News & Notes Inside the Week in Film

Warner Bros Slummin’, Yo, Not Crushing It

Warner Brothers is currently suffering through a first quarter from hell.  How bad is it?  They’re counting on a period piece starring Tobey Maguire to pull them back into the black.  Yikes!

by Chris Neumer

Warner Brothers Pictures is one of the most legendary studios in the world.  In recent years, Warner Brothers has reaped enormous windfalls from releasing The Hangover movies, Sherlock Holmes, Director Chris Nolan’s revamped Batman trilogy, the Harry Potter series as well as (through clever accounting), the Tolkien films, Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, Return of the King and The Hobbit.  However, there is a flip side to that coin too.  Just about everything else that Warner Brothers has touched has had less than satisfactory box office returns.

Warner Brothers’ 2012 was a pretty good example of just this phenomenon.  They released 17 films and reported taking in $1.6 billion at the domestic box office.  That was good for a $94.2 million average domestic haul; a pretty impressive number indeed!  However, $752 million of that total came courtesy of just two films, The Dark Knight Rises and The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.  With this in mind, every movie not featuring Batman or Bilbo averaged just $56.5 million.

First, some perspective:  $56.5 million is a lot of money.  If I told my mother that Warner Brothers was disappointed that their non-Batman, non-Bilbo movies averaged a $56.5 million box office take, she’d shake her head and say that things were getting out of control; then she’d get mad at Warner Brothers for not being happy with that amount.  A lot of people feel the same way.*  What those people don’t realize, though, is how much money Warner Brothers is putting into creating these projects that return an average $56.5 million domestic box office.

* These are the same people who hate the fact that Albert Pujols is earning $25 million per season, not realizing that he is projected to bring in many multiples of that amount through merchandising and gate revenue.  I mean, who in their right mind wouldn’t spend $25 million a year to get back $100 million?

Take Wrath of the Titans, for example.  Wrath of the Titans opened with a $33.5 million box office on its way to a total of almost $84 million.  It’s a crazy absurd amount of money… until you realize that Warner Brothers spent $150 million making it and another $100 million marketing it.  Armed with that knowledge, suddenly $84 million doesn’t seem like that outstanding of a run any more.

Wrath of the Titans truly represents one of the worst situations for a company to be in: it appears that they are doing well—the movie pulled in more than $80 million—when, in fact, they are ultimately sweating bullets.  Wrath of the Titans ultimately pulled in more than $200 million at the foreign box office, salvaging a lot in the process, but I think Warner Brothers would have been just a little bit happier if it had done something closer to Rise of the Titans, which ended up grossing more than $160 million.

Interestingly, Warner Brothers’ Magic Mike probably represents the best situation a company can be in.  Warner Brothers picked up the rights to the film for about $7 million (and, I’m guessing some back end points), released it and it went on to make $113 million.  They didn’t have to worry about raising money, any production elements, got the final product and then scored an absolute box office coup.  That’s the way to go!

Magic Mike also illustrates another point that people don’t often grasp.  Studios don’t want to spend $250 million making and marketing a film to get back $275 million; they do it in hopes that they’ll get back a billion!  This is why studio heads will occasionally get fired for projects that made money.  Because, basically, every project makes money (even Waterworld turned a profit eventually), the question becomes are they making enough money?  As a general rule of thumb, most studios hope to make their entire production budget and more back with a film’s domestic take.

All of this, though, is merely a long-winded introduction to the news of the week: With the colossal bombing of The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, Warner Brothers’ first quarter in 2013 can officially be qualified as absolutely abysmal.  It is an exact repeat of what happened in 2012, you know, if there hadn’t been a Dark Knight Rises or a Hobbit to offset things a bit.

Warner Brothers has released five movies thus far in 2013, Gangster Squad, Bullet to the Head, Beautiful Creatures, Jack the Giant Slayer and, now, The Incredible Burt Wonderstone.  The reported budgets for the five films add up to $400 million.  The cumulative domestic box office takes from the five thus far?  $138 million.

Quote

“Throw down your guns and come on out with your hands up. Or come on out, then throw down your guns, whichever way you want to do it. Just remember the two key elements: 1) guns down, 2) come on out. ”

-Leslie Nielsen negotiates with a bad guy in The Naked Gun 2 1/2

Gulp!

The biggest of these flops is unquestionably Jack the Giant Slayer.  With a budget near $200 million and a domestic box office take (through March 17) of roughly $50 million, this one is getting ready for the record books.  And, going in, who could have ever guessed that a $200 million fantasy tale without any stars in the lead roles, that was released in March and featured one of the most grotesque posters in recent memory, would go on to crash-and-burn at the box office?  I mean, who can see things like this coming?

This all puts Warner Brothers in an interesting spot.  Unlike 2012, when they had the guaranteed cash cows of The Dark Knight Rises and The Hobbit in the second half of the year to prop up their revenues, 2013 is promised only one can’t miss hit; in short, it doesn’t appear to have anywhere near the same rosy outlook as 2012.  The interesting spot though is that they can’t admit this.

