Predicting the Movie Hits and Bombs of 2015

From the folks I’ve heard from who have talked to some of the people involved in the “Love & Mercy” movie, they actually rolled it out to more theaters than they initially expected. I think they initially thought this was going to be purely a festival/art house thing theatrically.

I actually think the film nearly went the route of putting it up on Amazon right away as one of those $6.99, “rent it now while it’s in theaters!” sort of deals, and the fact that it even got into the Top 10 and hit nearly 800 theaters was actually beyond their expectations, especially considering they timed it *exactly* when Jurassic World was out.

I think they knew a Brian/Beach Boys story was never going to hit critical mass like “Ray” or “Walk the Line” (which is crazy, because the band has one of the most interesting, turbulent, no-need-for-embellishment stories ever), and that this “Love & Mercy” film would have an even smaller niche audience based on it not being a “biopic” in most conventional senses, and has very little of the old ABC TV movie-style early-era surf-era scenes of the group.

It is interesting that it seems to be disproportionately very difficult to find any budget info for “Love & Mercy” online, and that may well be because, as someone else pointed out, Pohlad funded it himself. I think he got great set designers to make the film look like it could have cost $20 million, but I’m guessing the budget for this film was south of $10 million (and they didn’t exactly pump a ton of money into marketing either), and I doubt they expected to even break even with the theatrical release. I suspect, even with the two-to-three-times-the-budget Hollywood accounting, they may already be near or past the breaking even point. It will probably make more money on home video than it did in theaters.

Everyone I’ve talked to the BB/Brian world, including those that are more than happy to spell doom or recount failure (if not predisposed to do so gleefully), have said the L&M film is at worst a modest success.

 

The Roy Orbison idea is fascinating. He did indeed have an intensely interesting (and often sad) back story. I would rather see a well-made documentary (they did one in the late 90’s called “In Dreams”, but it could have been done a lot better), but a good, non-cheesy “biopic” would be quite interesting as well.

Roy’s sons seem to be spearheading the whole operation now, and they put together a pretty impressive “Mystery Girl” deluxe package a year or two ago, including a pretty good song-by-song documentary on the album (certainly quite good for a music boxed set “bonus disc”).

 

The period detail in this film is really astonishing. Even the "film stocks" (color grading, grain, etc. -- I gather it was all digital) of the '60s scenes look authentic. And the 80s scenes were bang-on too, both in capturing the detail of the period in terms of mise-en-scene, but also in terms of photography. They got a dreamy, almost Michael Mann kind of look during those scenes.

If you compare it to the 80s scenes in Straight Outta Compton, the period detail really stands out. Compton just looks like it was shot in present-day California, but with old phones and cars in the foreground. Love & Mercy makes every layer on screen so vivid. I know a lot of people are unsatisfied by how the narrative is structured, and perplexed by the way it avoids ticking off the Most Important Events In the Artist's Life the way Ray, Walk the Line, and Compton do, but I thought it was a more human and idea/emotion-driven picture as a result.

 

Shot on actual film, but then graded digitally. There's far more control color-correcting in the digital realm.

Another movie that had some great period scenes was Dreamgirls, even though it was a fictitious Motown/Supremes story. They got a lot of the details right and it looked very, very good.

 

M:I may end its domestic run at over $200 million. It just passed the $500 million mark worldwide, with China set to open in a few days.

 

I expected it to be a big hit.

 

IIRC you were also the only other person in this thread who thought Fifty Shades would make bank!

 

Yeah but even a broken clock is right twice a day.


My prediction for 2016. Keanu. Big hit huge profits. Now that is a prediction.

 

What movie?

 

Keanu

 

Oh - I thought you were predicting a movie starring Keanu would be a big hit!

It's difficult to search for a movie titled "Keanu"!

 

This is the movie with Key & Peele, right? IIRC it's the reason why they've brought their show to an end. Not so sure it will be a big hit because as great as Key & Peele are, crime comedies aren't guaranteed profit machines -- for every Pineapple Express there's three or four American Ultras and Get Hards.

That said, I fearlessly predict that when the release date rolls around, it will be called something other than Keanu.

 

Yes

Not quite that simple but yes, the show came to an end due in large part to conflicts with other projects that were being developed.

Which will make my prediction all the more impressive when it comes true.

 

M. Night Shyamalan's "The Visit" made $9 million on opening night. Since it was made for only $5 million, it will easily be profitable.

It is receiving good reviews. There is a consensus of it being a return to form, but not reaching the stellar heights of his first films.

I'm a big fan of his first four films, so am glad to hear it.

