Box Office - Post MOS syndrome (1 Viewer)

Just an observation. If you look at the box office results pre Man of Steel, action movies did quite well. From Iron Man 3 to Furious 6 to Star Trek Into Darkness. Post MOS, family films and comedies have done great. The only action film that overperformed was World War Z, but it only opened a week after MOS. As you could see how front loaded MOS is with its box office, perhaps audiences got turned off from its overkill of repetitious violence and a soulless and humorless superhero. From the The Lone Ranger to Pacific Rim to yes, even Wolverine have underperformed at the box office while Despicable Me, Grown Ups 2 (gulp!), Monsters University, and The Heat have done excellent. I bet if The Hangover 3 was released after MOS, it would have been more successful!OK. Just my rant. I hated MOS and blame everything on it.

Man Of Steel has made $636 million worldwide so I would say it has been extremely successful. Maybe I'm missing something but I don't get your point. Are you blaming Pacific Rim and Wolverines boxoffice disappointment on MOS ? I for one loved MOS so I am happy for its success.

Tino said:

Man Of Steel has made $636 million worldwide so I would say it has been extremely successful. Maybe I'm missing something but I don't get your point. Are you blaming Pacific Rim and Wolverines boxoffice disappointment on MOS ? I for one loved MOS so I am happy for its success.

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Sorry, I'm actually talking about domestic box office. Of course, foreign sales is a different story. However, MOS actually underperformed considering its a known brand. Fan boys may have loved the movie but I can bet you the general audience that watched it out of curiosity thought it was 'MEH'. So yes, I am blaming MOS for the box office failures of action movies that came after it.

Actually I think "fanboys" have been the most vocal in their displeasure of the film. Just read the comments in the review thread to see what I mean. I think the general public for the most part liked it more giving it a A- cinemascore. And I'm not so sure $286 million is underperforming. I thought it would hit $300 million domestic so it's pretty close. But, feel free to blame MOS. He can take it.

Freddie Z said:

As you could see how front loaded MOS is with its box office, perhaps audiences got turned off from its overkill of repetitious violence and a soulless and humorless superhero. From the The Lone Ranger to Pacific Rim to yes, even Wolverine have underperformed at the box office while Despicable Me, Grown Ups 2 (gulp!), Monsters University, and The Heat have done excellent. I bet if The Hangover 3 was released after MOS, it would have been more successful!

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I can remember the year Hollywood was stunned--stunned, mind you--that Superman Returns "underperformed" catastrophically.
(But...it was Superman! And he was returning, after the 80's!)

I keep flashing back to the morning-news program segment where they brought on A.O. Scott of the NY Times to answer the question of the mysterious "drought" of blockbusters, and why MOS, Lone Ranger, Pacific Rim, After Earth, White House Down, Wolverine, Turbo, RIPD, The Internship, and Hangover 3 had all underperformed at the b ox office--
And I sat there, watching all the hemming and hawing and fear of rendering any critical judgment against holy blameless blockbusters, just gritting my teeth and thinking "(waves hand in air) Oo! Oo! Pick me, pick me, I know why!"

Anyone who WONDERS why Hangover 3 or Lone Ranger failed at the box office just wasn't there.
There's no demographic magic bullet, every movie is a loose cannon before it opens. Some...(long, tactful glance at Gore Verbinski, Zack Snyder and Roland Emmerich, searching for words)....looser than others.

So what are you saying? That all of these underperforming movies had unfocused demographics? Hollywood should be doing more to pigeonhole its movies into narrow niche demographics? Not quite getting your drift here.

Tino said:

Actually I think "fanboys" have been the most vocal in their displeasure of the film. Just read the comments in the review thread to see what I mean. I think the general public for the most part liked it more giving it a A- cinemascore. And I'm not so sure $286 million is underperforming. I thought it would hit $300 million domestic so it's pretty close.But, feel free to blame MOS. He can take it.

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Well, Cinemascore can be quite misleading actually. It's a tool used by studios to guage whether their marketing is successfull towards its target audience. It's taken on the first day the film is released and who comes out on the first day? Its target audience. In the case of MOS, the fanboys. So that cinemascore represents its target audience. Not the general audience. That's the reason there is such a discrepency between Cinemascores and RT scores for movies such as MOS. If they were to take a cinemascore over several days, it would be more representative of the general audience. It would most likely come closer to RT scores, which is pretty split down the middle. It's a love it or hate it film.

Anyway, there's no denying the box office is experiencing action movie fatigue . It just so happens that it started right after Man Of Steel.

Just saying...

Freddie Z said:

Anyway, there's no denying the box office is experiencing action movie fatigue .

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If you look at the yearly charts, that's not anything new for this time of year. The vast majority of the highest grossing movies come out in May & June and November & December. After the onslaught of 'blockbusters' in May and June, the audience is fatigued of going to the movies each week and the rest of the summer is generally slower. There's always anomalies like Batman, Harry Potter, Transformers or even Despicable Me but the slowdown is normal for this time of year.

