THB #712: The Karate Kid and the Mediocre, Disappointing, Not Significant, Almost Bad Weekend
I keep thinking I can stop writing the same thing about the box office over and over and over again… but once again in the wake of a disappointing start for Karate Kid Legends, there is this weird cheerfulness being expressed by some of the box office writing mainstream.
It’s alright for a movie to flop (especially when it is likely to end up a money maker, even if disappointing). But then I see Deadline Anthony’s take of, “SATURDAY AM: It’s a solid weekend following the Memorial Day holiday with all titles driving around $144M worth of business, +117% from the post-holiday doldrums a year ago. Let’s rejoice and take it.”
This didn’t get me writing yesterday. But this morning Scott Mendelson dropped the bizarre: “With a cume 126% above last year’s “sky is falling” frame, this is closer to what “normal” should look like.”
NO!!!!
I should credit Pamela McClintock (Variety) and Rebecca Rubin (THR) for not falling into this trap.
The box office for the summer is looking strong overall. And this is good. And beating the dead horse that was this January and February and mostly March over and over again is boring and obnoxious. But a healthy box office is not defined by weekly battles and every movie opening great (or badly in an argument for trouble, for that matter). It is combination of films that wildly overperform, many that underperform, and the whole range in the middle.
The best weekend in May, for instance, has changed repeatedly. It was Memorial Day weekend, then it became the weekend before Memorial Day as the big titles wanted the extra week of running time before the holiday. Then the opening weekend of May became the place to launch (Spider-Man… then the MCU) with the middle of the month soft offering some running space. (For the record, the year Sony pushed out Spider-Man to the first $100 million opening, Universal pushed out Scorpion King 2 weeks before, in April, to try to start summer then… didn’t quite take. Later they would try to take April to summer numbers with the Fast franchise to better results.) Then, for a couple of years, Marvel & Avengers made the weekend before the first weekend of May the place to be for the same reason launching the weekend before Memorial Day was hot… more space.
Then there was the Trilogy Summer of 2007, with the third Spider, Shrek, and Pirates each opened to $115m, $122m, and $152m over 4 weekends in May. But that was not the biggest May ever at the time it happened and was bested in 10 of 13 Mays after (until COVID).
Long story long… things change. There are no rules. There are not absolutes. It is not reasonable to expect the same thing from the same windows every year. It is also not reasonable to pretend that everything is okay because mom and dad are in lust for a moment after months of not talking to each other and throwing stuff at each other across the living room. Relationships ebb and flow… but trying to suggest that the ground beneath us is firm because everything is okay in this moment is, well, madness.
Karate Kids Legends opening to right around $20 million is not good. And it’s not the end of the world. But there is a level of absurdity in just writing it off on Sunday to, “Why wasn’t there a big rush to this film? Why is it under its projections? It’s the Cobra Kai streaming Netflix effect, dummy. With the Karate Kid audience conditioned to stay at home, what’s the big reason for them to run out and watch another fight tournament onscreen?”
I have to say, again, that I really like and respect Anthony D'Alessandro… but he swims in shark-infested waters and the sharks in this case talk a lot and often convince him to offer lazy spin as somehow being the obvious fact.
This is not to say that the years of Cobra Kai on Netflix didn’t have an effect on the interest of potential ticket buyers. But no, this is not like “It’s the economy, stupid.” There are clearly other major factors. Sony marketing does good work and I liked the campaign for the film well enough. But I also noticed that the studio clearly pulled back on what would be their expected ad spend in the last 2 weeks and leaned more heavily into publicity.
Here is the last non-ad digital asset Sony released…
“Oh… it’s a movie about old stuff.”
Seriously. As I said, I liked the early materials for this film. But this piece only got 49k views on YouTube (luckily) and would make me reconsider seeing the film if I was interested (and wasn’t compelled professionally). It says everything except, “Don’t come see this movie… there is nothing new here at all.”
And that’s before you see the movie… which has something seriously wrong with it. The Kid still overcomes… so that is the CinemaScore reality. (Silly) But the movie was clearly written as a ground-level reboot to star Joshua Jackson as the former boxer who is going to train The Kid as The Kid trains him together overcoming the young jerk and parent of the young jerk who are the villains…. but that isn’t the movie that got delivered.
You would notice, having seen the film, that Joshua Jackson has basically been erased from all the materials for the film. Why? Because someway, somehow - and I don’t have a real answer because I don’t care enough to spend a month digging out the truth - Sony decided that this full-on reboot with no actors from the past involved, aside from, it looks like, Jackie Chan cameo-ing as the former sensei of The Kid before he leaves for New York City, was not going to play. And it seems like they decided to change direction either just before or even in the midst of production.
When you see the film - 2/3 of which is the Joshua Jackson and his cute daughter and their relationship with The Kid - you should notice that when Jackie Chan lands in America in the 3rd act and Ralph Macchio 10 minutes later, they are almost completely isolated from the rest of the story in every scene they are in. As someone who rewrote problem movies for a few years, this feels very familiar. Chan has some footage inside The Kid’s apartment… then alone with Macchio in California… then they find a rooftop space (probably the same roof as the final fight, redressed) to train him with only the female love interest turning up in the training space, aside from Chan, Macchio and The Kid. Even in the climatic fight scene, Chan and Macchio are physically isolated from the rest of the cast, shown together in reaction shots and encouragement moments that could have been dropped in from the space shuttle. They are in the space and backed by plenty of extras, but really separate from the rest of the cast. I don’t know if either actor and Joshua Jackson are ever in the same shot.
