I just read an analysis of the summer movie season and as it seems with analysis over the past few years, it’s all over the map in trying to formulate hits and misses. Everything is broken down into how much money a project or studio made. The quality of the project isn’t too important for the bottom line. For instance, the article I read declared Will Farrell was back from the dead because after his flop of 2009 of Land of the Lost, his new movie The Other Guy, gave him the biggest opening of his career. Looking at the numbers from Box Office Mojo, the movie made a little over $35 million its first weekend and has now made just under 107 million dollars after a month of release. The cost of the movie was estimated at 100 million dollars so all shaken down the movie made just under 7 million dollars.

I have problems with number analysis for films because the numbers can be shaken so many ways. Just in the example of Farrell, he is considered a bankable star yet his film wasn’t a barn burner and considering cost it has yet to make a profit. This doesn’t take into account what the studio will consider important such as overseas money, resale to cable TV and the important DVD/BluRay market. A flop can become a hit because of DVD sales and vice versa, yet that doesn’t change if a movie is good or not and that’s element missing in the analysis.

In my opinion the film industry hasn’t been good in years. Originality is buried while predictable and bite size has thrived, or at least has been promoted. It’s the same rationale that has been seen in the comic book industry, in television and in a roundabout way, at Comicon. Everything is hyped as an event; everything has to be big because big money has been sunk into the project, even if the money or the project isn’t justified in the hype. The producers are hoping to squeeze every bit of money they can out of their ‘hit’ even if the ‘hit’ is a long shot. The modest success story is overlooked because everyone from producers to stars are looking to be stars in a way; they would rather burn bright and burn out over one film than have a career.

A recent example would be Scott Pilgrim. For months the movie was hyped as the IT film. This was going to be a game changer despite the fact it was based on a modest, to use the term loosely, comic book property that was little known in comic book fandom, shot in a way to emphasize the comic book element, and the film was supposed to appeal to . . . well that was the real point in that no one was sure who to market the film to. There were massive articles about how great the film was, a massive banner was hung at the side of a hotel at Comicon, and the buzz after Comicon was the movie was going to be a monster hit. According to Box Office Mojo, the film has made just under $30 million and cost $60 million to make, which includes foreign distribution. Out the same length of time as The Other Guy, Scott Pilgrim has yet to cover production cost even though it has had an internet presence for months which, if you believed marketing people, would guarantee a hit considering the film catered to the hip sensibilities of the internet fan.

The summer box office is about numbers and branding, not about good stories or ideas. That paradigm will be on display big time in 2012, when the Avengers movie comes out. Less than a movie and more of a branding ploy, Marvel Comics is attempting to tie in a number of movies and dovetail them into one massive film. The hype has begun without a script or a frame of film being shot.