 

"Pineapple" made less at the box office than "Get Hard". Due to budget, it was more profitable, but "Get Hard" still did $90 million US...

 

"Truth" will be box office poison but the investors won't care.

 

As a crew member of Dreamgirls I thank you for your comment!

 

Yeah, Dreamgirls was really good, and Tobias the DP did great work. I still chuckle at the double-slate on some of the musical numbers.

 

"The Visit" made $25.7 million for its opening weekend, coming in 2nd. The film was made for 5 million.

 

M. Night is breathing a sigh of relief on that one, that's for sure.

Perfect Guy is a big story as well, taking in $26 million on a relatively small budget (reportedly in the vicinity of $12 million) without being screened for critics, marketed to a mainly African American audience like Tyler Perry's movies.

 

I think M. Night Shyamalan has been very humbled and chastened by the failure of his last few major studio pictures:

http://screenrant.com/m-night-shyamalan-visit-movie-interview/

If he makes a $5 million indie horror picture that ultimately makes $50M, that'll be great. That's a huge hit by any definition.

 

I'd argue it's not. When a $5 million makes 10 times its budget, it's certainly very profitable, but being a "hit" has nothing to do with cost, IMO.

Let's say I make a movie that costs $500 million and it earns $1 billion. That means it probably wouldn't be profitable, but it'd be hard to argue that it's not a hit when it sells that many tickets,

Conversely, if I make a movie for $10 that grosses $10,000, I've made a tremendous profit, but I can't call a movie that only about 1000 people saw a "hit".

Those are extreme examples, of course, but in this day and age, it's hard for me to view a movie that earns $50 million as an unqualified "hit". It's a relative success but not an "objective" hit, IMO...

 

I believe you're mistaken. I think a hit has everything to do with a cost-to-gross ratio. And as I've often said, there's such a thing as a "modest hit," a "big hit," and a "blockbuster hit," all at different levels of the spectrum. And this is above and away from a film that "makes a profit" vs. a film that "barely breaks even." The studios are not in the business of making the later two.

The degree of profitability is a factor, but so is the amount. If the total costs in marketing and distributing a film are $20M (about right nowadays), then The Visit would really be a $25M film in terms of production plus P&A. If it makes $50M domestic, they're doing pretty well assuming they make at least another $30M overseas (and I suspect they'll do better than that).

If a $200M film like (say) Jurassic World makes $1.5 billion, that's probably earned over a billion dollars in pure profit simply because even with marketing and advertising, that film already broke even a month into release. But if you have a $200M film like Tomorrowland that only makes $210M, it's an absolute disaster. Even if it made $400M, that wouldn't quite break even, not when you consider that the studio only gets about 50% of what the theaters take in (though it's a sliding scale). Fantastic Four cost a lot less: a mere $120M and made $160M worldwide. Would you consider this a hit? No. That's a big enough flop that it's ended careers and caused executive shakeups.

What I think the studios really love are films like Minions, where you have a relatively low budget ($75M) and few profit participants, but somehow manage to go against the odds and make over a billion dollars worldwide... plus tons of merchandising that could potentially be in the hundreds of millions. When you can gross 13 times the budget -- and admittedly, Universal spent a ton of money on marketing Minions, probably well over $50M -- this is a huge, huge hit. A film like this is far more profitable by percentage than Furious 7, which also made $1.5 billion. But Furious is a film with 9 producers and lots of profit participants that went wildly over budget (reportedly going over $200M). I would bet when the dust settles, Universal makes more actual cash on Minions, partly because it had zero expectations and partly because the expenses were so low.

There was a discussion in the trades the other day that said that Disney will be hurting if Star Wars 7 doesn't make $120M+ the first weekend because so much is riding on the film. This could be the first film that will have to make over $600M to actually make a profit. I think it'll handily do that, but the pressure to maximize profits on these out-of-control budgets is a really worrisome problem.

 

I'd also agree that the definition of a hit correlates better to the number of tickets sold as a percentage of the movie-going population rather than pure profit percentages, as you can make a huge profit (if it's produced cheaply enough) on something that only a tiny minority of people care to see.

 

One also has to take genre into account. A movie like "The Visit", which is marketed as horror, is not going to make the same kind of money as Jurassic World, Minions, or The Avengers. I would be interested to know what a "hit" is for films in this genre. Maybe some here have an idea.

I am guessing a scary movie, made and marketed for 25 million, that makes it all back on the opening domestic weekend (and was within and eyelash of #1 at the box office), is a runaway success in that genre.