Hollywood remakes are a box office bust
Industry experiences worst weekend since 9/ 11 as audience rejects glut of unoriginal fare
HOLLYWOOD — Hollywood has suffered its worst weekend at the North American box office since the immediate aftermath of the 9/ 11 terrorist attacks, with analysts blaming a surfeit of sequels and remakes for deterring audiences.
Initial estimates suggested the entire gross takings for cinemas in North America would be around $ 65 million US last weekend, down 20 per cent from the same period a year ago.
In September 2001, takings on one weekend fell to just $ 59.7 million US.
The results were so bad that the bestperforming movie on North American screens, measured in terms of revenue per screen, was Raiders of the Lost Ark, first released in 1981. A digitally remastered version was shown on re- release on 267 screens last weekend and took in $ 1.7 million US, at an average $ 6,460 US per screen.
No single film grossed more than $ 10 million US over the weekend. The nearest was The Possession, a horror story with no big stars, that took just $ 9.5 million US.
Other major releases also disappointed. The Words, starring Bradley Cooper, one of Hollywood’s most indemand leading men, was savaged by some critics as “boring” and “turgid,” while The Cold Light of Day, an action film starring the British actor Henry Cavill, Bruce Willis and Sigourney Weaver, also flopped badly after costing $ 20 million US to make. The New York Times described it as a “catastrophe worth noting only for the presence of its name cast.”
The Labour Day weekend, which has just passed, is traditionally slow for cinemas, but this year attendances sank to levels that shocked studio executives.
It capped a disappointing season for Hollywood, which had expected its biggest ever summer. In a still troubled economy, executives were reluctant to take risks on original concepts and relied heavily on a series of bigbudget action films and superhero sequels.
The result was the lowest summer movie attendance in 20 years. The number of tickets sold fell to 532 million, down four per cent from summer 2011.
Two films that were successful — The Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises, a Batman film — accounted for almost a quarter of the entire box office return in North America. Before the summer even began, the Disney studio had been forced to incur a $ 200 million US writedown over its sciencefiction flop, John Carter, in March.
Paul Dergarabedian, a box office analyst at Hollywood. com, said: “It is pretty scary when the top movie comes in at only $ 9.5 million. On paper, the summer of 2012 looked like a clear record- breaker. But the audience is what makes and breaks the summer, and they didn’t come out in the numbers we expected for a lot of these films.”
Factors contributing to the slump included the Olympics on TV. The mass shooting in which 12 people were killed at a screening of The Dark Knight Rises in Colorado in July also put people off. But neither factor was believed to have had a major impact on attendance.