Friday, August 05, 2005

Dreamworks suffers; now Sony does too

You've doubtless heard about Dreamworks' summer woes at the box office, with films such as "The Island" and even "Madagascar" performing below expectations (and before that "Shrek 2" and "Shark tale" also underperformed). Well, the same is true over at Sony, which has had a really crappy summer so far. As the WSJ notes ("Stealth Leaves Sony Grounded at the Summer Box Office," Aug. 2, p. B1), its latest slew of summer blockbusters has failed to draw in the punters. After disappointing numbers for "XXX: State of the Union" and "Bewitched," Jamie Foxx's "Stealth" has really tanked. Like "The Island", "Stealth" cost about $120 million to make, but only took in a few million in its opening week. (You can find the latest box office totals here.)

The problem for Sony is that it doesn't have a big franchise film opening this summer - i.e., there's no "Spider Man" film coming out this year or next, so they could be in for a lean time. Next summer might be better - Sony is producing a movie version of "The Da Vinci Code," and they will have a franchise film next summer - the next James Bond outing, thanks to Sony's recent purchase of MGM.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I think that it's sad that Dreamworks and Sony haven't been getting box office totals that are up to par. Dreamworks has awesome animation (I love Shrek) and Sony I'm sure spends more money than neccesary to make movies. It sucks to know that these days you don't really have to leave your home to go watch a movie. You can get them bootleg in the train stations in NYC, and even download them off of Limewire, or if you have BitTorent you can get it easily. Unfortuantely, things have gotten out of hand with downloading things, and only some people respect the business enough to not download things. I also think that perhaps, if things were cheaper or of a more reasonable price, maybe people would go see movies more often. In my hometown, for example, it costs about 9.75 fore one movie, 4.00 for a small popcorn, 4.25 for a small drink and then you can just imagine with the rest is like. It is outrageous, however, I love going to the movies, and come out broke when I go. Perhaps things would be better if prices were more reasonable and affordable, and maybe if movies weren't so crappy, redundant, or with poor acting.

Stephanie Rufa

9/14/2005 1:10 PM  

Post a Comment

<< Home