Now is the perfect time for an update on what has been a competitive and dog-eat-dog box office season during the summer of 2013.
As expected we have had a very busy box office with a number of notable hits. Iron Man 3 set an early pace in May and currently is leading the box office for the year, making over $400 million.
Other strong performances have been from movies such as Star Trek Into Darkness, Man of Steel, Monsters University and most recently Despicable Me 2. That latter movie has roared to a July 4 long-weekend opening of $142 million, one of the biggest animated openings in history.
Business has been good and there have been a flood of movies at the local theatres this summer. This is a good and bad thing. For moviegoers, it's great because it means a lot of choices. For the movie studios, though, it is less than great because, quite simply, not every movie can be a hit.
When a movie opens on any Friday night during the summer, that one moviegoer cannot be in several theatres at once: that person has to make a choice which movie to go to and which theatre to attend.
So when you have a very competitive situation at theatres like we are seeing in 2013, with lots of releases and lots of competition for the moviegoing dollar, there will be head-to-head battles in which some movies end up on the losing end. Here is a rundown of some of the notable losers we've seen so far.
After Earth. This sci-fi movie from Sony Pictures about a post-earthquake Earth now uninhabited by humans, starring Will Smith and Jaden Smith and directed by M. Night Shymalan, was the first major disappointment of the summer. While a May 31 domestic weekend opening of $27.5 million sounds like a lot of money, it isn't so good when consider the movie's budget is $130 million. It was also only good for third pace that weekend. The movie did much better business internationally, but it was not a good way to start a summer. To date it's made $58 million. Ouch!
The Internship. This movie from 20th Century Fox was the much-hyped reteaming of Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson of Wedding Crashers fame. Unfortunately, moviegoers caught on that this plot - featuring two guys doing internships as Google - was just not as funny or as good as Wedding Crashers was. I figured the movie-fans were wise to what they thought was going on: they figured the producers thought all they needed to do was simply bring back Vaughn and Wilson and then sit back and wait for the money to roll in at the theatres. It takes more than that to win at the box office, folks. Next time, the producers might be well-advised to not make the whole movie a glorified product-placement for any one particular company. The Internship was released June 7 and opened to $17 million for an abysmal fourth-place finish at the domestic box office. To date it's made a miserable domestic total of $42 million.
White House Down from Sony Pictures was the next loser, starring Channing Tatum and Jamie Foxx. It opened the weekend of June 28-30 and finished in fourth place in North America at $26 million. A major reason why this movie flopped with moviegoers was because a lot of people looked at the plot line and figured it looked too similar to Olympus Has Fallen, which was released in March. That movie was a shoot-em-up with a White House and a President under attack. What was White House Down? Another shoot-em-up about a President under attack. So much for that. White House Down has so far earned a domestic total of $50 million.
The Lone Ranger became the latest in the string of failures this summer. The action movie starring Johnny Depp opened for the important and usually lucrative five-day July 4 long-weekend in the USA to a disasterous $48 million. That was way behind the animated Despicable Me 2 that opened to a record-breaking $142 million during the same period. Again, $48 million may sound like a lot of money to you, but $250 million sounds like even more money to me, and that is reportedly what The Lone Ranger cost. Disney is going to be spending a long time digging themselves out of this hole after the rotten egg that got laid by this turkey.
We may not be done with the box-office bombs this summer. High drama is expected for this weekend, July 12, when Pacific Rim, produced by Legendary Pictures and released by Warner Bros. goes up against Grown Ups 2 in an epic box-office battle. The early tracking has looked grim for Pacific Rim, which is a big-budget robots-versus-space-monsters battle directed by Guillermo del Toro. As a fan of monster movies generally, this sounds like my kind of entertainment, but Variety has reported that early tracking indicates that in the head-to-head battle Grown Ups 2 will prevail. That doesn't encourage me because based on the trailers Grown Ups 2, starring Adam Sandler, Chris Rock, Kevin James and David Spade, looks monumentally stupid.
If it does prevail it will really be the end of civilization as we know it, not to mention the end of the jobs for the studio executives who greenlighted Pacific Rim. The rumored budget for Pacific Rim, is around $150 to $180 million dollars. Yikes!
Then again, maybe Pacific Rim won't bomb this weekend, given some of the positive notices it seems to be getting. But I wouldn't bet against it. If there is one thing that has marked the summer of 2013 at the box office it is the fact that it really has been every man - or in this case, creature - for himself.
