What the dickens is going on with the movie Watchmen? It has made only 98 million dollars in total and was fifth in ranking this past weekend. (It's a list, I know.)That 98 million translates to about 45 bills being returned to the producing studio. Folks, this is bad news as the reality is movies like Watchmen are supposed to be the 'tent-pole' pictures; the money gatherers so smaller and riskier films can be made. To tell you the truth, whoever thought that Watchmen was a sure fire winner needs their head examined. Iconic branding is so important in any calculation of potential or expected box office receipts.
Let's face it, Ma and Pa Kettle would say Superman, yes; Batman, yes; Watchmen... who is he?
5 comments:
It didn't fail because there was no "brand recognition"; it failed because it was an impenetrable mess of a film: too long, too disjointed, too self-indulgent, and (death for a mainstream release) no characters the audience could really relate to.
Not surprisingly, these weren't problems the source material had. The original work by Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, and John Higgins is a fine work of art, the distilled vision of three creators near their peak (though I think Moore has gone on to create even better works).
May the "dark superhero" concept (which the Watchmen book inadvertently gave birth to) be laid to read by the Watchmen film.
The fact is Watchmen's box office crashed after the first day or two. The name or brand was not something that would get regular folk into the movie theatre. If a few days had gone by -- with constant lineups throughout -- and then negative word of mouth spread, effectively down-sizing the profits, then that would indicate that problems with the film itself prevailed in the end. But it happened way before the non-fans could even utter "don't bother". It is one of the fastest crashes I have ever seen.
The property is considered to be 'for fans'. I remember the 1978 "Superman" film's release...
...but then most people who go to see Watchmen wouldn't know who the fuck Ma and Pa Kettle were anyway....
Perhaps the pre-release publicity worked better than intended. Having seen "300" and "Sin City", when the names of those films came up in the publicity for "Watchmen", it just made me think, "OK, so it's another gory, jingoistic, shallow, overlong movie that trots out the worst excesses of humanity for our enjoyment while the characters rant about how they despise them. And it'll rain all the time. Enough of that."
Ended up seeing it anyway on a whim, and while it wasn't exactly THAT bad and did have some interesting takes on good/evil/sacrifice/etc, I couldn't recommend it to anyone who might like that simply because it was so revoltingly violent in so many places. So it's possible they created a film so specific to its audience that it can't cross over to anyone else.
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