It's a bit early to say Wolverine is a flop or is not performing, movies should be given time to catch an audience, if Titanic hadn't been given time it would have been a flop, nowadays it seems a film is branded a flop after just one weekend, it's ridiculous, what happened to human patience, it's like everyone looks at the short term gain and nothing is judged in the long term, ( and not just movies either ) it's just silly, i think Wolverine will be a money maker for the studio.

FoxyMulder said:

It's a bit early to say Wolverine is a flop or is not performing, movies should be given time to catch an audience, if Titanic hadn't been given time it would have been a flop, nowadays it seems a film is braned a flop after just one weekend, it's ridiculous, what happened to human patience, it's like everyone looks at the short term gain and nothing is judged in the long term, once again i say it's ridiculous.

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As I frequently do, I blame the media for a lot of that. They need to have something to write about so doing a story on movie X doing bad is as good as anything to write about and so people read that & the movie is branded as a financial failure (as if box office performance should matter to anyone but a studio stockholder). And since there's always a new 'blockbuster' coming next week, there's always another chance for the media to take some kind of bizarre joy in a new movie that doesn't do well.

Edwin-S said:

So what are you saying? That all of these underperforming movies had unfocused demographics? Hollywood should be doing more to pigeonhole its movies into narrow niche demographics? Not quite getting your drift here.

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No, I'm saying that in White House Down, Lone Ranger and After Earth's case, they were directed by escaped psychotic lunatics!

WHY are media analysts so terrified of offending the Olympian gods of the movie industry and admitting that maybe, maybe the law of averages didn't work out this time, someone got a little lazy or self-indulgent, and the movie stank on ice?
Only in extreme cases, where studios want to shift the blame off of themselves and find a head to roll (like Rich Ross after John Carter) do they start looking for "WHO went wrong": After TLR, we had Jerry Bruckheimer being asked "You're the producer, couldn't you have stopped or said no to Gore Verbinski?" Bruckie rushed to the Pirate King's defense, saying well, he's an artist, you don't just tell him what to do! Other execs immediately joined to the defense, praising the "Rock of Gibraltar of Hollywood", and reminding us that a man who had three hits could never, ever have a flop, or if he did, it must have been an off day.
In Hollywood, where they're afraid for their jobs, they're afraid of taking any responsibility for it: Disasters are "unexplained" like forces of nature. Even now, any shortfall on MOS will be explained on Superman's cultural standing or awareness, and not on Zack Snyder being too downbeat and geek-fan reverent, which's why he hasn't a mainstream comic-fan hit since 300. (Watchmen and Sucker Punch included.)

TravisR said:

As I frequently do, I blame the media for a lot of that. They need to have something to write about so doing a story on movie X doing bad is as good as anything to write about and so people read that & the movie is branded as a financial failure (as if box office performance should matter to anyone but a studio stockholder). And since there's always a new 'blockbuster' coming next week, there's always another chance for the media to take some kind of bizarre joy in a new movie that doesn't do well.

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Old saying: Just because you can't shout "Fire!" in a crowded movie theater doesn't mean there isn't really a fire.
Translation: You can analyze box office analysis all you want, but FIRST it has to start with the audience member who didn't want to buy a ticket.

Like TLR, it could be because of bad reviews or bad word of mouth, like After Earth or White House Down, it could be because the name/s behind it had officially become box-office poison, or like Turbo and RIPD, it could be because we got all the warning we needed to from the trailers, thank you very much--Or, like Hangover and Wolverine, they just couldn't live down the traumatic past of their last movie, and the audience was still bite-shy and didn't want to give them the benefit of the doubt and come back.
As for the media trying to "make" flops, I can recall media analysts laying traps for every year's Pixar movie, hoping to finally break the man-bites-dog headline of "Pixar's first flop!", but ironically, that doesn't seem to be the case this year--Just like in 2003 (when we all abandoned the Hulk and Terminator for Finding Nemo), the Pixar entry this year seems to be one of the solid performers, just for having a reliable reputation of NOT trying to sell the audience a bill of goods, and being one of the few movies in a crowded summer the moviegoers can depend on.
That's something a lot of high-roller directors this summer don't have; they all got together in a catastrophic planetary alignment this summer, and paid the price. Heck, we even had Michael Bay show up, and nobody cared.

TravisR said:

If you look at the yearly charts, that's not anything new for this time of year. The vast majority of the highest grossing movies come out in May & June and November & December. After the onslaught of 'blockbusters' in May and June, the audience is fatigued of going to the movies each week and the rest of the summer is generally slower. There's always anomalies like Batman, Harry Potter, Transformers or even Despicable Me but the slowdown is normal for this time of year.

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My thoughts as well. Summer is often front-loaded. I sometimes think it's more audience fatigue, rather than the movies themselves, as there seem to be fewer perceived "underperforming" films in the April-June period. Most of the films labeled as such are July-August releases. By that time, many people are also busy with summer activities and outdoor events, and likely overall to spend less time at the movies.

I think Hollywood just releases too many movies during the same time. Good films can be blockbusters in any month of the year. I don't understand why there's such a fanatical desire to cram them all into May-August.