Box Office Check – Dragon Tattoo Hits $100 Mil, Tops All Best Pic Nominees Except The Help
Yeah. It’s like that. With broad guild support, a Directors Guild nod, WGA/ACE/ADG/ASC — because of their weird voting practices which rewarded number one votes only, encouraged strategic voting, the Academy neglected to nominate one of the best. It was a strange year indeed. Here’s to hoping the Academy goes back to five or goes back to ten.
Box office isn’t everything — but it’s just funny, that’s all.
Harry Potter – $381 mil
The Help – $165 mil
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – $100 mil
Moneyball – $75 mil
War Horse – $74 mil
The Descendants – $62 ml
Hugo – $60 mil
Midnight in Paris – $56 mil
Extremely Loud – $24 mil
*The Artist – $20 mil
Tree of Life – $13 mil
*Still not in wide release
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Sasha, don`t use this argument. The King`s Speech made a lot of money more than The Social Network in the US and worldwide.
Agreed. Dragon Tattoo was certainly one of the best of the year, but box office is zero indication of quality. If it was, the Academy would’ve done better to nominate Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 1 for Best Picture. Or if you prefer a movie that at least got good reviews, Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol.
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo will have the same financial fate as The Departed. Too bad it won’t have the same Oscar result.
The Artist is in wide release. It’s in over a thousand theaters currently.
^
The King’s Speech exactly doubled its domestic box-office after its Best Picture nomination.
Before it’s nomination TKS had earned a little over half what The Social Network has already raked in.
The Best Picture Oscar sent the movie soaring — something that would never have occurred with The Social Network because it was already done with it’s theatrical run.
The King’s Speech was not nominated because it made more money than The Social Network.
It made more money after it was nominated. So let’s not being throwing any arguments around.
Sasha’s not arguing, is she? Just stating facts.
Sasha, don`t use this argument. The King`s Speech made a lot of money more than The Social Network in the US and worldwide.
Box office on the King’s Speech is the best argument to use for that movie being named the best of the year. In fact, it’s the only argument you can use. It was an amazing box office success. So was Around the World in 80 Days.
Sasha, why do you only use the US box office when you are talking about how much money films make? Wouldn’t it be more accurate to use the Worldwide box office when discussing how much the films have grossed (Dragoon Tattoo has made almost 200 million dollars worldwide while The Artist has grossed almost 50 million dollars)?
With greetings from Iceland
The Artist is in as wide a release as it’ll get until maybe after the Oscars. Even then, maybe not.
@ Ryan
Amazing that Sasha kind of contradicted what you said but… You`re right in what you said. But The Kings Speech made about 300 millions more worldwide… it`s a lot more. Not only the awards interfered on TKS box office but the story itself. People really fell in love with that story.
Yeah, if The Artist didn’t get a major bump already, it’s not gonna get anymore.
Worldwide box office is irrelevant to the Oscar race. It’s a Hollywood based awards ceremony, American perception of films usually revolves around US box office take. If we’re talking worldwide gross, strange things happen — like Tin Tin being a runaway smash hit — that failed to earn its popular oscar-laden production team even a best animated feature nod. I don’t think Sasha or any Oscar blogger needs to explain why worldwide gross is usually neglected.
@ Dane M
Tin Tin is not a good example. It was not nominated because of mo-cap. Nothing to do with anything else. And, anyway, they bumped it (along with the bad Cars 2) out to nominate two foreign films that virtually nobody has heard about in the U.S.
Everyone’s precious Hurt Locker changed everything.
Dane M
I guess you have a point. It might be because I’m not American that I find it strange only taking about the US box office because the films made so much more if you take in the worldwide box office. But the oscars are American, most of the voters are yanks so it makes sense that they focus on the US box office.
P.s. Was TinTin ever expected to make much money in the US? As far as I understand the books are not nearly as beloved in the US as they are in Europe.
I still think they thought it would be a hit based on the technology they were using for it plus being able to use the names Spielberg and Peter Jackson on the same project. Im from the US and loved Tin Tin books when I was a kid!
What a useless. The movies isn’t up for best picture so why compare?
Also, War Horse already stands at $77 million. That’s the real financial runner-up.
Everyone’s precious Hurt Locker changed everything.
Actually that isn’t true. First off, I’m proud to say it was my precious. But the fact is that I did a quick rundown of production costs on the recent BP winners and most of them, except The Departed, and one other were $15, $20 million movies. The only difference with Hurt Locker is that it only made back a little more than its production costs. Same with the Departed, though, just on a larger scale. The Artist is in keeping with recent winners – also The Descendants and Moneyball….
