It is not unreasonable to think that Tom Cruise was looking for a new film franchise when he signed on to Jack Reacher. The project was based on a series of popular thriller novels from writer Lee Child and had the potential to reach out to the same audience as the James Bond and Tom Clancy-penned Jack Ryan franchises.

Unfortunately, it is looking as if that plan might not be working out. The Hollywood Reporter has taken a look at the box office receipts for Jack Reacher and in its three weeks of release, it is looking as if the film will won’t quite hit the $250 million box office that studio Paramount has set as the benchmark to trigger a follow up film. Currently, the film has only earned $72.6 million domestically and $80.4 million internationally, for a total of $153 million. With the film not expected to get past $85 million domestically, the film would need to clear $165 million internationally to meet Paramount’s goal.

The film has yet to open in certain key Asian territories including Japan, China and Korea. But can the film basically double its current foreign box office take in these three countries? The Reporter points out that it is possible, but it will be an uphill fight. When the film opens in China on February 16, it will be competing against two other Chinese films that are opening over the Chinese New Year holidays and will only have a week before Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey opens on the 22nd. In Japan, box office is driven more by women ticket buyers who prefer more romantic fare rather than an action film like Jack Reacher.

But if the film does hit the magic number that Paramount is hoping for, the studio and the film’s production producers Skydance will still have to negotiate a deal with Cruise to keep any sequel at the approximately $60 million budget that the current film has.

And if that $250 million goal is reached and all involved agree to move forward with a new film, there are 16 of Child’s novels waiting for adaption, providing plenty of fertile material for many sequels to come.

The Avengers are becoming the superheroes to beat at the box office this summer. Not only is the superhero franchise mashup currently tracking to have an opening weekend that could knock 2008’s record-breaking The Dark Knight opening off its perch, but the Marvel Studios film has already reached another amazing milestone.

According to MovieTickets.com, with just a week to go until it opens, The Avengers has pre-sold more tickets than Iron Man, Iron Man 2, Captain America and Thor did combined! Additionally, 56% of Avengers pre-sales are from those wanting to see the film in 3D while 37% are to see the film in IMAX 3D.

Normally, we don’t talk too much about box office here, but this report is kind of exciting. Not only does it show that Kevin Feige made a brave, but ultimately right decision back in 2008 when he first announced Marvel Studios’ plans to launch individual superhero film franchises that would also dovetail into one big feature. But it also shows that the detractors’ claims that The Avengers could be a flop due to people being tired of seeing those characters summer after summer.

And the Avengers isn’t the only high–profile superhero film we have coming this summer with Sony’s The Amazing Spider-Man rebooting that franchise and Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises, the concluding installment of his Batman trilogy. Personally, I think it is moviegoers who win when we get great movies like this, no matter what kind of business they wind up doing. But the studios will certainly be looking forward to the box office rumble if only for the bragging rights.

Via Deadline.

As anybody with a passing interest in films could tell you, box office grosses are king when it comes to films. They become more important every year, getting to the point that studios count their money before the first reel is unspooled. Hits are deemed hits and flops called flops based solely on prerelease tracking. And what this prerelease tracking is telling us about The Avengers is that it should have the biggest opening of the year, and the biggest opening for a comic book film since 2008.

The Hollywood Reporter states that the Joss Whedon directed film is in line for a opening weekend in excess of $150 million, and that it is tracking better than The Hunger Games did this year (the film opened at $152.5 million),  and as good if not better than 2008′s The Dark Knight, which opened at a then-record $158.4 million weekend.

There are a number of questions to ask. One, is there any possibility of the film overtake Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2‘s  record $170 million opening weekend. Two, if it does break the record, how long will the film hold it? I’d say, not much farther than July 20, 2012, as that’s when the final installment of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy (and eagerly awaited sequel to The Dark Knight), The Dark Knight Rises, opens. Third, will it have the same kind of legs The Dark Knight had, as that film earned enough in its theatrical run ($533,345, 358) to garner a spot at #3 on the all-time grosses chart. I guess we’ll see.

Media cynics were calling it a failure from the time its first reel unspooled. But with another $2 million domestically and a strong showing overseas, John Carter has now grossed $254,510,000 worldwide in four weeks, $4,510,000 over its estimated $250 million production budget.

