Page Summary ·Last Airbender's Box Office Mojo [+54] Latest Month | April 2013 | | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | | Entry Tags akira, arguments, avatar, boycott, casting, contacts, conventions, cultural influences, essays, events, humour, info, interviews, m night, mod note, movement, news, other media, press, press:racebending, press:tla, production, protest, race, racefail, racewin!, rewatch, supporters, the hunger games, trivia, updates, visuals | 4th-Jul-2010 07:05 am 
Hey, everyone. So, unfortunately, it appears that all of the horrible reviews for the film haven't stopped The Last Airbender from making money off of the 4th of July weekend crowd. For most people, it's a choice between Twilight, Toy Story 3, and TLA, and people are choosing with their wallets. I checked Box Office Mojo for information on how Airbender was doing relative to the other movies out this weekend and compared to other openings. "Playing on approximately 4,600 screens at 3,169 locations or considerably less than Eclipse's estimated 8,200 screens at 4,416 locations, The Last Airbender notched the fifth highest-grossing Thursday opening of all time, though it was far behind fourth place Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull's $25 million and was a fraction of the last two Star Wars movies. . . Last Airbender's Thursday included around $3 million from its midnight launch, which was the largest midnight start of the summer for a non-sequel. Its location count included 1,606 venues offering 3D presentations, but the 3D share was unavailable as of this writing. " What really gets me is that the midnight launch probably consisted of a great many Avatar fans who either didn't know about the Racefail, didn't care about the Racebending issue or decided that the 3D special effects would be cool enough that they could just ignore the issue. I mean, I had a group of friends who went to go see the movie simply because they couldn't resist the possibility that the movie might be awesome. Here is also a page with overall box office totals and ranks for The Last Airbender Overall, this movie has gotten horrible reviews from critics and fans alike but the studio's strategy of presenting it as an action-packed, special effects spewing machine created by M. Night Shyamalan is working to the tune of $32,950,000 as of July 2nd. And the way it's going, that might be enough for another two movies full of RaceFail, which Shyamalan will insist just proves his point about being a culturally diverse enough tentpole to appeal to everyone. I also love that small gem of an interview where Aasif Mandvi tried to compare TLA to Lord of the Rings by pointing out that Lord of the Rings wasn't really about humans while TLA is. I'm not too sure that he's ever seen either movie. Lord of the Rings is my go-to example of a fantasy world where the cultural(European) influences were so prominent that the majority of audiences would have rebelled against and ridiculed the movie if they had cast any other race than white for the humans, elves, or hobbits. Whereas, it's fine to place a race of white people in an Inuit setting or prominently white heroes in clearly Asian roles because Asian culture and history aren't real enough or important enough to merit influence of any kind. I know I'm preaching to the choir here but I feel like we need to step up our game. If this movie continues to do as well as it is right now, we are going to have not one, but two more movies on our hands, and Shyamalan will have conceded absolutely nothing. Could we start a campaign with the slogan "Just go watch Twilight instead"? | | |
4th-Jul-2010 03:08 pm (UTC) 4th-Jul-2010 03:10 pm (UTC) | How about "Just go watch Toy Story instead," seeing as how trading up TLA for Twilight is just trading up racefail for misogyny. | | |
4th-Jul-2010 03:31 pm (UTC) | even if tla does make its money back, who would see a sequel with such awful buzz? it'd still be extremely risky unless they gave night a budget of like $20. | | |
4th-Jul-2010 07:30 pm (UTC) | I agree with this. Studios will take a risk if the box office numbers are high enough and the audience response is strong, like what happened with "Transformers 2," which the critics all hated. "Last Airbender" may make its money back, but the audience seems to hate it as much as the critics do. I don't see sequels happening. | | |
4th-Jul-2010 03:47 pm (UTC) This is just so disappointing. I was hoping it wouldn't do better than Percy Jackson, as that franchise is pretty much stillborn. I don't know that TLA will reach the $500mil WW it needs to turn a profit, but making its budget back seems likely now. A few months from now, a new director for Book 2 will be announced. Then Toph's ASIAN ASIAN ASIAN actress will be cast, and this will somehow excuse the whitewashing of the first movie, and once again we'll be told to stop our bitchin', this new director is sooo much better than M. Night, OMG, I'm so excited!!1" I don't understand why so many fans who admit that the movie was such a disappointment hold out so much hope for a sequel. | | |
4th-Jul-2010 04:39 pm (UTC) I don't understand why so many fans who admit that the movie was such a disappointment hold out so much hope for a sequel. You know, I heard that exact thing from a friend of mine. He was like, "I think M. Night has been punished enough. We should let this go and he'll do a better job in the sequel." I told him he was deluded and then he sulked a lot about how mad I was at him. | | |
4th-Jul-2010 04:33 pm (UTC) | I bought a ticket to Toy Story 3 3D, and saw TLA. So glad I didn't waste my money on TLA. I would've asked for it back. | | |
4th-Jul-2010 05:41 pm (UTC) *snuggles* I like this plan. This is a good plan. Have you seen Toy Story 3 for real yet? I loved it. | | |
4th-Jul-2010 05:23 pm (UTC) | clearly this just means we need to keep getting the word out. Facebook/Twitter/LJ away! | | |
4th-Jul-2010 05:43 pm (UTC) also keep in mind that the midnight showing had a huge presell. Now that word of mouth is getting out, that will drop off considerably. Remember that it has to make over $280 million just to break even. $32 million looks like a lot, but considering that now we do have a)awarenesss and b)forward momentum, that number is going to slope off steeply after the weekend. Tortoise and hare, people. It's not how well it starts off, but how well it finishes. (and once things like "Despicable Me" open, and with "Toy Story 3"'s continued long legs, the audience for TLA will dry up like a great big dried up thing.) /blackadder | | |
