WHY WONDER WOMAN CRUSHED THE MUMMY AT THE BOX OFFICE

   

      The weekend tallies are in, Wonder Woman earned over $57 Million while The Mummy (2017) wound up placing second making only $32,246,120 domestic on its opening weekend.  It is even more impressive to note that a week prior, Wonder Woman made over $103 Million domestic for its opening weekend.  It is even more embarrassing that The Mummy was sandwiched in between Wonder Woman and the family film Captain Underpants. And yes, the point of that sentence was because it allowed my to type the title Captain Underpants.

     So why did Wonder Woman emerge victorious?  There are a lot of contributing factors we will look at. Lastly, I hope to show that part of the reason was not the content of these screenplays but also the business decisions that went behind the development of these scripts.

     Full disclosure here, like most of America I did not see this reboot of The Mummy but I did plunk down the cash to see Wonder Woman on this pivotal weekend.  Given that, I will not comment on the stories of either of these movies but rather explore the differences in how they were developed and released.  My goal in writing this is not to ridicule any poorly performing movie, but to show how the film industry can get back on track, make their money while also fostering great storytelling.  I am a filmmaker myself, I want to see more quality movies in our cineplexes.

Here are the things I feel contributed to these box office results:

1. Critical Reviews/Word of Mouth
2. Marketing Approach/Public Perception
3. Process of developing and writing the screenplay.

     We live in a world of non-stop news and information access.  Because of this and trusted review sites like Rotten Tomatoes, moviegoers can and often will for an opinion about a movie before it is even released. As of 6/12/2017 The Mummy had the stale Rotten Tomatoes critic score of 16 percent, while Wonder Woman was standing tall at 93 percent.  These numbers were about the same leading up to the release of The Mummy, which did not help consumer confidence at all.  My friends and I were talking about how bad we expected this movie would be, we would overhear strangers saying the same thing.  Word of mouth can make or break any product or service.  People are more apt to take their friends word for something than listen to what a multi-million dollar ad campaign has to say.  The daily breakdown between these two movies speaks volumes:

• Wonder Woman -

6/9/17 $15.7 Million

6/10/17 $24 Million

6/11/17 $18.8 Million

• The Mummy -

6/9/17 $12 Million

6/10/17 $11.5 Million

6/11/17 $8.1 Million

     As you can see word of mouth quickly caught up with The Mummy after Friday night, no matter how fast Tom Cruise was running.  Wonder Woman made more on Saturday and Sunday than that Friday while The Mummy did the opposite.  It just goes to show you how much power we really have as a mass of consumers.  The Film industry does all they can to resist that, the deals Hollywood makes with the movie theater chains is structured so the studios make the highest percentage of profit on the opening weekend.  No wonder why they often spend upwards of 100 Million to advertise these prospective blockbusters leading up to their release.

     That brings us to how these movies were marketed and how that could effect public opinion.  For over a month and especially on the week of the release they pushed The Mummy HARD.  According to a Variety article, Universal Studios spent much more than their competition on television ads to promote The Mummy.  Based on estimates generated from 5/29 – 6/4, The Mummy spent $7.83 Million that week while Wonder Woman accounted for $3.64 Million in TV ads.  I can tell you that during the week of The Mummy's release, they not only filed an ample amount of commercial time slots, but on Universal/Comcast owned networks such as NBC and NBC sports net were littered with pop up advertisements for The Mummy during regular programming.  Spike TV played The Mummy (1999) and The Mummy Returns (2001) back to back all day broken up with extended promotional spots featuring the cast of The Mummy (2017) talking about the movie.  When people see something advertised this much it can make the wrong kind of impression.  It is like the boy at prom who is trying too hard... all the girls would say “he is acting strangely, there must be something wrong with him,” and then he ends up going home alone.

     Our final factor is what I find to be the most interesting and problematic about the industry since I am a screenwriter.  First it requires understanding of the WGA arbitration process, If you already know all about this feel free to skip this paragraph.  The Writers' Guild of America has the arduous task of deciding who gets writing credits on Studio level features if there is any dispute among the screenwriters. Writers work diligently on writing an arbitration letter to the guild that supports their claim that most of what ended up on the screen started on their pages. The reason this is so important is not just to have your name on the poster, it is because screen credit entitles the writer to residual money based on its success.  The Guild has set a standard of not crediting any more than three screenwriters for any type of writing credit.  What this means is there could have been 20 writers who contributed to a film, but the public will never know as most will stay uncredited.

     A few things can happen when many writers are writing their draft of the same movie, it can cause the story, character and theme to get real muddy.  It also means that most of the writers are trying to change as much of any of the earlier drafts as they can, because if the majority of the final shooting script is theirs, they are in the best position for screen credit and that extra cash.  This is like a battle with words.  The Mummy (2017) had about as many writing credits as the WGA would allow.  The credits are as follows:

(Screenplay) – David Koepp and Christopher McQuarrie And Dylan Kussman 

 (screen Story By) – Jon Spaihts and Alex Kurtzman & Jenny Lumet

     These are some of the best writers the business has to offer..... when their work is their own. David Koepp penned Spider-Man (2002) [The good one] and Christopher McQuarrie wrote one of the best crime films ever made The Usual Suspects (1995), but they wrote those on their own.  It stands to reason that if you want the best chances for a solid story with a cohesive tone and vision, you should try to have as few screenwriters involved as possible.  The studio executives these days tend to hire a bunch of writers to rewrite one script because it shows they are doing all they can to make the script better, at least that is what the theory is anyway.  This is mealy speculation, but when you see three screenwriters listed on a movie it can often mean that there were plenty of other writers involved that are now uncredited.  This must-read article from Den of Geek reveals that The Flintstones (1994) had 35 screenwriters hired to work on the screenplay, leaving the WGA to say Yabba Dabba WHO? Catwoman (2004) notoriously had 28 writers working on it, and all that clawing did not save it from wining a Razzie Award for worst picture that year.  Both Catwoman and The Flintstones had, you guessed it, three screenwriters each with screenplay credit.  Well there you have it, I think we can close the case on this one. Thank you for reading.

- Curt Wiser is the Writer/Director of the suspense movie Cam-Girl, which is now available on DVD, Amazon Video and other outlets.