The blame game
Poor box office on opening weekend for new Ben Stiller movie, ‘The Heartbreak Kid,’ is being blamed on the huge success of Halo 3, the third in the series of Halo video games by Microsoft Corp’s video game division.
Halo 3 sold $170 million in its first 24 hours of sales when it was launched on September 26, beating out previous record-holder movie Spiderman 3 for the title as biggest entertainment launch ever (of course Spidey 3 was a piece of crap, so it was just a matter of time). This shows how so NOT niche video games now are - they are going head to head with more traditional (read ‘dull’) forms of entertainment competing for the attention and pocket money of the fickle youths. And winning.
‘The Heartbreak Kid’ made $14million in its opening weekend, versus an expected $20-25million. And overall, box office receipts in October is down down down - it’s lowest level since 1999. Studio execs have been wondering aloud whether the success of Halo 3 can be blamed for the lackluster performance.
But we think there might be another explanation. Crap movies. Yes, Stiller’s movie (a project from the Farrelly brothers who worked with him on ‘Something Sticky About Mary’) just isn’t that good. The critics have panned it. If it was a good movie, the video game could wait a few hours. And there’s not much else out there to lure someone into the theater to kill a couple of hours on a Friday or Saturday night.
It’s all about content. And Bungie Studios, the newly independent studio that created the Halo series, got it right, while Dreamworks, the studio that produced the Stiller stinker, just didn’t .
So, movie men, ad people and anybody else in the content business, stop blaming external factors for your failures and start raising your quality standards. Then the people will come flooding back.
