There he goes, there goes Speed Racer -- right into a wall: Last weekend Speed Racer crashed and burned at the box office, pulling in a feeble $20 million. This gives 2008 its first major SF/F flop and assures that Warner Bros and its financing partners are going to eat most of the rumored $150 million production cost of the film (not to mention the additional tens of millions for marketing). Right now, the Wachowskis are sitting in a dark room, looking at the numbers and realizing that they really do have to stop cruising on the cred they earned on the original Matrix flick -- that's all gone now.

If Only the Wachowskis Had Released Speed Racer 31 Years Earlier
Because here's something interesting: On July 15, 1977, after several weeks in limited release, Star Wars had its official wide release and pulled in $6.8 million for the weekend, which, adjusted for inflation, would be about $20.9 million dollars today. Star Wars would go on to make more than $300 million in its initial release (a gobsmacking $930 million or so in 2008 dollars), and, of course, go down in movie history, spawning a franchise that is even now dropping films into theaters. (The animated Clone Wars, heading to screens in August.)

So, the question, which the Wachowskis might ruefully ask, is: Why does a $20 million opening spell disaster for Speed Racer today when its equivalent was absolutely fantastic for Star Wars, back in the day? Movies are still the same strips of images on film stock in 2008 as they were in 1977 -- has everything else about movies changed so much?

Well, yes. Movies are physically the same objects they were 31 years ago (although probably not for long, as more theaters go digital), and people still go to theaters to see them. But everything else about the mechanics of making money at the movies has changed.

In 1977, for example, if you were suggest to a movie executive that you should open a film in 3,600 theaters, like Speed Racer was last weekend, you would get a blank, non-comprehending stare. Star Wars -- and nearly every other movie of the time -- had its debut on just a few dozen theaters: 43, in the case of Star Wars, all clustered in and around major metro areas. If a movie did well, they'd add a few dozen more screens the next week, and a few dozen more the week after that, and so on. In all of 1977, the movie never made it into more than 1,100 theaters -- less than a third of Speed Racer's opening weekend count.

You would think that smaller number of theaters would cut down on the amount of money you could make -- and indeed, all through 1977, Star Wars never managed to make more than $7.7 million a weekend (about $25 million today). But what Star Wars could do that Speed Racer and other movies today generally can't is just keep running. From its first limited release on Memorial Day weekend, 1977, Star Wars stayed in movie theaters for nearly an entire year, and for that year, experienced very small drop-offs in business from weekend to weekend: Between ten and twenty percent each weekend. Compare this to last year's Transformers, which made $300 million in six weeks -- and experienced 40 to 50 percent dropoffs in attendance each week. In both their eras, Star Wars and Transformers are state-of-the-art blockbusters, in terms of how they made their money -- it's just that the state of the art evolved.

Continue reading "$20 Million Now, $20 Million Then - How Star Wars Changed Movie Math" »

Most geeks are spittle-flinging happy that Pan's Labyrinth director, Guillermo del Toro, has signed on to helm The Hobbit (and its ill-defined and almost certainly ill-advised extra-canonical sequel, which I henceforth dub The Hobbit 2: Electric Bilboloo), but most geeks are also not Salon.com film writer Andrew O'Hehir. O'Hehir describes himself as a fan of the Peter Jackson-directed Lord of the Rings series, and most del Toro films (Mimic rightfully excluded), but thinks the pairing of Jackson as producer and del Toro as director is bad news. O'Hehir's objections are A) del Toro is on record as loathing all things hobbitty, and B) del Toro will be wasting the prime of his career carrying water for Jackson on a project Jackson should do himself.

Is O'Hehir right? Hell, no. And here's why:

Peter Jackson Isn't a Better Choice
Anyone who suffered through the Star Wars prequel trilogy -- or Godfather III -- will understand when I suggest that it's not always wise for a director to return to his old stomping grounds. Jackson left Middle Earth as a hero to geeks and film investors, and on such a creative high note, he essentially slacked through King Kong and no one gave him any crap for it. That being the case, what's the upside for him to re-direct in Middle Earth? If he does it perfectly and sticks the dismount, it's still not fresh. If he screws it up, the fan response will make the Phantom Menace backlash look like a group hug.

Continue reading "Is Guillermo del Toro the Right Man for The Hobbit?" »