Is Battleship ready for bail out?
This year we already saw a colossal flop at the box office, John Carter, and there were of course many who were predicting it was going to fail for months.
Now the next big cliffhanger at the box office, Battleship, is two weeks away hitting theaters out in the U.S., and the film's been plagued by troubled word of mouth from the get go.
Actually, the bad word of mouth was before anyone saw a frame of it, it was the idea that a board game, of all things, was being adapted into a movie that cost $200 million at Universal, while movies that fans would be more interested in seeing, like The Dark Tower series and At the Mountains of Madness, got passed over.
The reviews for the film have been predictably awful, and from what TG has read it seems like a Michael Bay clone that's even dumber than Bay's usual fare, if such a thing is possible.
Battleship's already been out for some time now overseas, and it made $170 million, with Universal clearly hoping foreign box office will be Battleship's savior, like it has been for many movies here in the States, but the film is going to have to pull in half a billion to see a profit. (Not to mention The Avengers pulled in $300 million foreign in a little over a week, where it took Battleship three weeks to make $170 mil).
Yet now there's a report on The Huffington Post that speculates the film "could see financial trouble" in the States.
Besides the bad buzz and bad reviews, it's also got heavy competition from The Avengers, which should have several strong weeks at the box office, and Men in Black 3. As Ryan Nakashima writes, the movie could have probably done fine if there wasn't so much heavy competition this summer.
Whether Battleship will end up the next John Carter at the box office remains to be seen. Universal may end up learning a costly lesson from the film, and considering the studio already ended their deal with Hasbro and opened it earlier overseas are both serious signs of buyer's remorse, but it also doesn't mean the crap won't keep coming. After all, Fast and Furious sequels don't cost anywhere near the $200 million range...
Great hold compared to other huge early May releases.
