Way back on May 1, yours truly and fellow Screengrabbers Paul Clark, Leonard Pierce and Scott Von Doviak made our predictions about the Top 5 Hits and the Top 5 Bombs of Summer 2008. Now, with Labor Day Weekend in our rear-view mirror, I’ve compared our predictions with the box office results and industry perceptions of the past summer season to see how we did (and which one of us has the brightest future as a Hollywood Suit in charge of picking the production slate for Summer ’09)!
But before I get to the results, I should mention that I didn’t calculate based on grosses alone, since industry expectations and the initial (estimated) cost of a film’s production and marketing factor into whether any individual project is generally considered to be a success or a stinker.
That said, our overall batting average was pretty good when it came to picking hits. Four of our consensus picks for the successes of Summer ‘09 turned out to be unqualified hits: The Dark Knight, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Iron Man and Kung Fu Panda. However, our fifth consensus pick, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, is a bit of a sticky wicket. On the one hand, the fantasy flick is the 7th most successful flick of 2008 thus far (according to Wikipedia, anyway), with a theatrical gross of nearly half a billion dollars. On the other hand, it “only” grossed $141-ish million in its domestic run, and generally fell below expectations raised by the Red State driven success of its predecessor, The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe.
So, giving half points to Caspian, Screengrab went 4.5 out of 5 on hit prediction, which ain’t so stanky.
On the other hand, our bomb predictions more or less blew up in our collective face. Oh, sure...most of us could smell The Love Guru and Speed Racer stinkin' up the cineplexes from a mile away, and both films were, in fact, Hindenburgian box office disasters. (Oh, the humanity!)
But our third prediction, The Incredible Hulk, somehow rode the summer superhero wave to a respectable (if not sensational) gross, and our fourth pick, The Happening, while yet another disappointment for M. Night Shyamalan, at least managed to improve on the box office of the writer/director’s previous effort (Lady In The Water) and, thanks to a (relatively) low budget, failed to produce quite as big a crater as expected.
And, like most of Hollywood’s own testosterone-fueled prognosticators, we got caught with our pants down on our fifth pick: Sex and The City, which (like Mama Mia!) flooded America’s theaters with a tidal wave of estrogen, reminding the Suits that if you build good projects for women, they will come.
Thus, we essentially got three out of five of our bomb predictions right, for an overall batting average at LEAST as respectable as any four studio execs making double (triple? quadruple?) our salaries at Universal, Warner Bros., Paramount, etc.
As for our individual scores, I’ve included our original predictions below, annotated to indicate whether the films in question turned out to be unqualified hits (H) or bombs (B). Films that had respectable box office without quite qualifying as full-scale hits (for one reason or another) are identified with an (R), while disappointments that didn’t leave full-scale bomb craters are marked with a (D). And Hellboy II: the Golden Army is a push, since it didn’t exactly light up the box office, but still did better than 2004’s Hellboy.
HIT PREDICTIONS:
Leonard Pierce
1. The Dark Knight (H)
2. Kung Fu Panda (H)
3. Speed Racer (B)
4. The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (R)
5. What Happens In Vegas (R)
Scott Von Doviak
1. The Dark Knight (H)
2. Iron Man (H)
3. Hancock (R)
4. Prince Caspian (R)
5. Indiana Jones (H)
Paul Clark
1. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (H)
2. Hancock (R)
3. The Dark Knight (H)
4. Wall*E (H)
5. Iron Man (H)
Andrew Osborne
1. Indiana Jones (H)
2. The Dark Knight (H)
3. Prince Caspian (R)
4. Pineapple Express (R)
5. American Teen (D)
BOMB PREDICTIONS:
Leonard Pierce
1. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (H)
2. The Incredible Hulk (R)
3. Hancock (R)
4. Get Smart (R)
5. Sex and the City (H)
Scott Von Doviak
1. The Happening (D)
2. Sex and the City (H)
3. You Don’t Mess With the Zohan (R)
4. The Love Guru (B)
5. The Incredible Hulk (R)
Paul Clark
1. Speed Racer (B)
2. The Incredible Hulk (R)
3. The Love Guru (B)
4. Get Smart (R)
5. Wanted (R)/Hellboy II: The Golden Army (Push)
Andrew Osborne
1. The Love Guru
2. The Incredible Hulk (R)
3. Speed Racer (B)
4. Wall*E (H)
5. Hancock (R)
Thus, after totaling our individual scores (with a secret Price-Waterhousian formula too arcane to explain at length), it seems PAUL CLARK is Screengrab’s reigning Chief Prognosticator, with the most accurate Hit AND Miss predictions for Summer ’08.
(Please send any and all cushy studio job offers to Mr. Clark, care of [email protected].)