Well my question wasn’t about the reaction in the news to how the box office results are. We don’t get that in our news here, it’s relegated to the back of crappy magazines, and isn’t considered significant,as far as I can tell.
I was thinking more on how new movies are chosen to be greenlit. They tend to go by ‘Popularity’ based on their belief that if it’s big on the opening weekend, and it stars a particular actor, then that actor is now a bankable commodity to be used. Then they’ll look at the genre of this blockbuster hit and are more likely to greenlight something along those lines. I’m pretty sure we’re going to see a shitload of Fantasy films since LOTR and Harry Potter. We’re already seeing a heap of Superhero movies.
So I figured as the opening weekend is their initial guide, they were not really seeing popularity, they were simply seeing the results of successful marketing, a holiday weekend, a crap selection to choose from, and general tradition of moviegoers to go on opening weekends.
Whereas DVDs show true popularity of genre or star or director, because buyers of them are clearly spending their money more considerately, for something that would definitely sell.
In that sense, since LOTR, they should be more open to 3 hour films, to extended DVDs with amazing extras, to trusting Directors to do their job without undue Studio interference, to use relative unknown actors as leads, and a bunch of things like that - just based on DVD sales.
When it comes to greenlighting new movies, they don’t just look at opening weekend boxoffice numbers. They look at total box office – domestic and foreign – for films they feel, for whatever reason, will do similar business. They look at how easy it will be to make money from other revenue streams – McDonald’s promos, action figures, comic book spinoffs, cartoon spinoffs, commercials, etc.
And they certainly look at how the film performs on video. Cervaise mentioned Austin Powers above, which is a good example. The first film made about $50 domestic box office. Total. Which is not terrible, but it’s no great shakes. But the video performed really, really well. People rented it, people bought it, and a bunch of people who didn’t catch it in the theater caught up with it in the video market. The result? A sequel – which I think did better business its opening weekend than the first one did in its entire run.
The other major part of the equation, though, is what the initial investment is. Fantasy and SF movies can pay off big – but their up-front costs are pretty extensive, too. In some ways, the real Hollywood dream project, from a moneymaking perspective, is something like My Big Fat Greek Wedding, which cost next to nothing to make and ended up being wildly successful. It wasn’t the box office leader that year, but any studio would rather have that than an underwhelming “blockbuster” like Burton’s Planet of the Apes any day. It’s not just how much money comes in – it’s how much money goes out to bring that money in.
And the success of LOTR and Harry Potter have already had an effect on what’s being developed – the Narnia books are coming to the screen, as are other fantasy series. But the decision to make a movie is too time consuming and risky to base on something as arbitrary as opening weekend box office – PotA is a good example, again. Studios do factor in further performance. But they don’t always (or even usually, I think) understand what made any given film a hit in the first place, so the decisions they make based on the popularity of any given film may be different from what you’d think they should do, or what the market really wanted.