Greed, Fear and Hobbitses

Bilbo contemplates all the money he could have earned, but didn't.

 There's going to be a lot of stories over the next couple of days about how "badly" The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is doing at the American box office. Those quotation marks are a small but essential part of the conversation, since any such talk ultimately boils down to the idea that the film has made staggering amounts of money - through 10 days it has earned roughly $150 million in the US alone with another $288 million coming from overseas; more money than the vast majority of us will see in our lifetimes - but not quite as much as people might have expected. Then again, the figures being dealt with are so vast that just doing okay might be the same as failure as far as the studio is concerned. It's the difference between an athlete being able to run 100m in less than or dead on 10 seconds; it's an achievement either way, but it's also the difference between a gold medal and nothing.

Things I Learned From Movie X: Scream 4

I'm not sure how I feel about this gritty reboot of Reno 911!

After a few weeks away, caused by a mixture of holiday and a really busy period at work, Things I Learned With Movie X returns with a column about Scream 4, the long-delayed fourth film in a franchise that started out as a sly commentary about the nature of standard horror films but which mutated along the way to being a slightly smarter version of the films that it is meant to mock.

I'm pretty pleased with this edition of the column since I think I managed a nice balance between making fun of the problems of the film and actually critiquing its flaws. I also really liked the Sesevenen joke because it's pretty silly, even though I'm sure someone else has probably made it some time in the last 16 years. Also, following on from the Dawn of the Dead column, it is the second time I've worked a Se7en reference into one of these, so maybe the key to maintaining maximum comedic velocity is to keep talking about that absolutely hilarious film.

The Numbers Game

As well as writing the Things I Learned From Movie X columns for them, I've been a contributor to Box Office Prophets for just over a year now, and in that time have developed a keen interest in the various trends that are always running underneath the surface of the business side of the movie industry. I've watched the rise of 3D, the decline in attendance and the sharp increase of foreign box office receipts with great interest, and would consider myself, if not an expert, then certainly a talented amateur when it comes to examining the whys and hows of box office performance. This interest led Adam Batty of Hope Lies to ask me to write a Box Office column for him examining the summer movie season, which I was more than happy to do since I've been studying the performances of this year's crop with particular interest.

The resulting article can be found here, and I have to say that I am pretty damn proud of it.