This Quora post linked below makes the point that despite mediocre to awful reviews many Adam Sandler films are surprisingly successful at the box office. Who is spending their date money to see these things?
People like my wife’s cousin’s family. They have unrefined tastes and find simplistic comedies hilarious. It’s quite sad.
“…but even they skipped That’s My Boy, because one has to draw the line somewhere.”
Low tastes, DVD sales, overseas gross. Sandler has hit the sweet spot for his career: low-effort crap that can be made cheaply with no talent and still turn a healthy profit.
The man-child shtick has had a big audience since way early in film. Jerry Lewis perfected it, and Sandler and Farrell have tapped into it.
Sometimes, you want a mediocre movie that will entertain you and make you laugh without demanding too much of you.
I haven’t seen any of Mr. Sandler’s recent work, but I watched some of his earlier movies with relatively low expectations and found myself pleasantly surprised, or at least not disappointed, at how much I enjoyed them. If others have had the same experience, maybe they’ve learned to be skeptical of the bad reviews.
I have never seen an Adam Sandler movie but I’ll say this for him. The Chanukah song is one of the few listenable songs of the holiday season.
Click wasn’t bad.
Also a movie has to make 2x its budget to even break even. If the movie cost $50 million, it needs to break $100 million to break even since the other 50 will go to distributors and other costs.
Sandler is doing better than I thought he would.
Also is it ‘that’ hard to break 100 million now? I mean if 5 million people see the movie for $10, that alone is $50 million. Add in all the ad revenue, all the dvd rentals, streaming, etc.
I liked 50 First Dates and Click, actually. I was looking forward to seeing Pixels, but it got brutal reviews, so I passed. The other ones? No thanks.
I suspect the OP is like me - I go to the theater maybe twice a year and only see films I think are going to be truly excellent. Merely good can wait for NetFlix and Adam Sandler can stay in the warehouse.
But I know a lot of people who have this conversation: “We’re going to the movies tonight! What should we watch? No, we already saw that one. No, my girlfriend doesn’t like horror. Anyone object to Adam Sandler? OK, see you at 8.” Not only are these kinds of people less choosy about what they watch, they watch a lot more often than I do. Theaters would starve if they waited for me to come in, but these folks are outspending me by ten or twenty times.
My kids enjoyed Hotel Transylvania and wanted to see #2 (which we did). In my entire adult life, I don’t think I have seen a non-children’s movie in the theater- except for 1 date with my wife and several movies I went to with my first real GF (when we actually started paying attention to the movies the relationship was kaput). So, instead of being of one of the only-going-to-excellent-movies people, I’m a only going to kids movies person.
I don’t particularly enjoy going to movies, and the typical cost when I do is around $100- which I don’t have and would rather spend on something more substantive if I did.
I probably saw most of the early Sandler movies on video or cable, though I haven’t intentionally seen any since around “50 First Dates.”
I’ve never caught any of Sandler’s films in the theaters, only on TV. Big Daddy was OK. I liked Click, The Wedding Singer, 50 First Dates, and Anger Management. Reign Over Me was excellent. I can’t really say I’ve hated any of his movies.
Cheaply? I can’t figure out the budgets on some of these movies: $79 million for Jack and Jill ? Was there a portrayal of the Battle of Midway in there somewhere?
Don’t forget that a lot of the profits on a movie like this are made from fees that are like the studio “billing itself” for certain services. If you’re Famous Guy, a $79 million budget might include the $10 million you want to personally profit from the film, and that might be paid to you as an actor, as a director and as owner of both the FX company and the sound editing studio. (Think George Lucas as writer, director, producer and owner of LucasFilm and its subsidiaries like Skywalker Sound and ILM.) Your income is an expense to the film budget so that you get paid regardless of profitability and so that you’re not splitting residual profits with the lowly investors.
The old 2x factor applied to domestic take only. Overseas take is a whole 'nother ball of wax. For one thing, it’s common to sell rights in some territories. It doesn’t matter if the movie took in $1 or $100M in such a territory, the studio’s take is fixed. Even when they get a share, it’s much smaller than typical domestic deals.
Also, promotion costs are sometimes astounding. They are also frequently not available and have to be guessed at.
Jack and Jill came nowhere remotely close to a profit in theaters. (It came really close to a 50/50 split on domestic/foreign.) It might have made up for the loss on video, but I doubt it.
The Hotel Transylvania series is not in the same department as his other films. Most families were seeing it because it’s a kids film, not an Adam Sandler film. Animation is a completely different box office world. E.g., Hotel Transylvania 2 set a new opening weekend record for September (opening at all well is a rarity in September). You leave it off the list of typical Sandler films much like Punch-Drunk Love.
Basically, for Sandler’s case, one can infer that on average his movies made money somehow (despite his salary), so they keep making them. But apparently he’s reached some sort of limit of studio gravy, hence the Netflix deal.
If you make an Adam Sandler film without Adam Sandler you get Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star.
Exactly. It’s a lot like people who always have the TV going no matter what’s on. They’re just filling empty space–temporally, socially, and psychically.
I remember reading, and will look for a link to, an article talking about how Jack and Jill was basically guaranteed to make money due to product placement alone, and that many of Sandler’s seemingly throwaway films were similarly Trojan Horses. When every person who comes to see your film accounts for $10 worth of box office and $3.50 worth of endorsement that nobody gets a cut of, that kind of two-tracked business makes a film quietly much more profitable.
I paid money to see The Waterboy on the big screen, but my buddy and I toked the Divil Weed in the car right before we went into the theater, so it was worth it.
I also enjoyed Fifty First Dates. Haven’t seen the others.
Say what you will about Sandler’s talent (or lack thereof) the man has been well-advised when it comes to business. I wouldn’t be surprised if product placement wasn’t a much larger amount.