Nice Movie Opening, but Did You Beat the Forecasts?

In a recent episode of the HBO series “Entourage” about a fictional Hollywood star and his posse, actor Jeremy Piven, playing fast-talking agent Ari Gold, contemplates what would happen if his client’s “Aquaman” movie falls even a hair short of its projected $95-million weekend box-office opening.

“Expectations -- you beat ‘em by a dollar, life is great,” Piven said. “Under by a dollar, put a gun to your mouth and make sure I’m standing behind you.”

Those who work in the film industry in real life know the feeling. Whether a movie is liked by audiences, or eventually makes gobs of money for a studio, is secondary in Hollywood to whether Monday’s lunchtime crowd at the Grill thinks it made its numbers.

“On Friday afternoon everybody in town is already gossiping about how much business your movie is doing,” said former 20th Century Fox studio chief Bill Mechanic. “By Monday everybody is asking, ‘Did you beat expectations or disappoint?’ ”

The process is similar to evaluating a football team’s performance not on the outcome of the game but on whether it beat the point spread set by oddsmakers. An amorphous group of Hollywood executives and box-office pundits mulls over how much a film should gross. Hollywood buzz then sets a line of demarcation defining success.

Studio executives often work overtime weeks before a movie’s opening to downplay projections. In the run-up to last month’s record $135.6-million weekend opening of “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest,” Walt Disney Co. and the filmmakers refrained from making even innocuous comments on whether it could beat previous box-office-opening champ “Spider-Man.”

“The industry is always giving you high benchmarks because competitors want to make you feel bad when you fail,” “Pirates” producer Jerry Bruckheimer said. “When they started talking about how we could open as high as $125 million, I said to myself, ‘Uh-oh, here’s the game again.’ ”

Internet pundits and rival studios had been forecasting -- correctly, as it turned out -- a record-breaking opening.

As much as studios say they don’t like the expectations game, they play it like political strategists spinning poll numbers behind the scenes. That’s because moviegoers often use box-office performance as a filter in deciding which movies to watch. Wall Street also pays close attention to perceived success on an opening weekend.

“Anybody who ignores the need to manage expectations does so at their own peril,” said Tom Ortenberg, president of Lions Gate Entertainment Corp.

Last week, Universal Pictures had to sweat out the prospects for its costly adaptation of the 1980s cop show “Miami Vice.” The studio’s honchos were relieved when it won the weekend with a haul of $25.7 million, a new high for director Michael Mann.

When this weekend’s grosses are estimated today, the pressure will be on Sony Pictures, whose NASCAR comedy “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby” is widely expected to finish No. 1 with a total above $30 million.

For studios, releasing a movie that has fallen short of expectations spells trouble, especially in an era in which the media are obsessed with handicapping and analyzing the box office. Box-office pundits offer their takes each week on TV shows, in newspapers and on the Internet. The likes of BoxOfficeMojo.com provide daily updates via e-mail.

“This industry has become the world’s biggest spectator sport,” said Adam Fogelson, Universal Pictures’ marketing chief. “You have as much pregame and postgame analysis as you will find with any sporting event.”

Studio executives may talk up the prospects for their rivals’ upcoming releases while downplaying their own films, hoping to create the impression of a surprisingly strong opening. Like a losing candidate in a political primary who does better than the polls predicted, a film can be proclaimed a winner even if it doesn’t finish first.

“The Devil Wears Prada” opened to $27.5 million in June, the same weekend the more heavily hyped “Superman Returns” drummed up $52.5 million. The couture comedy was pronounced a surprise hit, but the latest superhero installment was labeled “unspectacular” and “disappointing” in articles.

A bigger-than-expected premiere also gives films momentum. The Tyler Perry comedies “Diary of a Mad Black Woman” and “Madea’s Family Reunion” from distributor Lions Gate were lauded for attracting surprisingly big crowds.

“When a picture opens better than expected, we get a publicity bump from that,” Ortenberg said.

“Fahrenheit 9/11,” Michael Moore’s documentary attack on President Bush, expanded to 2,000 theaters from 868 thanks to its surprising opening in 2004.

