Gross Inadequacy

The new Sarah Palin documentary, The Undefeated, made $65,000 in ten theatres over the weekend.  Apparently, whether this is a good number or not has become a partisan debate.  Over at The Atlantic Joshua Green isn't too impressed, but asked a friend:

Seeking an objective judgment, I turned to Gabriel Snyder, editor of the Atlantic Wire, who happens to have deep expertise on precisely this subject: he used to be Variety's box-office reporter. Here's what he had to say:

Snyder's response:

A $7,500 per screen average is not a number that anyone should brag about. [Green's number at the time was a gross of $75,000] The way these sorts of brags go, distributors open a movie in some of the highest grossing theaters in the country -- in markets like New York, L.A., etc. -- where a $10,000-plus weekend is typical. Of course, the only place to go from there is the lesser houses in smaller markets, but for that weekend when you are playing a movie in just a handful of theaters, the high per screen average creates a sense of potential and wonder.

For comparison purposes, "Fahrenheit 9/11" (which I covered extensively and was, along with "The Passion," a beautiful marriage of movie marketing and GOTV campaign strategy) posted a $27,558 per screen average on its first weekend on a pretty high 868 screens.

For a more analogous example (in distribution strategy, not content), the David O. Russell movie "I Heart Huckabees" (which had nothing to do with Republican politics) opened with great fanfare to a $73,044 per screen average on four screens, leading to all sorts of predictions that it was going to be a HUGE box office hit. Once it left the cherry-picked first four theaters, its performance plummeted, ultimately grossing a forgettable (to us, not to David O. Russell) $12.8 million.

So, while high opening weekend per screen averages are often touted, they are a) highly correlated with the size of the specific markets they measure, b) a high-water mark in a film's theatrical life: usually there is nowhere to go but down and c) not terribly impressive unless they are somewhere north of $50,000.

This is just weird.  Why would anyone compare this documentary, or any documentary, to Fahrenheit 9/11, which rewrote the rulebook?  Documentaries in general are not big moneymakers.  In 1989, when Michael Moore's Roger And Me made close to $7 million, political documentaries simply didn't make over a million.  And then, in 2002, he broke his own record when Bowling For Columbine grossed an unbelievable $21 million.  His films played like entertainments, rather than documentaries, and in 2004, he made history when Fahrenheit 9/11 grossed $119 million.  To this day, political documentaries rarely make over a million, and if you don't count Michael Moore films, only one has made over $10 million (An Inconvenient Truth).  Furthermore, documentaries about specific politicians rarely do well.

Then Snyder brings up I Heart Huckabees, though I don't know why.  It was a relatively big-budget ($20 million) fictional film with stars.  It opened in a few theatres to get the word out before it went wide, but the hopes were always to make tens or hundreds of millions. The final domestic gross of $12.8 million was a flop by Hollywood standards, but if it had been a political documentary that would signify a huge hit.

Finally Snyder suggests an impressive number would be above $50,000 per screen.  That's nuts.  In the world of lowered expectations that come with political documentaries, a small opening at over $10,000 per is decent and over $20,000 is great.

So how should we look at the Sarah Palin numbers?  Hard to say.  The director-writer of the film, as Green notes, claims they played small theatres and didn't advertise much.  It's certainly true that a film with such a subject might not play the same way as other documentaries.  On the other hand, it's also true that a lot of people, even Sarah Palin fans, may not feel the need to see a film about someone who's already on TV and in the news so much.

I don't know the budget for the film, but $6500 per screen for a small opening is tepid. (It's almost exactly the same per screen as Errol Morris's documentary Tabloid, which opened the same weekend on 14 screens.) Yet in the world of political documentaries, it's not outrageously weak.  At the rate it's going, it probably won't make more than a few hundred thousand, which is what you expect for the genre.  However, with all the talk about the film making it higher profile than most in its category, that would probably classify it as a disappointment.

PS  The bottom fell out the second weekend, as it grossed $24,000 in 14 theatres.  As might have been expected with a project like this, the interest was front-loaded.  Unless there's some extremely unconventional distribution plan, it's hard to see how it can spread much further, and will probably end up grossing under $150,000 domestic.  Theatrical is hardly the end these days, but it's hard to spin it to say the film did well.