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It was a big holiday weekend at the box office, with three films each raking in at least $45 million from Christmas Day through Sunday.
“The Hobbit” led the way ($54.5 million), followed by “Into the Woods” ($46.1 million) and “Unbroken” ($46 million). And two other films, “American Sniper” and “Selma,” did extremely well in limited release.
But the talk continues to be about “The Interview,” the off-again, on-again release from Sony that debuted last week in selected theaters and on platforms such as You Tube and X-Box.
Lucas Shaw, who writes about the entertainment business for Bloomberg News, spoke with The Frame's Oscar Garza about the film's financial performance.
The online release for "The Interview" did about $15 million in business, according to Sony. Add that to the $2.8 million it did in theaters. Does that add up to a good — if unconventional — opening for Sony?
Yeah, considering the unusual circumstances, it’s pretty good — bordering on great. There was a point where you had none of the major theater chains showing it, so Sony had to make a deal with 331 independently-owned theaters, many of which have smaller theaters than the big guys. So, getting close to $20 million is a good start.
We’re talking about grosses here. For theatrical releases, studios typically split the box office 50/50 with theater owners. Is that also true for the online platforms?
I believe that Sony gets more than that 50 percent split, but it’s unclear especially because this is such a strange circumstance. I don’t know what the specifics are of the deal between Sony and Google. You know, Google [YouTube] and Microsoft [X-Box] are the two online stores who released the movie at first. They kind of stuck their neck out, [so] they may have asked for a more favorable split.
There’s a rough formula in Hollywood that says a movie’s box office performance has to double the film’s combined production and marketing costs. What is that cost for Sony on this film and is there any chance it will ever make money on “The Interview”?
Sony’s cost is $70 to $80 million. It was a $44 million production budget and then the marketing could be anywhere from $25 to $40 million. There’s little chance that Sony makes its money back on this. People assume that they will lose money on it, but perhaps not as much as we all thought a week ago.
So this is really, in some ways, just a strategy to reduce the damage?
Yeah, in many respects for the top executives at Sony, they don’t get criticized as much because they actually managed to get the movie out there and they will not have to lose as much [revenue]. They will still lose a lot of money in having to reset their computer systems and pay for a lot of their employees’ security and settle potential lawsuits. So the cost of the hack will be really high, but the cost of the particular movie has gone down a bit.
Sony was in some ways cornered into this release strategy, but does this have any ramifications for future online releases of major titles?
It may encourage people to experiment. It shows that if you have built a lot of interest in a movie that you can make some money selling it online, especially since it’s only available on only three outlets. I don’t think this will influence the release of "The Avengers" or "Star Wars" – no studio is going to do that because you make a lot more money if people pay to see it in theaters than they pay online.
There was also – reportedly – a lot of pirating of this movie once it got online. Is that just something that Sony assumed it was going to happen, that they could not control at all?
Yeah, once you put something online, especially because they didn’t work out a strategy for the movie overseas, there was no way of controlling it. In an ideal scenario, if you were going to do this, you’d make it available for rent or purchase in a bunch of other countries outside of the U.S. as well. They didn’t have time to work that in this case. A lot of this piracy does happen in other countries.