A Look at the Economics of the Theatrical Performance of Atlas Shrugged
Personally, I see theatrical distribution as a "branding event" to assist in the marketing of the theatrically released film in Home Video and TV. I agree with the author that the emphasis on the amount of box office as an indicator of a movie's success is misplaced ... although a lot of box office is a great thing!
But the casting fuck-ups, as well as that incident where 20th Century Fox marketed the film as being based on a "timeless novel of courage and self-sacrifice" (rather than self-interest; Rand was opposed to self-sacrifice) are all indications that John Aglialoro should never attempt to produce a film again.
He's right, Harmon. In your heart you know it.
I remember before the first one when Aglialoro was predicting a hundred million in ticket sales.
But I guess we're all supposed to forget he said that now. I guess we're all supposed to pretend that the box office failure wasn't a sign that you'd made a stinkbomb.
The author of the article, Isaac Baranoff, appears to know very little about film economics. Except in rare cases, threatrical box office is the *driver* of the other revenue streams such as home media. Otherwise, there's simply no point in releasing a movie theatrically; you might as well go direct-to-DVD or direct-to-download, and avoid the P&A costs associated with getting it into theaters.
In any case, Kaslow, you are conflating the concepts of QUALITY and SUCCESS. They're not the same, and in the entertainment field, only occassionally overlap.
By defintion, theatrical box office is most definitely an indicator of a movie's success, though it's not necessarily an indicator of how good a movie is.
The ultimate driver of a movie's economic success at the box office is, and always has been, word-of-mouth; reviews by professional film critics, even in the dreaded "mainstream media", have very little to do with it. The two Atlas Shrugged movies flopped at the box office because the word-of-mouth was mainly negative.
(And, as I have argued many times on this Web site, the reason the word-of-mouth was mainly negative was that the movies really were appalling for reasons largely having to do with weak screenwriting and unimaginative directing.)
As for Baranoff's statement that Atlas Shrugged Part I recouped its production budget via home media sales, he appears to be just as clueless as he is about everything else. Here are the numbers:
http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/2011/A...
Domestic BO: $4,752,353
Home Market: $3,654,185
Total film revenues to date: 8,406,538
Production budget for Part 1 was $20,000,000
[8,406,538 / 20,000,000] * 100 = 42%
Almost 30 months have elapsed since Part 1 was released theatrically on April 15, 2011, yet the total film revenues, comprising theatrical box office + home media, have recouped only 42% of the production budget — not even half!
On top of that, remember that they cut a distribution deal with Fox in hopes of a promotional budget that never arrived. So out of that $13.50 out of the customer's pocket, I'd be surprised if the producers see even $5.
This production is a vanity product. The customer for this product is the production team, or rather their vanity. Part III will fail just as completely, assuming it even gets made.