by gfan1984 » Sun Apr 14, 2013 10:40 pm
[quote="mr.negativity"]
[quote="Scott Mendelson"]
As I mentioned last week, the success of Guillermo del Toro’s large-scale monsters vs. robots action tale Pacific Rim is at least partially predicated on how well-received the previous two months of summer films happen to be. This summer will mark the ten year anniversary of Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl. As most of you know, the Disney pirate adventure was a surprise of sorts, both in terms of its unexpected quality and its huge financial success. The film was a proverbial dark horse of summer 2003, a film based on pirates (box office poison!) starring Johnny Depp (usually box office poison way back when) and based on a theme park ride. On paper, the $130 million film was seemingly a recipe for disaster. But two things happened that summer. Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl was very good and a large portion of the May/June summer releases were not. As such, by early July, summer movie audiences were primed for a would-be tentpole that actually delivered the goods. Gore Verbinski’s pirate adventure was the one we were waiting for, and audiences responded accordingly with a $73 million five-day opening and a $303 million final domestic total.
It’s a somewhat unique phenomena. You have one film that basically capitalized on the somewhat underwhelming slate of movies that proceeded it, allowing it to be presented as the proverbial ‘one you’ve been waiting for’. In terms of mainstream opinion, it delivered crowd-pleasing thrills and unexpected quality in a summer where The Matrix Reloaded (a film I believe is massively underrated, but that’s for another day), Hollywood Homicide, Daddy Daycare, Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, and Ang Lee’s Hulk did not. This is not dissimilar to what happened in summer 2007. Even factoring it massive financial success due to audience goodwill and old-school front-loading, audience disappointment with Spider-Man 3 ($151 million opening/$336 million total), Shrek the Third ($121 million opening/$322 million total), and (ironically) Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End ($156 million Fri-Mon opening, $309 million total), along with a relatively unmemorable June, gave way to the unexpectedly crowd-pleasing Transformers. Minority opinion aside (I was among the only ones who didn’t like that film back in summer 2007, to the point where I saw it twice just to see what I was missing), Michael Bay‘s robot-smashing epic delivered the blockbuster goods in a way that had thus-far mostly been missing in the various big movies of summer 2007. Cue the $155 million six-day debut and $319 million domestic total.
Chris Nolan’s Inception, also a mid-July release, capitalized on the same trend, truly becoming the lone diamond in the rough during one of the absolute worst summers in modern history. Seriously, summer 2010 was such a wasteland of mediocrity and disappointment (Iron Man 2, Prince of Persia, Sex and the City 2, The Last Airbender, The A-Team, etc.) that the Jackie Chan/Jaden Smith Karate Kid remake felt like an honest-to-goodness Oscar bait picture merely because it was very good. Enter mid-July, and, aside from the then-standard Pixar triumph, audiences were literally starved for a genuinely good “bigâ€