“The weekend results for Our Brand Is Crisis are upsetting,” Sue Kroll, Warner Bros. The trick is not having a slew of bombs in a row so that the phone stops ringing. George Clooney has a few: Solaris ($15M) and Ides of March ($40M). The list goes on.
Most stars’ filmographies include vanity projects that failed, like Tom Hanks with his directorial debut That Thing You Do! ($25.9m). And if studios fail to back them, the industry will never realize the upside of a creative gamble. Like last weekend with Steve Jobs, one can argue it’s another case of specialty titles lost in the studio system, but this is what happens when stars and filmmakers stretch with passion projects. Weinstein Co.’s wide release of Cooper’s bad boy chef film Burnt didn’t do that much better with $5M in 5th at 3,003 screens, delivering the second pan to the actor’s head after summer audiences failed to lei with Sony’s Aloha ($9.7M opening, $21M domestic). In a fall where some of the most critically acclaimed adult titles such as The Walk and Steve Jobs were mowed down, Warner Bros.’ Our Brand Is Crisis stained Bullock’s resume as the actress’ lowest wide opening of all time with $3.43M in 7th place, logging under her 1996 romantic comedy Two if By Sea which debuted to $4.7M and capsized at $10.7M stateside. 28-30 which made $87.8M and saw the release of the Efron bomb and lower than the March 6-8 weekend of $89.4M when Chappie blew a fuse stateside with a $13.3M weekend. This weekend was lower than the pre-Labor Day frame of Aug. Rentrak reports that the 2015 Halloween weekend was the lowest grossing frame to date of 2015 with $73M, down 31% and off another 23% from a year ago.
4TH UPDATE, Sunday, 7:16AM FINAL: What’s worse than a weekend filled with a South African violent robot ( Chappie) and a Zac Efron DJ film ( We’re Not Your Friends)? How about a Halloween weekend with two star-driven bombs - Bradley Cooper’s Burntand Sandra Bullock’s Our Brand Is Crisis - topped off by a teenage horror film, Scouts’ Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse at $1.8M that barred its core demo from even entering the auditorium with its R rating?