The great thing about modern technology is that we don’t even have to wait to see a movie or find out how it actually performs at the box office before we call it a big flop. In today’s “gimme the info now!” world, we want to know what is going to happen before it actually happens so we can help make it happen. In other words, Speed Racer, which won’t open until this Friday and has only been reviewed by a handful of critics, is in trouble.
According to HR, the big screen adventures of Speed, Racer X, Trixie and the gang have been ”tracking unimpressively in prerelease surveys. People, apparently, aren’t saying they are super excited about seeing this movie and that may result in a box office of “only” $25 million to $35 million during the opening weekend. That’s sounds great but I guess it is actually piss poor. Since Iron Man made almost $100 million last weekend, it has a good chance of finishing first this weekend and keeping Speed Racer in, gasp, second place. It’s all downhill from there.
Still, it might not be as dire for the Racer family as it seems. Family films are tough to track before opening, so moms, dads, and their kids might give Hollywood the old middle finger and go see this anyway. Even a paltry $35 million dollar opening will put the film on track to be profitable, so that will make the studio happy and allow them to make more movies without coming up with any new or fresh ideas. Warner Brothers executives sound very optimistic. President Dan Fellman said, “this is the first real family movie of the summer, and we’re going to give it out best.” Actually, that doesn’t sound very optimistic at all.
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I wonder at what point it was decided that Speed Racer would be touted as a 'family film.' You mean, like a family of Japanimation freaks?
It seems to me when they announced that the target audience was boys 5 to 12, it was all over. If that's not an admission of defeat, I don't know what is.
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The great thing about modern technology is that we don’t even have to wait to see a movie or find out how it actually performs at the box office before we call it a big flop. In today’s “gimme the info now!” world, we want to know what is going to happen before it actually happens so we can help make it happen. In other words, Speed Racer, which won’t open until this Friday and has only been reviewed by a handful of critics, is in trouble.
May 11th, 2008 at 01:51
And bomb it did. One big stinker. How are they going to recover $140M production with 20M opener?