September 1, 2003

If The Facts of Life taught us nothing else, it was that you must take the bad with the good in life. And that casting directors love George Clooney…but I’m getting off the subject. In order to appreciate the Finding Nemos, Freaky Fridays and Pirates of the Caribbeans of summer box office (i.e. the Disney releases), we also must denigrate the films that come up short. There is a danger in doing this because one man’s feast is another man’s famine. The number one and number two films selected below both made more money in domestic receipts than the other three films on this list combined. That makes it somewhat arbitrary to determine them as greater disappointments than their counterparts. But the reality in this business is that expectations kill. If a studio is going to spend $30 to $40 million positioning a film as one of the tent pole releases of summer, the ceiling for unrealistic expectations is raised. A prime example of this is The Matrix Reloaded, which has made $730 million in worldwide receipts, yet many cynics are inexplicably calling it a disappointment. Thankfully, BOP caters to a more intellectual and informed clientele, but we still expect to get more than a few cards and letters for the film we have chosen as the most disappointing summer release of 2003.

5. Alex and Emma

4. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

3. Down with Love

2. Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle

Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle should have been huge. The fact that it wasn’t is one of those enigmas that could drive you crazy if you spent too much time thinking about it. Maybe it’s that the Demi Moore Loves Ashton Kutcher publicity machine worked a bit too well, taking the starlet well beyond a point of saturation weeks before her epic return into theaters. There is also the fact that Moore, the outsider, was played up more heavily in the marketing than Drew Barrymore, Lucy Liu and Diaz, the recognizable stars. That might have been an error in judgment.

Finally, it’s possible if not likely that when making the sequel, no one at Sony ever took a moment to consider if movie goers really wanted one. Once might have been enough for T&A action with a comedy twist. Judging from the similarly disappointing receipts of Bad Boys 2, a title that narrowly avoided making this list, and several other sequels, this appears to be the underlying theme of the entire summer. Cinema buffs appeared to rise up en masse and say, “Don’t give us another movie unless we ask for it.” And it’s this thought process that victimizes Charlie’s Angels, leaving their $97.7 million in domestic receipts as the Rubik’s Cube of 2003 summer box office. Don’t feel too bad for the hotties, though. Full Throttle has been huge overseas, earning even more than the original. That means we might be seeing yet another unwanted film in the franchise

1. The Hulk

Yikes, did we really say that? What were we smoking that day? It was later passed along to us that Charles Ealy, an entertainment critic from the Dallas Morning News, rightly poked some fun at us. His comments were: “The Hulk, starring Eric Bana as the man who turns green and mean when his temper is tested, grossed about $62 million, which isn't bad. But it's a tad embarrassing for the "leading Web site for box office analysis" to be off $24 million, don't you think?” The man makes a fair point about the risks inherent in our Web site’s policy of contacting over 500 media sources across North America to share our analysis of the major tent pole films each season. When we miss this badly, we open ourselves up to a lot of mocking and rightfully so.

This also nicely dovetails into the other issue with expectations. An argument could be made that since the staff of BOP had such lofty visions of box office performance for The Hulk, we are being unfairly harsh in judging the film’s box office receipts relative to what we expected them to be. That’s a valid point to an extent. We certainly try to avoid bias whenever possible, but it is human nature for these prejudices to creep in from time to time. Fortunately, in the case of The Hulk, the situation is relatively black and white. Consider that Daredevil, a movie based upon a virtually unknown comic book character, managed $102.5 million in domestic receipts. Factoring in international box office as well, Daredevil attained $173.8 million in worldwide receipts. Even ignoring the performances of X-2: X-Men United and Spider-Man, it’s still obvious that the most unknown of comic book heroes can open a movie as long as the studio marketing it handles the advertising campaign correctly.

So how did The Hulk, a well known character from a popular 1970s television show and animated cartoon, barely surpassed Daredevil’s numbers? The CGI has been kicked around so often that it feels like I should be flagged for unnecessary roughness to even mention it. What doesn’t get discussed enough is what a poor job Universal did in protecting the animation. It should have been readily apparent early on in the process that creating an animated version of everyone’s favorite tortured green giant was proving difficult. In the studio’s rush to release footage to get fanboys hyped for the production, they ignored the very obvious concern that Comic Book Guy on The Simpsons is funny for a reason. This is a group of people who are notoriously abrasive when turned against a project, and butchering The Hulk was the quickest way to accomplish that task. BOP made the same miscalculation that Universal did as we expected people to show up anyway, but the reality is that once the damage was done, it was impossible to put the genie back in the bottle. The only salvation would have been a great film, and Ang Lee couldn’t deliver on that promise either. The cold, hard truth here is that The Hulk is the most disappointing summer tent pole release since Godzilla in 1998.