So what exactly is the argument to go back to 5 or 10? Why is 9 so bad? I’m confused.
Thank the lord there are still 2 movies in the dragon tattoo trilogy that mr. fincher will hopefully direct and that gives us the opportunity to move on from past Oscar debacles and have an endless string of the maestro’s masterpieces in the pipeline! House of Cards! 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea! Cleopatra! more Lisbeth Salander! This is why Awards Daily will remain my go-to movie destination for the next decade!!
Well, yes, the Best Picture hasn’t been a big-budget film since, what, the post-Miramax, post-LOTR phase? Once The Hurt Locker won, though (not that Avatar should have won), it felt like AMPAS more than ever was saying that box office doesn’t mean shit. But nothing really new, just more of the same.
I agree with Sasha. It`s not really The Hurt Locker who changed and I don`t buy this “Oscar doesn`t care about Box Office“. It`s too simplistic to say such things. There are many other factors involved with this: the rise of HBO that made adults stay more at home, the change of the Oscars to february. In the past two years, half of the movies made more than 100 million dollars but… did they make such money because of the awards? Did they nominate them because of box office? Or it was because of their qualities? Each case is a different case… generalizations should not be used to explain those things.
And if you look at the Box Office, The Hurt Locker is definitely not a typical Best Picture winner. But if you look at the thematic, it was the most typical Oscar movie that year. The Academy usually goes with the film they think are the most important, the one who deals with “noble“issues. And The Hurt Locker was the great film made about a recent and important issue.
I’m sorry, but this lavish praise you’re giving “Dragon Tattoo” is just baffling to me, Sasha. From almost every standpoint, I find it to be completely unremarkable. Direction, editing, script, neither really stood out for me. Fincher seemed to be on autopilot with this one, much like Spielberg w/ War Horse. The only things that stood out for me were Mara’s performance and the score (though the way Mara’s and Craig’s story-lines ran parallel to each other was well edited and paced). As far as I’m concerned, “Zodiac” is the last word on serial killer movies. This one had nothing to say. Violence against women, the various roles that women play, the inherent cruelty in the world, if those are the themes, none of it was said in any way that was interesting, which would be fine if the filmmaking was compelling, which it isn’t. I could understand the praise for “Social Network” around these parts (though even that film was overrated), but this just doesn’t make sense to me. How could a film like this be considered better than “Drive,” which also isn’t very layered, but is a showcase in artful entertainment. Also note that I’m not trying to pick a fight. I am genuinely curious.
I’m a bit surprised at the low box office returns for “Hugo”.
Didn’t it cost a bazillion dollars to produce?
The 11 nominations should help to recoup its costs, but I read somewhere that this film (financially) has not done all that well for the studio and is in the “red”. If any best film nominee needs an Oscar “push” to make more money, it’s this one.
@ Keifer
Almost every film produced is in the red when you consider the Box Office. The studios get a LOT of money later, with the DVD/Blu-Ray sales, the TV contracts… Box Office doesn`t mean very much in the studio economics itself. The theatrical release is more of an exposition to sell license rights (toys, games, etc.), DVD/ Blu-Ray sales, tv contracts, etc.
The theatrical release is more of an exposition to sell license rights (toys, games, etc.)
Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, backpack and tool belt.
Words With Friends With Benefits.
Shame/BK Whooper tie-in (Have it Your Way) (add Tossed Salad for just $1)
pretty sure Hitchcock’s estate gets a percentage from Angry Birds.
I’m not quite sure how you came up with the idea that “Dragon Tattoo” was done in by the voting system. The only difference from previous years, as we’ve stated before, was that the cutoffs for redistribution were different (it needed to get 1% of the #1 votes at first). Just as before, redistribution occurred, which means that 2nd/3rd place votes mattered.
Moreover, the guild that uses the Academy’s own preferential ballot system (the PGA) had “Dragon Tattoo” in its Top 10.
You can say that they should have had 10 spots, but returning to the old system wouldn’t have helped Dragon Tattoo fare any better. And five nominees certainly wouldn’t have improved its chances.
(And this is coming from someone who prefers TGWTDT to five of the nine Best Picture nominees.)
^And of course the other important cutoff in the new system was the “5%=nominee” one. Other that, it’s essentially the same old voting system.
