Disney Disappoints at Box Office

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Greetings from New York where it’s both the heat and the humidity. Have you ever had a person you know pretty well but you keep getting their name wrong? Happens to me all the time. As a result I have reasonably close friends I’ve know for years who will always be “Bud,” “Dude,” or “My man.” Females are most often “babe,” making me both an idiot and a sexist.

I bring this up because I seem to be stuck in a mental rut of transposing “barrels” and “gallons” when I write about BP (BP). Being accountable to the point of self-abuse, I can offer no excuse other than “seriously, I know the difference.” There are 42 gallons in a barrel, making gallons the “big number” when calculating the spill and barrels the smaller one. I can even use the terms correctly in a phrase. For instance, I buy gas in gallons, rather than barrels, despite having a Hummer. When I go to the grocery store I buy a gallon of milk. I couldn’t fit a barrel of milk into a paper or plastic grocery bag.

Borrowing from my top-notch social strategy, from here forward I'll dispense with the units of measurement and just use “a lot” or “enough to cover the entire Gulf Coast” when referring to the size of the spill. The technique isn’t optimal but it’s more effective than the Top Kill effort.

Here’s what I’m watching in lieu of self flagellating:
 

• DreamWorks' (DWA) Shrek... We’re Beating the Franchise to Death proved it has legs at the box office. The Ogre-rich 3-D movie raked in some $55.7 million in its second weekend, down about 40% from last week but better than expectations. By comparison the equally tired Sex and the City 2 debuted with $37 million in the box office. Comparisons are being drawn between How to Train Your Dragon, which opened soft but has gone on to generate more than $200 million.
  
  
• While on the topic of box office, as a Disney (DIS) shareholder I’m a bit embarrassed to report that the company’s Prince of Persia took in $30 million. Assuming about a 50% per week drop off in Prince box office sales, the movie is on pace to recoup Disney’s $200 million production cost roughly never. Who would have thought an adaptation of an '80s video game featuring the very white bred Jake Gyllenhaal as Persian royalty would be rejected by the American movie-going public? (Answer: every single human being on earth who doesn’t work for Disney).
  
  
• Why does Hollywood keep adapting video games into films? Because the dollars and margins in games are much, much better for hits and Hollywood wants to capture that mojo. Consider current number-one game Red Dead Redemption. Released last month, Red Dead sold just under a million and a half units its opening week despite being sold out almost immediately. At 50 to 60 bucks a pop, that’s more than $70 million to $86 million in sales for Take-Two (TTWO), which finally has a follow-up hit to the Grand Theft Auto franchise. Considering it costs almost nothing to produce incremental game discs and none of the voice actors get a cut of the revenue, video games are pretty attractive, even without a new generation of consoles on the horizon.
  
  
• Concluding with my long-delayed review of Shrek’s final chapter, it’s sufficient to say I wish I would have gone to see the Dragon movie again. Shrek’s story is a rip-off of It’s a Wonderful Life with the green ogre being granted his wish of experiencing life as it would be had he not been born. The mid-life crisis thing didn’t so much resonate with the Macke children who are 4 and 7. Four-year-old Superfly Macke was baffled by Shrek wishing for life without his wife and kids, repeatedly asking his old man why Shrek didn’t have a family anymore. It’s a tough question so I went with the truth: “Shrek doesn’t like his wife and kids anymore, buddy. He wishes they didn’t exist. Sometimes that happens to daddys... But not me”. Based on his reaction, Superfly doesn’t seem to be quite ready for that kind of honesty.

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