I wrote a prediction story on SiliconANGLE about the flops of 2014 in Hollywood. I got lots of emails on one of the movies Godzilla. It seems many in the “crowd” think of all the predictions, “Gozilla” will flop the most. After the megaton flop known as John Carter imploded harder than any movie in recent memory in 2012, costing Disney a $200M write down, several supposed “blockbusters” faced a similar fate at the box office in 2013.
In fact, in 2013, some of the biggest, most costliest misfires in cinema history were released, leading to over half a billion dollars in writeoffs for major studios. Led by such massive flops as “The Lone Ranger” ($190M writeoff), sci-fi disasters “R.I.P.D.,”and “After Earth,” the poorly received “White House Down,” and most recently the samurai CGI schlockfest “47 Ronin,” which had a negative cost of at least $175M before marketing is factored in and yet only opened at $20M, it was a year that prompted industry legends such as Steven Spielberg to say:
“There’s eventually going to be a big meltdown. There’s going to be an implosion where three or four or maybe even a half-dozen of these mega-budgeted movies go crashing into the ground and that’s going to change the paradigm…”
When it comes to box office success, trending on Twitter doesn’t translate to packing butts in seats. “Scott Pilgrim” was trending on Twitter and that bombed. Justin Beiber has 48 million followers on Twitter and yet seemingly none of them showed up for his latest theatrical masterpiece. The correlation of Twitter activity to theatrical receipts has yet to manifest itself in any repeatable, tangible way. There is a very high level of variability when it comes to social media impact on box office results. In our analysis “Hunger Games” was able to harness the power of social media to its advantage while other films have either generated social media buzz and fell apart at the box office or screwed up their social media initiatives altogether. ”John Carter,” for example, was a social media disaster that stumbled throughout its entire campaign.
Which brings us to 2014, and examining which movies are positioned to be the biggest bombs. Which movies will “go crashing into the ground” leading to the inevitable industry-wide paradigm change of VOD available day and date with wide theatrical releases as Spielberg and George Lucas prognosticate?
Before we begin, it’s important to keep in mind that studios only recoup approx. 50% of theatrical grosses, the rest being split with theater owners. This means that for a film that has a negative cost of $200M (the cost of the actual film production) and $100M in associated marketing costs (premieres, ads, events, airfare, etc.), grossing $300M at the global box office means the movie earned half of its total negative costs back, or $150M. Such a movie would need to make $600M theatrically to break even. Of course, the strength of digital downloads, video streaming, upfront cable and TV network sales and physical format distribution (a dying revenue stream) can most definitely help make up for a theatrical shortfall, but no studio greenlights a $200M summer movie with business plans that call for generating half that amount at the global box office. Which is why the industry change of making movies available on VOD concurrently with theatrical releases is inevitable as it would allow studios to recoup investments more quickly, particularly for a movie with horrendous word of mouth, as many of these recent mega flops have had.
So for 2014, what are the surefire bets? What are the riskiest movie ventures out there? Who is approaching social media the right way? And what genres are still marketable?
Following are our predictions and analysis for the Top Three biggest flops of 2014, in order of magnitude (net loss):
1)Godzilla. Hands down, “Godzilla” will be the biggest box office bomb of 2014.
Godzilla as a character is box office poison. The fact is the last 3 Godzilla movies released domestically have flopped: “Godzilla 1985” made $4M; “Godzilla 2000” made a whopping $10M and the last attempt at a Hollywood-style big budget remake, also called “Godzilla” bombed so bad that its lead toy licensee went bankrupt. Had the movie made a profit the studio wouldn’t have just let the rights expire in 2003 without even attempting a reboot or sequel. They had 5 years to make a new film based on this property yet they passed. Think about it—Sony, the studio that greenlights sequels to most anything—”Resident Evil 6″ is on the horizon and don’t forget about “Underworld 5″—walked away from investing another cent in Godzilla.
Moreover, the last Godzilla movie produced was a decade ago—“Godzilla: Final Wars”—and that bombed so hard that the studio, Toho, Co. Ltd., put the entire franchise on ice. That movie cost $20M and made $12M in Japan and had the lowest admission numbers for a Godzilla movie in nearly 30 years. Following that bomb, the film’s director, Ryuhei Kitamura, has been cranking out budget-rate horror slasher flicks ever since—choice fare like “Midnight Meat Train” and “No One Lives.”
Aside from Godzilla, the giant monster genre as a whole is anemic. “King Kong” flopped, despite having Peter Jackson at the helm; “Pacific Rim” bombed, despite having umpteen giant monsters battling on screen; “Gamera the Brave,” about a lumbering giant turtle monster, delivered weak numbers at the box office; and if you go to the outer edges of the giant monster genre, recent films like “Jack the Giant Slayer” bombed and “Walking with Dinosaurs” flopped as well.
The bottom line is if Peter Jackson couldn’t turn “King Kong” into a mega-size box office hit, the chances that an indie film director—Gareth Edwards—attempting to make a big budget giant monster action film like “Godzilla” a global, profitable hit are essentially nonexistent.
The $160M “Godzilla” is also sandwiched between some of the summer’s sure-fire mega hits, with Sony’s the “Amazing Spider-Man 2” coming at it with strong tailwinds just two weeks before, and the double team of Adam Sandler’s latest summer comedy “Blended” and Fox’s “X-Men: Days of Future Past,” opening just one week later with strong headwinds pointing right at “Godzilla.” “Godzilla” will essentially be getting hit from all sides, and theater owners will be allocating more screens for “X-Men” and “Spider-Man” rather than take a chance on empty theaters screening “Godzilla.”
It’s also worth noting that the marketing to date for “Godzilla” has been rather weak (and nearly invisible). This appears to be continuing—and part of the plan—as Warner Bros. has elected not to feature a “Godzilla” trailer during the upcoming Super Bowl, while “Amazing Spider-Man 2” and “X-Men” are there in full force.
Considering that “Godzilla” is the last film that Warner Bros. is cofinancing with former producing partner, Legendary Pictures, we believe that Godzilla’s box office results aren’t exactly WB’s top priority at this time. Especially considering that the studio is opening up an Adam Sandler summer comedy only one week after Godzilla’s release. It should also be noted that WB is only financing 25% of “Godzilla,” so its exposure is minimal. And since the two companies have effectively divorced, we don’t expect a “full court press” on the marketing front from WB, who is distributing worldwide except for Japan.