Ryan,
you should read read The Hollywood Economics. It`s an amazing book that got a 2.0 edition released in the end of january. It helps us to look at the movies from a different angle. And there`s actually a new section about The Hurt Locker/ Avatar. And you should read the WHOLE sentence and not put only a part of it. TGWTDT will get a LOT more money with the DVD/ Blu-Rays, license for TV…
I have this feeling in the pit of my stomach that Sasha is going to harp on “Dragon” all year long like she did all last year with “The Social Network” Heck, she’s still shrill about “Social Network.” I think it gives her the “warm fuzzies” to rip the academy electorate apart.
It’s a bore.
The Hollywood ECONOMIST. And the only purpose of my sentence was to defend Hugo from something that people say all the time (about its box office), which looks like the top defended film in Awards Daily.
Whether or not Dragon Tattoo was done in by the voting system (I still haven’t seen it and can’t speak to its merits though I’m a big Fincher fan), I really wish the Academy would go back to just five nominees. Being a BP nominee was a bigger deal, there were less films with no chance to win sniping votes from real contenders, and the whole ordeal was less cluttered. Who the hell would vote for ELAIC? The Blind Side? They upped it to 10 because the Dark Knight was snubbed. But HP got snubbed with the current system in place so the populist films are still getting ignored. Go back to five!
Probably more due to the fact that most people don’t consider the final Harry Potter to be anywhere near The Dark Knight in terms of quality. Let’s see how next year shakes out…there are a lot of major releases.
One wonders if the Academy will be “burnt out” on nominating Peter Jackson’s Middle Earth films or if The Hobbit (if it’s truly magical) will be another easy Oscar favorite. I for one would love to see Sir Ian McKellen’s Gandalf or Serkis’ Gollum (in my dreams) get some acting love.
It would be crazy to see Jackson go 4/4 with Tolkien adaptations, for sure, but I have high hopes and the trailer did not disappoint (for me anyway).
Wow, you’re too annoying and biased to have this much clout. At least last year your Fincher-centered obsession was warranted. Talk about something else already.
As good as parts of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” were (I have no problem whatsoever with the five nominations it actually got), I can’t understand why anyone would think it was one of the absolute best of the year. Sure, this lineup of BP nominees is weaker than usual, but just because Dragon Tattoo may be better than War Horse or ELIC doesn’t mean it’s one of the best of the year.
The significance of HP is its complementary relationship with the books and other media. Remarkable achievement. Nothing under consideration this year comes close….. makes this years Oscar small and quaint…. inbred.
Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, backpack and tool belt.
I’m sure you can get those as part of the H&M clothing line.
When The Hurt Locker is nominated, box office doesn’t matter because it is the lowest grossing Best Picture nominee ever. But if Dragon Tattoo isn’t nominated, box office matters.
I just Albert Nobbs today–wow did I love that film! It had me riveted from the get-go. It’s my new favourite film that was released last year. I can see why the Academy might not have gone for it for Best Pic–it’s a very challenging film in a lot of ways. But it’s the type of film I love to champion. I would love it if Glenn Close pulled an upset for this one.
“The trick is not minding.”
Clearly you can’t practice what you preach.
Is limping past 100 million really that impressive? Didn’t it cost 90 million to make? And the marketing for it must have cost millions. I could not turn on a channel without seeing a commercial for it.
Well The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1 has made $281 Million Domestic and $421 Million overseas for a total of $702 Million world wide. I’m not happy with some of the films nominated either but this box office argument is weak. “A SEPARATION” has made almost no money and I would have no problems seeing that nominated for Best Picture.
Isn’t there some rule that a movie has to double it’s production budget (local + internatinal grosses) to break even?
Dragon Tattoo is at that point now and I don’t think they’re gonna add a lot more to it, so for a remake that was supposed to be a blockbuster (why else remake it, since the movies are rather similar), it’s box office run can only be described as disappointing, hardly a big hit or a success.
Oddly enough, The Artist is the movie that is actually making a profit.
wow, Dragon Tattoo scraped past 100 million after being in theatres for over 1 and a half months. Plus in 2012, 100 million doesn’t mean that much, at least it doesn’t mean what it used to. And this idea that it’s Oscar prospects would have improved had it made 100 million by the time of nomination balloting, is just off; does it mean that Cowboys and Aliens would have been nominated just because it made 100 million? No.
I don’t know what it’s like in the States with rating enforcement, but I know plenty of kids that really want to see TGWTDT – but can’t. Post theatrical release will be bigger than usual I think.
