“Marley and Me” stars Owen Wilson and Jeniffer Aniston as a married couple who after escaping the harsh winters of Michigan for the warm days of Florida buy a rather rambunctious dog named Marley. The movie is basically about the changes in a relationship over the years and man’s best friend that is there to help you through it all. The film is actually pretty good but one that I did not plan to even see.
Jen and Owen star in “Marley and Me”
As I looked to at the numbers this morning a theory started to work in my head about what happened. Marley and me broke the record for single day Christmas earnings. How in the world did that happen? I mean while I am sure they had hoped the movie would do well, no one anticipated it doing that well. Here is what I think happened.
My party and I decided to go to the movies on Christmas day to see “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett. However, by the time we got our tickets and got into the theater it was already full, I mean packed. It was so packed that people had to have been there 30-45 minutes before the movie started. As you might expect, we weren’t going to see the movie and we decided to go back and check the next showing time. Unfortunately for us and I am assuming several other moviegoers, the next show wasn’t for four hours and the only movie that started within a reasonable amount of time was “Marley and Me”, and so that’s what we saw. When we first got in there, there was no one but soon the masses came and it was packed too.
Sorry Brad.
Most of the people that came in were whispering that Benjamin Button was sold out and that they came to see this instead. And that my dear friends is how I think “Marley and Me” did it. I think it was a collective miscalculation of the number of viewers that would come out and of those how many would want to see Benjamin Button. If other theaters were anything like the one I went to, they suffered from not having Button playing on enough screens and at enough show times. It is because of that fact that I think the real loser in this was “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” which still did relatively well coming in at number 3 after “Marley and Me” and “Bedtime Stories”. I am not saying both of those films were not great but I think a lot more people saw them than wanted to because there simply weren’t enough show times and screens for good ole Ben. This is a lesson that distributors should not soon forget, but as they say to the victor go the spoils.
1 response so far ↓
coffee buzz // January 4, 2009 at 5:10 am
Marley and Me is money to a great extent because Jennifer Aniston is money; Owen Wilson is… not so much