In case you haven’t noticed, it’s getting a little harder to keep track of who’s ahead (or, at least, by how much) at the box office these days. That’s because certain movies are now competing on two different playing fields at once: the domestic box office…and the worldwide box office. In truth, this isn’t an entirely new phenomenon. American movies have been opening around the globe, and making a reasonably good percentage of their profits that way, for just about as long as they’ve existed. What is new is how much of the total tally is starting to come from places outside of the United States (for any number of big movies, it’s a lot more than half), and also the fact that it’s all happening simultaneously: 30 countries a pop. More than that, this information is starting to get treated as an intrinsic part of a movie’s Daily Media Infotainment Profile.
It’s not as if this stuff has never been reported before. In a strange way, though, the era of global-grosses-as-the-new-normal really kicked off just a few weeks ago, when Michael Jackson’s This Is It was released simultaneously on several zillion screens around the world on Wednesday, October 28. A handful of factors fed into the thinking behind this release. As a star, Michael Jackson was, of course, a singular global phenomenon, and the movie itself had a one-of-a-kind, scrapbook-from-beyond aura — a posthumously released concert doc that also loomed as the last chance any of us would have to see Jackson as he was (and to get a lighter-side-of-the-tabloids peek at, exactly, how he was). For those reasons, a decision was made to give the movie a kind of pan-planetary release.
But there was one other factor that made it a perfect storm. On that opening weekend, at least in America, This Is It did solid but less-than-spectacular business. The returns of roughly $23 million, for a total of $34.5 million over its first five days, were relatively modest, and therefore mildly disappointing. (To get some perspective, it made only $3 million more than the Hannah Montana concert film of 2008.)
Worldwide, however, This Is It was huge: the exploding supernova that every studio dreams of. Over those same five days, it took in a total of $101 million. And so, in part because the studio wanted to make the movie look as successful as possible, the global grosses became the news. And in that moment, you could feel the liftoff to a paradigm shift. All of a sudden, global was bigger, and therefore better, and therefore much more worth publicizing.
I assumed, at the time, that the avid reporting of This Is It’s worldwide grosses would turn out to be an anomaly. But now, here we are, just about a month later, and I’ve since seen the studios, and the media, flirting with the very same sort of breathless one-world accounting for two major releases. 2012, a movie designed ( in its very earth-crust-splitting-open concept) to be a global phenomenon, made $65 million domestic its first weekend, but it was widely broadcast that it took in a whopping $160 million throughout the rest of the world, resulting in a grand tally of $225 million. Gee, which figure would you rather report — $65 million or $225 million? And New Moon, which according to the Los Angeles Times opened “big” in Australia, Brazil, Britain, France, Italy, Mexico, Russia, and Spain, made a mountainous $274.9 million worldwide last weekend.
My point is that global grosses, always vital to the economics of Hollywood, are fast becoming too good a PR strategy — and, in that sense, too addictive — to be anything less than pivotal. And that, inevitably, has the potential to change a lot of things: how movies are marketed; who, exactly, they’re expected to entertain; and how newly connected all the movie audiences across the globe have the potential to be.
When it comes to the box office, it’s a whole new world.
So what do you think? When you’re following the weekly box-office horse race, is it more fun — or less — to consider worldwide grosses? And do you think that we’ll ever get to the point where the global take is all that really counts?
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Where were you last summer? I remember lots of chatter about the early global box office for Transformers 2 and Harry Potter 6. I’m sure there are earlier examples of that, as well.
Harry Potter always does better internationally than domestically but Transformers? not so much.
Yeah, of course this will happen. And yet part of me doesnt trust it. Like the pursuit of cash is mirroring the unhealthy fix that Hollywood has become: a drug that needs to be taken at much larger doses now just to feel as good anymore. So America is not enough anymore, so we have to put the whole world in our pipe and smoke it for a full $$$ high. So much about this being about art anymore, right?lol
When was Hollywood ever more about the art than the money? Once upon a time bigselling actors were tied into studios with massive golden handcuff contracts and then expected to play the same role in movie after movie after movie. It might have been entertaining, but the motivation was hardly artistic.
i noticed this too! you’re exactly right, ever since the MJ movie, people have started reporting on the ww gross of other movies since, to make it look bigger, i guess. i wonder if this will become the new norm?
Finally, globalization has hit Tinseltown, it was about time.
yeah, i wouldn’t mind if it did become the norm. it’s not cheating or anything. it’s not like america is the only place in the world that counts
so what is wrong with global reporting,Are the movies made only for american audiences.The studios are not lying when they report global cume.it is even more fun to see the global appeal of new movies.
I think that anymore, you HAVE to look at worldwide grosses. It’s silly not to, especially considering just how much cash is at stake.
For example, Transformers 2 is the #1 movie of the year in the U.S., running about $100 million ahead of HP6 there. But worldwide, HP6 is kicking Transformers 2’s butt. Which is more indicative of success, Transformers 2’s $400 million U.S. gross, or HP6’s $930 million worldwide gross?
Face it, the U.S. isn’t the only player in town anymore. It will probably always be the biggest single market, but grosses like HP6’s $600 million in foreign markets alone should wake people up.
What do you mean ‘ever since This Is It’? It was only released last month, hardly a trend.
“the potential to change a lot of things: how movies are marketed; who, exactly, they’re expected to entertain”
If that means that American movies will have more of an international flavour, I’m all for it. For once I’d like the movies filmed here in Vancouver to be set here, instead of being a stand in for Seattle or Boston or New York or Philadelphia or Portland etc etc…
Event releasing worldwide isn’t particularly anything new. And Hollywood honchos are all about the numbers: bigger the number the better and if they can do this with globally-synced releases, well that’s just going to do better with their respective boards of directors and shareholders.
But the real global story might lie in two areas worthwhile pursuing a) the decision to opening globally when you don’t want to get too stung by poor domestic reviews and box office which might hurt you if overseas release dates are delayed…open at the same time and the now-global audience may not cotton on a flim is trash quickly enough; you still get you that phenom 3-4 day weekend you need for your scorecard and b) that the global audiences taste may be morphing so worldwide synchronised releasing will happen more frequently. Once studios could only be assured of a bigger box office worldwide with action films which would play well in both English and non-English language-speaking countries – audiences would still flock as subtitling or dubbing wouldn’t matter since there was so little talking anyway, being it was all about the spectacle. Why not look more closely at what plays where…has it changed? I’d say that it probably has – especially has since LOTR and Harry Potter.
Most US-made films, though, don’t open world-wide at the same time…opening dates overseas will still often be tied into seasonality, differences in school breaks and local appetite for the film content. And for those types of films, studios would be unlikely to trumpet international numbers simply because those figures wouldn’t have any local (ahem) currency weeks or months after a North American opening.
There’s definitely been a noticeable shift in how global revenues are reported. It used to, “So and So made this much at the box office [domestically]… hopefully it’s global take will be enough to cover it’s losses” Plus, I don’t know how it’s done now, but international figures take longer to come in. They usually aren’t available on Boxofficemojo.com until a week later. Since people want to be able to gauge whether a movie is a hit or not RIGHT AWAY that’s just too long a wait.
There is a big wideworld out there bigger than America. A success should be measured at global level, why do you want to restrict it to just domestic.