Yes, it’s true—I shrieked like
a pterodactyl when I saw how much money “Jurassic World” made this past weekend. In fact, I’m still in shock. $208 million?
The biggest opening weekend of all time?
Even the film’s distributor, Universal Pictures (a box office
overachiever this year, thanks to “Furious 7” and “Fifty Shades of Grey”)
didn’t dare hope for that much (the studio projected around $100 million). So what explains the movie’s shark-chomping
success?
Not a great deal.
To a certain degree, the course of ticket sales and the choices of
moviegoers will always be wily and hard to chart; for every “San Andreas” that
meets expectations, there will always be an “American Sniper” that defies
them. Yet there are a few trends that
help explain why “Jurassic World” may yet rampage financially past every 2015 release
not called “Star Wars.”
To a certain degree, moviegoers crave predictability; the
recognition of a familiar character like Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark is
often all it takes to fill theater seats. In that vein, “Jurassic World” is familiar in
a way that sells tickets—it’s the forth movie in a popular series and boasts a
leading man (Chris Pratt, of “Guardians of the Galaxy”) whose face has been
increasingly visible across digital screens and magazine covers.
Still, recognition is no guarantee of success. Sure, franchises like “Harry Potter” will
always be welcomed by their fans, but audiences still crave novelty, which
partly explains why a reported $16 million worth of cinephiles decided to sit
out “Avengers: Age of Ultron” when it opened this past May. That film may have been a sequel to one of
the highest-grossing films of all time, but it lacked the sort of high-concept
hook (like the elaborate time travel gimmick of last year’s “X-Men: Days of
Future Past”) that could have expanded its audience.
The hi-jinks of “Jurassic World” couldn’t be called
high-concept either; the movie was marketed as a family adventure about fleeing
from and hunting for computer-generated dinosaurs. Yet its trailers exuded an aura of freshness
that “Age of Ultron” couldn’t claim. The
last “Jurassic” movie debuted in 2001; ticket buyers have had plenty of time to
wash its taste out of their mouth. In
other words, “Jurassic World” looked just familiar enough that most people knew
what they were paying for, yet had a slight tinge of novelty—it felt fresher
than a new “Avengers,” yet not as foreign as an “Interstellar.”
I’m tempted to launch into a moaning diatribe about how
the monetary triumph of yet another violence-packed sequel can only degrade
cinema. Then again, George Miller’s
wonderful “Mad Max: Fury Road” is also the fourth chapter of an ongoing saga. And on the indie front, even as “Jurassic
World” clawed through the record books, the Sundance hit “Me and Earl and the
Dying Girl” scored a $210,000 debut—a start even more promising than that of
the Oscar-winning “Whiplash” (another Sundance spawn).
In the end, “Jurassic World” and “Me and Earl” may both
have a part to play in movie history, albeit in very different ways.
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