Also in Monday morning's news round-up, Your Sister's Sister leads in the specialty box office over a very quiet weekend for limited release titles, Warner Bros. beats the rap after Louis Vuitton tries to bag the studio for knockoff joke, and you too can figure out how to find a bad movie.
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Was Disney's John Carter the victim of our increasing cultural overstimulation? IndieWire's Matt Singer considers the tentpole's reception — and suggests parallels with Kenneth Lonergan's troubled production-cum-critical darling, Margaret: "[As] perpetual sneak preview culture becomes normalized, audiences are being conditioned to weigh in on a movie before it even comes out. They're trained not only to trust their expectations, but to express them constantly. 'I knew this movie was going to be bad from the first trailer,' is a commonly expressed opinion online. At a certain point, it begins to feel like people want a movie to fail, if only to prove their expectations right." [IndieWire]
"Even though the media exhibit enormous sophistication and historical perspective in a thousand different ways — not that I can think of a specific example right now — they are far too often bedazzled by the sheer novelty of a story. If you watch cable news, for example, you know all too well that if there are two child kidnappings in the same month, the first one gets far more attention than the second. This same law applies to box-office bombs. With Battleship, the fascination with Hollywood flop sweat had already worn off. When I asked a veteran showbiz reporter why his publication had spent so little time covering the demise of Battleship, he joked: 'I guess we all had the same reaction — didn’t we just write that story already?'" [LAT]
Marvel and Disney's The Avengers is set to close out the 11th Tribeca Film Festival on Saturday night, but the blockbuster has already started cashing in abroad, where it's an early hit with audiences. The superhero blockbuster featuring Robert Downey Jr. and Scarlett Johansson opened in 10 markets this week, earning a total of $17.1 million internationally. The haul included opening-day records in New Zealand and Taiwan, as well as new marks for a Disney release in Australia and Italy. As Bloomberg notes, the studio could use the hit after its recent $200 million loss on John Carter. [Bloomberg]
After two and a half years running Disney, during which time the Mouse House released hits like Pirates of the Caribbean 4, Alice in Wonderland, Toy Story 3, The Muppets, and The Help -- but also a string of disappointments topped by last month's quarter-billion dollar bomb John Carter -- studio head Rich Ross is out. "The best people need to be in the right jobs, in roles they are passionate about, doing work that leverages the full range of their abilities," Ross said in a statement. "It's one of the leadership lessons I've learned during my career, and it's something I've been giving a great deal of thought to as I look at the challenges and opportunities ahead... I no longer believe the Chairman role is the right professional fit for me." [Deadline]
"'I’m very proud of John Carter. Box office doesn’t validate me as a person, or as an actor. [...] I’d love to go do John Carter 2. I really would. It’s just shitty I don’t get to work with the [John Carter] family. It really was a special thing." [EW]
Lionsgate needed it, and Lionsgate got it: The beleaguered studio's Hunger Games gamble paid off in record-shattering fashion over the weekend, milking smart social-media strategy with old-fashioned saturation marketing — not to mention an honest-to-goodness good film — on the way to $155 million in three days. $155 million. As in the third biggest opening ever. You weekend receipts are here.
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Suzanne Collins can start her victory lap now. The film version of her first Hunger Games novel is on the brink of blowing up box-office records – and critics and fans like it, too. Other young-adult fantasy authors haven’t been quite so successful in dealing with Hollywood. Some of Collins’s success was luck and good timing: her first Hunger Games book was released a month after Stephenie Meyer’s final Twilight novel appeared, sending publishers and studios alike scrambling for the next young-adult franchise. But Collins also skillfully played the game with and for the filmmakers, making deliberate choices about how she wrote the novels and how she helped market them to the books’ fierce fans. Forget teenage love triangles or wizards vs. werewolves; here's a far more practical list of dos and don'ts for when your popular young-adult fantasy book is being adapted by Hollywood. (Spoilers for lesser movies ahead.)
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Stephanie Zacharek already kind of addressed this phenomenon in her review, but as John Carter postmortems go, yeesh: "[W]hat's really sad is when you look at the Rotten Tomatoes pages for The Lorax and John Carter. Among 'top critics,' The Lorax has a 48 percent fresh rating, and most of the reviews I've seen have been pretty respectful. (Except for the New Yorker, which says 'The badness of the picture is a shock,' and the New York Times, which called it 'a noisy, useless piece of junk.') And critics pretty much piled onto John Carter — among 'top critics,' it's at 35 percent fresh, with people outright gloating about how expensive it was and how much it falls short. It's like there's a collective agreement that The Lorax is too big and too much of a mainstream juggernaut to call out — but the herd decided it was okay to feed on John Carter." [io9]
Biggest. Bust. Ever: "In light of the theatrical performance of John Carter ($184 million global box office), we expect the film to generate an operating loss of approximately $200 million during our second fiscal quarter ending March 31. As a result, our current expectation is that the Studio segment will have an operating loss of between $80 and $120 million for the second quarter. As we look forward to the second half of the year, we are excited about the upcoming releases of The Avengers and Brave, which we believe have tremendous potential to drive value for the Studio and the rest of the company." [Disney via Deadline]
Despite the stiff competition of the NCAA tournament and the local bar, the multiplex fared all right over St. Patrick's Day weekend: The single new wide release 21 Jump Street was a hit, and The Lorax retained its blockbuster status in its third week of release. Not bad! Your Weekend Receipts are here.
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If only all ticket buyers were anthro majors, amirite? "If I were an anthropologist put on Barsoom, I'd try to integrate myself within the Tharks and learn more about their lifestyle. I'd definitely need to know about the current political climate first. That's always a good idea when you're thrust into an alien environment, here literally. Political unrest kept me out of Bolivia... On Barsoom, I'd be drawn to the civil war, but I wouldn't want to become involved. As an anthropologist, we like to keep our heads down in these types of situations. I actually have a shirt from my old archeology club at Boston University that says, 'Don't shoot — I'm an archeologist!' in 13 different languages. Then again, Tharks don't read." [Box Office Magazine]
Everything went pretty much according to plan at the box office over the weekend: Scurrilous liberal plot The Lorax indoctrinated enough kids and families to reign over a second consecutive week, while Disney's super-expensive sci-fi gamble John Carter settled somewhat anemically into second place. But it's not all bad for our boy on Barsoom. Your Weekend Receipts are here.
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With John Carter currently drawing both mixed reviews and potentially catastrophic early box-office returns, Movieline today revisits our conversation with director Andrew Stanton and producer Lindsey Collins about the film's troubled back story — and what they and Disney really have to lose. - Ed.
A trade report last month suggested that Disney’s March sci-fi tent pole John Carter was in serious trouble owing to Pixar vet Andrew Stanton’s relative inexperience directing live-action film, citing rumors that production reshoots and late-game rejiggering had bloated the budget from $200 million to as much as $300 million. Speaking with press Thursday, Stanton called the report “a complete and utter lie,” insisting that he stayed on time and on budget – but it’s easy to see how the Pixar way of moviemaking may have made for a bumpy transition for the filmmaker.
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"Yes, because everybody's giving me a ration about it. I wish they would have named it something else because I have a weird background and now people keep accusing me of being reincarnated." I see. How about John Carter of Oklahoma? "Why are you calling? Oh. Well, he's been dead for over 10 years." [Moviefone]
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