Sunday, April 08, 2007

The Public Vote Goes Hi Tech, Not Lo, At The B.O

You probably know by now: Grind House underperformed at the box office this Friday. The weekend estimate is now coming in between 12 and 14 million, massively under the 20 million floor that was expected.

Interestingly, though, the Friday box office for Meet the Robinsons tells a very different story. Taking around 7.5 million last Friday, it's opening day, it has still taken over 7 million on Friday of this week. That is an almost entirely negligible drop in box office terms and is, these days at least, not common at all.

Is this down to word of mouth? More schools being on holiday? The kid-friendly competition running out of steam?

The hi-tech 2.5D world of the Robinsons has beaten the faux-lo-tech conceit behind Grind House. Is this a rejection of this kind of (possibly elitist?) conceit? A simple desire to 'keep moving forward'? Or something else entirely?

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think it's more down to the fact that no one, even people who like Tarantino, have heard of Grindhouse.

Anonymous said...

Box Office Mojo reports a total amount of 11,5 millions of dollars...

Anonymous said...

Saw this a couple of days before it opened in NYC. It's got a few cool moments, but combined with the fact that most of it is just too long (RR segment) or executed poorly (QT segment), I think people are staying away...

Elisabeth said...

I think it's the timing. It's Easter weekend and people have family obligations...which means if they go see a movie, it has to be something everyone likes. And college students who were free to flood the cinemas for 300 are now swamped with papers and projects. A week or two earlier as the 300 buzz wore off and it would have done better. That's my guess.

Brendon said...

Not only would I argue that Death Proof isn't poorly executed, I'll be extremely cynical about the effect botching your film would have on the box office.

Personally, I don't think such considerations have much to do with opening night grosses. If anything, they're based on the film's content, not its form.