Disclaimer: the kids are my nieces and nephews and their friends that have read the books, and not my circle of friends.
@keifer
Hugo cost upwards of $170 million to produce and has only brought in $60 million at the box office which qualifies for the 2nd biggest flop of year, behind only Mars needs Moms.
There are two possibilities here:
1) Someone expected Marty to make a movie that would generate enough box office to at least break even
2) Someone ok’d a $170 million film that only film nerds could enjoy …. without a care in the world over how much money was lost
I don’t know about you, but if I finance a film to the tune of $170 million bucs, I’m expecting a real crowd pleaser with broad appeal. Hugo is clearly not that type of film.
On the other hand, it’s equally hard to believe that someone allowed Marty to make a film only film dorks could love for $170 million.
In Hugo’s case, the box office is indicative of how poorly received it’s been by the general public.
Anyone who spends $170 million on a passion project has got to have a screw loose
It’s difficult to believe that those involved with the film thought they had a blockbuster on their hands.
Well Sasha,
Girl with the dragon tattoo
- didn’t have a stellar performace (much higher production costs than Moneyball, Artist, Midnight in Paris for example)
- is a remake from an also very respected film
- has a solid metacritic (which is ALWAYS used as an argument for films that “loose”) score of 71, which is way below the great movies of the year
- came out very late
so, although I had it predicted as a nominee, this kinda makes sense.
We really should stop bothering about the so-called “mistakes” the Academy makes. Very often people start overdoing this.
Marc R pretty much said everything that I was thinking on the topic, but I’ll say a bit more: WHAT is so great about Fincher’s movie? WHATWHATWHAT? It was slickly made, sharply edited, decently acted and occasionally sexy, but way too long and basically trashy.
Whoa it really stunned me when Harry Potter’s last film made over $1.3 billion and broke alot of box office records and had universal critical acclaim.
Also great work for Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
Maybe the Oscar pics for Best Picture should be
1. Hugo
2. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2
3. Tree of Life
4. The Descendants
5. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
6. The Help
7. War Horse
8. Fast Five
9. Midnight in Paris
10. The Artist
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is so much like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, except maybe for the score and of course the English language. I’m thinking that Academy voters who were likely to put The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo at #1 in their ballots already saw The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and thought, “well, there must be other films than The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” and picked another film instead. I for one prefer The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo over The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo because the setting and the language matched. Acting-wise, there’s really not much separating The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Noomi and Rooney were both fantastic as were Michael and Daniel. Now, the cinematography, art direction, and even costume design and make-up of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo greatly resemble those of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. So you see, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo might just as well be The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo dubbed in English. And maybe because The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo got zero Oscar recognition last year that it would be too much of an injustice to nominate The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo for best picture.
By the best objective measure (critic’s choices for the best films of the year)Dragon Tattoo didn’t deserve a nomination. It only finished #19.
Drive, Melancholia have the biggest gripes.
You left out The Iron Lady, which has also (just like The Artist) croseed the $20 million domestic box office now!
By the best objective measure (critic’s choices for the best films of the year)
best? objective? um, no and no.
for one thing, the critics choice awards own nominations for BP have no relations whatsoever to their own numerical rankings
but if their squirrely numbers mean anything at all:
84 The Girl with Dragon Tattoo
80 War Horse
78 The Tree of Life
78 Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
So the BFCA says The Tree of Life is considerably less valuable than The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
They say The Tree of Life is pretty much of identical equal value to Extremely Loud
Maybe you agree with that. and if you do, that tells us a lot.
The Help is at almost $170 million (so a little more than $165 million as noted).
I don’t see what relevance the box-office take of Dragon Tattoo is in the Oscar conversation. As a Fincher fan, I’m glad the film has been a commercial success and that this will free him up to get other projects going. I’ve said before that the most depressing future for Fincher fans is one in which he is beholden to this franchise – I sincerely hope directing duties are passed on to someone else if the other novels are adapted. Dragon Tattoo was good, not great, a minor work in its director’s canon, which possessed all of the technical mastery one would expect of Fincher but even he can only get so much from that material.
Both Zodiac and Fight Club, arguably still his two best films, barely made more than $35m in the US – the fact that Dragon Tattoo has made substantially more should indicate that it is merely closer to having the mass audience appeal of other genre works like Panic Room and nothing more. It is not in the Best Picture race because it is not only not an Oscar movie in terms of what we tend to think of as traditionally appealing to Academy tastes but because it really isn’t of a high enough quality. And I think Fincher would be the first person to agree.
