I'm not entirely sure, but I think the first time one major Hollywood franchise collided with another in the same year was the summer of 1989, when the first Batman went up against Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Sure, 1984 had seen the release of three major studio films, Ghostbusters from Columbia Pictures, Beverly Hills Cop and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom from Paramount, but the concept of the franchise hadn't quite evolved into what it is now (although there had already been three Star Wars films and E.T., the idea of using movies to move enormous amounts of merchandise was not nearly as widely used as it is today). Besides, the only place where one could read about Batman trouncing the third Indiana Jones film at the box-office was in the trade paper, Variety, or in the occasional story the mainstream media would run on the subject.
These days, however, with the internet offering people all around the world instantaneous, real-time, daily access to box-office receipts, suddenly everyone can find out how this year's Batman installment (the sixth, although it amounts to a "reboot" of the 1989 version which featured the first Batman/Joker showdown) fares against this year's Indiana Jones. And suddenly, for some strange reason, it suddenly matters to fans how much money their movie will make in relation to another movie, even if they won't receive a single cent of it.
I've written derisively about fanboys here and elsewhere so I'm not particularly interested in flogging that particular dead horse right now (at least, not till I get some momentum going). What I would like to offer is my own personal opinion on the whole horserace phenomenon when it comes to predicting and even just following box-office results.
The first time I was exposed to a box-office horserace in the internet age was when the inaugural Spider-Man film pulled off a major upset against the second Star Wars prequel, Attack of the Clones. I was just happy to see Spider-Man on the screen for the first time in the many, many years I'd been following his adventures, and didn't care at first how well his movie fared relative to another one, except of course that I wanted the film to succeed.
That's what I'm about: box-office results of a movie in their absolute sense, and not relative to the earnings of other movies. Monitoring such results has been my hobby, my addiction, for as long I've had hobbies. Thanks to the internet it's one I'm able to enjoy free of charge nowadays. In the pre-internet age I can even remember following the weekly grosses in issues of Variety that I read off the rack ;) way back in 1990, if not earlier.
Before too long, though, I found myself genuinely irked that a lot of fans on the internet even in the mainstream media were "shouting down" Spider-Man, saying that there was no way it could possibly gross more revenue than the latest Star Wars installment. None of the makers of either film was trying to sell one movie as an alternative to another (there were interview statements to this effect, in fact) but for some reason fans and wags had just seen the need to make their more-or-less simultaneous release as a boxing match of some kind, or, like I said, a horse race, one that Spider-Man eventually won. For my part, I was gratified, but when I think about it, I probably wouldn't even have cared if none of the Star Wars diehards had started shooting off their mouths (or keyboards).
Since then, franchise showdowns have been a fairly regular thing at the multiplexes, but most studio execs are smart enough to space their releases because they realize that if they try to open against a big movie, everybody loses, including them. So, they're not really being diplomatic by saying "we'd love to see both movies succeed;" to an extent it's sincere.
It's not the studios, whether Paramount, Sony, Universal or Warner Brothers that are contriving these ridiculous contests, it's the twelve-year-old (actual or equivalent, sorry, I couldn't resist) fanboys who are stirred up by trashy magazines/websites like Entertainment Weekly or comingsoon.net into creating this whole mentality.
2008 is yet another year for a horse race, it seems. The Dark Knight, the sequel to the successful 2005 reboot of the Batman franchise, Batman Begins, is arguably the season's, if not the year's most anticipated movie. Iron Man, the long-awaited adaptation of the popular comic book character, is what kicked the summer season off. Dark Knight comes out in July, Iron Man opened in May to stellar grosses and reviews. Judging by their release dates, these movies were intended to co-exist rather than compete. What the makers of Iron Man, a character relatively unknown to non-comic book fans, achieved is genuinely impressive: sustained box-office revenue over an eight-week period and really good reviews, which is rare in this day of first weekend bonanzas and second weekend dropoffs and critical panning. Whether or not TDK earns the highest grosses this summer, Iron Man is still an unqualified success. Still, articles on the internet pointing out this feat are invariably met with cries of "TDK will own" or worse, "TDK will pwn." It says something about the intelligence quotient of these people that they adopt typographical errors as their catchphrases.
I actually believe, given the buzz and some early reviews, that TDK will be every bit as successful as fanboys anticipate it to be, but that's not really the point. I doubt I'll be able to have that silent moment of gratification I had when Star Wars: Episode II failed to match the grosses of Spider-Man, but one thing I will be able to take solace in is knowing that the makers of Iron Man have made more money than most, if not all of those idiotic fanboys will ever make in their lifetimes, for all their harping about the as-yet-non-existent grosses of The Dark Knight.
It's as if fanboys want the products they love to monopolize success, not having the brains to realize that in a four-month summer movie season, there's more than enough of it to go around. It was the case with Star Wars, and was the case with The Dark Knight. If Marvel has its zombies, well I guess DC now has its drones who, without even receiving a red cent from Warner Brothers and without even being asked to, are slavishly marketing a film they haven't even seen yet. It doesn't help that the media, online mainly, contrives a competition when there is none.
Yes, the horserace mentality is really and truly stupid, but I guess entertainment "journalists" have to have something to write about every season besides the latest starlet's trip to rehab.
Still, I could be wrong about saying that it's the media who whips them up into a frenzy; for all I know, these stupid people have been around since time out of mind, and are only finding their voice now thanks to the internet, where stupidity and inanity can at last make itself heard, as witnessed by the fact that I devoted so much time to the topic on this blog. Hehehe
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