “regulars” who are unprepared to become super again… which is what it is for about one act. Smart, not because the other two acts aren’t as wondrous as the first act, but because making a satire of something that is already a bit campy is really hard… and selling it based on that element it is an act of masochism.
The financial hope for Team America, which will not gross its production cost domestically, is not just home entertainment, which will surely take the movie into the black, but international, where hating America is sport that may inspire box office returns. (No doubt, Matt Stone’s French auteurist satire Le Petit Package should have been attached to the front of the domestic release of Team America... a movie Fox Searchlight would make in Weekend Four.)
Shall We Dance also came stumbling out of the blocks, though they’re probably feeling pretty good about the per-screen average. The film the release seems to be built around is The Notebook, the summer surprise that opened to $13.5 million and held on, primarily thanks to women, young and old, to crack a breathtaking $80 million.
I doubt that Shall We Dance will have that kind of staying power. Firstly, the movie is not as good, within the genre, as The Notebook. Secondly, competition is not far away. Thanks to Paramount, Alfie is two weekends away now. But after that, there is Bridget Jones: Edge of Sanity and then, A Very Long Engagement. There were really no alternatives to The Notebook this summer.
And don’t think that New Line didn’t learn the lesson of valuing key-demo space. They moved the Joan Allen – Kevin Costner film The Upside of Anger into the spring a couple of weeks ago, realizing that they could market the film to their Notebook audience, but not in the middle of awards season insanity.
Meanwhile, no one seems to be talking about two formula films that are each going to gross more than $65 million domestically, one of them probably over $70 million… The Forgotten and Ladder 49.
Why aren’t pundits talking about these two hits? Well, The Forgotten is from Revolution Studios, released by Sony and is likely to be among the five most profitable films released by Revolution over the three years since the film started delivering movies. But Revolution is expected to be, at best, reconfigured when their deal with Sony comes up for renewal next year and has been seen as a kind of dead man walking since Claudia Eller’s wea culpa piece in the L.A. Times a few months back… and Terry Curtin’s exit ain’t exactly a shot of encouragement. So the good news goes silently into that good night, sucked into the ether like Alfre Woodard through a roof.
And Disney’s Touchstone division… woe is anyone who writes a nice word about it. Ladder 49’s box office is running just a few hundred thousand behind the beloved (and aforementioned) School of Rock, both after three weekends. It will certainly outgross Kill Bill, Volume 1. It was also more expensive than either film (once Bill was hair split), so there is that. But still, it is sure to be the second, third or fourth highest grossing movie in the “fall” season (now just September/October, as the entirety of November has become a heavy hitting “holiday” season). The fact that no one is acknowledging it tells you just how “it’s about what we like” the media has become and gives a good excuse, horrifyingly, to studios wishing to diminish the media’s roll in the lives of their films.
Finally, Napoleon Dynamite passed $40 million this weekend. Awesome! Huge kudos are deserved. And now, they have to bring Sideways, still the best American film seen this year, home to similar box office and into the awards season blazing.
Recent Comments