What it's like to come to work at a movie studio after the weekend of a mega-flop like Jack the Giant Slayer .
An image from Jack the Giant Slayer, which opened Mar. 1 and was declared a flop almost immediately.
Image by Warner Bros. Pictures / AP
You'd be hard-pressed to think of a less fun place to spend this past Monday morning than the executive suites of Warner Brothers Pictures. Last weekend the studio's Jack the Giant Slayer became Hollywood's latest high-profile misfire, earning a dismal $27 million on a budget reportedly in the neighborhood of $200 million, before marketing expenses.
Sooner or later, into the life of every entertainment executive some flops must fall. But coping with failure in a productive, healthy way is not an automatic instinct in a town where schadenfreude and finger-pointing are more popular than the Super Bowl — for every show-business executive must eventually face the day when he or she has to take the long walk down the studio corridor after their weekend disaster.
We spoke with three who have known those halls and witnessed many walks of shame close up, to find out what it is like in a studio's executive suite in the days after a very bad loss. The picture that emerges is of a town not generally geared toward learning from failure, but where that can, eventually, in fact occur.
Executives A and B, who spoke on condition of anonymity, have each worked in and around multiple studios in their decades of entertainment experience. Mike Medavoy was a cofounder of Orion Pictures and chairman of TriStar Pictures. He serves today as the CEO of Phoenix Pictures.
Head Start
2012's John Carter took $250 million to make — plus $100 million in marketing costs — but only earned about $283 million worldwide.
Image by Disney
BuzzFeed: The flop game has changed in recent years thanks to tracking — the advance numbers every studio receives indicating public awareness of and enthusiasm for an upcoming release. Thanks to tracking, the flop game begins long before opening weekend.
Executive A: Because of tracking, everyone knows well in advance what's going to happen. As you approach the release, there is a lot of ass covering. The head of the studio doesn't want the head of the company to read in the paper for the first time that a disaster is coming up, so he's prepping him: what we're doing, how we're changing the campaign…
Mike Medavoy: The only thing tracking teaches you is that you're headed in the wrong direction, so you can make marketing changes. But If you're headed in the wrong direction and the other film opening that weekend is going to beat you 20 to 1 — if, say, you've made a bad decision to open on that date and the film isn't working — then there's nothing you can do. You just brace for the train wreck.