A $4 million profit doesn’t seem like anything to shout about, especially if you, like most of the naysayers are now doing, choose to add its advertising budget of approximately $100 million to the total hurdle the film needs to cover come (Personally, I choose not to because A) every film has an advertising budget and that cost should be considered an institutional expense, and B) when the critics like a film and promote it as a box office success, they never include the advertising then, making its inclusion here seem like dirty pool). However, the film is coming of two weeks of a strong showing in China (where it was the number one film two weeks running to the tune of another $30 million) and its set to open in Japan, another country that likes its 3-D blockbusters, on April 13th. Which means that profit will only go up.

Of course, the naysayers are still saying nay. Box Office Mojo points out that the film’s overseas grosses ”plummeted” 72% to $6.2 million this past weekend. That number seems quite dubious since the films grosses in Mainland China has averaged $14 million per weekend for the two prior weeks, and actually made more on its second weekend than its first. To have drop off that left the grosses as just a fraction of that total seems unrealistic.

Regardless, if we need any more proof of the true popularity of the film, we have to look no farther than Amazon.com. Amazon shoppers who signed up for e-mails to alert them of DVD & Blu-Ray new releases were informed that they were able to pre-order John Carter on video today. As of this writing, the Blu-Ray 3-D/Blu-Ray/DVD/Digital Copy was the #1 selling item in Amazon’s Science-Fiction Movie list, and ranked #2 in the Action & Adventure and Fantasy Categories , behind the Game of Thrones Season One box set. It ranks #13 over all in the Movies & TV Blu-Ray list. So someone obviously wants to see it.

Heidi MacDonald over at The Beat has a fairly good rundown of rampant, joyous, near-orgasmic display of schadenfreude the film media is exhibiting over John Carter this morning. They are attacking the film like a bunch of vultures, calling it a “flop,” a “bomb,” and  even, GASP, an “Ishtar on Mars.”  She pulls quotes from Nikki Finke at Deadline, Brooks Barnes at the New York Times, Amy Kaufman at the Los Angeles Times, and others who are all doing a happy dance after being proven right in predicting that the Andrew Stanton helmed-flick would be a massive flop at the box office.

But, one problem, what if John Carter turns out not to be a flop? Granted, it ONLY made $30.6 million domestically and ONLY opened in second place this past weekend, behind The Lorax, a movie that opened the week before. But this doesn’t mean that the film will not make its $250 million budget back.

What? I’m talking crazy? How can I say that John Carter might be a success? Every other film journalist is saying the film is a failure, so that must obviously be the case, right?

Not necessarily. Allow me to present a comparison to argue my case. Let me compare John Carter with another live action film directed by a Pixar-alum, Brad Bird’s Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol.

Now, John Carter has some advantages of MI:GP. It opened in 51 foreign markets to the latter’s 42 markets and opened in about 300 more theaters domestically as well. And MI:GP opened over the crowded Christmas holiday weekend, with competition from films such as The Adventures of Tintin, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, and War Horse.

However, MI:GP has more advantages than that over John Carter. It was a highly anticipated sequel to a long standing franchise. It starred one of the biggest international stars of all time, Tom Cruise, leading an international cast. And the foreign markets it did open in included Moscow, Dubai, and Mumbai, all of which were used as shooting locations in the film. MI:GP was a veritable Dagwood sandwich of built-in audience, something that John Carter never had.

Taking that into consideration, MI:GP‘s opening weekend, both here and abroad, should swamp John Carter‘s right?  Wrong. Based on Friday to Sunday weekend grosses, they were about even.

MI:GP grossed $29,556,629 from December 23 to 25th, less than JC‘s $30,603,000 this Friday to Sunday. Overseas during its opening weekend, MI:GP grossed $69.5 Million compared to JC‘s $70.6 Million. Even with the discrepancies in theater counts and foreign markets, it’s pretty safe to say that the two films are just about even. But nobody ever took joy in deeming MI:GP a flop or a failure. No one wrote that film off as another Ishtar.

And the kicker? MI:GP‘s gross-to-date is a $688,784,000 combined foreign and domestic. if JC keeps on the same pace, that will mean it more than doubled the film’s $250 million budget. That, my friends, will make it a hit. Maybe not as big a hit in a cost-to-return ratio as the $145 million budgeted MI:GP, but a hit nonetheless.

But the know-it-all’s in the press really don’t want that to happen. I believe that’s why they were so in a rush to declare the film dead on arrival after a weekend where it made 40% of its budget back. Because if they declare the film a flop, people who read their columns and blogs will believe them, figure “why bother?’ and ignore the film. Then their premature damnation will become the truth.

I don’t really know if that will work this time, because the film has been getting extraordinarily good word of mouth from people who have seen it. It garnered a B+ Cinemascore rating from theatergoers. People who believed the negative, pre-release hype are surprised by how good the film was, and people who skipped the film because of the bad press are being swayed to see it. The film doesn’t really have that far to go to make a profit. I believe this might be a case of the media’s report of the film’s demise to be greatly exaggerated.

