I just read some numbers today on a thread from GFY about the dismal success of the mainstream movie Middle Men. Apparently it made less than $100,000 this week and the poster expects it to not gross anymore than $7 million over all. That’s pretty bad. Apparently when you don’t have any money to market your movie, this is what happens.
In its 2nd weekend, it grossed a whopping $96,198 in 252 theaters, dropping off 70.5% from the previous weekend, which is incredible considering that weekend was a fucking bomb at $325,641 in 252 theaters. Its domestic total is at $678,012. Even if they expanded it, I bet it wouldn’t do any more than $1,000 per theater and would be gone in 3-4 weeks after…so MAYBE if it’s lucky it’ll do a full run of $7 mil. Pretty pathetic.
It cost $20 million to make, and it’s not like there’s a huge market for Middle Men merchandise, so if it doesn’t make that back or more, it wouldn’t be profiting.
If you don’t understand perhaps how bad it’s doing, there’s another limited release movie out now called Flipped. I’ve never heard of it, doubt anyone here has ever heard of it, and it’s only playing in 44 theaters and last weekend was its 2nd weekend as well. It with 44 theaters made $119,310 (which is not very impressive) while Middle Men with 252 theaters made $96,198. 33 movies grossed higher than Middle Men last weekend, 11 of them in less theaters than Middle Men was playing in, and only 2 of them were in their 1st or 2nd weekend.
It’s not a COLOSSAL failure, but given who was in it and it being a somewhat interesting-looking movie, it’s doing much worse than was expected.
Marketing is EVERYTHING. When the fuck will people learn this?
You know the sad part is, the movie has a decent story line and a lot of potential. More so than some of the total shit they put out there in theaters alongside it. But when you can’t afford to market it properly, you just really have no point in even making the movie in the first place.
This movie mad a big mistake in teaming up with known content thieves. Here is the best post ever to describe exactly how so many of us feel about this movie paying what little money they had to market on PornHub.
what? it bombed? you mean all that amazing golden traffic on the pornhub network did nothing for it? omg, who would have believed it? they have “more traffic than god” though, how can it be?