Seen any good movies lately? Well, maybe, if you happen to live near a theater playing one of a handful critically acclaimed smaller releases now playing, like The King’s Speech, The Fighter, Black Swan, Rabbit Hole, or 127 Hours. But if you’ve gone to your local multiplex to take in one of the major studios’ splashy, big-budget year-end movies, you may have come away feeling pretty bah-humbug about the experience. It’s hard to remember any holiday season in which Hollywood has decked the halls with this much high-gloss dreck. And for a slew of would-be blockbusters, from The Tourist to Gulliver’s Travels to Little Fockers to How Do You Know to Yogi Bear and on down the list, scathing reviews have been reflected in subpar box office receipts. As a result, Hollywood’s total box office haul has fallen below last year’s for seven straight weeks.
One group of people getting the message loud and clear? Studio executives. One high-ranking studio exec tells EW, “I think what we’re seeing at the box office is more a testament to the quality of the overall slate of releases than anything else,” adding with a grim laugh, “I mean, if I were a projectionist, I’d want to shoot myself.” Another exec sums up the last couple of months in a single word: “Painful.”
With 2010 just about in the books, and a 2011 slate that includes Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Captain America, J.J. Abrams’ Super 8, Green Lantern and new installments of Pirates of the Caribbean, Pixar’s Cars, Harry Potter, The Hangover, and Transformers, let’s hope thoughts of a prosperous (and painless) new year keep projectionists from doing anything too rash.
In the past week I’ve seen Black Swan, The Fighter and The King’s Speech at my local arthouse theatre and each showing was packed. Lesson to Hollywood: make quality, interesting movies and people will come.
If they are able to find a cinema showing them…
Exactly. I can’t find “The King’s Speech” in any of the theaters near me.
hopefully it may just take a few more week or the distribution companies and mainstream theaters will get the hint and re-release them in your theaters!
I saw The Fighter to a packed house as well, maybe studios should take note and release the awards bait films wider sooner in the year. On the flip side, I saw “How Do You Know” and “Life as We Know it” and thought both were dramatically underrated, I pay as little attention as possible to reviews, but I think the main problem with those films’ performance was the marketing, both were much more than your standard romcom.
They have to make the low-budget movies in order to gain a profit. All the above movies you mentioned were made in the $4MIL to $20MIL range.
This shows how moviegoers are paying more and more attention to bad reviews. There were several movies this year that I wanted to see (like Burlesque) that I ended up avoiding after reading the scathing reviews. We are tired of paying $12-$15 to see a stupid dud.
Agreed. And people pay attention to word of mouth. Movie tickets are so high that the whole movie-going experience had better be worth it in order to force most people to fork up money.
Same here. I was eager to see The Tourist, on the fence about Tron, How Do You Know, and Gulliver’s Travels…and then I ended up seeing none of them based on reviews and poor word-of-mouth. And I’m usually at the theaters 2-3 times a month, at least.
You should have ignored the reviews and saw Burlesque, you wouldn’t have been disappointed. There’s a reason exit polls show Burlesque as an A-, the movie is just a fun escape!
Agree! I like going to the movies every weekend but the movies lately haven’t been worth the price so I pay a little more attention to review sites like Rotten Tomatoes and word of mouth.
The people paying to see Yogi Bear and Little Fockers are the same idiots who watch Sarah Palin’s Alaska.
Exactly.
Not a fan of Sarah Palin’s and have never seen her dreck of a show. However, took the family to see “Little Fockers” over the holiday weekend. Theatre was almost empty (hard to believe it was the #1 movie). Wife and kids agreed it was clearly the worst of the three Focker films. They couldn’t even get Babs Streisand and the other co-stars into the same scene until the closing moments. I understand scheduling conflicts, but the patched-together editing to make it seem like they were all at the same party was terrible for a big budget holiday film.
They were just lazy with the movies of the holiday season. No Christmas-themed movie at all, just the same ordinary Oscar worthy movies that the Golden Globes and Oscars love to gloat about! And Little Fockers had terrible reviews, worse than the first two movies. Bad reviews will scare some people off! That’s why it only got $34 million. It would have gotten $50-56 million, but the silliness of the clips turned off some people.
