Mars Needs Moms: Historical Box-Office Bomb Leads to Hysterical Overreaction
There is only one adage when it comes to the business of Hollywood: that despite the best efforts of everyone involved, nobody really knows that the heck they are doing.
And yet, every time a movie becomes an unexpected hit or expected flop the entire industry attempts to wrap their brains around the underlying factors involved.
The latest example of this phenomenon is Disney’s Mars Needs Moms, a $150 million animated project helmed by Robert Zemeckis that tanked its way to a pitiable $6.9 million at the box office last weekend.
So now all the executives and pundits are scratching their heads, wondering how this could be. And they are quick to leap to conclusions not supported by the available evidence.
“Scary,” noted Chuck Viane, president of distribution for Walt Disney Studios. “Was it the idea? The execution? The timing? There are a lot of excuses being floated.” But probably a combination of all of those, plus awful marketing. It doesn’t help that the movie just didn’t look at that appealing.
You want to make a movie about a kid that travels to Mars to save his kidnapped mother? Okay sure, but first let me just tell you no. That just sounds stupid. No, a thousand times.
But instead of just looking at this as an isolated incident, of one movie gone horribly awry — as Waterworld, Cutthroat Island, The Alamo, The Adventures of Pluto Nash and Ishtar, et al. all did before it — studio executives now believe the problem is with animated movies, or motion capture pictures, or the high cost of 3-D ticket pricing.
Whatever the reasoning, Hollywood should stop being so reactionary. There’s no way one could predict the dismal failure of this movie, which has less than favorable reviews, anymore than they could have predicted the massive success of Inception or Avatar.
Instead of playing Sherlock Holmes and deducing lessons than are not applicable to future projects, studio executives should focus their energy on things they can control: marketing, the projects they finance, the cost of those movies, and not taking their audience for granted.
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