Even by the standards of the mostly terrible box-office summer we’re having so far, Fox are having a pretty terrible time at the moment. Coming off the biggest hit in history with “Avatar,” they’ve had two high-profile duds so far with “Marmaduke” and “The A-Team,” and their high hopes for the Tom Cruise/Cameron Diaz action comedy “Knight & Day” were thwarted when it opened to a meagre $27 million over 5 days, despite a near-inescapable publicity push.
It’s thrown Paramount for a loop over next year’s “Mission Impossible 4,” and the questions are already being asked; how did something that five years ago would have seemed like a sure thing open to a smaller 3-day total than “The Bounty Hunter” or “Diary of a Wimpy Kid”?
Many have pointed the finger at Cruise, whose appeal as a star has been widely seen as wavering since his erratic behavior during the promotion of “War of the Worlds” in 2005. Except Cruise was thought to be on the upswing; his “Tropic Thunder” cameo brought him an enormous amount of goodwill (so much so that a spin-off is being developed) and he was even able to take the far less commercial “Valkyrie” to a $200 million worldwide gross.
Instead, Fox’s co-president of marketing Tony Sella has stepped up and taken the blame, giving an interview to the LA Times taking responsibility, saying “Blame me, don’t blame Tom Cruise. We did lots of focus groups for this film, and no one ever said there was a star problem. Never. Tom Cruise was not the issue.”
Many blamed the movie’s initial poster and teaser trailer, which ran in front of “Avatar,” for not selling the film properly, and Sella concedes that neither worked — they were trying to run an unconventional, more adult campaign, which resulted in a lack of traction. Once early tracking numbers came in, Sella & co went into panic stations “The minute the tracking came out, we went into Def Con 5, because the tracking never lies — if the numbers aren’t there, you know you need to do something. We reacted almost daily in a way to make the campaign better, with different ideas and different spots. Whether we reacted effectively or not is another question, but we did our best, because we always believed in the movie.”
Of course, there’s a degree of danger in changing the message late in the game — audiences can often sense trouble if wildly different ads for the same movie appear. Furthermore, the familiar nature of the film’s plot may have caused problems; Sella says “Once we decided to change the message to be as literal as we could be… then people started to say ‘Oh, I’ve seen that movie before. It’s ‘Mr and Mrs Smith’ or it’s ‘True Lies’.”
It can’t have helped that they were beaten to the punch by Ashton Kutcher and Katherine Heigl’s “Killers,” a film with basically the same premise. It didn’t perform any better, but it’s entirely possible that the two cannibalized audiences from each other. Sella partially puts it down to the older audience that were being targeted for the film (a surprisingly low 44% of audiences opening weekend were under 25). But Jeff Wells reports that Angelina Jolie starrer “Salt,” with a similar genre and target audience, is already tracking strongly, nearly a month before its release, so it can’t simply be that.
Some have pointed the finger at studio head and internet hate figure Tom Rothman, who’s known for micro-managing the marketing of Fox pictures. He supposedly picked the film’s title (which is a pretty poor one, even if Sella doesn’t place much importance on the title — it made no sense in the context of a film, and suggests a different movie entirely) and the release date (which also seems like an error in retrospect — there’s plenty of crossover with “Grown Ups,” which doubled “Knight & Day”s opening, for instance, and it followed “The A-Team” by only a few weeks).
Ultimately, people just didn’t want to see “Knight & Day.” Action-comedy is often hard to market anyway — you risk alienating fans of both genres, rather than uniting them — but it’s clear that Fox marketing dropped the ball here; some movies connect, and an overly familiar piece like this one just didn’t. Word of mouth is fairly strong, so it may have enough legs to take it to $100 million, and international should be decent — Cruise carries more weight abroad still. The LA Times piece is a good read, and you’ve got to commend Sella for standing up and taking responsibility. But if the likes of “Predators,” “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” and “Gulliver’s Travels” all fail to connect, it’s possible that he and Rothman may be looking for work elsewhere soon.