One Billion Dollars for The Meg?

The first trailer for the massive shark movie, The Meg, dropped last week and with it came some criticisms from fans of the book.  They aren't happy that things have changed in the translation from one format to another.  The truth is that alterations are a must, as the sorts of things you can communicate on paper are not necessarily what you can communicate through visuals and dialogue.  All books that get turned into movies meed to get tweaked.  It's the nature of the game, and people need to accept that.  As well, their criticisms are based off a short trailer, a trailer that has me looking forward to purchasing a big ol' popcorn and grinning my way through the film when it comes out.

In a now deleted post defending the movie, author Steve Alten talked about the changes made from his book, Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror, and gave his perspective.  What stood out to me about his post is something that illustrates how some people outside of the movie industry view Hollywood when they get involved.  Alten writes, 'this is a really amazing movie... one that I believe will earn in excess of a BILLION DOLLARS and spawn some even better sequels.'  Was this spoken as exaggeration, or was it a solid belief in the success of the material?  It's hard to be sure, but I'll just go with it being more literal to talk about an issue of people believing the movie game is easy to just jump in on.

If this is truly how he feels, then it is really cute that Alten has that belief.  It reminds me of a number of years ago when mixed martial arts media members were talking about Ronda Rousey's options and that she could simply make the shift to movies.  Once again, cute thinking.  If success was so easy to capture, how come off the top of my head I can only think of a handful of crossover stars such as Dwayne Johnson, Mark Wahlberg, and Will Smith.  It just baffles me that people outside of the movie scene sometimes believe that certain levels of success are so easily attainable.  What would those mixed martial arts journalists think if Andrew Garfield announced that he was going to start competing at the highest levels of the sport?  They would have had a solid laugh, and that's what I had about their comments about Rousey's easy career, and that's why I laugh at Alten's delusional thinking here.

There are currently thirty three movies that have cracked into the billion dollar club.  The entry that came out the longest ago is Jurassic Park which sits in 27th place and came out in 1993.  Just for a fun exercise, I am going to do a rough (and I mean rough) calculation on what percentage of movies get over a billion dollars.  We will be conservative and say that there are two wide release movies a week.  That's fifty two weeks per year, and we will tally all the years back to 1993.  This gives us roughly 2,600 wide releases in the past twenty five years.  Yes, there were less movies released back then, but there are many weekends now where there can be three to four wide releases, so I feel the conservative two per week works.  So, 2,600 movies, and only 33 have hit over a billion.  What we get is that 1.3% of movies break a billion dollars.  Just over one movie a year.

Now let's look at movies in the billion dollar club that aren't part of already established cinema franchises.  There are only five films in this group that weren't already established in some way.  They are Zootopia (rank #31 at $1.023 billion), Jurassic Park (rank #27 at $1.029 billion), Frozen (rank #11 at $1.276 billion), Titanic (rank #2 at $2.187 billion), and Avatar (rank #1 at $2.788 billion).  New movie properties, using the math we used before, have a 0.19% chance to make a billion dollars.

The odds are not very good, but one could point to the fact that Jurassic Park was based off a novel about prehistoric creatures, just as The Meg is.  Fair enough.  There area a few differences here, though.  First, people knew exactly who Jurassic Park's director Steven Spielberg is.  The fact that he was making it assisted a lot.  Yes, talents attached to movies these days don't bring in the numbers the way they used to, but I would argue that the name Jon Turteltaub is definitely not going to move the needle.  He did manage $457 million world wide with Disney's National Treasure: Book of Secrets.  That's an indicator that he can handle big money makers, but that movie was one that was part of an already established cinema franchise, something that The Meg isn't.  He also hasn't had a critically well received movie since While You Were Sleeping in 1995.

I would say the biggest difference is that the book Jurassic Park was three years fresh when the movie came out.  There was still lots of buzz about it.  The same could not be said for The Meg.  The book came out twenty one years ago.  Back in the late 90s, I didn't hear anyone talking about Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror.  It may have a fan base, but it can't expect to get the similar kind of success that a movie with plenty of buzz could turn in.

One of the scary indicators of the success of The Meg is that it's release date got pushed back (not a good thing, usually), and it is now being released in August.  This is a month where movies generally die.  The rush of the summer blockbuster season is coming to a close, and people have already  opened their wallets a number of times.  That's not to say that a movie cannot succeed in August.  Guardians of the Galaxy made $773 million world wide in 2014, and Suicide Squad earned a solid $746 million world wide in 2016.

Now, I'm not saying that The Meg can't get to one billion, but I would almost bet the farm that it won't.  This is not an easy benchmark.  Only one Harry Potter movie made it.  Only one of the Lord of the Rings movies made it.  Spider-man, Superman, and Katniss Everdeen are bankable characters that couldn't get in there.  James Bond has only been in there once.  Nemo couldn't even make it.  None of those names are jokes, and they show just how tough the competition is at the upper echelons of blockbuster cinema.

The one thing that The Meg has going for it is that it is set off the coast of China.  Besides North America, China is the next make it or break it market.  The film's proximity to the country should help it perform there.  However, Jurassic World, which is the fourth highest grossing movie of all time, brought in $228 million in China.  I point that out because I cannot see The Meg out performing a dominant franchise film such as that.  For The Meg to break a billion dollars, I would guess that China's gross would need to be over $500 million.

The billion dollar club is for the illustrious, the films that broke ground technically (Avatar and Titanic), the movies that were well hyped continuations of previous franchises (The Force Awakens and Jurassic World), or movies that provided an event that we had never seen before (The Avengers). Sure, not all movies in there are critically acclaimed, but each film's success is that they spoke to multiple demographics and had cross culture appeal.  Can a silly shark movie do the same?  I am betting not.