My favorite quirk is that The Kid wears a headband/Bandana, in the style of the series, for his final fight. And there is a scene in which Daniel LaRusso gives him what we assume to be the headband he wears and explains its deep meaning to him and Miyagi. But once the kid puts the headband on, we never see it clearly under his bangs. Why? My bet would be that they had shot him doing the fight and we never see the headband he wore and the very clever team on the film (probably led by the editor), when looking for fixes, noticed that we never saw the fight headband clearly in the shot footage, making it possible to add this meaningful 2-person dialogue scene with The Miyagi Headband.
Of course, I could be wrong about that detail or others. Looking at the production schedule, weird late additions of Chan and Macchio don’t make a lot of sense in terms of timing. I mean, it really feels like they shot 80% of the movie and then decided to add Chan and Macchio. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. But something happened.
I should also point out, before moving on, that the movie, which is almost 2 hours as is, drops a lot of loose ends from the Joshua Jackson version of the movie… stuff just doesn’t make sense. They do almost nothing to establish the “bad guy” dojo and the father and son asshole combo aside from their Act One fights. Jackson’s character’s story suddenly stops when Chan and Macchio arrive. And there are holes with the female love interest. We have all seen Karate Kid movies in the past and know the schtick, which this movie abandons for some aging star power.
Given the time and how things were shot, I would bet that Chan worked 2 weeks on the film and Macchio a week. If the budget was really $45 million, almost half of that would have gone to Chan and Macchio and they would have been better off saving the money and making a deal with Netflix to go direct to the Streamer. You know I am a “put these things in the movie theater” person to the death. But I completely get that the studio would have been scared of a cast with a Chan cameo and no one who has every opened a movie before trying to open this movie. And 4 or 5 million Americans will see the film in theaters, so a win for exhibitors. But this movie is a mess… even if it hits the classic Karate Kid notes just enough to keep you from punching a hole in the theater wall as you exit.
Anyway…
It is only the massive size of the 2 hit openings last weekend - $264 million total 3-day weekend box office - that we hit more than $100 million ($149 million by current estimate) this weekend. But it’s nothing to crow about. It’s a 44% drop from last weekend… with a new major studio release in the market. That’s actually worse than the drop early in May when no new studio movie followed the soft Thunderbolts* opening in the 2nd weekend of the summer.
No question, we are in a much better place this month than last year’s disaster. But this is where we are this weekend.
These 7 titles represent $139 million of the $149 million projected weekend total.
What’s missing?
Look in that 4th column… those are the numbers of weeks the films have played… 2 #1s, 2 #2s, 1 #3, no #4, 1 #5, and 1 #7 (Sinners still killing it).
What’s missing? I say, at least another $10 million or about a million tickets sold.
Where from?
Another #3 and at least 1 #4 entry.
Even if they were mediocre grossers, 3 titles 3 and 4 weekends old would have added at least another $10 million to this mix.
It’s not the marketplace. It’s not failed movies. It’s the choice studios have made.
It’s okay… but it’s NOT OKAY.
No point in crying over spilled milk… except to remind everyone we can that the milk didn’t have to be spilled.
And dear lord, what if one of those 3 mediocre releases turned out to be a bona fide hit? Then the box office is $20 million or $25 million more this weekend. And young Anthony doesn’t need to clean up the mess the studios left behind and give him a million excuses for.
“As we said all weekend, even if the numbers for Karate Kid: Legends and Bring Her Back aren’t dazzling, let’s celebrate depth.”
I’d be thrilled to do so… if there was a legitimate amount of depth. This crap that the studios are trying to force into mainstream thinking, that its all about splitting demographics in the market place. On one level, yes. On the real level, such bullshit. Not only bullshit, but the exact opposite of what is happening in a marketplace in which the major studios are not delivering enough product with enough range.
Of course, my first hard reality is that we don’t have to either celebrate or shit on every weekend. Movies are going to do better than expected and movies are going to do worse than expected… that is to be expected.
As Peter Guber used to tell the story, no, there is no one who can just pick the winners. And that isn’t what The Majors are doing. They are making a higher percentage of “pre-sold” IP, but it costs more to make and distribute… they aren’t all winners. And they are making the choice not to make cheaper, wider ranging movies with the potential not only to be positive surprises, but potential “safer” IP for the future.
We have now completed 22 weekends this year. And The Majors have released 22 movies.
The last year before COVID, 2019… by this date… 30.
That’s a 27% drop-off in Major Studio releases through the first 5 months of the year… but there are, uh, people out there who want to keep arguing that the problem is the marketplace and everyone wants to watch everything on YouTube and Netflix. and screw everything else.
And how about this for symmetry? The year’s box office through May 31 is off… wait for it… 27.1% from 2019.
But please… stop telling me no one wants to go to the movies… because it will make it perfectly clear that I should ignore any industry opinion you have.
Until tomorrow…