Through two months, 2013 has been a pretty awful year for major motion pictures at the box office thus far. If you look at a rundown of the year’s biggest films to date, you’ll see that only Identity Thief, a comedic caper about Jason Bateman and Rex Reed’s tiny penis chasing Melissa McCarthy all over the place, has topped the $100 million mark this year.

That means that star-driven action movies like A Good Day to Die Hard ($63 million), Snitch ($31 million) and Parker ($17 million) have been big old turkey turds at the U.S. box office, while unusual entries like the comedic zombie tale Warm Bodies ($63 million) and horror films like Mama ($71 million) and Safe Haven ($62 million) have been surprising successes. Wait, what? Safe Haven isn’t a horror film? But it stars Josh Duhamel and Julianne Hough and is based on a Nicholas Sparks novel. I can’t think of anything more terrifying than that.

The biggest concern* lies with the year’s first huge budget film, Jack the Giant Slayer, which had a $195 million budget and has only grossed $43 million through its first two weeks. However, before any Hollywood execs go burying themselves to the neck into mountains of cocaine, Oz the Great and Powerful may have pulled us out of this year’s early funk, grossing $80 million in the U.S. and Canada this weekend, with an additional $65 million overseas. Although, while $145 million might sound awesome, Oz cost $215 million to make, so Disney would probably appreciate it if you took your brats to see it 12 more times.

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We talk about domestic box office a lot, but international markets are where the real money is made. In fact, of the 25-highest-grossing movies worldwide, the smallest percentage of total budget earned internationally was 59 percent. This could go a long way to explaining why movies aren’t better, since with few exceptions, broad strokes are what play in foreign markets (and/or are what studios think will play, and thus spend a buttload of marketing money on). You know how the French are, they can barely tell a skunk from a cat that got paint spilled on it.

Pajiba already did the heavy lifting here, so I’m just going to have a cigarette and let the block quote do the work.

First, some fun facts: Internationally, the top ten all-time movies added two new entries this year, The Avengers at number three, and The Dark Knight Rises at number seven. Although it didn’t perform as well as The Dark Knight domestically, Rises bested it internationally by $200 million.

Which could add some credence to the theory that the Aurora shooting hurt TDKR‘s box office. Not that that even rates in terms of important impacts of the Aurora shooting, but there you go.

Meanwhile, Skyfall became the highest gross Bond film to date (and the first to cross $1 billion worldwide). Among the year’s top 25 films internationally, Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax (61 percent) and The Hunger Games (59 percent) were the movies with the highest percentage of their box office from North America, while The Intouchables (97 percent) and Ice Age: Continental Drift (81 percent) were the two films with the most box-office proceeds from overseas.

The highest grossing original property was Brave, followed by Ted, which was also the highest grossing comedy of the year. Titanic 3D was the highest grossing film not originally released in 2012, and two films considered box-office failures in the United States (Battleship and John Carter) both broke the top 25.

1. The Avengers— $1.5 billion

2. The Dark Knight Rises — $1.081 billion

3. Skyfall — $1 billion

4. Ice Age: Continental Drift — $875 million

5. Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part II — $799 million

6. The Amazing Spider-Man — $752 million

7. Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted — $742 million

8. The Hobbit: Unexpected Journey — $692 million [so far]

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Please break, dock.

It didn’t take very long for a “respectable” and “legitimate” film critic to finally “like” Gerard Butler’s new epic flop Playing for Keeps, but the film has taken a step forward from a 0% Rotten Tomatoes score to 2%. The critic in question is Leonard Maltin, who wrote this of Jessica Biel’s latest paycheck:

It won’t be up for any Oscars, nor will it score points for originality, but it’s harmless enough fare for its target audience.

Translated: “It sucked, but not enough that bored single women and housewives wouldn’t kill themselves if they had to sit through it.”

That said, enough people were either scared away by that horrible RT score or they just had enough common sense to watch the commercial or trailer and know that this paint-by-numbers romantic comedy probably isn’t even worth waiting for on Netflix. (I’ll let you know the answer to that soon enough, as Playing for Keeps is the only movie remaining on my Must Watch list for the 2012 Worst Movies feature, and thank God. I’m seriously in pain from this year’s awful mess.)

