The summer box office has been one of the hottest topics of conversation among film fans of late, but mostly for reasons no one expected. Two independent horror films, Backrooms and Obsession, doing so incredibly well is the biggest one. A Star Wars movie, The Mandalorian and Grogu, failing to perform is another. A third might be that the new film, Masters of the Universe, appears to be a disaster, but one of the executives behind the project says otherwise.
Masters of the Universe, which reportedly cost about $200 million to make before marketing, grossed just over $29 million on its opening weekend in the U.S. and another $25 million overseas. A $54 million opening weekend globally, of which only half goes directly to the studio, seems bad, but in a statement published by Variety, the chief of domestic distribution for Amazon MGM, Kevin Wilson, looked at the film’s opening as something more. “[Director] Travis Knight and the entire cast and filmmaking team have delivered something truly special, and this opening is exactly the kind of critical first moment that validates our holistic distribution strategy—building awareness and engagement that will carry well beyond the theatrical window,” Wilson said.
There are obviously a few ways you can take this. One is that Wilson is trying to spin an unfortunate situation. The film, unequivocally, underperformed. Another is that finally releasing the film in theaters does open up opportunities that weren’t there before. Things like additional merchandising, licensing, new streaming subscribers, potential sequels, etc. All of those things would look much sweeter if Masters of the Universe made two or three times what it did, but it’s still an accurate statement. Releasing a movie is a great way to kick off a larger campaign. Even if not everyone saw it, chances are they at least heard about it.
It’s also important to point out that executives like Wilson look at data all the time. They’re not reacting to this in a vacuum. There’s almost no way that, at a certain point in the past few months, Amazon MGM didn’t run the numbers, look at the competition, and know something like this was coming. They probably couldn’t have predicted Backrooms and Obsession would be such a hit, but they had to know Scary Movie was going to win the weekend, and that awareness of this 1980s toy line wasn’t massive.
And so, you give it a positive spin and see what happens. We understand. What do you think about the reaction?
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