If one was ranking the biggest guaranteed hits right now in Hollywood, the list would looks something like this:

1)    Batman movie

2)    Harry Potter movie

3)    Tolkien movie

4)    Spider-Man movie

5)    Twilight/Hunger Games movie

Those franchises just print money.  And Warner Brothers had two of them in 2012.  Somehow, they lucked into having another one in 2013—The Hobbit: Smaug’s Desolation—but they are most definitely lacking that second title.  There are certainly candidates—Nikki Finke reported that Warner Brothers is resting its hopes on The Great Gatsby, The Hangover Part III and Man of Steel—but all of them seem to have some rather sizeable uncertainty surrounding them.

The biggest question marks definitely surround director Zack Snyder’s $200+ million reboot of Superman. It’s not spoken of often, but one of the biggest superhero disappointments ever was the 2006 film, Superman Returns ($270 million budget, $200 million domestic take).  But I will write more on the Superman conundrum at a later date.  For the time being, just enjoy the fact that Warner Brothers is reportedly pinning its hopes for a financially lucrative 2013 on a period piece adapted from a work of classic literature that stars Tobey Maguire.*

* … with Leonardo DiCaprio playing the part of Jay Gatsby.

Suffice it to say, it all has the markings of a very interesting and potentially tumultuous year for Warner Brothers.  This is one story that I am definitely going to keep an eye on.

A Minor Thing About The Natural

Spring is here!  Flowers are starting to grow, spring training has started and the Cubs haven’t yet been eliminated from post-season play.  This means it’s the perfect time to watch baseball movies like The Natural… and then question plot points in it.

by Chris Neumer

For about five years in the ’80s, before Bull Durham and Field of Dreams were released, director Barry Levinson’s film The Natural was viewed as the quintessential baseball movie in Hollywood history.  Even in light of Kevin Costner’s entries into the genre, The Natural still holds up and represents one hell of an entertaining movie viewing.  With spring training in full swing, I have been watching a number of baseball movies including the aforementioned three.

One thing that I never previously realized about The Natural was how much of the plot revolved around the titular character’s bat.  A quick recap: Roy Hobbs (Robert Redford) is a 40-something baseball player who comes out of nowhere and takes Major League Baseball by storm.  He’s not only going to be the oldest rookie-of-the-year in any professional sport ever, but the obvious choice for MVP as well.  Instead of suspecting steroids for his performance–this was set in 1939, after all–people think that a lot of his ability comes from his bat, nicknamed ‘Wonderboy’.  It was a bat that Hobbs carved as a kid from a tree in his backyard that was hit by lightning.  And he absolutely destroys with it.  In the film’s climactic scene, Wonderboy breaks and Hobbs is forced to use another bat to do battle against one of the toughest pitchers in the game.

The part of all this that I found most fascinating was the fact that Wonderbat made it through three decades of use, including an almost full major league season, without ever chipping, fracturing or out right breaking.

Jack Marucci, president of the Marucci Bat Company, estimates that most current major leaguers go through six or seven dozen bats in a given season; that’s 72-84 bats a year, or roughly one every two games… given that there are 162 in a baseball season.  Assuming that bat technology has gotten substantially better over the course of the last 68 years, that means that bats would probably break even more frequently that they did in 1939, when The Natural was set.  And yet, Hobbs manages to make it through more than 30 years of on-again, off-again baseball with his one special bat, using it to not only play games but also to take batting practice.  There’s no doubt in my mind that this is the true reason that the bat is called “Wonderboy’.

At this point, I guess the real question is whether bats can take steroids.  Time to talk to Jose Canseco, I suppose.

The Photo of the Week

Sean Penn in
This Must Be the Place

I’m not sure how I missed the fact that actor Sean Penn played a washed up, emo-80s glam band rock star in the movie, This Must Be The Place, but I did.  And, until we run out of new photos to run of Penn in costume, complete with a teased rat’s nest of black hat on his head and white face makeup, This Must Be The Place will occupy the Photo of the Week.  It’s Sean Penn.  Dressed as a more effeminate Robert Smith.  We don’t need more than this to amuse us.  Bonus points: this photo features Judd Hirsch in the background!

The 5 Things I Learned This Week

Fascinatingly true things to broaden your mind

1) There are not only Rock, Paper, Scissor enthusiasts, but there are Rock, Paper, Scissors World Championships.

2) The aforementioned Rock, Paper, Scissor enthusiasts reference their game as “RPS”.

3) Jim Carrey is now a grandfather.

4) The TimeWarner website with information about Warner Brothers Pictures looks like it was designed by a fourth grader with a limited knowledge of WordPress.  How bad is this design?  My first reaction upon seeing it was that it was a parody site.  Nope.

5) In the novel The Natural, Roy Hobbs does not hit a home run in his final at bat.  He strikes out and fades from the limelight.