'The Last Samurai' image courtesy of Warner Bros.
I actually saw Tom Cruise's The Last Samurai at a paid national sneak preview over Thanksgiving weekend. It was one of those double sneak previews that I always talk about, where a studio debuts a new movie prior to its domestic release with a second movie from the same studio being offered for free. The Warner Bros./Time Warner Inc. freebie was The Matrix Revolutions. I had already seen said underrated Wachowski trilogy capper, but I gladly would have stayed for a second helping save for the fact that one of our peer group had not yet seen The Matrix Reloaded.
But, no matter, we all saw and rather enjoyed Edward Zwick's sweeping period piece adventure movie. I wasn't the least bit surprised when "Dances With Samurais" debuted the next weekend with a$24.2 million opening weekend, eventually legging it to $111m domestic and $456m worldwide on a $140m budget. That's still one of the biggest-grossing R-rated movies of all time. I bring this up because it stands as proof that you can score big on what is conventionally accepted as one of the worst weekends of the year.
What makes The Last Samurai special, beyond those insane worldwide numbers and that it contains an incredible second-act action scene involving honest-to-goodness ninjas, is that the movie opened on the dreaded post-Thanksgiving weekend. That weekend is where the big November releases tend to take giant falls after the holiday sugar rush wears off.
We start getting super-duper serious about Oscar prognostication since almost everything has been seen by the critics and pundits (the studios often debut some of the December biggies over the Thanksgiving break) and we start talking about the big Christmas tentpoles that will hopefully close the year out with a bang. And we often enter the month of December with one minor new wide release, or maybe none at all.
This weekend sees only High Top Releasing's 1,500 theater launch of Incarnate. And we're lucky we got that.
In any number of years past, such as 1997, 1999, 2001, 2011, this post-Thanksgiving weekend has seen exactly zero (0) new wide releases. But most years we had a single newbie that was either a college try Oscar contenders (Killing Them Softly, Out of the Furnace, Brothers), a preemptive embarrassment (The Pyramid, Awake), a Christmas pitch (Trapped In Paradise, The Nativity Story), or a... well, whatever you want to call Gus Van Sant's Psycho remake from 1998. Not all of these films are bad.
The would-be awards contenders are generally good and I'll defend Sly Stallone's Daylight if the need arises. Not all of them are flops, as Mike Nichols' Closer made $33m domestic but $113m worldwide. Some of them, like Aeon Flux, Punisher: War Zone, The Warrior's Way, became weird cult-favorite oddities after they bombed. But, as a longtime rule, films that open on this weekend aren't the sort to be taken serious as box office contenders or (exceptions notwithstanding) as art.
It wasn't always this way. Popular/leggy hits like National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation (still the biggest-grossing Christmas-themed movie ever actually released during the actual month of Christmas), Misery, and My Girl got solid launching pads on this post-Thanksgiving slot. But the Thanksgiving releases got bigger and became bigger deals after the holiday. Theatrical moviegoing got frontloaded to the point where a $10-$13 million debut didn't guarantee a smooth ride to $50m domestic, and the budgets overall went up so that a $11m debut for
Theatrical moviegoing got frontloaded to the point where a $10-$13 million debut didn't guarantee a smooth ride to $50m domestic, and the budgets overall went up so that a $11m debut for Analyze That or a $10m opening for Daylight wasn't good enough. So, we started to see fewer and fewer mainstream debuts on this specific quicksand of a weekend. And now, more often than not, the post-Thanksgiving weekend is reserved for studio dump titles, would-be cult novelties, or often nothing at all.
But it doesn't have to be that way. The Last Samurai proved that you could launch a big movie in this very weekend provided it was something audiences wanted to see. I'm not sure 2001's Behind Enemies Lines counts, since 20th Century Fox's Gene Hackman/Owen Wilson "downed fighter pilot" thriller was something of a "first nationalistic war movie to drop after the 9/11 attacks" fluke, but otherwise do note that film's $18 million debut and $91m worldwide take on a $40m budget. And just last year, Universal/Comcast Corp. absolutely learned the lesson of The Last Samurai with Krampus.
Okay, so it wasn't a mega smash, but the $15m Christmas-themed horror movie earned halfway decent reviews and rode a "nothing like it in the marketplace" wave to $42m domestic off a $16m debut weekend. Michael Dougherty's ghoulish trick/treat was treated by Universal as a big deal and thus it performed well above expectations and now Universal has a cult classic/annual tradition movie on its hands to milk as it so chooses.
If you make something that audiences want to see, and you make them aware that it exists and that it's being taken seriously by the studio releasing it, audiences will show up no matter on what weekend it happens to drop. Audiences didn't care when The Last Samurai opened, but rather that it was a big-budget Tom Cruise-fronted period piece action spectacular. As to the whole "why this matters" thing, it's pretty simple.
We are getting to the point where we're going to see something approaching year-round tentpole season. With several major studios all releasing a few (or several) would-be franchise titles over a 52-week year, because franchises dated in advance is what impresses stockholders and/or the media, we can ill afford to waste even one weekend. Every weekend of the year needs to be "safe" or "viable" either as a spot for a would-be franchise film to avoid another franchise film or a place where a studio programmer can flourish without sharing a date with an 800lbs gorilla.
