The incredible shrinking ‘Chronicles of Narnia’

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

‘The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian’ producer Mark Johnson looks like a happy man in my photo, probably because I just bought him a great cheap lunch at my favorite Santa Monica dive. But no one at Disney (or at its producing partner, Walden Media) is grinning about the grosses of the ‘Narnia’ sequel, which has mysteriously underperformed after nearly a month in the marketplace. It’s hardly a flop, since it’s grossed more than $125 million in four weeks of release, with a big chunk of its foreign loot still to come, since it hasn’t opened yet in Europe.

But the contrast with the first film, ‘The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,’ which opened in December 2005, is striking. ‘Narnia 1,’ as we’ll call it, only grossed $10 million more than the sequel in its opening weekend. But since then, the gap has widened considerably. Four weeks into the second film’s release, ‘Narnia 1’ is nearly $100 million ahead of the sequel.

This wasn’t supposed to happen, especially since the original film was hugely popular, leading everyone to believe that the sequel would be a slam-dunk at the box office. The sequel earned largely good reviews and had a big summer weekend to itself. But the supposedly loyal family and evangelical audiences haven’t shown up, at least not in droves.

What happened?

Disney chief Bob Iger has publicly theorized that the film’s May 16 date was too competitive, leaving it squeezed between ‘Iron Man,’ the first big hit of the summer, and ‘Indiana Jones,’ which, arriving just six days after ‘Narnia,’ may have stolen away most of its family following. This is a huge admission of error, since it was Disney that decided to pull the movie out of its original 2007 Christmas holiday slot and save it for summer on the assumption that if ‘Narnia 1’ grossed $200 million-plus during the 10-day holiday season, imagine how much its sequel could make with a summer playdate.

Rival marketers say Disney’s ad campaign may have turned off moms and evangelicals, since many of the TV spots, which emphasized the film’s action scenes, seemed to be going after a young male audience. A more intriguing theory is that Disney was hurt because it was the first major studio to jettison its promotional partnerships with McDonald’s and other fast-food franchisers, which form the bedrock for most studio summer franchise campaigns.

Johnson doesn’t have any answers, though he worries that the marketplace may have become saturated with films where kids inhabit an alternate universe full of strange but fabulous creatures--a storyline that ‘Narnia’ shares with ‘The Golden Compass,’ ‘The Spiderwick Chronicles’ and ‘The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising.’

‘We still have high hopes for doing well overseas, but it’s obvious that something didn’t work as well as we thought it would,’’ says Johnson, who is careful about not criticizing Disney, in part because he thinks the studio has done a great job with the franchise, in part because he’s producing another installment that goes into production later this year. ‘I tend to agree with Bob Iger. When we looked at May, in theory everyone had their own weekend. We thought we could plant our flag and run for the rest of the summer. Our exit polls were good, the reviews were solid, it tested great. Who knows? All I can say is everyone is just as perplexed as I am.’

Photo by Patrick Goldstein / Los Angeles Times