It's been a cruel couple of months for the nation's film critics. They pan Paramount's Norbit and the thing opens huge. They rip into Sony's Ghost Rider and it sets a record for the biggest-ever Presidents' Day-weekend opening. And despite their best efforts to warn audiences away, Disney's suburban-doofuses-on-Harleys comedy Wild Hogs, starring Tim Allen, John Travolta, William H. Macy, and Martin Lawrence, roared into theaters last weekend with a stronger-than-expected $39.7 million, leaving the much-lauded Zodiac to eat its dust. So Disney execs reveled in Wild Hogs' grosses like pigs in you-know-what while the rest of the industry was left searching for lessons. Here are a few:
LESSON 1
Don't forget the boomers. Hollywood may be eternally entranced with
youth, but older moviegoers came out in force for Hogs. ''The demographic
is overlooked frequently, yet they're more available,'' says former
Disney production head Nina Jacobson, who greenlit the movie. ''If you
give them something worth seeing, they'll go.''
LESSON 2
Small is the new big. Buzz may emanate from the coasts, but Hogs drew
much larger crowds than normal in smaller towns — many of them in the
country's midsection. And the two midsize-market theaters where it
grossed the most money? Albuquerque, N.M., and Fresno, Calif.
LESSON 3
Sometimes bad reviews just don't matter. ''We'd all like nice things to
be written about our movies,'' says Sony Pictures' distribution head Jeff
Blake, ''but the one thing Norbit, Ghost Rider, and Wild Hogs had in
common was that they looked like a lot of fun.''
LESSON 4
Between Ghost Rider and Wild Hogs, America clearly can't get enough motorcycles. (Additional Reporting by Joshua Rich)
Unexpected Big Bows
THE PACIFIER: $30.6 MIL, March 2005
FAILURE TO LAUNCH: $24.4 MIL, March 2006
GHOST RIDER: $52 MIL, February 2007
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