This weekend sees the release of Jupiter Ascending and Seventh Son. Jupiter is said to be budgeted around $175 million while Variety is saying Seventh Son only cost $95 million, which sounds like a joke to me, but oh well. Both of these films may do quite well internationally (Seventh Son has already made $82 million overseas), but I’m not expecting much domestically for either of them, which should put them in competition for the biggest busts of 2015, a list that already has two very strong contenders.
After hitting theaters on January 16, Blackhat lost 2,332 theaters in its third weekend. That’s a 90.8% drop in theaters. The end result was a 93% drop from the week prior and I’m not even sure if it’s in theaters this weekend. I searched Fandango.com and it isn’t playing anywhere in Seattle. I have never heard of such a thing. A movie being released in 2,567 theaters and three weeks later it’s gone? Not to mention a movie with a $70 million production budget that has somehow only managed to make $7.8 million domestically and $14.5 million internationally. Yet, it’s not alone…
This weekend the Johnny Depp bomb, Mortdecai, is losing 2,395 theaters in its third weekend. That’s a 90.4% drop from its second weekend and it’s only playing in two theaters near me (with only three showings total), neither of them actually in Seattle proper. I expect it will suffer just a bad a drop at the box office as Blackhat, which could only manage $116,725 from its 236 theaters last weekend, if not worse.
Does this mean theaters are also getting in on the limited window trend? Studios pretty much give theaters three months to make as much money as they can on a film’s theatrical release, at least when it’s not a biggie such as a Marvel movie or The Hunger Games, but are theaters fighting back by saying, “Hey, you give us a dud and it has three weeks or it’s gone”?
I don’t know how the deals are written up between studios and theaters, but if this comes to be a trend we might see studios taking even fewer risks. Why even bother spending $70 million on a Michael Mann film if the risk appears to be too high when compared to making something like The Boy Next Door for only $4 million? Jupiter Ascending is an even bigger risk considering it’s a wholly original property and the Wachowskis are far removed from their success with The Matrix. That’s a decision even I would question, but still, it’s a risk I’d rather see than the McNugget factory filmmaking behind Seventh Son, which, in the end, might end up losing less money for Universal than the hit Warner Bros. is going to take with Jupiter.
Of course, this isn’t the audience’s fault. None of these films are receiving rave reviews, but if we’ve learned anything over the past few years, studios aren’t exactly big risk takers. Add to that everything from a Michael Mann film to a Johnny Depp “comedy” failing miserably at the box office and next up is another big budget Wachowski bust you begin to wonder what the studios will be willing to green light if it doesn’t include a DC or Marvel logo on the script or someone like Christopher Nolan attached to direct.
