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Jan 13, 2010 by News Gatherer
In the early summer, Transformers 2 steamrollered all competition on its way to becoming alone the ninth movie in history to acquire $400 million at the domestic box office. Cameron is still bottomward the road. It has already passed the billion-dollar mark at the worldwide box appointment (Transformers 2 topped out at $800 million), bound becoming the fourth highest-grossing all-timer after the second Pirates of the Caribbean film, the final Lord of the Rings installment and, at the top, a little love story called Titanic. But in 2009’s cosmic economic action of extraterrestrials — the Autobots and Decepticons of the Michael Bay movie and the Pandorans of Cameron’s — the blue people will soon triumph. Then, as if not just in acknowledgment but rebuttal to this mass-produced entertainment, came Avatar, the James Cameron sci-fi amazing that has becoming $350 million in its first 2½ weeks and, in about the aforementioned time, should overtake the Transformers sequel. The ultimate face-off of Cameron vs.
The number of tickets sold, 1.474 billion, was the highest of the past five years — admitting lower than sales in any year from 2001 to 2004, when the big franchises (Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, Spider-Man, Shrek, Harry Potter) were really cooking. Inflation explains the variance amid dollars becoming and tickets sold. No matter what else Americans skimped on when they got slammed by the Great Recession, they didn’t stop going to the movies. For the first time ever, the annual box-office total exceeded $10 billion ($10.5851, to get into pi calculations), outpacing the antecedent record, in 2008, by about 10%. This may not have been the time to aggrandize the Oscar class for Best Picture from five films to 10, but studio bosses will say it was a very good year. Ticket prices keep rising; and with Avatar charging road-show fees and getting away with it, look for Hollywood to keep following the Starbucks model: persuade the customers that your product is premium, and charge them for the privilege of buying it.
Winners and Losers It happens — or was it inevitable? — that the top three winners were also the year’s most expensive movies, costing amid $210 million and $250 million, not including the amount of bringing them to market (usually another $100 million or so). That trend is already evident: the industry becoming its big boodle in 2009 while making about 20% fewer films. The worldwide popularity of these über-movies also suggests that smaller pictures will have a harder time getting made. Studio moguls are always looking for means to tamp bottomward runaway budgets, but they may have to accede that money on the awning equals money in the bank often abundant to take the risk.
And which were the big losers? Expensive duds are harder to calibrate; for example, a film may abort Stateside and be a hit abroad. Joe, Angels & Demons, Watchmen, The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, Public Enemies, Land of the Lost and Where the Wild Things Are. The underperforming nine: Terminator Salvation, Disney’s A Christmas Carol, G.I. Still, it’s a Hollywood aphorism that movies with $100 million–plus budgets should at least acquire as much at the domestic box appointment as they amount to produce. If they didn’t in 2009, they fabricated our top-of-the-flops list.
The lesson, which Hollywood should have abstruse by now: $20 million salaries — star wattage — don’t always metamorphose into box-office heat. (And great to critics, who put the Mann and Jonze films on their 10-best lists, and would rightly fret if big-budget assignments went alone to hacks.) Consider, too, that none of the first seven of the top 10 grossers had traditional stars; but the loser account featured the likes of Jim Carrey, Tom Hanks, Denzel Washington, John Travolta, Johnny Depp and Will Ferrell. Note that, of the admiral of these nine flops, four were either Academy Award winners (Robert Zemeckis, Ron Howard) or Oscar nominees (Michael Mann, Spike Jonze), whereas Cameron is the alone Oscar winner among admiral of the top 10 grossers. The lessons: prestige admiral get to spend more money, and, in dollar terms, their “personal vision” can look astigmatic to the mass audience.
In medium-budget films, stars and admiral with hits in their past can take disastrous oversteps. Ferrell’s Land of the Lost amount $100 million to produce, and took in less than half that domestically. In 2009, reliable comedy stars such as Adam Sandler and Jack Black headlined fairly pricey pictures (Funny People, Year One) that went doggo; Sacha Baron Cohen tried to parlay his Borat success with the more acerbic Brüno, and what did the admirers do? Pranked him. Up and bottomward the movie money chain, that aphorism applies.
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