Chronic Murmuring

The Passion

The Passion juggernaut is still going on. It was knocked from the number one spot by Dawn of the Dead, but it still made approximately $19.5 million this weekend. The fact that it's been playing for almost an entire month, and still pulls in $19.5 million over the weekend is impressive. Each weekend is dropping around 30-40% from the previous one, but Easter is coming up, which might drive the numbers temporarily back up for one last weekend. I won't at all be surprised if we see $30-40 million Easter weekend. When I worshipped with Paige's family over spring break at their Church of Christ church in Nashville, the pastor used a powerpoint presentation for his sermon that had The Passion poster in the background of each slide. All I kept thinking was "free advertising."

I also read that it's entirely plausible that the movie will eventually become the highest grossing film of all time, even after adjusting for inflation, because of the potential revenues to be reaped in repeated re-release (whew! say that five times fast...). It has a built-in audience, the author said, for Christmas and Easter. But, I doubt that, a little bit anyway. True, Gone With the Wind used this strategy. It has been re-released 33 times since 1939, placing it in the number one position (after adjusting for inflation) at $1.2 billion. But, Gone With the Wind also did this in a day when households did not have DVD or VHS players. DVDs and VHS versions of a film are imperfect substitutes for theater films. While a temporary campaign targeted just at the liturgical holiday of Easter or Christman could potentially increase the movie's revenues, I'm not sure I believe it could maintain that more than a few times. Still, it will go down in history as, at least, the highest grossing R-rated film of all time (and could very well keep that position for a long, long time - to beat it, a film would have to appeal to teenagers in the same way that Matrix or this film did. Those films, while not impossible to create, are nonetheless difficult because the synergy is tough. The Matrix largely relied on the first movie to generate demand among teens, which allowed it to survive with an R-rating, but normally, R-ratings limit the market. And, according to one study by Arthur de Vany, "Does Hollywood make too many R-rated movies?: risk, stochasitc dominance and the illusion of expectation," R-rated films simply do much more poorly at the box office relative to G and PG. So there's built-in incentives to avoid extraneous violence, profanity and sexual content - something that Robi hinted at earlier in the semester on this blog.