What we can learn from “Jack the Giant Slayer” (Part 2)

Yesterday I posted this, an analysis of a NYT article which itself analyzed the poor opening weekend box office of the movie Jack the Giant Slayer. Why did the movie have such a soft opening? Here is a list of reasons noted in the article:

* There has been a “glut of bed-time story adaptations”

* Problems with the visual effects company Warner Bros. used

* Forced to shift release dates from summer 2012 to March 2013

* Less than stellar marketing

* The studio couldn’t decide which audience to target and therefore which tone to take with the movie

Per this last point, Vulture chimes in with their own analysis:

To star with, this was a fairy tale for which the studio chose Bryan Singer as director, whose non-franchise oeuvre — The Usual Suspects, Apt Pupil, Valkyrie, House MD — is the polar opposite of family friendly. “The director started out making an edgy R-rated film with violence,” explains one talent agent, “And the studio changed mid-stream and tried to make it a family film.” The result, adds a rival studio’s vice-chairman, was “real ratings confusion: Its DNA is ‘kids’ despite its cast or director, and it ended up PG-13.”

But there is more to learn from the NYT article:

The movie, a PG-13 adaptation of the “Jack and the Beanstalk” fairy tale directed by Bryan Singer, took in about $28 million, enough for №1 but roughly half of what would have been considered a success. First place does not always mean as much at a time when studios spend so heavily on so-called tentpole films designed to appeal to the widest possible audience.

Warner Brothers and a financing partner spent about $190 million to make “Jack the Giant Slayer.” Global marketing costs added another $80 million or so to the price tag.

$190M production budget. That used to be an unheard of number. Now $200M is the de facto figure for a tentpole spectacle film. Add another $80M in marketing costs and you are looking at a movie that — figuring 3-to-1 revenue to expenses — will need to earn $600–700M to break even. Or as THR notes in an article today:

The finger-pointing has begun over why Jack failed to connect. Warners’ New Line division and Legendary Pictures spent nearly $200 million to produce the revisionist fairy tale thanks to costly special effects. Tack on a hefty marketing spend, and the price tag grew to close to $300 million — reminiscent of last year’s Battleship, which resulted in a sizable loss for Universal after topping out at $303 million globally. Box-office experts say Jack is headed for the same fate unless it takes in $400 million to $500 million worldwide. In its favor: Early response in select Asian markets has been slightly better.

International markets, right? There have been a lot of movies that have done poorly in the U.S. that have done well overseas.

Jeff Goldstein, Warner Brothers’ executive vice president for domestic distribution, defended the movie’s performance in a telephone interview on Sunday. “Our audience in the United States was a little bit more narrow than we wanted, but the Canadian numbers are really strong, and the overseas reaction has exceeded our expectations,” he said. “The story on this movie is far from being written — we need more time.”

— —

“Jack the Giant Slayer” took in $13.7 million over the weekend from release in 10 Asian countries, a result the studio called “stellar.” Warner Brothers hopes that “Jack the Giant Slayer” could ultimately take in $225 million or more from foreign theaters — possibly enough for the movie to break even. (About 50 percent of global ticket sales go to theater owners.)

Whoops. What’s that parenthetical at the end of the paragraph? Only about 50% of global B.O. revenues go to the studios. Actually I’m not sure it’s even that high, but whatever the figure is, it doesn’t approach the percentage of what the studios make domestically. So while international box office is increasingly important, a movie has to significantly overperform overseas to make up for a soft performance domestically.

Why go into the weeds with all these numbers? What relevance do they have to screenwriters? First you should understand something of the economics of the movie business because if you sell a script or land a writing assignment, that project does not exist in a vacuum, rather its very livelihood is tightly tethered to budgetary considerations.

More importantly, it’s important for us to remember that almost every movie a studio or production company commits to is a gamble. People get fired when a movie bombs. So in one very real respect, what our job is as screenwriters is to hit the buyer’s comfort level. Everything from the perceived marketability of the story concept to the execution of the story to potential of the story’s characters to land name actors to a sense that the movie would do well internationally to the ease with which the marketing department can craft a winning campaign… all of these concerns and much more rattle around a studio executive’s mind as they consider your script.

What this means is we need to be able to put on our producer’s hat and see the world through their eyes, even down to assessing our own scripts, asking some challenging questions: Why would they want to buy this screenplay? Why would they think the script could be a successful movie? Does this story hit their comfort level

If not, pick a better story concept and write a better script… because every movie that gets produced, big or small, has the potential to go the way of Jack the Giant Slayer.

For the rest of the NYT article, go here.

For the Vulture article, go here.

For the THR article, go here.

For further analysis, the LAT provides “five lessons from a box-office bomb” here.

Comment Archive