I dunno, I just find it strange and artificial that so much of a film's success these days rides on whether it does really hugely well in its first few days of release. When I was kid, movies were typically in theaters for months, even a year or more, before getting pulled. There was plenty of time for them to turn a profit. These days, a film has to do insanely well in its first 3-5 days or it's considered a failure, and that just seems an unrealistic standard to hold it to. Now, I understand that home video has changed things so that keeping a film in theaters for a year is no longer feasible, but still, it seems things have gone too far to the other extreme. Isn't there a comfortable middle ground somewhere?
It maybe strange, but that's the nature of the movie business today.
How many movies cost 100 million dollars 30 years ago? Even adjusting for inflation?
How many things were competing for the entertainment dollars (sure, there was the Atari 2600, but... Playstation, Wii, Xbox, internet, computers)
Movies have become EVENT driven. You HAVE to see it opening weekend, you have to stand in line, you HAVE to be the first to see it--that's how it's being sold, that's the nature of the culture now.
Most movies face a decline from one week to the next, and if you have a 150 million dollar movie and if you lose 60 percent of your audience from one week to the next, it's tough. And I believe, contractually, studios take a greater percentage of the box office on the opening week, and each week the theater gets a greater and greater percentage. (I think that's true...)
So, yeah. It's not artificial. It's the current reality of the movie business. Things change.
EDITED TO ADD, as you were writing this while I was posting...
Things change, 50 years ago when you were a kid there were less movies, less TV channels, home movies were a sci-fi thing, no internet.
No need to be insulting. For your information, I'm 42 and I'm referring to the status quo as little as 25-30 years ago.
And your counterargument is too facile. I'm perfectly aware that things change, and I acknowledged as much. My point is that I'm not convinced that it's necessary for the change to have been taken to the extreme that it has been, this insistence on an all-or-nothing gamble on a film's first three days of release rather than basing expectations on its performance over a few weeks, say. Like I said, I'm looking for a healthy middle ground between the extremes.
But, even in 30 years things have changed DRAMATICALLY.
Now, I think we're mostly talking about Blockbuster movies. They really do depend on opening weekend. They are aimed at a younger, perhaps more distracted, audience.
Not as much for smaller films, more dramatic, aimed at an older crowd. Like The Kids Are Alright, that can take some time, an older crowd might not rush out, but the studio, or whoever is distributing the movies, know this, and are willing to let it stay in the theater longer. But those movies are MUCH cheaper to produce and have much lower box office expectations.
