Which Studio Is Having the Best Year?

Believe it or not, we’re more than halfway through 2011. The doldrums of the winter box office are over (best not to speak of them), spring spared us too much grief, and now the heat of the summer box office is essentially over and done with. For those who disdain the schlock cinema of spring, or the bombastic stuff of summer, it is the month that tries the artistic soul. (Award season is coming up. Don’t despair.) Naturally, it’s time to number crunch! Who is winning? Who is losing? And if you’re about to say, “Who cares?” let me gently remind you that we should care. I detest the whole mentality behind today’s box-office bean counting and the cinematic product it leads to, but it also leads me to be coldly fascinated by it. Such is the way of the movie marketplace that we all need to pay attention to the box office in order to support and encourage the films we want to see, and to send a death blow to the ones we don’t. Of all the years to study numbers, this might be a good and prophetic one. 2011 has proven to be a surprisingly tumultuous year, as Universal and Disney canned projects with ballooning budgets, despairing of ever turning a profit on them. It’s also a year when the international box office became (or was at least openly admitted to be) more important than the domestic. We aren’t just living in a world where films are greenlit based on “marketability”; it’s now an industry where cinema is being shaped by its global appeal, which can lead to good things (diverse casting) and bad (plots based on polls). But that’s getting ahead of myself, and rather esoteric. Let’s answer the title question first: which studio is having the best year? It’s not who you might think. It’s not even who I thought it was when I began writing this! The winner of 2011 is … Paramount Studios, which has taken in a whopping $1.4169 billion this year! I know, I thought it was going to be Warner Bros. too, since they’ve won the title for the past three years running. They also had two of the five top grossing films of 2011 so far: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part II (the reigning champ of the summer with $370.8 million domestic), and The Hangover: Part II ($254.3 million and holding fast with a bronze medal). But Paramount had Transformers: Dark of the Moon (second biggest gross of the season with $349.4 million), Thor ($181 million), Captain America: The First Avenger ($168 million), and Kung Fu Panda 2 ($164.2 million), all of which are in the top 10 of 2011 earners. They also had Super 8, which may have fallen off the top 10 but still pulled in a respectable $125.6 million. If these numbers seem low — and what doesn’t when you begin a discussion by discussing billions? — then let me remind you this is only the American domestic box office. Listing all of the international grosses would make you quite ill, but suffice to say that Harry Potter scooped up $923.4 million internationally, while Transformers: Dark of the Moon did $757 million. When combined with the domestic, both films did a billion dollars just by themselves. (As Willie Scott said to Short Round: “Pass me your hat … because I’m going to puke in it!”) The other nausea-inducing fact about these numbers is just what films were successful. Harry Potter is a given and forgivable as far as franchises and sequels go. (You can quibble about the Part I and Part II split, but I suspect the box office would have been the same whether it was one film or two.) But Transformers: Dark of the Moon and The Hangover: Part II are definitely dark spots of the summer, as is Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. Studios will learn the worst sort of lesson from successes such as these. But if one expands out of the top 10, there’s some hope for progress and innovation. Captain America: The First Avenger was a genuine crowd-pleaser, and hung on in the top 10, which hopefully shows Marvel’s new studio — Disney — what audiences like in a superhero film. (As opposed to Green Lantern, which shows what they don’t.) Bridesmaids proved you can not only make money with a female-oriented film, but one that had quite a dark and heartbreaking spin to it. Rise of the Planet of the Apes may be small fry in comparison, and only ranked at #11, but it showed what a well-crafted and thoughtful sci-fi film can do, as opposed to blastfests such as Cowboys & Aliens. Of course, we’re only just now approaching fall, and the blockbuster Christmas season looms.  While it’s unlikely that the balance sheet of 2011 will be upended too much, we may see Warner Bros. winning out in the home stretch with Contagion, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, and Happy Feet Two. (J. Edgar and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close may be the dark-horse dramas of the bunch, but they’re unlikely to rake in major bucks.) But you can’t count Paramount out of keeping its hold since it has Footloose, Paranormal Activity 3, Puss in Boots, Hugo, Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, and The Adventures of Tintin on its cool weather slate. Several of those — place your bets, but they seem obvious — are guaranteed to make ridiculous, filthy, and embarrassing amounts of money at the box office.  Even Tintin, which seems a dubious success stateside, is guaranteed to be huge overseas and balance it all out. So, congratulations to Paramount. Now, go and use that money to make us some good movies. Original ones. And enjoy it while it lasts, because next year comes The Dark Knight Rises, and no studio is going to have a prayer against that powerhouse….