[quote] Now that it overperformed and became the number one movie in America, they're trying to spin it by saying the studios are inflating the numbers. "It's nothing to crow about."
Sweetie, it hardly overperformed. $19m for a nearly 4000 screen release with a likely $20m P&A spend is not an overperformance, however much the studio decided to lowball expectations after they saw tracking.
The way it works, for everyone screaming RACISM!, is tracking begins about a month before the release of a film. Tracking is surveying the awareness of and desire to see a particular film, how soon, which age and sex demographic, etc.
They figure out how to tweak marketing based on the early tracking. By the time tracking gets to the week of opening, the distributors can pretty much figure how much a film is expected to gross. (Now that number has nothing to do with what is reported, it's simply a projection.)
A long time ago, distributors learned that, to spin a film that was tracking poorly, they would send out a press release lowballing their expectation. If the film did better than that number, then they could act like it was something of a hit. It never worked because everyone now knows what a film of a certain budget and release size needs to gross its first week in order to have legs and/or make a profit. But the distributors keep on doing it.
Did the film gross $19m? Yes, as mentioned before, Sunday estimates can be off, but rarely-to-never an appreciable amount to make it seem like anyone is lying. Did the studio really think the film would not gross $19m? No. They knew this was not going to do any better, and not much worse.
Any way you look at it, the film is a disappointment in terms of what they spent. Maybe they were hoping for another Black Panther? I have no idea. Viola Davis is not a box office star, never has been, never will be. She cannot open a film on her own name. Sure, she's been in hits, but the draw has either been another actor or the existing IP (i.e. The Help). The subject matter also has a very limited appeal. I think once people realized this actually was NOT, in fact, another Black Panther superhero-type film, the air got let out of the balloon pretty quickly.