Well, the ridiculous clip and the fact that a blizzard buried most of the East Coast. For some reason, that’s not being taken into account. If people were stuck due to the snow, chances are they weren’t hitting their local multiplexes. That blizzard probably cost them a good $10-$15MM, at the least.
I don’t know. I like this season well enough. I am a 23 year old man. I saw Tron Legacy when it opened, Narnia last night, I will be seeing either Tangled or The Tourist tomorrow with an old friend tomorrow, and True Grit with my best friends next Monday. That’s 4 films between the 18th and 3rd. Seems decent to me
Clearly, you have a very well-paying job!
Honestly other than the movies above, Tangled turned out to be a good movie.
The reason Tangled is holding so well is because it’s a great movie.
Well I am a projectionist and every time i have to screen a movie prior to its opening, I do feel like doing something horrible. I think I lost a lot of brain cells thanks to transformers, Yogi bear, etc. But yeah I notice that there is hope still. A lot of people are coming to see black swan, true grit and the fighter, and are ignoring the rest of the garbage
I have seen “Black Swan” and “The King’s Speech” since Christmas. “Black Swan” on Christmas with about half capacity. “The King’s Speech” today, a weekday, with also about half capacity. Pretty good. My friend saw it Sunday to a sold out crowd. “The Fighter” is also getting good crowds. People go to the quality movies. The big studio releases are bad. This isn’t that hard to figure out.
I saw Black Swan on a Friday night to a packed theater but was pleasantly surprised going to the late afternoon showing of King’s Speech yesterday in a packed theater.
As a mother of three, I really have to pick my movies carefully. If I go with my children, it costs over $50. If I go with just my husband, it costs $20 plus babysitting (another $40). Add in dinner and I’ve spent over $100 on three & 1/2 hours (dinner, movie and babysitting). And then you finally get to see Black Swan and the idiots next to you talk through it. If I had waited two months, I could have seen it at home for $1 from RedBox.
By the way, that legislation that California is trying to pass concerning video games is a crock of s__t. Video games are a growing threat to the film industry, and it’s just Arnie (an ACTOR) trying to help his studio buddies crush a possible threat to their business.
I saw The Voyage of the Dawn Treader & enjoyed it very much. I also enjoyed How Do You Know, but not as much as Dawn Treader. I’d go see Tangled if I had any kids to take!
Find some adult friends and go see Tangled. It is beyond amazing. It is the first Disney animated movie (not counting the wonderful Disney/Pixar movies) that made me feel like we were back in the 90′s again!
People have been hammering on movies ever since I’ve been going to the cinema (a/k/a the 50s). Every year everyone complains, says it’s the worst, etc. But I tell ya, this year is the absolute WORST year for movies I can remember. Its screenwriting by committee. It’s throwing stars at us and assuming it’s enough. In short, it is terrible storytelling/movie making.
Since I’m home for a month from college for Christmas break, I love going to the movies. But many of the films seem dreadful. I wanted to see Little Fockers, but after seeing it get awful reviews, I’ll be skipping that one. It will turn out to be this season’s Grown-Ups, meaning that it is a comedy that will make more money than it should. I know these are tough economic times and people need a good laugh; but surely they can find better films than Little Fockers. I know some people don’t care about quality and just want to be entertained, but it seems so depressing to think about a crowded theater with people laughing at erectial dysfunction jokes involving Robert DeNiro, one of cinema’s greatest actors today. As for me, I’m seeing The Fighter tomorrow. After that, I plan on eventually seeing True Grit, The King’s Speech, Black Swan, and Tron: Legacy.
Skip Tron, it’s awful. Seriously.
Tron was great.
Tron was cool especially on a huge Imax screen. Light cycles rule!!
If people find something entertaining, than to them it IS quality. Movies are subjective, and that fact is too often lost on these boards. If you want to see Little Fockers, see it and don’t let the masses make your decisions.
But if people think that erectial dysfunction jokes involving a veteran actor like Robert DeNiro are quality, then I weep for the movie-going public.
I’m kind of surprised how many (apparently) big-time movies are being promoted for mid-January. I always thought January and February were when studios dumped their dregs.