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Aaron Eckhart Happens; Marketers Not So Much

"You’re making lemons out of lemonade." - Martin Sheen in “Love Happens”

Box Office Analysis by Paul Maslak
Posted:  September 21, 2009

A funny thing happened this weekend on the way to Love Happens. When we walked through the theater doors, we could have sworn we bought tickets to the latest romantic comedy starring two of Hollywood’s hottest - Aaron Eckhart and Jennifer Aniston.  I mean, the lobby poster steamed romance.  The preview trailer sang romance … and comedy.  The theater guides actually printed the words “romantic comedy.”  And my wonderfully enthusiastic woman swooped me up so fast in the direction of the movie house that I nearly floated skyward like a kite.

But when we found our seats - POOF! … presto change-o - magically, not much comedy and perhaps less romance.

What we got instead was the story of a widower confronting his grief over the loss of his wife, egged on by the prospect of a new love.  More accurately, then, you might classify Love Happens as a romance drama.  A perfectly fine movie, mind you, with a tour de force performance from Aaron Eckhart, emotionally-charged bits from Martin Sheen and John Carroll Lynch, and plenty of charm from Jennifer Aniston in an otherwise nonplussed supporting role.

Still, something of a buzz kill for an audience all revved up for a different experience.  The film title is an outright canard.  So is the ad campaign.  And pre-release, the critics were silent; apparently kept away from advance screenings because Universal’s studio marketers did not want them to tell the public.  Good grief, you’d think this old-fashioned personal drama was the fine print on an adjustable rate mortgage.

Reading between the lines of that fine print, we can surmise what went on…  Filmmakers Brandon Camp and longtime partner Mike Thompson (Dragonfly) had a small arty project.  They called it Brand New Day - an absolutely spot-on terrific title for this film!  Relativity Media got behind it.  Eckhart and Aniston, both of whom periodically take on less mainstream material, signed on … which in turn brought in Universal Studios to co-finance.  Given the cost of studio overhead, we guestimate Universal could not afford to turn on its office lights for projects budgeted much under $15 million.  So with talent and studio commitments, Brand New Day’s budget moved upward.  All the tenpercenter agencies now could make more money and could pat each other on the back for their deal-making prowess.  Perhaps deep down the filmmakers knew better.  But who would rock the boat with all these now house-proud agents about being handed more money since they had Eckhart and Aniston AND their first shot at directing and producing a major feature film?

Of course, tossing extra money at a film project seldom increases the inherent demographic appeal of its concept by very much.  Brand New Day began as a small slightly arty “worth-doing” drama and, upon completion, remained so.  Now the whiz kids in Universal’s marketing department were charged with the do-or-die mission of recouping the studio’s 50% negative costs plus their own department’s heavy marketing costs and overhead.  They would need an opening weekend gross somewhere north of $7.5 million.

Using our own Marquee Stars package calculator in Table 1 above, correctly classifying the picture as specialty & genre product, we calculate the package strength for these combined marquee elements at an anticipated opening weekend gross of $6.22 million.  Our package calculator is actually intended as a measure of relative strength between different package combinations but, nevertheless, can often anticipate good ballpark performance numbers in a pinch.  When further adjusted downward for genre, subject, and prevailing market conditions, the picture’s package strength might even dip as low as $3.47 million - ouch - in all cases well below the studio break even requirement for $7.5 million.

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