4th-Jul-2010 06:11 pm (UTC) also, just thought of a counterargument to the "just get a new director for movie two" argument: do you REALLY want to acknowledge this POS as Movie!Canon? wouldn't you much rather have them start over from scratch and do it right? Because another thing that occurred to me, even if fans of the series go wibbly and say they can put up with this thing just to get a decent Toph in the second movie... ATLA does NOT have the fanbase of say Twilight, or HP, or whatever, to support it at the box office. Those who came to the movie without prior exposure to it are now poisoned to this incarnation. They will NOT go see a sequel even if Peter Jackson jumped on board (well maybe they'd consider it, but even then, but he's got his own *cough*KingKong*cough*LovelyBones*cough* adaption issues for things not LoTR) And Paramount now knows that if a second movie in this incarnation goes ahead, we'll be there. And the critics and those who have seen this movie will be right behind. And the papers and the magazines and the blogs will keep namechecking the protest. I don't think they want that kind of hassle, frankly. They'd have to be incredibly stupi-- oh wait opened against Eclipse in midsummer with a movie with everything wrong with it except maybe the soundtrack and some of the CGI Oh, yeah, right. Yeah, they could still opt for that. Because they are that stupid. | | |
4th-Jul-2010 06:25 pm (UTC) At the moment I just hope that these numbers come mostly from fans or people fooled by trailers who don't know anything about the controversy or the overall bad quality of the movie. Not everyone is reading reviews or is involved in the online fandom and these people would need to rely on good old real live Word of Mouth - and as we know this is slow. With a little luck they could make about $130million domestically I suppose. But that would be if the numbers drop similar to Toy Story's rate (50% after the first weekend, then slow drops during the week, little rise at the weekend, and then another high drop on Sun/Mon). If bad word of mouth kicks in it might be a more drastically drop. In any case the would need overseas tiket sales to earn back their money. | | |
4th-Jul-2010 09:40 pm (UTC) | Right, this isn't a film that's going to slow burn like "How to Train Your Dragon" did. Something new and better will come along this coming week for young and old age groups ("Despicable Me" and "Predetors" repectivly) so if they get a good bump, it has to be this weekend. | | |
4th-Jul-2010 06:33 pm (UTC) 4th-Jul-2010 08:13 pm (UTC) 4th-Jul-2010 06:50 pm (UTC) I can't remember what news show I was watching, but I found out that the stars of the Twilight films are going to be traveling to specially chosen theaters around the country to watch Eclipse with fans. I imagine that fans would be going back to see Twilight again regardless, but depending on how soon this starts, the elevated amount of repeat viewings may cause Airbender to lose whatever momentum it managed to gain this week until a shiny new movie geared at kids and families (like Despicable Me) or one towards teenagers comes out. I'm not sure how realistic this is, and in other circ*mstances, I wouldn't be rooting for a Twilight film to do well (especially since it managed to break one of The Dark Knight's box office records *raaaage*), but I'll take anything that will steal TLA's attention and ruin whatever small chance it has at those sequels. Oh, and on another note, I was channel surfing and caught a brief interview on MTV with Shyamalan about TLA. It was about the fans' disappointment over his decision to cut out the Kyoshi Warriors from the film. Long story short, he plays it up like he was really conflicted about it and says that it was a difficult decision but he chose to remove them from the film because they were too distracting, or something to that effect. But he did say that they would be in the next film, if it's given the greenlight. I don't know when the interview was taped, but perhaps he's starting to feel a little less confident that the other two films will be made... | | |
4th-Jul-2010 11:45 pm (UTC) Bronson Pelletier went to a couple of theaters in Southeast Michigan, around where I live. I'm kind of surprised Taylor didn't do it since he was born in the state. Edited at 2010-07-04 11:47 pm (UTC) | | |
4th-Jul-2010 06:52 pm (UTC) 4th-Jul-2010 08:22 pm (UTC) I'm not worried. To me, these numbers represent the people who want to see some 3D on July 4th weekend and TLA is new and exciting OR people who heard it was epically horrible and wanted to see for themselves just how bad it really was. The numbers will drop off drastically from here on out. I don't think it will pull a Transformers 2 where critics HATED the movie but audiences actually really liked it and saw it over and over. It seems like both audiences and critics hate TLA. Word of mouth will spread. ETA: Also, TLA is depending on the power of families or groups. Groups of friends going to see it or families. That's prob why it's even getting any money. Edited at 2010-07-04 08:23 pm (UTC) | | |
4th-Jul-2010 08:41 pm (UTC) io9 has a new article up, "what is missing from the movie". Wonder how much they got from the racebending.com list? http://io9.com/5578518/ | | |
4th-Jul-2010 11:51 pm (UTC) over 20 episodes in Avatar: The Last Airbender's first season "Over"? | | |
4th-Jul-2010 09:20 pm (UTC) From the link Fanfare posted up above: "It turns out the The Last AirBender's budget ended up being $150 million, which is comparable to how much the first Iron Man, Transformers, and Spider-Man movies cost to produce. Additionally, Paramount Pictures who distributes the movie, put in motion a massive $130 million marketing campaign to promote The Last Airbender across the world. When you include split revenue between Paramount and the movie theaters themselves, The Last Airbender would have to generate more than $580 million worldwide at the box office alone to turn a profit." | | |
4th-Jul-2010 09:22 pm (UTC) | Forgot to add this in the post, but the thought of the theaters taking their cut didn't even occur to me this whole time. That means that while it might be showing take at one number a chunk of that doesn't go to the studio. It's that much more that they have to make. | | |
4th-Jul-2010 10:08 pm (UTC) |
