While surfing idly this evening, I somehow wound on up the BoxOfficeMojo
list of worst grossing, wide opening films ever. That is, movies that opened on more than 2500 screens (in the US) and made the least money. It's a fascinating collection, full of "tip of the memory" type names. Films I almost remember hearing about, or maybe seeing a trailer for; but not quite. Others don't even generate that much mental near-friction. I look at the name, I paste it into the search box on MetaCritic and look at a synopsis and some reviews, and I'm still left with a scowling, WTF expression. (As seen below.)
Who made these movies? How did they get on 2500+ screens, which means they had major ad campaigns, without me having any memory of them? I'm not that big a movie fan, and I pretty much ignore family movies and chick flicks, but I watch a lot of trailers online, I see a lot of ads on websites, I used to read Entertainment Weakly regularly...
It's understandable when the movie came out 6 or 8 years ago, since I know I've just forgotten. But when the movie was released a few years ago, or last year, or even last month? The worst performance ever goes to The Rocker, which opened on nearly 2800 screens, and earned $2.6m for the weekend. If you're too stoned/drunk/lazy to do the math, that's about $930 per screen, for the weekend. You figure that's $7 a ticket (It's around $10 most theaters in the Bay Area, but we'll include matinee discounts and kid's prices.) So let's be generous and say 150 tickets sold, per theater, per weekend. The movie probably had 4 show times per day per screen, over 3 days. So 150 / 12 = 12 people per show. Nothing like seeing a "comedy" with a full house to boost the laughs!
Backtracking slightly, I only know The Rocker was a comedy since I researched. When I first saw the list, I noted it, then returned, then clicked the link to
the movie's page. My thoughts ran as follows, "What was that date? 08/20/08. Wait... that's August 20th. This year. That's one month ago. What? The biggest flop in the history of widely released movies was just last month? Why don't I have any idea what this movie is? Oh... I guess that's only logical, really."
I still had no idea what it was from the Box Office Mojo page, which had a poster for ease of recognition. I had to search the name on MetaCritic to be sure it was real. It was, and I read the synopsis, and I still had no idea what it was. It wasn't until I read one of the reviews (which aren't that horrible, surprisingly) that I got a grain of recollection. I actually seen a trailer for that film, at some point this summer. It looked horrible; some kind of School of Rock/Spinal Tap rip off with one of those pudgy, white, late-30s manchildren losers Hollywood "comedies" have lately grown so found of vomiting onto the screen. He was almost a rock star 20 years ago, and now his nephew, or something, has a band and they need a drummer, and he joins up and wacky, acid-tinged hijinks ensue.
Clearly I wasn't alone in thinking it looked stupid and immediately forgetting it, given the record breaking opening weekend, and total gross of $6.2m, or less than 1/3 of the production/marketing costs.
At least some memory of that movie came back to me, eventually. Others on the list rang no bells, even after I researched them. Even when they flopped within the past few years.
Lucky You?
Rumor Has It?
Firehouse Dog?
Raise Your Voice?
Zoom? The funny thing about each of those, once I attempted to refresh my memory by reading the synopsis on MetaCritic, is that they all reminded me of some other movie. None of them seemed in any way original; they were all rip offs of some other successful film, or at least looked like it, and I think that might have been the secret of their failure. Potential viewers saw a trailer or an ad, saw nothing new or exciting, and mentally filed it as a lame derivative of some other, similar, more successful, not necessarily any good, movie. Most of them have really bad titles, too. Generic, non-evocative, or instantly forgettable.
Perhaps the king (queen?) of that
is this film, which didn't make the list since it only opened on 1121 theaters. It was mentioned
in an article about the weekend with the highest number of wide releases, which was last Oct 19-21. Unsurprisingly, most of them fell through the cracks, led by the bet-losing title,
Sarah Landon and the Paranormal Hour, which starred no one you've ever heard of, and which features a perfect image on the MetaCritic page. I inserted it earlier in this update. That's the film's "star," I assume, and she's (helpfully) making exactly the face most of the rest of us made when we read the title of the movie. It earned $858,415 total in the US, had no international release, and made $586,283 its opening weekend, on 1121 theaters. That's a whopping $522 per screen! Enough to make
The Rocker seem like a hit, in comparison.
Labels: movies