Although it got trashed by the critics (scoring a 23% at Rotten Tomatoes) audiences who came out to see this past summer’s fantasy adventure Conan The Barbarian seemed to enjoy the film, giving it a “B minus” CinemaScore. Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough audiences showing up to see the film to hit any higher than fourth place at the box office its opening weekend.

This weekend at New York Comic Con, the film’s three stars Jason Momoa, Rose McGowan and Stephen Lang appeared at a panel to discuss the film. Invariably, the subject of the film’s poor box office and the chance of a sequel came was brought up. Momoa, who had stated when he was doing promotion for the film that he had written a story for a possible sequel, stated that there was little possibility that a sequel would happen.

I haven’t heard a word from anyone and it’s kind of sad because I feel a little cheated myself because we really busted our asses to make it amazing for the fans. I was a fan and I think we really hit it but to tell you the truth a lot of people didn’t go see it so I doubt that they’ll make a sequel. I would love it, but there would be less money there and [a sequel] is something that I would want to be bigger and better.

McGowan jumped in to add that a fate of a movie can often be outside the control of its cast and crew, stating that the film’s R rating may have kept some audiences away while the PG-13 rated horror film Fright Night, which opened the same day, further siphoned off potential ticket buyers.

People don’t understand behind the scenes stuff.  Lionsgate and Millennium, the people behind [the movie], to an extent did a really good job. But the entire distribution team at Lionsgate just got replaced. Also the second weekend Hurricane Irene happened and two-thirds of the country was shut down so it was just bad luck essentially.

McGowan went on to draw an analogy as to what it was like to make a film she was proud of only to have it fail at the box office. “It’s essentially like giving birth to this really great baby, you hand it to the nurse and it falls out of her hands and flies out the window,” she said.

“They dropped my baby?” questioned Momoa after the laughter in response to McGowan’s statement died down.

“They did!” she replied. “They drop kicked it!”

Lang added that he has participated in a number films that weren’t successful right away but still went on to find their audiences. He also stated that he was disappointed that he wouldn’t get to see more of his castmate Momoa continue to explore the character of Conan in future films.

It’s really easy to do a postmortem on the thing. I think that the R didn’t help the business of the film one bit. Maybe it was necessary for the movie. I see that. I think Rose says it pretty well that the distribution didn’t work out quite it should have. I sure wish this one had done much better than it did. I think it deserved a number of sequels and I would like to see Jason track that character for a long time.

There is often a gap between what films critics pan and what films audiences flock to. All the critical accolades for a film can sometimes fail to sell tickets as much as critical brickbats won’t stop crowds from showing up to see some cinematic turkey.

But this weekend it seems as if critics and audiences were in synch over two films that debuted on Friday – the comedy Bucky Larson: Born To Be A Star and the indie horror film Creature. Critics hated both films and the audiences stayed away in droves.

Bucky Larson, starring comic actor Nick Swarsdon as a hapless idiot who stumbles into the p0rn industry, earned a perfect goose egg, 0% score on Rotten Tomatoes. Not only that, but according to Box Office Mojo, it only grossed $1,450,000 in ticket sales. However, with that spread across 1,500 screens, that averages out (according to Film Drunk) to a whopping 8 admissions per showing! The film finished in 15th place this weekend, right behind The Smurfs, which has been out for seven weeks. (For some perspective, recent stinkers like Jonah Hex, Disaster Movie and Norbit all managed to score higher than 0%.)

The indie horror film Creature fared a little better with critics, earning a 11% on Rotten Tomatoes. However, it did far worse at the box office, opening at 29th place with total ticket sales of $331,000. That’s an average of less than six people per screening. This dismal showing is also the worst-ever opening for a film showing on more than 1,500 screens.

The incredible low box office numbers for Bucky Larson are even more surprising considering the extensive marketing campaign the film got in the preceding weeks leading up to its release. Creature’s box office is a little easier to accept as being an indie release it had very little in the way of marketing.

Now traditionally, the weekend after Labor Day is a slow one at the box office, but even coupling that fact with the aggressively inclement weather in sections of the northeast of the country keeping moviegoers at home doesn’t excuse the poor box office performance seen here. I personally can’t think of a weekend when we’ve seen two complete disasters of this magnitude open simultaneously.

Judge for yourself from the trailers below. Would you have seen either of these films?

