Byrne Robotics: Batman Box Office

Will "Batman Begins" launch a sequel? One of Warner Bros. key behind-the-scenes agendas in the last two years has been to re-establish their "Batman" and "Superman" tentpole franchises. Its a risky manuever - despite the mega-success of the "Spider-Man" franchise, and to a lesser extent the "X-Men" movies, the comic book to film genre seems to be on the wane with a lot of high profile properties crashing and burning in the last two years whilst others like "Fantastic Four" and "X3" struggle to overcome early bad word of mouth.

Indeed Warners took some bold chances with "Batman Begins", the gambit has paid off - kind of. After a low-key marketing approach in the early stages, Warners ramped it right up this past week with an international launch. Yet despite faring better so far than any other film in the franchise and earning a healthy and very respectable $71 million in its first five days domestically, the figure is being labelled by pundits as under expectation. All sorts of reasons are being spouted such as people being burned by the last few Batman movies, the more adult dark tone of the material keeping kids away, mixed reactions from some of the die-hard comic purists, and the good weather in general.

Its not a local trend either with film opening well but being beaten out by the more crowd-friendly "Madagascar" which it opened against this weekend in a number of key territories like Australia. Even with the diffusion caused by the Wednesday-Thursday opening, the criticism comes despite the film's Friday-Sunday total being the third highest domestic opening of the year just behind the more tabloid and female-friendly "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" and the promotional blitzkrieg that was "Star Wars: Episode III".

In its favour though it has become the most positively reviewed wide release film of the year so far and the third most well reviewed comic book adaptation of all time after 1978's "Superman" and last year's "Spider-Man 2". A quick scan of Rotten Tomatoes shows the four most well received major films of 2005 at present to be "Batman Begins," "Cinderella Man," "Millions," and "Star Wars: Episode III" with each scoring well over 80% in terms of positive reviews. Of those four, 'Batman' garnered the highest average score from reviewers with a 7.7/10 (SW3 = 7.3/10, Millions = 7.5/10, Cinderella Man = 7.6/10). Paradoxically whilst there's a lot of love (see the various reviews), there's a handful of moderate to high profile reviews of near hatred ranging from major newspapers like USA Today to websites like CHUD.

The question though might be rendered mute by how the film performs in the next few weeks. Two other films with almost the exact same opening five-day take are "Pirates of the Caribbean" and "Hulk" - the former went on to become a major $300+ million domestic hit whilst the later is generally considered a minor bomb with a $131 million final gross. The general buzz for "Batman" whilst not near "Pirates" territory, leans far more towards it than the quite negative buzz which quickly emerged for "Hulk". Whilst it might not have hit the ball out of the park, 'Begins' has scored enough of a home run for the studio that Warner Bros. distribution boss Dan Fellman told The Hollywood Reporter that the film has landed enough so far that he expects the studio will push ahead with a sequel.

The John Byrne Forum
Byrne Robotics > The John Byrne Forum		<< Prev Page of 11 Next >>