Monsters Vs. Aliens. Who will win?

I don't know why people are dissing Watchmen. While it could never capture everything that is in the Grahic Novel, it was certainly still a good movie. I've already gone to see it twice on the big screen.

~ Lazarus ~

I agree with Laz,

Any more details from the graphicnovel and Watchmen would have been complicated for nothing and too long.  We were 7 people together to see it and only two came out with reservations, the rest liked it a lot.  I was warned before getting to go that the ending was messed up, but in the end I think it made perfect sense to do it this way, it was more ellegant than the graphic novel.

I enjoyed this movie and would see it again, will def purchase the DVD.

What I find interesting is the large number of theatres in which Watchman is still playing. It is nearly double its closest rivals. I think if you were to break down the yield per screen, it's probably not making as much money as some movies, although it does look like it will make back the $150 million or so that it took to make the movie which is a good thing, but probably not the big profit maker that the studio was hoping for. I imagine the size of profit will depend on how well it does in the DVD market.

I think the R rating is what hurt it the most since that automatically limits the size of its potential audience, but releasing it early was probably a smart move because I think the movie would have been lost among the summer blockbusters.

C.X.

'aye, those are U.S & Canada Box Office figures, factor in Europe Box Office and DVD sales and TV broadcast rights sales and it'll make a healthy profit. 

As you say, not as big as they were hoping, but a tidy sum, probably somewhere around 50-75 million profit when all is said and done. read: when you take out the advertising budget.

Good point, I've noticed the screen-count likewise on movies and thought that whomever decides how many screenings a given movie gets holds the REAL hidden power to Hollywood Box-Office.

I mentioned it on a media site frequented by execs in an attempt to get an answer to the Q: just who decides how many screens a film gets? but answer came there none.

also of note: seems to me that run-time is as important to B.O because even if you open in twice as many theaters if your movie runs more than the typical hour and half, such as Tarantino's last double feature, which clocked in at nearly 3 hours, then you would need acquire -twice- as many screens per day per theater as a movie that runs half as long with _half_ as many screenings, to make the same B.O.

Seems to me if we put together our various observations here, we can heavily suspect from this discussion that:

Shorter Run-time + Greater number of screens + Family rating = Hollywood's secret formula to maximizing box-office dollars.

(um. point of order. where's the mention of the film's -quality- in this formula? - Ed)

TBH I think it's almost irrelevant. At least in so far as topping 100 million. 

AISI the Hollywood Hype-machine combined with carefully honed advertising (to a film's target-demographic) almost insures that the quality of any given film is nigh on irrelevant.  Most properly constructed movie-campaigns can pull in 100 million based strictly on good advertising combined with the formula above.

I think today, given the finely honed Hollywood formula, one could argue that a movie is not *really* a hit (with the public) until it has amassed 200+ million dollars at the Box-Office. 

Caveat: and that's provided it's not a sequel to a mega-hit with a built-in returning audience.  In that case, imo you need to top 300 million to be a real hit.

imo.

The Avante Guardian. ---- Einstein's Hair^2 //Approved.