The incredible latest edition to the James Bond franchise, Skyfall, remains at the top of the box office this week, as it earned another $11 million, bringing the grand total to $261 million. Playing for Keeps was the top earner for new films with a lousy $6 million earning it the sixth best gross of the weekend overall. Meanwhile, Hyde Park on Hudson earned $83,300 on 4 screens, giving it a meaningless but awesome per screen average of $20,825. Hey, I’m just trying to find anything positive in an otherwise goober of a weekend.

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Paul Thomas Anderson’s kinda-sorta-about-Scientology epic The Master broke the record for per-screen average this weekend, earning $145,949 from five locations in New York and LA and beating out Moonrise Kingdom’s $130,749 per-location average in its opening earlier this year. (BoxOfficeMojo notes parenthetically that Kevin Smith’s Red State technically earned more per location, but did so using premium-priced tickets and a concert-style opening at Radio City Music Hall). But it wasn’t all good news for studios, because while the box office as a whole was up 27% over last weekend on the strength of Resident Evil: Retribution’s $21.1 million, it was still down 18% from the same weekend last year, and this weekend was the second worst of the year. At the risk of sounding overly reductive, outside of New York and LA, it was another weekend of movies no one really gave too much of a sh*t about and so they mostly stayed home. The ones who did show up gave Resident Evil a C+ Cinemascore, and that’s a self-selecting group of people who purposely paid money to see a Resident Evil movie.

Thus you have an interesting dichotomy. The weekend’s top wide releases largely represent the old strategy – led by Resident Evil 5 and a 3D re-released of Finding Nemo – of trying to squeeze every penny out of properties with built-in audiences, even as those built-in audiences slowly get bored of the product. The Master, meanwhile, is the second film to hit theaters from Megan Ellison’s Annapurna Pictures. Ellison, the 26-year-old daughter of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, started by investing in movies like True Grit, and has since gone on to start Annapurna, financing such films as Lawless, The Master, Killing Them Softly, and David O. Russell’s next project.

One way to look at her is that she’s a bratty heiress playing around with her family’s money. The other way to look at her is that she’s a movie fan like us in the privileged position to finance the kind of movies she wants to see. I say this all the time when I’m not making cheap dick jokes, but the movie business has a ton of competition these days, and if it’s going to survive, people need to stop competing for a shrinking market (by churning out lazy sequels and remakes) and start actually expanding that market. The only way to do that is to get people excited about movies again. Excitement for going to the theater has been on the wane for some time now, even as everyone goes nuts for TV dramas like Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad et. al. It seems like such a simple thing, but the Annapurna Pictures strategy seems to consist of trying to create a good product, and not just a profitable product. And that seems important to the viability of the medium in the long term. Anyone who does it will tell you, making movies is a terrible way to make money. So it follows that if you are going to do it, it should probably be because you like it. I’m not saying the Annapurna strategy – of financing movies that seem exciting and new, as opposed to the old, hey-you-pigs-seem-to-like-slop-so-here’s-some-more-slop strategy – is the future, but… it’d sure be nice if it was, wouldn’t it?

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Aw, don't pout, Bane.

We all knew ticket inflation was a thing, especially in the age of IMAX and 3D and IMAX 3D, but this, frankly, is shocking. Seriously, I need a new top hat now, it flew off my head and got shredded in the ceiling fan.

The Dark Knight Rises is actually on pace to sell 10 million fewer tickets than Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman.
When Box Office Mojo took the average ticket price for each year and worked backwards from the total box office haul to figure out the raw number of tickets sold for each film, the numbers spoke for themselves. Batman sold an estimated 62,954,600 tickets back in 1989 with an average price of $3.97. The Dark Knight Rises, meanwhile, has sold 50,635,700 tickets to date at an average price of $8.02 per ticket – a 12 million ticket gap.

A ticket gap?! WHERE ARE YOU, JFK, WE NEED YOU NOW MORE THAN EVER! Mmm, history jokes. Anyway, I want to know who saw The Dark Knight Rises for eight bucks, and how they accomplished this. That’s the average? How is that possible? I can’t see a first-run movie for less than 11 bucks. Are there places in the Dust Bowl where a movie costs five bucks and you can get a fine pot roast for a buffalo nickel?

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