Earlier this week, lost somewhere in the shuffle of all the furor over whether or not Kick-Ass was too violent, was another story circling Lionsgate’s indie gem. Movie news sites, ever eager to be the first with the news of the weekend winners and losers long ago abandoned the habit of reporting the weekend actuals and instead have gone with the much less accurate option of accepting the studio estimates as the basis for their Sunday Night stories. Yes, everyone is sure to mention in the article that these are just estimates – but this week was one of THOSE weeks; a week in which one studio fudged their numbers in order to milk one last week in the spotlight while damning another to a series of articles on its disappointing figures.
The “cheater” this week was Dreamworks, who fudged their numbers on How to Train Your Dragon, to a nice, even $20 million, nudging it just ahead of all the publicized estimates of this weekend’s Kick-Ass debut. In what looked like a photo finish to a number of us in the press – what with Dragon having such a nice clean round number next to everyone else’s more realistic ones – other reporters were quick to announce Dragon’s return to be the #1 film of the week, while proclaiming Kick-Ass a failure.
But that wasn’t the real story. Monday morning, when all the tallies finally rolled in, one company had underestimated its figures by $75,000, while another had over-inflated its numbers by nearly $400,000. When the dust settled, How to Train Your Dragon wasn’t number one at all; instead it was number two behind the weekend’s success story, Kick-Ass. There were a few print corrections, but no real fuss made. After all, everyone had already clicked the story and discussion had already begun about why Kick-Ass did so poorly. And who cares about the Box Office on Monday afternoon when you’ve already read that story the night before?
Dreamworks cheated, but they were far from the first. This story plays out every few months and history rarely gets rectified. I recall a few years ago when Warner Bros. pulled this stunt two weeks in a row, overinflating the numbers on Speed Racer to make it look like it beat What Happens in Vegas week after week, when in fact it was the other way around. Fox was reporting their numbers on the level, WB wasn’t. And the stories simply were run week after week, with the lesser members of the press mentioning various iterations of “Speed Racer tops What Happened in Vegas for the second week in a row!” Never happened.
My problem isn’t simply that this happens every once in a while – I can forgive the occasional over-estimation – but it is happening with greater and greater frequency as Studio PR folks pull this trick out of their bag regularly to eek a tad bit more juice out of the press before their film gets put on the news cycle’s backburner. I’ve seen it half a dozen times this year already, with more flip-flopping positions in the top 10 than the Kama-sutra. People need to be a bit more wary of this practice – especially within the industry – and call the studios out when they do it. This weekend the #1 film in the country got body-checked for underperforming when instead it took the weekend. It deserved better than that.
