Box Office Lessons of Summer 2008
by Brian Tallerico

As my Kindergarten teacher used to say after a rough day of coloring within the lines and nap time, "Now, class, what did we learn today?" We're currently stuck in one of the worst movie seasons of the year - when Hollywood dumps product like Babylon A.D., College, and Disaster Movie (a historic trifecta only in that none of them screened for critics) and all anyone can talk about is the upcoming Toronto Film Festival. Before you know it, people will be blogging about Oscar buzz and what we're going to see next year. But, right now is the window when Hollywood executives are crunching the numbers on summer 2008 and asking themselves some important questions. What worked? What bombed? What could've done better? And, most importantly, why? So let's ask ourselves - what lessons can we take away from how movie audiences spent their money from May to August of '08?

1. The Word For the Day is "Counterprogramming"

Studios have been counterprogramming for years, but it never produced quite as drastic results as it did in 2008. Honestly, it's remarkable that more movie houses aren't paying attention to what the other ones are releasing around the same time as their big budget movies. It's mind-boggling to me when release schedules are announced and there are three CGI-animated movies in a row (it happened two years ago with Barnyard, Monster House, and The Ant Bully) or romantic comedies opening on the same day. These flicks are sure to cannibalize themselves, and always do. It's even more ridiculous when you consider the weekends - like the first of September this year - where there's literally nothing more than a Nicolas Cage action movie on the schedule. Why not slide in a questionable title like Made of Honor here to counterprogram? A few box office stories of 2008 might have made studios rethink how they plan when to release their flicks.

The king of counterprogramming, and the studio truly leading the way for summer 2008 when it came to turning questionable product into gold, was Universal. Sure, Paramount, Disney, and Warner Brothers had huge seasons, but they had Iron Man, Indiana Jones, Batman, and Pixar to work with. The marketing department for your local community theater could have had successful summers with that roster. What's impressive about Universal is how they planned their attack. Yes, opening Hellboy II a week before Dark Knight might have been the dumbest scheduling move of the year, but let's look at the positive first. (We'll get to the man with the red right-hand later.)

What's the best way to combat the juggernaut that is Pixar? A naked Angelina Jolie and some wicked slo-mo. Wanted always had the potential to be a hit, but, by picking one of the few action-free weekends of the season, Universal proved that there is still room for two blockbusters to open on one weekend. Kids went to see Wall-E and their babysitters went to see Wanted - to the tune of a $50.9 million opening. There was only one weekend this summer that can lay claim to two of the top ten opening weekends of the season, and it's not a coincidence that those two movies were about as drastically different as any pair of the year.

But Universal's mastery of counterprogramming doesn't end there. Quick, which musical lays claim to the highest opening weekend of all time? Not Chicago, not Hairspray, not Dreamgirls. No, the first weekend of Mamma Mia! owns the sequined crown with $27.8 million. And don't think for a second that it's a coincidence that it opened against The Dark Knight. In some cases, the counterprogramming actually has the interesting effect of bringing in people from the opposite movie. If you don't think there were people turned away from sold-out shows of TDK sitting in those opening weekend showings of Mamma Mia!, then you don't understand the way a lot of people see movies. There are still a number of folks who head to the multiplex just to see anything on a Friday night, and Mamma Mia! clearly siphoned some adults from sold-out TDK shows. But that alone won't take you to the top. No, what really worked for Mamma Mia! was that, despite the emphasis in both movies on costumes and over-the-top makeup, it targeted a completely different audience than the biggest movie of the year.

And it wasn't just Wanted and Mamma Mia! In a year when horror movies were getting destroyed at the box office, do you think it's a coincidence that the highest grossing scarefest of the year, The Strangers (another Universal hit), opened against Sex and the City? The most baffling success of the season has to be the $80 million grossed by Fox's What Happens in Vegas, but is it a statement of the draw of Ashton Kutcher or the fact that it opened on a practically vacant weekend and then drew female audiences and people who don't like CGI and only had Prince Caspian and Indiana Jones to choose from in its second and third frame?

2. Even Stars Can't Repeat Themselves

It doesn't seem that long ago that Mike Myers, Kevin Costner, and Eddie Murphy were bulletproof. Not anymore. (Maybe someone should tell them.) The most baffling thing about the trifecta of crap that these three released in 2008 wasn't that they made such bad movies. Anybody can make a bad movie. It's that they made movies that felt so much like scripts that they turned down a decade ago. Myers, Costner, and Murphy dug out the crumpled drafts of The Love Guru, Swing Vote, and Meet Dave, respectively, and audiences collectively said, "I've seen that movie before. And I don't want to see it again."

How brutal was the season for these three? The box office grand totals for all three movies don't equal the gross of Baby Mama... COMBINED. The Love Guru was Mike Myers' lowest-grossing film in which he played lead since 1993. Swing Vote is going to barely edge across the $16 million mark, which puts it next to 3000 Miles to Graceland, The Postman, The War, and Revenge in the actor's $15-20 million range of bombs. It didn't help that Swing Vote had perhaps the worst marketing of the season with a poster that not only made it look like something we'd seen before, but also like Costner was doing another baseball movie. Finally, there's Meet Dave, a movie so bad that Eddie Murphy promoted it with stories suggesting he was going to retire. Seriously, who is advising Eddie Murphy on career decisions? It would have been smarter to make The Adventures of Pluto Nash 2. Meet Dave was Eddie's biggest flop since that notorious turkey and had a similar opening weekend to 1998's Holy Man, one of the biggest bombs of that year.

The law of diminishing returns didn't just nail Kevin, Mike, and Eddie. It's hard to lump a movie that made around $100 million in with failures like Love Guru, Swing Vote, and Meet Dave, but You Don't Mess With the Zohan marked Adam Sandler's worst total for a comedy since The Wedding Singer. With each of Sandler's summer comedies of the last four years dropping in its total gross by about 10% from the movie of the year before, Sandler might want to take a look at that trajectory and reconsider Happy Gilmore 2.

Every year you'll read stories about the end of star power. That's crazy, there's still some star power out there (and we'll get there later). But what's changed is that audiences are smarter about what Hollywood is pitching than they used to be. Moviegoers used to line up to see action heroes and comedy stars basically make the same movie over and over again with different character names. Those days are over. Unless it has a number in the title, audiences don't want to pay for something that they feel they've seen before.

None of these actors are done. (Unless, of course, as has been rumored with Mr. Murphy, they actually want to be.) But they really need to take a lesson from this season about how much audiences will close their wallets to something that they not only feel like they've seen before, but that they also know probably isn't as good. With more and more movie ownership with DVDs, iPods, and beyond, audiences are going to be less likely to see something that looks like Tin Cup or Austin Powers if they can just go home and watch the original on their cell-phone.

Box Office Lessons of Summer 2008 Page 2