9/11, Military Families Urge Bush to see Fahrenheit 9/11
Actually, they want everyone in Washington to see the film–and while many will, it’s a sound bet that Bush won’t, and just as sound that few in Washington would change a bit, unless they felt pressured by a groundswell among their constituents.
Meanwhile, F-9/11 remains at the top of the box office through the early part of the week, losing less of its audience than other films, and now grossing a total $32.3 million through Tuesday. It should be interesting to see how F-9/11 will fare once Spiderman 2 comes out–will it be knocked way down in revenue? Will the increased number of screens prop it up? Or, under the rosiest scenario, will it both benefit from having more screens and catch most of the overflow from sold-out shows of Spiderman 2?
Okay, here’s my prediction (I can hear you making notes right now: “Paul says…”)…
Spiderman II is going to thump F9/11 at the box office. But F9/11 is still going to do good business, carrying over a higher percentage to the next week than people are used to.
Part of the deal with F9/11 is that it’s not really a traditional movie. With a big blockbuster, you generally know how much it’s going to do the first week/weekend directly relative to how much dough you spend advertising it, how much it’s going to drop off, and so forth.
Based on word-of-mouth, you know what kind of legs it’s going to have.
(For example, they advertised the SNOT out of the Matthew Broderick Godzilla movie, but the fact that they didn’t encourage a lot of pre-screenings by critics and the “buzz” about the movie indicated that it would open, do a bunch, and have a giant-lizard-sized dropoff. And it did.)
F9/11, on the other hand, has a different fan base (not your average movie crowd, and not a bunch of teenyboppers, either) and different advertising, too.
As if THAT weren’t enough, it’s a “documentary”, so it’s mostly true. (Let’s face it, if we are to be honest then we know perfectly well that even a “true” movie is going to be at least *somewhat* subjective in its choices for editing, which facts they show, and so forth.) But how entertaining can that be? (Well, with Moore, pretty entertaining.)
Anyway, since nearly everything I read about Spidey is good, and since they’ve spent great gobs of money, and despite the lack of scenes with Kirsten Dunst dripping wet in the rain… it’s still going to clean up.
The big question is whether or not the story is spun “F9/11 gets caught in Spiderman’s web” or “F9/11 does surprisingly good business in the face of massive summer blockbusters”.
Paul
I can’t disagree with any of that.
I think several factors will work for the film getting good business–The increase in the number of screens, the word of mouth, the continuing political situation, and the people who declined to see the film when it was packed will come back and see it this week and next… in addition to the aforementioned spillover from S-2. I predict that while the totals will not be as big as last week, they will still be respectable.
As for the media coverage, I suspect it will be relatively fair (outside the decidedly and obvious right-leaning rags)–if the film retains, say, 60% ~ 90% of its business from last week, I think they’ll say it’s holding up well, less than that and they might start calling it a flash-in-the pan. But if it does business just as well as last weekend or even better, they might try to explain it away as just the increase in screens it’s playing on–I doubt they’ll go too positive on it.
Just purely guessing here…
BTW, overseas box office numbers will surely get some press, a lot of it sharply nasty from the right wing.