A mini-controversy of sorts erupted on Monday ( Wall Street Journal) when Paramount Pictures (a division of Viacom, Inc.) released their final weekend figures for Transformers: Age of Extinction which put the film just over the $100 million mark. Rival studios claimed that the figure was closer to $97m. I was asked to comment on this story by several regular readers. To be honest, I don't see that much fire here. If the number is genuine, good for Paramount. But if it's not, the film will merely suffer a larger-looking second weekend drop since it will be going off the inflated total, which will bite them on the butt this Sunday. But it does offer a glance at both how box office is reported as well as how accustomed we've become to once-unthinkably large opening weekends. We've gotten to the point where Paramount may-well have thought their Transformers sequel would have been tagged as a disappointment even with a mere $99m debut.
This is not the first time there has been 'controversy' over box office figures. In December 1997, Miramax released initial weekend estimates for Scream 2 as $39 million, a record for an R-rated debut at the time, but later revised those numbers to a 'mere' $33m by week's end. There was some scuttlebutt in October 1994 over whether Pulp Fiction ($9.3m) had grossed more in its opening weekend than The Specialist ($8.7m) in its second weekend. It became a moot point when Pulp Fiction dropped just 8% in its second weekend. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen found an extra $2m in its couch to add to the opening Wednesday gross in order to get its five-day total over $200m back in 2009, while Fox had to revise its four-day Attack of the Clones estimate from $86m Fri-Sun/$116m Thurs-Sun to $80m$110m, which put its four-day total under the $114m Fri-Sun debut of Spider-Man three weekends earlier. It goes both ways too, of course.
Paramount underestimated the 3.25 day debut for Star Trek (from $76m to $79m) while Batman Begins went from a $45m Fri-Sun debut estimate on Sunday to a $48m debut on Monday and The Dark Knight broke the opening weekend record with $153m only to revise that figure to $158m. And Star Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace was able to fend off inexplicably negative press over its 'mere' $100m Wed-Sun debut (a record at the time) when it released revised numbers raising the Fri-Sun number from $60m to $64m and the whole debut up to $105m. As a quasi-mix of both situations, Warner Bros. explicitly counted its $12m worth of Thursday Man of Steel grosses as separate from the film's $116m Fri-Sun frame, despite the fact that Thursday previews are usually rolled into the Friday figure, presumably because they knew that the second weekend drop (to $41m) wold look better from off a $116m weekend (-64%) than a $128m weekend (-68%).
I've long theorized that studios will overestimate on Sunday knowing that most news sources will merely report the potentially 'sexier' number from Sunday, such as the $60m debut of 22 Jump Street that magically became $57m on Monday. On the other hand, there is also news value in 'Gee, this movie did even better then we thought!' That is where those underestimated Sunday totals can come in handy, potentially giving your movie an additional news day while selling a narrative of a larger-than-expected weekend multiplier. But truth-be-told, unless you're an obsessive box office junkie like myself, you probably don't remember any of these stories.
You remember that Batman Begins and The Phantom Menace had exceptionally leggy runs beyond their 'disappointing' debut weekends and that Attack of the Clones was uncommonly quick-kill for a Star Wars film (barely $300 million before its IMAX re-release). You remember Pulp Fiction for its leggy and award-winning theatrical run, as the film crossed $100m domestic and basically became the art house version of Jurassic Park. While I don't necessarily want to encourage studios to inflate their weekend box office figures, I can also guarantee you that whether or not Transformers 4 earned $100m or $97m last weekend will be irrelevant in terms of its overall box office legacy.
Assuming that Paramount inflated the number, and that's me assuming facts not yet in evidence, we should take a moment to as ourselves why Paramount felt the need to make sure that Transformers: Age of Extinction at least appeared to have topped $100m on its opening weekend. Aside from the obvious appeal of being able to trumpet a $100m weekend debut, I would argue it was a matter of playing preemptive defense. I believe that a $95-99 million debut for Transformers: Age of Extinction have been considered a disappointment. was the first time I remember a $40m+ debut being considered disappointing, way back in August 2002, and as the box office openings have climbed ever higher over the last decade so too have the expectations. Last year Lionsgate found itself on the defensive when The Hunger Games: Catching Fire debuted with 'only' $158m.
We've now reached a point where (for example) The Hollywood Reporter is asking (in a piece less sensationalistic than its headline) ' Where Are All the $100 Million-Plus Summer Openings?' even though in the thirteen summers since we had our first $100m Fri-Sun debut we've had only six summers with more than one (two in 2006, three in 2007, three in 2008, two in 2010, two in 2012, and two in 2013). For what it's worth, we may have only one $100m debut this summer, but we've already had a record four $90m+ debuts this season. There are notes of concern for the summer, specifically the terrible domestic legs exhibited by said May openers (Warner Bros.' Godzilla, Sony's Amazing Spider-Man 2, and 20th Century Fox's X-Men: Days of Future Past barely doubled their $90-$93 million Fri-Sun debuts). But we've also had a few relative over-performers, such as Universal's Neighbors, Walt Disney's Maleficent, and Fox's The Fault in Our Stars.
2014 was never going to be a record-breaking summer. That we expect each summer to top the previous one is yet another way we are implicitly asking the industry to give us nothing but Transformers films. If another summer release inexplicably tops $100m on its opening weekend (unlikely, but let's use our imagination), does that mean that everything else is okay by default? And if those three May monsters had all topped $100m in their debut frames but still exhibited the same terrible legs, would their box office performances no longer be causes for concern? Moreover, by presuming the whole industry is in turmoil because the conventional tent pole isn't performing as strong as expected even while the less conventional entries are doing quite well inherently writes off the unconventional performers and negates their worth on the studio slate.
Paramount's Transformers: Age of Extinction's domestic box office success won't be defined by whether it opened with $100 million or $97m. The Amazing Spider-Man 2's barely-$200m domestic total would still be pretty lousy even if the film had topped $100m in the first weekend of May. Without taking a position as to whether Paramount is telling the truth and without letting them off the hook if they are indeed fibbing, I would argue that the fact that Transformers 4 may not have opened with $100m is less of a story than the fact that we in the entertainment media were somewhat demanding it do so as a bare minimum for perceived success. When the once-impossible now becomes the expected, the bar for success may eventually be too high to climb.
Post By http://www.forbes.com/sites/scottmendelson/2014/07/02/does-it-matter-if-transformers-4-actually-debuted-with-100m/
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