The last 24 hours has yielded a cluster of stories about the worrisome build-up to Super 8, this weekend's '80s-tinged sci-fi vehicle from writer-director J.J. Abrams (and co-produced by Abrams's chief influence Steven Spielberg). Deadline notes Paramount's "bold gamble" in not spoiling Super 8's storyline, visual effects or its central creature alluded to in earlier marketing efforts, thus leaving pre-release buzz -- and thus box-office expectations ($25 million to $30 million, according to the studio) -- on the low side. The Hollywood Reporter cited "industry chatter that the film would not open on par with recent summer releases like X-Men: First Class or Thor"; Vulture quotes a witness to "'purgatory' tracking. It's horrific." Except it's not horrific. Abrams and Paramount have us right where they want us.
As much as we've heard about Super 8's homage to films like The Goonies, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and especially E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial (whose June 11, 1982, release date precedes Super 8 almost precisely 29 years to the day), Abrams has indeed insisted on a level of secrecy not often seen in contemporary marketing campaigns. We know a few things: There is a group of adolescent friends making a movie. There is a train crash. There is a monster. A town is in peril. But that's pretty much all we know. This alarms observers who think the moviegoing public hasn't seen or heard enough about the film and its elements -- and that neither Abrams nor Spielberg are enough of a draw on their own -- to land that blockbuster opening on which so many studios count this time of year. Paramount's official line is that budgeted around $50 million (not including untold tens of millions in marketing expenses), Super 8 doesn't need a blockbuster opening to show commercial promise. It's the un-tentpole, in other words -- the direct opposite of Spielberg and Paramount's other summer delivery, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, and more in line with long-legged sleeper hits like Paramount's earlier True Grit, which debuted wide last December to $24.8 million before finally bringing home $171 million domestically.
That's fair, but it's also defensive and a little misleading. Ultimately, the strategy behind Super 8 orbits around trusting audiences to talk about a movie after it opens as opposed to before. Imagine! A film culture that subsists on whole films as opposed to micromanaged fragments of hype! That is a "bold gamble" in a day and age when the Web economy relies on B.S. trailer "leaks" and endless clips, stills, posters and other spoilers whose revelations often do more to undermine than bolster audience anticipation. (I'm looking at you, Green Lantern.) Chatter means nothing without context; it doesn't even necessarily mean a huge opening. To wit, is there anything left to see, hear or discuss about X-Men: First Class after yesterday morning? Was the overexposure of everyone from January Jones to Jennifer Lawrence worth the relatively modest opening-weekend return and the imminent 50-plus-percent week-two drop?
In fairness to Hollywood, of course blockbuster budgets do require any means necessary for blockbuster openings. Even if Paramount is radically understating the production cost (and having seen the film, I think they are), Super 8 is still not that movie. As good as the young cast is, the biggest name in the cast is Kyle Chandler -- the head coach on that football series that everybody loves but nobody watches. Ultimately, the movie is the star, which brings everything back to its fundamental spiritual and thematic influence: E.T.
Watch this original trailer for Spielberg's biggest hit and tell me what the Super 8 skeptics might say is missing:
Hint: There's no extra-terrestrial. There's a spaceship here, a few alien digits there, and the implication that it can be domesticated enough to be "kept," but that's all. Super 8's marketing to date has provided virtually the same clues about its mystery creature: A train crash here, some muscular steel-bending there, and the implication that it is dangerous to humans. History has proven the merits of discretion in this genre; the Abrams-produced Cloverfield benefited from the same approach, busting out to $40 million in January 2008.
Then again, Cloverfield -- subject to significant fanboy-targeted, January-doldrums hype ahead of its release -- plummeted 68 percent in its second week. Furthermore, as one insider told Deadline's Mike Fleming:
"It was a different world when Spielberg held everything secret, and Abrams isn't Spielberg, at least not yet. Young moviegoers now have shorter attention spans, they want to know what they're getting right away, or they will find any one of 40 other things they can do with their time and money. If Super 8 doesn't open strong, next week will be even tougher because awareness on Green Lantern is tracking through the roof and both films need the young male audience to succeed."
Well, yes and no. Green Lantern is indeed tracking well, though not so far beyond Super 8, and anyway, we're kind of talking conceptual apples and oranges: Vulture cites 88 percent total awareness and 45 percent definite interest for the Ryan Reynolds-starring comics adaptation, with the low-wattage original Abrams story Super 8 hovering at 64 percent and 36 percent, respectively, in the same categories.
More importantly, while Super 8 does need the young male audience to succeed, it doesn't need them right now. It needs 30-somethings who couldn't care less about The Green Lantern next week, or Cars 2 the week after, or Transformers or Harry Potter following those -- the same relatively underserved demographic that, coincidentally, helped make a hit out of E.T. when they were kids. Nostalgia counts for something, and it doesn't need to be $60 million out of the gate: E.T. opened to $11.8 million in 1982 -- roughly $24 million in 2011 dollars -- before finding a phenomenal word-of-mouth stride throughout the remainder of the summer and well into 1983, when it finally exited theaters after grossing a total of $359 million.
That kind of run won't happen with Super 8; attention spans are too short, there are hundreds more movies released today than there were 30 years ago, and honestly, it's good but not great. But the beauty of E.T. -- Spielberg's cachet notwithstanding -- has a lot in common with the beauty of Super 8: It's long-legged, low-maintenance counterprogramming for a summer otherwise awash in franchises, adaptations, updatings, knock-offs and/or overhyped crap.
The week E.T. opened, for example, it beat Annie, Grease 2, Star Trek II and Rocky III. As it continued its dominance deep into the summer of '82, it vanquished the likes of Blade Runner, The Thing, Tron, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, The Road Warrior, The Beastmaster, The Pirate Movie (!), Friday the 13th Part III in 3-D (!!) and re-issues of both Raiders of the Lost Ark and Star Wars -- all of which were expected to open big and successively push E.T. down the box-office charts. Indeed, a few of them debuted at number one, but none outlasted Spielberg's blockbuster in the long haul.
That's where the young male audience came in. If Super 8 can manage half that profile, it will be a $200 million sweetheart -- not to mention the summer Oscar probable we all know it was intended to be.
So instead of second-guessing Abrams and Co. as cagey, aloof and/or self-sabotaging, let's give them some credit for daring to let Super 8 succeed or fail on its own accord -- to find, captivate and sustain an audience organically without resorting to the unhinged Hollywood stunts that we bemoan in so many other campaigns. Regardless of our opinions of the film, we shouldn't take for granted storytelling that demands being seen on its own terms, however and whenever its creators are ready. Sure, it's a risk -- for them and for us -- but that's as it should be. Nothing good at the movies ever came without it.
[E.T. box office figures via Box Office Mojo]