That's a warning for all you people who think I'm crazy and obsessed, you can stop reading now. (::heehee::)So Dawn Treader recently "won" on Box Office Mojo for "biggest box office failure" (or some other such depressing title) which....yeah. I kind of have to agree. It was a box office failure - especially in the US.
The US domestic gross is currently $104,159,819 and the foreign gross is at $296,500,000 which puts the total at$400,659,819.
We were all ridiculously pleased when they finally hit $400m - woooo!!! Based purely off of opening weekend (which was a major fail: $24,005,069) it wouldn't have been near enough to continue to the next film. However, now that they have reached $400m, which exceeded their production budget by a lot ($155m) things are looking much better.
Compared to the previous movie, Prince Caspian, this isn't actually too bad. Prince Caspian started out with an opening weekend of $55,034,805. It grossed $141,621,490 domestically, $278,044,078 in other countries, and $419,665,568 worldwide.Prince Caspian, however, was a box offices failure in contrast to what the production was
expecting, based on the numbers from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: Opening weekend: $65,556,312
Domestic: $291,710,957
Foreign: $453,300,315
Worldwide: $745,011,272
My reasoning: Obviously LWW was a smash hit and there's nothing to worry about with that. Prince Caspian was marketed excellently (you can thank Disney for that) but had a poor theatrical run - because the production got cocky after LWW and decided to release it with Indiana Jones and Iron Man. (how dumb is that?) It had a fairly okay opening weekend, but didn't progress that far because it wasn't that good.
In contrast, their production budget was $255m. Yeah.
So then the production got scared that they'd keep losing money so they backed out and 20th Century Fox took over.
And they don't know how to market properly. VDT was probably the worst marketing failure I have ever seen in a movie - resulting in a poor opening weekend. BUT - people told other people about it - that it was a good movie - and they managed to pull off a worldwide gross that wasn't too far from Prince Caspian - and exceed Prince Caspian's foreign gross by $20m.This poster is probably one of the most poorly designed posters in history. With the exception of Eustace, the faces of all the characters (partiularly Lucy, Edmund, and Caspian) are ridiculously washed out and none of them are in character at all. the "N" on the sail of Dawn Treader is backwards because they flipped the picture around (and how they thought they could get away with that, I don't know.) Aslan also looks like he's about to murder everyone with his laser glare. (this is a foreign poster, btw, but all of them looked the same, domestic and foreign included)
SO, that was a lot of gibberish about the box office numbers. What's next?
Originally the production of Dawn Treader said they would let fans decide whether they wanted The Magician's Nephew or The Silver Chair next - and the votes came in with an overwhelming favor for The Silver Chair. This is obviously the next logical step in the series.
However, last month, the producer of the three Narnia films thus far, Perry Moore, died on February 17th, age 39. For those of you who don't know who he is: while he was the producer, he was also the one who started the entire Narnia film franchise to begin with. He had the vision and he got the ball rolling.
After his death, a lot of fans were worried as to what the future of the films would be - until two days later, February 19th, when we learned that the night before he died, Perry Moore had secured funding for the production of - The Magician's Nephew.
So what does this mean for the series? It's looking a lot like The Magician's Nephew will be next.While I'm ecstatic to see another Narnia film and I can't wait to see what they do with this one - I'm sorely disappointed that the Silver Chair won't be next.
I have been SO anticipating this movie for a long time, and it's always been one of my favorites in the series. And Will Poulter, who plays Eustace, is going to be too old to be in SC if they make MN first.From a strictly marketing standpoint, MN would be a lot easier to do. Think - how easy would it be to market a "Prequel to Narnia?" But "Sequel to VDT?" - with only one reoccurring character? (that's Eustace) They already had a hard enough time tying VDT in with PC - in fact they were trying to tie it in more with LWW by bringing back the witch (who had hardly no screen time at all) and playing up a lot of themes that didn't actually come into the movie.
Alright, so if you've made it through all that I think you really deserve a prize. I tried to make it more bearable by putting lots of nice pictures in.
In other news, VDT comes out on DVD APRIL 8TH!!!! (check the cool widget on the sidebar!) That's right. If you haven't seen it, you need to. The DVD cover (for once) is uh-mazing and it's PURPLE, and it's got tons of awesome bonus features on it. While the cropping/photoshopping wasn't that good, at least they improved the placement/coloring. It's only flaw is the lack of Caspian on the cover - and the witch in his place. >.<
As for what comes next in the Narnia films...who knows? It's nothing like Harry Potter, Twilight, or Indiana Jones, where the production is secured, and the characters are always the same. But that, I believe, is what makes it unique. Lewis made each book a stand-alone book, yet they all tie beautifully into each other. There's a reason their called the chronicles of Narnia. But the key to making these films a success is not the marketing, but the adaptation - taking the core, important themes found in the books and translating them on the screen.
