THB #677: Increasing The Upside Of Marginal Movies

Originals & Oscar Movies Should Do Better

Hindsight may not be 20/20… but it is a hell of a lot easier than foresight. So I apologize for this exploration as I start it.

But…

I finally got to Companion tonight. In a theater that was near capacity on a Tuesday night… with full-price tickets. Yes, it was in Los Angeles. But clearly, after 3 weekends and a day, even with WB pushing it into PVOD prematurely, word-of-mouth was drawing an audience, which seemed to be mostly couples. I was going to go over the weekend, but looking at 4 or 5 screenings, all of them were so full that I didn’t feel like going and feeling crowded in (the embarrassing habit created by 3 decades of critics screenings).

If there was word-of-mouth in the rest of the country like there was in Los Angeles, I guess the movie would have double the domestic gross and not be on PVOD for another month or so. But it clearly does not.

Or maybe it does. It dropped 67% in the second weekend… but that was clearly affected by the Super Bowl being on the Sunday of that weekend. On the third weekend (this last one), the drop was 39%… which seems high considering the ugly drop the weekend before. But the secret sauce there is that WB dropped the screencount from 3,285 on Weekend 2 to 1,062 on Weekend 3… which is insane… unless you intend the film to fail.

Movie gossip columnists have no idea how the box office works or how it worked in the past. But let’s put their blathering aside and just stay on point.

Companion should have done better than $25 million (which it may not even reach). 94% on Rotten Tomatoes with an 89% audience score. I am not a fan of putting too much power on RT numbers, but they can tell you that audiences and critics like something.

One part of the marketing failure of the film is, perhaps, being too clever for its own good. The movie, which I don’t want to spoil for you, has a very specific hook. Once known, it is very, very clear… not ambiguous. But in the marketing - which was kinda beautiful and charming, I thought - it is hidden. I get not wanting to give away the end-of-the-first-act surprise. But on the other hand, when you have what we used to call a high-concept movie and Jack Quaid is your biggest name, maybe you need to be a little less subtle.

I liked the trailer and saw it over and over again through the fall and holidays…

And then they released a trailer about 10 days before opening that finally explained…

Too late.

And for me, still a bit too non-specific. One doesn’t want to spoil the movie. But if you are giving away the gimmick, make the trailer really clear about what it is… please. “Sexbot Gone Wild” (or obviously, so variation) could have sold a bunch of tickets, I think. But my sense is that there was a joy about the movie within the marketing team that just didn’t translate to people who knew nothing about the movie except for these trailers. “The studio that brought you The Notebook” is adorable… but it doesn’t actually tell you anything about the movie you are being asked to buy a ticket to see.

There have only been 8 Major studio releases so far this year, 4 IP titles and 4 Originals. The biggest opening for an Original was $11.8 million for One of Them Days. The other 3 Original films opened between $5.8 million and $9.3 million.

Why So Minimal?

This is the road I was starting down in my “It’s Not Funny” column a couple weeks ago, but I ended up writing myself into an argument for more of what is not being made (mostly comedies). Why are Major studios, led by some of the best marketers in the history of the film business, seemingly unable to launch at least some of these original films?

Even One of Them Days is, in my opinion, an underperformer. It’s headed to more than $50 million domestic… but still, it could have “easily” been double that. It’s not The Hangover or even Girl Trip, but with audiences hungry for comedy and women hungry for movies focused on women, there was clearly a better piece of business there.

Sony, which releases OoTD also released Heart Eyes, a hard-R slasher movie… but it opened against Love Hurts, from Universal. Let’s start with the release of “heart” and “love” on the same weekend, creating an unneeded challenge of differentiation. Both films are violent, though very differently. Doesn’t matter. A weird, not helpful conflict was created in the process.

As it turns out, critics hated Love Hurts and were actually fairly sweet on Heart Eyes… but neither one so hated or loved as to change their fortunes at the box office. Still, just a $5.8 opening for Hurts and just $8.3 million for Heart.

The horror film, Heart Eyes, came to market with the advantage of that genre. Here are the major horror openers in the 3 months before Heart Eyes.

Terrifier 3 (Cineverse) - $19 million
Smile 2 (Paramount) - $23 million
Heretic (A24) - $11 million
Nosferatu (Focus) - $22 million

What couldn’t Sony figure out about a serial killer movie with a kink?

Pretty… but effective?

My theory on Love Hurts is not just that the movie wasn’t good… it wasn’t… but that doesn’t keep a movie from opening better than this one did. One of the producers on the film produced Nobody with Bob Odenkirk, which opened to just $6.8 million. And Odenkirk led a hit TV series at the time. The film legged it out to $28 million domestic (4x opening), but that was an exceptional hold.

Ke Huy Quan is well liked and a good fit for the lead… but has never opened any movie… ever. No TV series. So what do you do when you have a lead who can be embraced, but has no known box office juice?