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Box Office

Your Fears About Hollywood Overreacting to Scott Pilgrim‘s Bad Box Office May Be Justified

by Robert Quigley | 9:29 am, August 17th

With a weekend box office of $10.5 million, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, which cost about $60 million to make, had the alarmingly bad opening that fans feared it would. While a few (generally older) critics slammed it, it was really a stellar movie, and one needn’t have read the graphic novels it’s based on (I didn’t) to appreciate it.

There are plenty of theories as to why such a buzzed-about, well-marketed, solid movie performed as weakly at the box office as it did: CinemaBlend surmises that it existed in a no-man’s land, with people above 30 not ‘getting’ it, but people too far below 30 not ‘getting’ the retro gaming references either; it being a geek movie that most geeks don’t actually relate to (“This is a movie about a slacker musician whose biggest problem is choosing which of the two hot girls he’s dating he most wants to sleep with”); and, lastly, the ‘everyone hates Michael Cera’ hypothesis, which I don’t entirely buy, but which is widespread enough that it has to be based on some reality.

In some respects, it doesn’t matter why; what matters is the aftermath. Hollywood’s backlash against ‘geek’ properties without a hit-you-over-the-head mainstream hook could be just as bad as we fear.

Read on...
Insidery

Scott Pilgrim Vs. The Box Office: It Doesn’t Look Good

by Susana Polo | 11:31 am, August 14th

Scott Pilgrim may be good at fighting exes, but not at fighting middle-aged action heroes, Julia Roberts, or Will Ferrell.

At least, according to current estimates of his movie’s box office pull for this weekend.

Read on...

Inception Beats Salt: Still #1 Movie at the Box Office

by Robert Quigley | 10:00 am, July 26th

Turns out the early speculation that Salt was likely to beat out Inception at the box office this past weekend was premature: Inception is still the #1 box office movie in America, with a box office of $43.5 million, bringing its U.S. total up to $143.6 million for its first ten days in theaters. Salt, for its part, didn’t do too shabbily, taking the #2 spot with #36.5 million.

Are box office horse races a little silly? Sure. But we at least understand the origins of this one:

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Elsewhere on the Internet

Kick-Ass Box Office Dragging, Dragon Box Office Kicks Ass

by Susana Polo | 4:01 pm, April 18th

Kick-Ass is not doing so well in its first box office weekend, according to USA Today. The Millar-based flick expected to at least clear its production costs, but estimates put it at earning $19.8 million.

This puts it neck and neck with How To Train Your Dragon, which took in $20 million in the past two days, its fourth box office weekend.

Read on...

An Actual Use for Twitter: It May be a Great Box Office Predictor

by Robert Quigley | 12:52 pm, April 2nd

Here’s a factoid for all of the gripers out there who say that Twitter is useless: It turns out that it may have an uncanny power to predict how well movies do at the box office — even better than Hollywood Stock Exchange, which is the leading market-based stock market performance predictor.

HP Labs’ Social Computing Lab crunched the numbers, and found that by measuring in the volume of tweets about a given movie and factoring in sentiment, using the anonymous workhorses of Mechanical Turk to crunch the numbers. The result is quite striking:

Read on...
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