Monday, May 13, 2013

Box Office Report 5-12-2013: Gatsby Overcomes Prognosticators Predictions of Doom & Gloom. Ironman? Do you even have to ask?


From Rope of Silicon:


For some reason I think Mamma Mia is a more predictive film, it opened around $28 million back in 2008. The lowest possible number for The Great Gatsby is something like Romeo + Juliet's $16 million opening (adjusted for inflation). The highest number is in the upper $40s, mostly due to sheer marketing might. I enjoyed the film, but it's certainly long, and it's tough to think it will spark male ticket-buying interest, especially with Iron Man 3 and Pain & Gain still on the board.
My Gatsby prediction lands at $35 million against the $40 million tracking number. Care to dream higher?

From Forbes:

Iron Man 3 isn’t remotely terrible and The Great Gatsby isn’t traditional counter-programming.  Yes it’s a literary period piece drama in a summer of fantasy adventures, but it’s also a $120 million 3D spectacle.   Correlation isn’t causation,  but history is not on the side of Baz Luhrmann’s latest adaptation. Obviously the film may very well under-perform in the states only to flourish overseas. But purely from a domestic point of view, it seems beyond odd that Warner Bros. seems to keep tempting fate by attempting to open expensive summer movies during a period where audiences have rejected their pictures in favor of the summer kick-off film again and again. If the pattern holds, The Great Gatsby is doomed.

From Daniel’s Film Reviews:




The main appeal for the young’ns, I think, is Leo DiCaprio.  DiCaprio’s movies have an average opening of $22.28M, and the rest of the cast includes Tobey Maguire, Carey Mulligan, Isla Fisher and Joel Edgerton; and it is directed by a man of style, Baz Luhrmann. The 3D might also help the movie make a little extra money. Similar movies open to an average $23.14 million. This hardly stands a chance at beating Iron Man 3 this weekend, but I expect a healthy opening between Robin Hood‘s $36.06M opening and Shutter Island’s $41.06M, so I’ll go with $39,198,750.
From Yahoo Movies:


When Baz Luhrmann announced that he would helm "The Great Gatsby," with Leonardo DiCaprio playing the title character, it was a buckle-your-seat-belt moment in movie history. Could the Australian director of "Moulin Rouge" finally pull off the literary adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic about the American dream, a vision that has eluded so many before him?
Well, after much delay, fanfare, and cross-promotion, it appears that Luhrmann's $104.5 million 3-D adaptation is in serious trouble. Here are the 10 reasons why we think "The Great Gatsby" may be the summer's first great disappointment.

I just love it when all the soothsayers are so so wrong, and with these predictions they didn't really come close.  In case you haven’t heard, Gatsby did come in at number two as expected, but it did so with $50 million dollars thus astounding the experts and critics alike.  Take that Michael Bay!

I especially loved that last article by some yahoo from Yahoo which gave us not one but ten reasons why Gatsby was in world of hurt at the box office and destined to fail. So instead of just being wrong, that particular writer, Thelma Adams, was wrong in ten different ways.

And now you know why I stay away from Yahoo.  Until I did my google search, I was surprised to find out they still had writers, let alone internet traffic.

But those I presented to you are only a few of a whole boat
load of wrongness out there for you to devour because both you and I knew better didn’t we?  Do a search for predictions regarding Gatsby that were made before this weekend, and they are all pretty much the same. I don't know why but I get the feeling there are a lot of people out there that just don't get Baz Luhrmann. Or don't like him. Or both.  

Not me. I love
Baz Luhrmann films because you know you're going to get hit right between the eyes with some different, something imaginative, and usually something unexpected. The first Luhrmanm film I saw in a theater was Moulin Rouge. I went in expecting to hate it, and came out loving it.  It’s one of my favorite musicals. 

His last film, Australia, didn't do well financially. But I liked it. My girlfriend liked it. But it was a film meant to be viewed on the biggest screen possible. Watching at home on a small screen, I can imagine one would just shrug their shoulders and move on. In the theater, it was magnificent.

If you've recently upgraded to a 60 inch screen or larger, and have some stellar surround sound equipment, get the blu-ray of Australia and try again.

I actually came close to seeing Gatsby today. I had to go into town to get a part for our evaporator (more commonly referred to around here as a swamp cooler), and gave serious thought to going. But I dallied with
my Annette article for too long this morning and got a late start so that pretty much put the kibosh on that.

Iron Man took in another $73 million here at home. Between that and it's international take of $664 million, it is only $50 million shy of a billion dollars. Like I said last week, Marvel and Disney better do what they can to keep Downey around for The Avengers with those kind of numbers.

The rest of the box office wasn't too rosy for the also rans. Michael Bay's Pain & Gain held onto the number three spot, but only with a paltry $5 million dollar take. I wonder what it's like for Bay to be at the bottom of the well looking up at Iron Man and Gatsby and being able to kiss Leonardo DiCaprio’s ass?  There’s a big difference between Michael Bay and Baz Luhrmann.  Luhrmann is the one that actually has talent.

Tyler Perry Presents Peeples managed to sneak into the number four spot, but only because  the rest of the top ten had already plundered the box office over the past month or so.  However, Perry didn’t star in nor did he direct Peeples.  And if he saw the same trailor for his film that I did, he was probably thanking his lucky stars.  I imagine having his name attached to that turkey makes him feel as bad as well, when Quentin Tarantino lent his name to awful The Man With The Iron Fists.

How bad did number’s three through eight really do?  Oz, the Great and Powerful hung around in the top ten for another week with less than a million dollars as it continues marching towards it’s DVD/Blu-ray release on June 11.  Order it from Amazon through here, and I might just make twenty or thirty cents for a big night out on the town.  Can’t beat that?

And Star Trek?  Like Ironman it made it’s debut overseas,
and raked in $31.7 million dollars in markets where the previous Abrams spectacle played well.  So far, it’s doing better than the original which is a good sign for Paramount, Abrams, and the franchise before Abrams packs up his bags and head to Disney to begin working on the Star Wars films.  Buy your Disney stock now. 

Scary Movie 5 has left the building this week, dropping off the chart and probably headed for a quick buck or two on the DVD circuit.

Not from  my wallet though.  Not in this lifetime, nor the next one.

Mud is hanging on, but when you consider it’s only on 854 screens, that’s not too bad. 
Here are the numbers:



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