Quantifying if a movie is a hit or not is a trickier task than one might expect. Surely just looking at box office receipts should give one a sense if people are coming out to see one’s film or not. But that’s not always the case.

Take for instance the release of director Stephen Bannon’s Sarah Palin love letter cum documentary The Undefeated this past weekend. It premiered on 10 screens around the country this past weekend and its distributor stated that it took in somewhere between $60,000 and $75,000 in ticket sales. The film’s distributor crowed these numbers in a press release which went on to quote Bannon as saying, “to characterize [The Undefeated] as anything less than a hit would be a mistake.”

The press release also stated that this weekend’s box office for the film could have even been much higher except for a list of reasons that pinned the blame on too small theaters that had to turn people away and minimal marketing.

Now, the practice of spinning box office results started about five minutes after the first tickets were sold to the very first movie screening ever, so it’s not surprising that the producers are putting a brave face on their numbers. But if you take a hard look at those figures, one will see that the films weekend ticket sales were nothing more than just plain average.

Breaking down their stated box office numbers, we see that The Undefeated averaged a weekend take of $6,750 per screen if we go by what the producers’ press release would have us believe. The folks at Box Office Mojo have reported an actual box office total of $65,132, or a per screen average of $6,513.

This is not an exceptionally impressive number when $10,000 to $20,000 is considered more the norm for small release films. For example, Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, a Bollywood film that opened this weekend on 100 screens pulled a per screen average of $9,605 while Errol Morris’s new documentary Tabloid opened on 14 screens and beat out The Undefeated by a $1 a screen with an average of $6,514. But all of these limited release films were dusted by Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness, a documentary about the writer whose short stories were the basis for the musical Fiddler On The Roof which averaged an impressive $20,998 on the one screen it is showing in its second week of release.

But outside of documentary juggernaut Michael Moore, partisan political films seldom do well at the box office. Ben Stem’s argument in support of intelligent design, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, averaged $2,824 per screen when it opened on 1,052 screens. An American Carol, a satirical comedy from Airplane! co-creator David Zucker fared a little worse, earning just $2,325 on each of the 1,639 screens it opened. Atlas Shrugged Part 1, based on the novel by conservative author Ayn Rand, fared a bit better when it averaged about $5,600 per screen during its 300 screen release.At best, it could be stated that The Undefeated is a hit compared against these bigger hard-Right leaning films released in the last several years. But since neither of them really lit the box office on fire, it is not much of an accomplishment.

Suppose though, we do accept the producers word that the film is a hit. Why do they feel they need to then downplay their own box office numbers by saying that they could have been higher, especially when their proposed excuses are so laughably transparent? The idea that crowds were being turned away due to venues being sold out is at best anecdotal and certainly not quantifiable. How many were turned away? Four? Forty? Four hundred? We know that at at least one screening at the Orange, CA theater there were exactly three paid admissions – one blogger who then reported the poor attendance and two young women who thought they were buying tickets to an action movie and walked out after 20 minutes.

It is also hard to credit that there was a lack of awareness of the film as its premier was covered extensively on all the major cable news networks, much in the same way that just about anything the film’s subject does is covered.

It remains to be seen how much longevity the film will have at the box office. The film will be opening in 14 more markets this coming weekend, though they are primarily in the south and southwest. (Still nothing for the mid-Atlantic and New England states.) Presumably, the film’s distributor ARC Entertainment will be getting it into even more markets over the next several weeks. But will it bring out crowds to pay what they could very well see for free on the FOX News channel? Even the fiercely conservative film critic Kyle Smith of the New York Post called the film a “hopless, sputtering jumble” and observed that “The busted logic and narrative chop of The Undefeated don’t suggest the phrase, ‘spirited new defense of Palin.’ They say, ‘cyclone landed here.’”

And if you can’t even preach to the converted, who is going to listen?

Although the X-Men films has always been a particular popular franchise for 20^th Century Fox, this past weekend’s box office numbers for the new X-Men: First Class left many industry watchers scratching their heads. Sure a weekend gross of $55.1 million is nothing to sneeze at. That’s what the first X-Men movie made 11 years ago. But factor in over a decade of ticket price increases and the fact that the last films in the series, X-Men: The Last Stand and X-Men Origins: Wolverine, did $102 million and $86 million respectively on their domestic opening weekend have left many to decry the numbers as “disappointing.”

Now we normally don’t do box office analysis here, but there was such online chatter about this, I wanted to toss in my two cents as well.

I think we first have to look at how “disappointing” this weekend’s ticket sales actually are.

