Here’s my advice to box office analysts and various marketing gurus who suck at their job:
Run a website – or make friends with people who do. Why? Well, let me tell you.
I sit here looking at stats of this webpage a lot and I also read what a lot of other websites are following – and y’know: Very few things are surprising. All I’ve been reading is people are “shocked” as to how well ‘The Passion of the Christ‘ did, and how well “Fahrenheit 9-11” is doing. And y’know, anyone running a movie website could’ve told anyone in the upper ranks that it would’ve been huge. — I could’ve told Michael Moore’s webmaster that his bandwidth would crash the first day the trailer came online because we were busy getting slammed with hits from people looking for it – before it even existed! And the day before and of its release, we nearly quadrupled our regular hit-count. Meanwhile stuffy people sit back not knowing how big this movie will be.
In fact, all of this stuff seemed so obvious in the first place, I’m shocked people are shocked.
I can already tell you that, although so far it sounds like it won’t deserve it, Alien vs. Predator will make a fair chunk of cash opening weekend. – Make billions of dollars? no. But it won’t tank out. Certainly not. “Hero” will make more money than ‘Donnie Darko’s Director’s Cut. And Napoleon Dynamite sill has a few sweet bucks it will be raking in. I’m not calling these concrete, but we’ve got public opinion pouring onto the page at 3-4000 people a day. They can’t all be wrong. And, granted we don’t have a recent post on the movie, but Catwoman is set to tank. Maybe I should make a post right below this just to test it out. Yes, that sounds wise. Here’s my proposal:
I’ll make a Catwoman post with many nice keywords in the title and report back in a couple of days what kind of response it’s getting. We’ll then see how well it does opening weekend and compare notes, sound good? Goody. And .. begin Test:
Wait! 14 minutes later!
ANOTHER hit!.. Woo-hoo. From Australia even!
The waves are rollin in now..
HIT COUNT UPDATE!!!!!
July 6 ’04: 10:23EST…
Currently, if you type “Halle Berry and catwoman”
into a google search, our “Catwoman” testing post comes up Number 3 out of the massive list…
That’s pretty impressive. In the past couple of hours, it has generated ONE hit. That’s not good.
Catwoman’s problems (and they are legion) all revolve around the choice of director. By signing a man who doesn’t speak the language the film is being shot in and who has no previous knowledge of or interest in the character they’ve just opened themselves up to a world of hurt … it is NEVER a good idea when a director shoots a film in a language he doesn’t know. It pretty much always turns out badly. They thought they had some sort of visual genius in Pitof which is why they went this route, but the visuals in this don’t even look so hot and having seen Vidocq – his previous film that landed him the job – I wasn’t at all impressed.
It is strange how after so long a time, movie companies cannot seem to put together a decent trailer. The original trailer for Catwoman was a complete joke. I was planning to go see it. No longer. The second trailer was much better, but I saw the crap they thought was good enough for a trailer and it was awful.
Secondly, if you are going to take a lesser known superhero/villian and make a movie, why are you going to just piss on the story. It is the fanboys who are going to come see the movie, why tick them off by jerking around with the origin story.