The
weekend box office results are out, and much to my surprise,
Sex in the City made a fortune. No where near
Oldiana Jones 4 or
Iron Man opening weekend business, but it did clear $55m, an exceptional take for a non-action movie or cartoon. I can recall a few comedies making more than that their opening weekends, but most rom-coms
are lucky to break $25m, and for this one to more than double that without young stars, bankable stars, or any hot cultural consciousness is quite an achievement. I'm guessing those neutered
Sex in the City reruns they show on basic cable must be doing pretty well in the ratings?
I haven't spent much time thinking about the box office prospects of this film, but I thought it would flop. Well, not flop, but I didn't think it would be a big success outside of the fairly small demographic of clock-ticking, 40-something, designer label-obsessed, fantasy-of-being-an-upper-class-woman, women it seems designed to appeal to. Admittedly, I know next to nothing about the property; I've never seen an episode of the show, the only one of the actors/resses I could name is the blog-dubbed "My Little Pony Parker," (and only her since she's on celeb blogs a lot with jokes about Michael J. Fox feeding her sugar cubes) and the only reason I had any awareness of a
Sex in the City movie was because of the news a few years ago that one of the four actresses on the show was balking at appearing in the movie. She was channeling David Caruso, apparently, and once the reality of the career prospects for a 40-something white female who wasn't even the biggest star on her ex-cable show sunk in, she snapped to her senses and signed right up.
My theory that the movie would flop was largely
based on the trailer, which I twice tried to watch online, without success. I was mildly curious about the property, but I got so bored with the trailer's approach of simply showing random scenes of characters I didn't know, that I clicked it off halfway through. Both times. I did eventually see the whole thing in a theater, but that complete viewing just reinforced my presumption. This was a movie made for the fans, without any effort or interest in appealing beyond that core audience. I thought it was one of the worst trailers I'd ever seen, but intentionally. There's not even a hint of a plot or a conflict, there's no effort made to introduce the characters, no one in the film is especially attractive or blessed with screen presence, and it quite clearly states its purpose: "This is a continuation of a TV show. If you want more of it, you'll want this movie. If you don't know the TV show, you've got no reason to see this or interest in doing so."
I've been trying to think of another movie trailer that went with that approach, and the only one that jumps to mind is
The Matrix 3. As best I recall, that trailer made zero effort to appeal to the non-initiated. It was just a bunch of scenes of stylish people in black leather and sunglasses holding intense conversations, mixed with big explosions, robots with shiny arm cannons, etc. I guess that trailer might have appealed to non-Matrix, action movie-fans who liked the imagery, but were there any such people at that time? Probably not, at least not in demographically-significant numbers. And by that light, it was an an effective trailer, since its purpose was to announce that the 3rd Matrix movie was coming soon. No one was finally going to see their first Matrix movie with the 3rd one, released 6 months after the 2nd one, and years after the first one had set DVD sales records, been shown on basic cable hundreds of times, and pretty well become a cultural icon.
In contrast,
Sex and the City's glass slipper makes a much smaller cultural footprint. It's a movie based on a cable TV show that never had more than a few million viewers in its heyday, that had been off the air for years, and that appealed to a fairly narrow demographic in the first place. I didn't think a movie version of it would necessarily fail; I was just surprised how the trailer was constructed, since other
movie adaptations of TV shows have gone a more traditional route. The trailers have always been introductions to the world, and tried to seduce new viewers while reassuring the fans that what they want will be there. I expected the
Sex in the City trailer to give the usual quick introduction to the main characters, segue into the plot of the film (the horsey one
is apparently galloping off with
Robert Goulet), hint at some of the typical rom-com misunderstandings and difficulties, before telegraphing the requisite happily-ever-after ending. The trailer does none of those things. It just leaps right into lots of scenes of botoxed, 40-something white women living in palatial NYC condos, lounging around a pool making jokes about hunky waiters half their age, marrying rich men old enough to be their fathers, etc. The theater I saw the trailer in sat in silence until it was done, collectively hoping something more entertaining would come on next. But clearly we were not the target audience for this film, or for its trailer.
It makes me wonder if this success might portend a marketing swing in future TV/movies? Why go the traditional introductory route and try to appeal to everyone with your trailers, when
Sex in the City did so well with what amounted to a greatest hits clip reel? Just sell the atmosphere, rub the audience's noses in the fact that it's their last chance to see their old TV show favorites, etc. I wouldn't have thought that, "More of the same, but on the big screen!" would have been such a compelling offer, but $55m don't lie...
Update:
Ebert's Review (which is not, shockingly, 3-stars) sounds a lot like the one I'd probably have written. Except I wouldn't have gotten the Diane Arbus joke.
Labels: movies