If the Academy were going to recognise pulp, Drive would’ve been a far more deserving choice.
David Fincher doesn’t do anything he doesn’t want to do. If he does the sequels it is not b/c he is “tied down” to them….it will be b/c he chose to do them and wants to do them. If anything, it seems Fincher had more passion and obsession with TGWTDT than he did with TSN.
Whether there are five or ten nominations, Dragon Tattoo was not unfairly judged as there were at least a dozen superior films. It seems such a strange choice with which to criticise the Academy for. There are clearly undeserving films in the Best Picture race, but surely there would be a case for Shame, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Drive, Melancholia, Young Adult, Martha Marcy May Marlene and A Separation to name but a handful long before Dragon Tattoo came up in the discussion. And that’s coming from someone who’s a massive Fincher fan.
It received a lot of Guild noms because it is technically impressive across the board (though Fincher’s directing nomination ahead of Malick, McQueen, Refn or Alfredson seems bizarre), but the film is a case of being less than the sum of its individual parts.
Girl with the Dragon Tattoo tops $100 million dollars at the box office. The film is a travesty. The Help is one of the best movies of the year. I can’t wait to see Midnight in Paris, The Artist and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.
no ryan, i am referring to the top ten lists
http://criticstop10.com/
as always, i value what critics say. they see more film than most of us, many have even studied film or have a great appreciation for film and have made it their life’s work. over 770 vcritics listed theit top 10 and this is what resulted. you can nitpick here and there, but i think most of us would agree that this list is about as good as it gets objectively speaking.
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Drive, and Take Shelter all deserved Best Picture nominations over The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. So if we really want to talk about snubs, take your pick of those three.
And I say this as an unabashed Fincher fan.
Fincher’s career very much follows the “one for them, one for me” pattern – for every Fight Club there is a Panic Room, for every Social Network there is a Dragon Tattoo. Hollywood likes Fincher doing serial killer movies in much the same way they like Scorsese doing gangster pictures, though both are obviously capable of much more.
Fincher knew Dragon Tattoo was good credit with a major studio and a solid commercial return ensures he has some collateral to play with next time out. He’s put his touch on it, but its not as if he elevated the material or conveyed any real personal affinity for it. It was a good professional job, nothing more, nothing less.
Although I really do look forward to his adaptation of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
Fincher shoudl have made Sweeney Todd, not Tim Burton.
On remarks regarding Fincher on autopilot, I’d point to Jim Emerson’s formalism study of Dragon Tattoo for the Sun Times. No director in Hollywood uses the frame with the psychological depth the way Fincher does.
To subscribers of the auteuer theory Fincher’s adaption brings up interesting phenomenon of whether a director can take a work of existing cultural relevance and make it personal.
Some interesting things the film touches on: the portrayal of a non-monogamous relationship. Violent rape which subconsciously addresses our reaction/non reaction to violence general especially with it’s non celebratory revenge scene and climax (where Drive fails). The contrast of wealth and poverty’s treatment of women. The casting of James Bond that seems dependant on stronger women and needs to be saved by a girl twice(I’ll take that genius film genre subversion over the Artist’s gimmicky pastiche).
As the critics of Tattiville have written “… Dragon Tattoo is poised to become neither a break-out hit nor a mass critical darling. Instead, Fincher’s latest looks as if it will occupy, judging by the popular consensus, a relatively minor position in the filmmaker’s corpus moving forward – which of course will provide the perfect position for future rediscovery and upward reconsideration.”
No Oscars for Hitch, Welles or Kubrick. They each had films that had to be rediscovered.
@Marc: I vaguely remember you posting a comment on the similar composition of shots between Lisbeth being raped and then Lisbeth showering (or something of that nature) that really proved how layered Fincher’s work remains even in an ostensibly pulp film. His personal vision combined with Mara made for 150 of the most engaging minutes I spent in a theatre last year.
Minus the budgets
Harry Potter: $131 m. Total = $1.07 billion
The Help: $144 m. Total = $180 million
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: $1 million. Total = $100.4 million
Moneyball: $25 m. Total = $57 million
The Descendants: $46 million Total = $91 million
War Horse: $11 m. Total = $52 million
Hugo: -$87.7 million Total = -$53 million
Midnight in Paris: $39 million Total = $131 million
Tree of Life: -$18.6 million Total = $22 million
The Artist: $6.2 million Total = $35 million
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: -$12,667,420
NO OFFENSE
Tree of Life never even went wide. Pathetic.