If you were to listen to the number of records broken this summer, you'd start to believe that the box office record is going to be shattered. At closer look though, all the big movies are being opened on strategic days to give the illusion that something extraordinary is happening, when it probably isn't.
The latest record broken with the release of "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix," was for the single-day gross of a movie on a Wednesday. It brought in $44.8 million on its first day of release. That includes about $12 million brought in from midnight showings on Tuesday.
There have been so many odd release dates this year, that you know Hollywood is up to something, and that something is trying to live up to the hyped expectations that they brought upon themselves. If all the potential blockbuster movies had been released on the usual weekend days, only one would have broken any record during the summer.
That's something the industry couldn't let happen, so they have used all sorts of creative release dates so people can write and talk about records being broken over and over again during the summer.
There have been just about every day of the week release records this year, Memorial Day records, five-day records, six-day records, Fourth-of-July records for the middle of the week, four-day weekend records, etc.
This isn't to take anything away from "Harry Potter" or some of the other movies, it's just that we have to understand that this is all marketing and hype, and is creating the illusion of something bigger happening than really is. It's manipulating the market so headlines about the records broken can be written.
The truth is that the season isn't living up to expectations, and this has the industry nervous. They've launched as many potential blockbuster movies as possible, and they still aren't on track to break the box office record. They're working on the contingency plan of being able to say they've broken "X" amount of records this year, if the overall box office record isn't broken.
While this isn't that big of a deal for moviegoers, other than using social proof to keep people coming to the movies, for those investors that don't look under the hood of the industry, it can make it look a lot healthier than it really is.
The industry created this problem with their boasting because it thought they had a slam dunk this summer. When they realized that the movies were cannibalizing one another, and people weren't coming around a second time to watch, they had to take another approach.
What I wonder is where will they go from this year? They through everything at the market they had, and they'll be lucky to stay flat in the North American market by the end of the season. This has to be a big concern for them. Companies like Disney who dropped the number of movies they would make, probably will do real good, as they limit their exposure to the fickle market we now live in.
The thing that will save the industry this year will be the international sales they garnered. If it wasn't for them, this would have been a disastrous year. As it is, it's still making the studios jittery.
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