Monday Morning Quarterback Part III
By BOP Staff
July 10, 2013
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Jay Barney: You gotta give them credit for trying. I will probably be in the minority here, but I don't mind them attempting to offer big movies. Sometimes they miss. Other studios make mistakes as well. Just look at May 2012 and see how bad Universal did. They spent $150 million on Dark Shadows and that flopped. They forked over $200 million on Battleship and that sunk badly. Now look at the summer of 2013. Big difference.
Disney will have successes and failures. Some of the failures will be big, sure. Even with the soft opening of the Lone Ranger, they still have had a very impressive year. Iron Man 3 made over $1 billion worldwide. Oz the Great and Powerful has brought in almost $500 million globally. Their latest hit, Monsters University, has already brought in $400 million combined, and it is nowhere near the end of its run.
The international box office is changing the game a lot, and there is some indication that Lone Ranger may not be the epic disaster we are speculating it will be. Don't get me wrong. The numbers are not good thus far. However, I would like to remind everybody of After Earth, this summer's other considerable miss. When it opened in the U.S., all of the talk was about how much of a mega bomb it was going to be. Well to a certain extent, that is true. However, we all underestimated the international star power of Will Smith. After Earth did substantially under perform in the U.S, but it has quietly accumulated nearly $200 million globally. Will that film make money? Probably not. Will it be the utter disaster we all predicted? Probably not. Johny Depp is one of the biggest stars in the world. Let's just see what happens.
Disney spent a lot of money on this project and the competition will be pretty huge in the coming weeks, but let's see how everything plays out. Will the box office performance of Lone Ranger earn it a sequel? Absolutely not.
Disney still has Planes in a few weeks. Thor II will be a solid Thanksgiving release. And I haven't even discussed the long term properties like Star Wars that they can develop. Mouse House missed with Lone Ranger. They will be fine, though.
Edwin Davies: I don't think it's a dichotomy so much as it is a case of one thing leading to the other. Prior to their acquisition of Marvel, which has obviously yielded huge dividends for Disney over the last few years, Disney was pretty much solely reliant on Pixar for their biggest hits. They would occasionally get lucky when something like Pirates of the Caribbean came along, which was both huge in its own right and allowed for the creation of a franchise, but most of the time they had mid-level hits. It's no coincidence that as soon as it looked like Pixar would break off its partnership with Disney and go its own way, Roy Disney helped force out Michael Eisner, who was the main impediment to their relationship and paved the way for Disney to buy Pixar and ensure more hits down the road. Disney has been struggling for years, since their last great in-house animation surge dried up in the early '00s, to have huge hits on their own, and the realization that it's really, really hard to force people to want franchises has clearly driven their plan of basically buying sure things to make up for their own shortcomings. These basically cushion them, albeit lightly, against the failures of things like The Lone Ranger because they've always got a property that they can fall back on. But they also keep taking these risks because there's always a chance one of them might take off. More often than not, they don't, but when you've got a new Star Wars trilogy on your schedule, you're probably not too worried that you're not going to get to open Lone Ranger Land in Orlando.
Daron Aldridge: By adding The Lone Ranger to that unholy trinity of financial disaster, are we sure it wasn't originally titled “The Lone Ranger from Mars”?
With regards to "original" (meaning non-acquired) titles, you also have to throw National Treasure in the mix alongside Pirates of the Caribbean. It's admittedly not the multi-billion dollar enterprise of Jack Sparrow but it was a great foundation for a franchise that spawned only one sequel before Nicolas Cage decided to make a crap-ton of terrible movies instead of another National Treasure film. Was it entirely Cage’s decision? Probably not but he’s as good of a scapegoat as anyone. Maybe he can be blamed for The Lone Ranger, too.