X-Men: First Class also pulled an impressive $64 million in worldwide ticket sales. Impressive, as worldwide box office generally barely equal, let alone surpass, domestic ticket sales in an opening weekend. And the movie hasn’t opened in all territories yet.

We also have to take into account that X-Men: First Class was not released in 3D, which with its inflated ticket prices has accounted for a significant bump in box office for films released in the format over the last two years. So by comparison, First Class’s numbers are going to look a bit flat.

If we can use the last two X-Men films as a model, I think there isn’t much to worry about. Ultimately, Last Stand and Wolverine more than doubled their opening weekend box office take over the remainder of their theatrical runs. Combined with their foreign gross, they each more than doubled their announced production budgets. While I don’t think First Class will quite hit that mark, it should come within a couple million dollars of doing so.

And that’s not even factoring in the fact that First Class has been getting much better reviews than Last Stand and Wolverine, with an 85% on Rotten Tomatoes compared to the other films’ 57% and 37%. If good reviews translates into good word-of-mouth, than First Class might have longer legs at the box office, significantly increasing its take.

But certainly, the domestic gross could have been higher, which leaves one asking “Why didn’t audiences turn out in greater numbers?”

There seems to be two separate schools of thought as to the answer why. The first fixes the blame squarely on Fox’s marketing campaign, while the second states that the film had no marketable stars for the campaign to capitalize upon. While many of the film’s leads certainly aren’t names with a strong marquee value, I would assert that director Matthew Vaughn’s casting choices aren’t the contributing factor to a poor box office result. The fault can only rest squarely on the shoulders of Fox’s lackluster attempt to sell the film.

The studio’s attitude towards X-Men: First Class has been puzzling from the beginning. They totally passed on advertising the film during the Super Bowl this past January, an event that in recent years has pretty much served as the launch pad for summer blockbuster marketing campaigns. There was the poster debacle in which Fox released some of the worst teaser posters ever. And as opening weekend drew closer, Fox did step up with the usual expected television campaign, but they supplemented with some rather stupid stunts, including skywriting the X-Men X-in-a-circle logo over some major cities.

Skywriting!? Seriously, that has to be the stupidest idea since someone thought to have The Last Action Hero painted on the side of a NASA rocket.

I just can’t buy that marketing wasn’t the fault for the film’s box office when it looks like it failed every step of the way. When your film’s villain is portrayed by Kevin Bacon, whom I don’t think that anyone would say that he is not a recognizable star, and people don’t know that he’s in the movie, it ironically hammers home the fact that Fox’s marketing failed utterly.

Back in January, Harvey Weinstein announced his plan to release a re-edited edition of The King’s Speech. His thought was that if the film’s rating was dropped from it’s current R rating to a PG-13 one by eliminating the only string of profanities in the film, that entire families would be able to go to theaters to see the at-the-time Academy Award nominated film. This weekend that edited version of The King’s Speech, made without the participation of the film’s director Tom Hooper, premiered in theaters.

So did the hoped for audiences show up this weekend?

In a word – no.

Taking a look at the box office numbers for this weekend, the re-edited version of The King’s Speech pulled in $1.19 million dollars in ticket sales on 1,011 screens. This was down 23.3% from last weekend‘s $1.55 million. Which isn’t bad considering that last weekend’s box office take was down 23.4% from the previous weekend of March 18-20, where it sold just over $2 million in tickets.

But factoring in the number of screens the film is on for each weekend reveals a different picture. Two weekends ago, The King’s Speech was on 1,249 screens and had a per screen average of $1,629. However, the following weekend, the film lost 187 screens and had a per screen average drop of approximately 10% to $1467. Between last week and this week’s release of the re-edited film, there was only a 51 screen drop, but with a per screen average of $1,181, that comes to loss of 19.4%.

The numbers don’t lie. They clear show that Weinstein’s assertion that a more family-friendly rating would bring in more audience just wasn’t going to happen. I dare say that if the R-rated version remained in theaters that the box office numbers wouldn’t have been too much different from what we’re seeing now.

In Britain, where they don’t have quite the hang up over “naughty” words as it seems we have here in the States, The King’s Speech carries a rating of 12A, similar to our PG-13. The film has been doing well with audiences of all ages, and yes, families have been going to see it together. I think it would be fair to say that a story about the Royal Family would have a wider appeal in Britain and perhaps not too much of an appeal among the age group of Americans that was already prohibited to see it by its rating.

Harvey Weinstein is a savvy executive and his list of smart business decisions is a fairly long one. It’s just that we won’t be adding the idea of editing The King’s Speech down from an R to a PG-13 to that list.