Meryl Streep: Superhero Killer?

I've a few minutes before I'm off to work so I'll squeeze in just one more blog post...

Two years ago, 20th Century Fox's The Devil Wears Prada opened the same weekend as the much-hyped Superman Returns in American cinemas, in what is known in Hollywood as a counterprogramming maneuver. The idea was that considering that SR was by and large a male-oriented movie, women were a neglected audience for that weekend and would want to watch something else.

Now, counterprogramming doesn't always work. It didn't work too well for Sony this year, which tried to counter the Paramount release Iron Man with chick magnet(TM) Patrick Dempsey's Made of Honor, only to discover that women liked Robert Downey Jr. and Gwyneth Paltrow better than Dempsey and his leading lady. If I could think of more examples of counterprogramming, I'd love to make this post about the phenomenon in general, but none spring to mind right now.

Going back to Streep, the stratagem of opening against SR paid off for Devil. Whether it was because it was a genuinely good movie or because there was absolutely zero romantic chemistry between Kate Bosworth's Lois Lane and Brandon Routh's Superman, the women who went to see Devil paid a total of $27 million dollars during a weekend the Man of Steel had been expected to crush all box office records. Though SR still opened at number 1, it was an underwhelming opening at best and it was observed that Streep had stolen some of its thunder.

Oddly enough, Universal Pictures has decided to pull something similar by releasing the film adaptation of the popular musical Mamma Mia on the same weekend as the massively-hyped The Dark Knight. The adaptation stars Meryl Streep.

I don't see Streep pulling off a similar upset with TDK, which will draw on a solid fanbase due to the success of Batman Begins three years ago. SR was always iffy considering that the last Superman film nearly twenty years earlier had tanked and there was still a question mark as to how much demand there still was for another movie starring the character. (For the record, there was enough for the film to gross $200 million dollars flat, but not enough for it to recoup its nearly $300 million price tag, including production and marketing costs.) TDK faces no such question marks. People definitely want their Batman.

But I find it very interesting that based on the grosses of one movie, a studio seems to think of Streep as the anti-DC hero. This could be coincidence, but then one wonders why Universal didn't try to play its film against Iron Man or Indiana Jones.

Well, arguably, Batman doesn't have any real love interest. Katie Holmes was most definitely one of the weak links of a mostly sublime Batman Begins. Sure, some mention is made of the fact that Maggie Gyllenhaal, has replaced Holmes as Assistant District Attorney Rachel Dawes, but that's never been much of a selling point. So maybe that lack of a romantic angle influenced Universal's choice of release date.

However, the dynamic hyped up in the trailers appears to be that of Christian Bale's Batman going up against Heath Ledger's Joker and this could ultimately be Mamma Mia's undoing on its opening weekend. Ledger's death is something women have most certainly mourned, and the fact that TDK contains his last complete performance may have just provided the movie with some entirely unsolicited and scathingly effective publicity. In short, it's possible to the point of being probable that people who don't give a damn about Batman will line up to see Heath Ledger's last hurrah.

Of course, movies made for women tend to be the kind that play on and on (like Titanic) and don't just depend on an opening weekend bonanza (though the recent Sex and the City, which made a killing on its opening weekend only to plummet in the weekends that followed, seemed to buck that trend), unlike their testosterone-fueled counterparts, so maybe all is not lost for Meryl Streep's latest effort.

However, if the marketplace is broad enough to accommodate both films, as it appears to have been this weekend with both Wanted and WALL-E raking in over FIFTY MILLION dollars apiece in the United States on opening weekend, then maybe fans of both Batman and Streep covering Abba songs will have reason to cheer in three weeks' time.