Hollywood’s wrangling with media coverage of weekend box office grosses is a delicate balance of pre-release cajoling, begging and arm twisting in an attempt to manage expectations, writes “Los Angeles Times” columnist Patrick Goldstein.
“If your movie doesn’t match those opening weekend predictions come Monday morning, you’re faced with an onslaught of stories saying your film may have earned $40 or $60 or $80 million at the box office,” writes Goldstein. “But — gasp! — it didn’t meet expectations, transforming what might have been a success story into a gloomy and often premature obituary.”
Golstein holds out as a case-in-point the just-opened “Star Trek,” which pulled in $75.2 million in its three-day weekend that is the second-best premiere weekend of the year so far. Weeks earlier, its distributor Paramount began suggesting quietly to journalists that $50 million would be what to expect, given comparisons to past well-known franchises that had been on a downward trajectory.
Goldstein says that most forecasters went with $65-70 million, which Paramount’s low-balling prevented from going higher.
“Marketing to Moviegoers: Second Edition” devotes an 11,000-word chapter to murky, behind-the-scenes world of theatrical distribution research, of which pre-release “tracking surveys” that predict box office openings are one of seven different strands. Four research companies sell such tracking data and findings are supposed to remain confidential within the studio system, but invariably info leaks out.
“A given film appears in track surveys about six weeks before theatrical release when the movie’s trailers enter theaters, and its commercials appear on television,” says “Marketing to Moviegoers”. “At this point, the film is locked into a premiere date that can’t be changed.”
Meanwhile, “LA Times’” Goldstein gives his scorecard of studio expectation managing: “Paramount is probably the most aggressive studio in trying to spin downward, although Warner Bros. is a close second. Fox’s suggested numbers are so absurdly low they’re usually not even worth considering–if Fox’s estimates to me had come true, all of their movies would have bombed. Universal, Disney and Sony are surprisingly close to offering reasonable guesses, although like every other studio, they’re almost always on the low side.”
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