Also, not all their acquired properties are sure things. Look at The Chronicles of Narnia. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe did incredible business domestically ($291 million versus $180 million budget) but the follow up Prince Caspian failed to duplicate with its $225 million budget and only $141 million North American gross. Hmmmm…A $225 million misfire…sounds familiar. It did hit $400+ million box office but that was thanks to the rest of the world. (Incidentally, Disney DID have a Prince Caspian attraction at its Hollywood Studios park up until last year, when it was replaced by a Pirates of the Caribbean: Legend of Jack Sparrow experience.) Caspian the film’s performance resulted in Disney walking away from the series and Fox picking it up with Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which also grossed less domestically but matched the global take of Prince Caspian. Unfortunately, the reports that I read this morning don't spell similar international success for The Lone Ranger. It has only earned $23 million so far overseas from more than two dozen countries.
Sorry for that tangent to Narnia, but I think that Disney has had enough misfires of both the in-house and acquired property variety that they are content with using their deep pockets to use the "throw everything against that wall and see what sticks" mentality. Unfortunately, there are only so many pieces of $200 million spaghetti that you can fling before someone has to wise up and start shopping for cheaper noodles.
Bruce Hall: I think part of what I'm hearing here is a general consensus that the success of acquired properties like Marvel helps give Disney the latitude to swing for the fence with things like Pirates AND John Carter. It's often said that major studios are too risk averse, but one of the reasons why is the amount of money involved. There will probably be more misses than hits, but if picking up properties like Star Wars helps stimulate variety over there, who am I to complain?
Kim Hollis: While I agree that their "sure thing" franchises give Disney an opportunity to take some chances on some different franchises, I really believe they've got to start being more discerning with the projects they greenlight. I think in both the case of John Carter and The Lone Ranger, you had some person or persons who were so attached to the source material that they had a hard time letting go and saying at some point, "Okay, this is just a bad idea." It's fine to be enthusiastic about a book or TV show you loved once, but smart people should be able to do the calculations and figure out when an investment is a bad one. That comment doesn't just apply to Disney, by the way.
David Mumpower: I think that we give a studio too much of a pass when we say "Everyone will have a bomb from time to time." While true, that statement rings hollow when the same studio experiences three such catastrophes in 30 months. Oddly, I am inclined to give them the biggest pass on Mars Needs Moms, a hallmark visual achievement whose story would get a C- in a seventh grade Composition class. Disney knew it was terrible, they knew they couldn't save it and they didn't waste money marketing it. The same is not true of John Carter and The Lone Ranger, both of which employed massive marketing campaigns in a blatant attempt to trick consumers into believing that the movies were not as bad as they looked. Global audiences were wise to those tricks.
Why does this keep happening? I will use a baseball analogy here, primarily because I'm a Braves fan and the similarities between our 2013 team and Disney are undeniable. Disney as a corporation does not make their money by hitting singles. They do not care about on base percentage. Disney is one of the largest conglomerates in the world. In order to advance their bottom line, they need blockbusters. And the only way to create blockbusters is to swing for the fences. Everyone knows that power hitters are going to strike out more because they cede consistent contact in exchange for making their contact count.
The above explains why Disney does not release a lot of small scale movies like The Odd Life of Timothy Green. $25 million productions rarely move the dials to the degree that they need. Ergo, Disney is in the business of making movies like Oz the Great and Powerful, which did what it was supposed to do (more or less), and The Lone Ranger, which has died screaming.
What drives Disney's decision making is finding the next Phineas and Ferb, the next Sofia the First. These are properties that afford ancillary revenue opportunities. We will see a Phineas and Ferb movie next year, and that release will feature a new line of toys that will drive toy sales through the holiday season. The Lone Ranger and John Carter were intended to afford opportunities such as amusement park rides, franchise sequels and, yes, toy sales. Alas, both films were strikeouts. Oz isn't a grand slam or even a homer but it did well enough to keep those possibilities in play. We all know where Iron Man and The Avengers fall into the conversation just as we recognize the Star Wars sequels will behave the same way.
What Disney must avoid is exactly what Kim stated. Their decision making has to improve on these projects that scream "Failure!" that scare them off for years before they suddenly decide, "Eh, we're Disney. We can make it work." The recent evidence demonstrates that the Mouse House isn't impervious either.