The most surprising numbers were not those garnered by the success of a quite bad direct-to-DVD title sold brilliantly by Fox.
The most surprising numbers were 2126, 1633, 882, 1105, and 1002.
Those are the screen counts of Button, Slummdog, Milk, FroNx and Reader,
A year ago, the analogous screen counts were 2475, 1507, 1367, 1273, and 1010
The year before, 2797, 1850, 1453, 1090, and 720.
Noticing a trend?
But even more compelling is the fact that four of this year’s five films were all waiting for nominations for any significant expansion at all.
Button opened wide and topped out at 2988 venues.
But none of the other four nominees had cracked 615 screens before nomination. And while all four have expanded, the only one pushing for a major commercial opportunity is Slumdog, which is up to 1633 screens now.
What does it say that Frost/Nixon’s response to its nomination was an expansion from 205 screens to 1105 and not more? That’s almost the exact same count as Notorious, a very specifically niche movie from Searchlight, which in its third weekend, down about 550 screens, still did better than Oscar nominee Frost/Nixon last weekend.
What does it say when Milk goes from 250 screens on the weekend of the nomination to 882 screens this last weekend? How much confidence is there that there is an audience for this film, even with the support of the big nomination?
The Reader pretty much doubled its screen count… from 500 to 1000. The last time Harvey Weinstein had a picture lurk around, waiting for a nomination to expand (and got the nod), was Chicago in 2002/03, which went from 623 screens to 1841 on nominations week and then to 2268 the week after and then 2355 the week after that and then 2447 the week after that and then 2600 the week after that. The film’s high count was 2701, the weekend after it won Best Picture.
The good-ish news is that while the screen count on the first weekend of February is down 884 from last year and 1161 from the year before (even with the staying-tiny Letter From Iwo Jima lowering the count significantly), weekend box office for the 5 nominees is right in between the two previous years.
But the reason it’s good-ish and not good is that, as noted before, these films are not just reaping the benefit of a nomination, but they are getting as wide a release now as they ever will, barring an upset of Slumdog by one of the three smaller releases.
None of the Small Release Trio seems to have a shot at cracking $30 million. $20 million will be an achievement at this rate for two of the three.
You have to go back all the way to 1996 to find a year with more than one BP nominee of five with less than $30 million at the end of its domestic run. And then, it was just two, not three. If you go back twenty-five years, to 1983, you will find The Right Stuff, Tender Mercies, and The Dresser all falling into this sad category.
In the last twenty years, even one BP title grossing under $30 million total domestic has happened only nine times.
Everyone has been aware for a few years now that the idea of the nomination bump has diminished significantly. But people had stopped using the “small release in December, go wide with the nomination” strategy in significant numbers, mostly because of the shorter Oscar season. This year, more films used it, four of them got in (although Slumdog is borderline, with a mid-November small release pattern)… but only one, Slumdog, has really gone anything close to wide. And even that film has not gone quite as wide as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon when that foreign language film got nominated in 2001.
The good answer to all this is that Milk and Frost/Nixon and The Reader have good-sized niche audiences and have little chance of going mainstream… and that the studios know and respect this and are being cautious with the money of their parent companies.
But times are changing… as we see over and over and over again lately.
Read the complete post at http://www.mcnblogs.com/thehotblog/archives/2009/02/whatever_happen_2.html