Those articles make me sad because I’ve watched Delgo. (Not in a theater, thank goodness!)
It was horrible.
1.3 million in 2400 theaters. That’s $540 a theater. So, lets say a $12 ticket average? So that’s 45 tickets over 3 days. 4 showings a day is 12 showings per theater. So, 45 tickets over 12 showings. That’s like 4 tickets per showing.
Hindsight is rose tinted. Jem was always a cheesy, transitory moment in the 80s that can’t be repeated. It was riding the coattails of the Tiffany fad. While retro 80s might be sorta kinda in today, not every toy (or hardly any) of these toys were even that prominent then.
The “correct” IMO version of this would have been a tween version of Taylor Swift, meant for girls.
Apparently it only cost $5m to make, so it’s not quite as bad a bomb as it first seems
The production budget was $5 million, but according to the director Universal spent a lot more on marketing. However, even if they spent double the production budget, it’s still not that big of a loss to the studio. That’s like a day of Jurassic World’s Blu-ray sales, so I think Universal is going to be okay.
A buddy of mine theorized that maybe this movie had an original script about some generic kid that makes it big after playing music on YouTube, and some suits thought it would be more marketable with a Jem n’ the Holograms brand name awkwardly slapped on it.
I remembered that the original screenplay of Die Hard 3 was in that position. They added Bruce Willis and some awkward references to the Hans Gruber dynasty and otherwise it might never have been made. My friend mentioned that, more pertinent to the '80s cartoon/doll franchise under discussion, the Masters of the Universe movie from the '80s was originally supposed to be a Jack Kirby New Gods movie. I didn’t understand the reference but apparently the Masters of the Universe movie, with nary a Cringer or Castle Greyskull in sight but with the main character walking around on Earth a lot more than in the show, would have made a lot more sense as an adaptation of that other property…but with a lot less brand recognition.
Today’s young girls wouldn’t have heard about Jem, but their moms or cool aunts have. The suits must have gambled that would be enough for a big bump in ticket sales.
They should have taken some script about a girl who likes horses and awkwardly turned that into a Wildfire movie.
I frequently point this out as one of my regular go-to movie trivia facts, and I should recheck why it happened, but I’m pretty sure Die Hard 3’s script was originally a script for Lethal Weapon 4.
So I guess it begs the question, forgetting this insipid formulaic drip-o-thon completely, would an out-an-out full-on retro-fem-power live action reboot of Jem have worked with ladies, as well as, say, the transformers and turtles films for guys? Or are TF and TMNT successes because action, robots and monstery things are just inherently cool enough to men that they’d sell no matter the brand? And/or that women are content enough to be dragged by their dates to action movies but given the choice they’d rather do other things than see brand reboots at the cinema? ie, was this a losing proposition no matter the execution, or is there an untapped market on the girl side of things.
I don’t think anything would’ve worked outside of turning it into a full-blown summer blockbuster with a $80+ million budget to hire AAA stars and effects, and even then you may still end up with a John Carter misfire. I don’t think Jem as a property holds much value to the people that grew up during her cartoon days.
ie, was this a losing proposition no matter the execution, or is there an untapped market on the girl side of things.
These two aren’t mutually exclusive. Female-led/targeted comedies have done really well recently for a reason.
That sounded interesting so I dug around on Google. Different fansites had slightly different stories, and none cited any definitive sources, so take this with more salt than you would your average wiki article. Die Hard with a Vengeance started as a spec script called Simon Says. The titular Simon eventually became Simon Gruber and, like With A Vengeance, tortured the hero with mind-bending riddles and puzzles. Which now that I think about it sounds like a slightly dumber version of Se7en, which came out the same year. Simon Says was originally tied to Brandon Lee, and, as star vehicles go, sounded not as good for him as the Crow, but about as good as Rapid Fire and obviously way better than Laser Mission. He would have played the Bruce Willis part and an African American actress would have played the Sam Jackson part. After he died, the studio (20th Century Fox) still owned the script. The script had enough buzz about it, especially in those halcyon Die Hard On A ____ action-movie days, that they tried attaching it to different properties and franchises. At one point Richard Donner tried to attach it to Lethal Weapon 4. His studio, Warner Bros., tried to buy it from Fox, but a deal couldn’t be reached. Fox wouldn’t produce the script without attaching it to a franchise (ha ha, that would be crazy!), and there were a bunch of franchises that needed scripts. Fox had actually tried several scripts already for a Die Hard 3, but they weren’t distinctive enough for Bruce Willis. He didn’t want another Die Hard in or on a ___, he wanted a sequel that had some other angle to it. So eventually they matched Simon Says to Die Hard. A movie which in retrospect reached 51% on Rotten Tomatoes resulted.
Or at least that’s what the internet tells me.
If you want an example of movies where funny and talented ladies sing, there’s the Pitch Perfect movies. They were box office successes. If you want examples of the same kind of movie, but with an oddly shoehorned-in franchise based on a too-old cartoon series, there’s Josie and the Pussycats. That was a huge flop, but I think that’s partially because audiences didn’t get the joke about the product placement. The Runaways (the one about Joan Jett and her first band) also grossed far less than its budget. But Spice World, a movie about cartoon singers, did pretty well worldwide.
I guess it depends. It’s a good question that’s fun to talk about, and at some point to throw up your hands and paraphrase William Goldman. Everyone tries hard and hopes for the best, and who knows if it will catch on. Is a success made by the source material, the stars, the hype, the reviews, the kind of music performances? A movie about music isn’t inherently good enough to bring in audiences. But then, if action, robots (or at least spaceships) and monstery things could guarantee an audience, Jupiter Ascending would have sold many more tickets.
I wonder if it’s in part that traditionally male interests, like robots, tanks and space ships, transcend age. I still read a Conan comic with just as much interest as I did in my youth, but my wife only feels nostalgia and yearning for a simpler time when she looks on her old barbies and my little ponys. I still want to actively build ED209 when I pull out my lego, my wife just looks forward to our daughter using them. Or maybe it just speaks to the superficiality in women’s toys, or that the foundation upon which a lot of their appeal is based (fashion, beauty, clothing, singing and dancing etc) are aspects that women roll into their own selves as they grow older and don’t need to totem any longer.
Ha ha, you saw Delgo!
-Tom
Kudos, that was way more thorough than my “I read it somewhere that sounded credible once and I just use it as an occasional soundbite” version. So it was a spec script that got offered as a new Lethal Weapon along the way before becoming Die Hard. Offered to Brandon Lee as well! Movies are funny.
Universal is pulling the movie from theaters. They’ve also stopped reporting box office numbers for this.
“Theater chains are contractually obligated to hold a film for two weeks after booking it. However, in all my days as an analyst, I’ve never seen a studio actually stop reporting after two weeks,” Jeff Bock, senior box-office analyst at Exhibitor Relations, told Business Insider Monday. “This is unprecedented, and shows just how badly this film flopped. Not only is it the lowest-grossing debut for a studio film this year, but it’s the worst all-time — by a considerable margin — for any film released in 2,000-plus theaters.”
$2.1 million at last report. $5 million budget.
Jem & The Holograms got sent out for theatrical release.
Bone Tomahawk didn’t.
I realize the audience for the latter is limited, but still.
Was this even marketed at all? I wouldn’t have even known it was out were it not for the articles talking about how bad it bombed. Zero commercials, zero print ads, zero internet presence, at least in my market (Midwest US). No wonder it bombed.
I think I saw a (single) TV commercial. And given how very little TV I watch and the infinitesimally small number of commercials that I don’t fast-forward through… that’s pretty impressive.