Expectations have their origins in weeks of market research that, to its credit, is often accurate. Hollywood buzz correctly predicted that “Poseidon” would sink while “Pirates” could set records. Besides moviegoer surveys, analysts look at such variables as the number of theaters screening a movie, whether the running time will limit daily showings, historical performance of similar pictures, the track records of the filmmakers and stars and the weekend’s competition.

But the methodology has grown increasingly suspect in recent years. Traditional research methods such as calling people at home have become harder in an era of cellphones and do-not-call lists. That means there are more potential surprises that can hurt or help a movie.

In 2000, Hollywood was stunned when “The Perfect Storm,” starring George Clooney, crushed the Mel Gibson film “The Patriot,” which had been expected to be that weekend’s top draw. Lions Gate’s Ortenberg said research for “Diary of a Mad Black Woman” vastly underestimated the strength of Perry’s fervent fan base of adult African American women.

Even the holy grail for movie distributors -- a chart-topping opening weekend -- can translate to failure if a film doesn’t meet the predictions of industry sages.

In addition to “Superman Returns,” that fate recently has befallen the likes of “King Kong” and “Mission: Impossible III.”

Rob Moore, Paramount Pictures’ president of worldwide marketing and distribution, noted that “Mission: Impossible III” opened at $47.7 million, better than the studio’s “Failure to Launch” and “Nacho Libre.” Yet the Tom Cruise thriller was tabbed disappointing, whereas the comedies were sleeper hits.

“The obsession with expectations has become so great that of our last three movies, the one that had the biggest opening weekend is the one that got beaten up by the press,” Moore said.

Escalating film production costs on such films as “Mission: Impossible III” are one reason opening numbers get so much scrutiny. Box-office pundits view the opening in the context of how much was spent to make the movie and whether the studio will make a profit.

“Prada,” which cost a relatively modest $35 million to produce, was deemed a hit partly because it would yield a juicy return on investment for 20th Century Fox. But it quickly became clear that “Superman Returns,” which cost $209 million, wouldn’t bring the profit that Warner Bros. was hoping for in reviving the Man of Steel as a franchise.

Producers and studio executives grumble that because of Hollywood’s short attention span, the expectations game focuses exclusively on opening weekends. They say that movies with staying power don’t get their due, and instead can be prematurely branded flops.

Two years ago, the computer-animated holiday picture “The Polar Express” was labeled a dud when it opened at $23.3 million rather than the $40-million-plus that some had forecast, said Dan Fellman, distribution president at Warner Bros. But the film showed stamina at the box office, ultimately generating $298 million worldwide.

Universal’s “King Kong” remake was creating strong buzz before it opened last December. The show business paper Variety predicted that the film’s grosses were “destined to be huge,” potentially the size of blockbusters “Titanic” or the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy.

News reports labeled “King Kong” a disappointment after it grossed $50.1 million its opening weekend. Nonetheless, the film ultimately reaped $218.1 million in the United States and Canada and $549.2 million worldwide.

“The minute that movie opened, all we were reading about was how it’s not going to beat ‘Titanic,’ ” Fogelson said. “People should have been reading about how ‘King Kong’ was one of the best-reviewed special-effects movies ever made. It was not an underperformance -- it was a fantastic result.”

When a movie disappoints, the Monday morning quarterbacking can test the patience of even jaded industry veterans.

Mechanic, while chief of Fox Filmed Entertainment, once hung up on his mother when she asked about one of his studio’s movies falling short.

“I get that from everybody else,” he said. “I don’t need it from her.”

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Numbers game

Here is how some of this summer’s movies have fared in their opening weekends, compared with expectations.

*--* Pctg. Actual above/ results below (in millions) expected The Devil Wears Prada $27.5 +54.4% The Break-Up 39.1 +29.0 Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest 135.6 +11.2 The Da Vinci Code 77.1 +9.7 Superman Returns 52.5 -14.4 Poseidon 22.2 -24.4 Mission: Impossible III 47.7 -29.2 Lady in the Water 18.0 -38.8

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Note: The expectations were averaged from predictions at three entertainment websites.

Sources: BoxOfficeMojo.com, ComingSoon.net, LeesMovieInfo.com, Times research