‘The Incredible Hulk’ vs. ‘Hulk’
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Box-office reporting is, to put it mildly, an imprecise science, in the sense that what you read on Monday morning about a movie’s performance over the weekend often has very little to do with whether the movie ends up being a profitable enterprise or not. These days, a number of box-office reporters seem preoccupied with whether a movie ‘performed up to the studio’s expectations,’ which is a strange way of measuring success, since it largely only tells you whether the studio’s expectations (often themselves deflated to lower the bar for media approval) were right or not, not whether the movie was really a hit.
That brings us to the strange case of ‘The Incredible Hulk,’ which opened No. 1 this weekend, grossing roughly $55.4 million. The media’s box-office assessments were uniformly upbeat--see today’s coverage here and here. But what surprised me was that the new ‘Hulk’ is uniformly considered a hit, while the old ‘Hulk,’’ the 2003 model directed by Ang Lee, is uniformly considered a flop, even though it grossed $62.1 million in its opening weekend.
The 2003 model did indeed turn out to be a flop, because it dropped off precipitously in the following weeks. But if you went back and read the original box-office dispatches from 2003, you see that it looked like a hit too. Here’s how the box-office seers of the day played it:
The Wall Street Journal hedged its bets a little, but it made the bold prediction that the movie’s performance was ‘strong enough that the studio stands a good chance to make money on the expensive $150-million picture.’ It also quoted Universal’s Marc Shmuger calling the film’s opening weekend showing a clear success, saying it was ‘right up there and beyond if you want to launch a new franchise,’’ with Shmuger noting that it topped the opening of the original ‘X-Men’ and ‘Tomb Raider.’
Our coverage at The Times was equally upbeat, saying the 2003 film marked the biggest box-office debut for director Ang Lee and represented one of the highest non-sequel superhero movie openings of all time. Of course, when the movie dropped 69% in its second weekend, the tide quickly turned, with a tsunami of stories appearing, all saying the movie was turning into a bomb. Still, why didn’t anyone know that on opening weekend?
The real answer is that opening weekend is not always a great barometer for a film’s eventual box-office performance. Yet we in the media are locked into an instant-analysis format that often leaves us with eggs on our faces. (I say ‘we’ because I still regret writing a column calling ‘The Polar Express’ a flop after its first weekend in the theaters, a pronouncement that turned out to be something less than accurate.) But we keep doing it. Most of today’s box-office dispatches labeled ‘The Happening’ a surprise success, largely because it out-performed the reporters’ own low expectations for the film, which got terrible reviews, but still grossed roughly $30 million.
But is it a success, just because it outperformed expectations? I don’t think so. EW’s Joshua Rich threw some bracingly cold water on all those upbeat assessments, having taken the time to discover that the movie earned a ‘D’ grade from the CinemaScore audience reaction tracking survey. That’s a pretty reliable indicator that audiences hated it, meaning it will drop like a stone next weekend. Let’s just hope no one writes that they’re surprised by that!