Via Box Office Mojo, The Numbers, Deadline, and other sources:Despite a strong start with higher than expected numbers from midnight showings and a well attended Friday night, Warner Bros. saw its "Green Lantern" flicker and dim by the end of the weekend. The third superhero film to arrive in 2011, following "Thor" and "X-Men: First Class", "Green Lantern" was the least attended opening weekend of the three, starting at a $52.3 million clip. Most films would be thrilled to land that sum, but everything has perspective and Warner Bros. are hugely disappointed in the diminishing returns.
A strong midnight to strong Friday to lessening Saturday to dismal Sunday can be attributed to a lot of different factors. Initially, the film was ravaged by critics and although CinemaScore provided a B+ rating from audience members, the fact is that people stopped coming after the first eyes got a look at the final cut. That pesky word-of-mouth can be a helluva thing sometimes.
Nikki Finke at Deadline has reported that there was a great deal of behind-the-scenes consternation by the marketing department, as they were only able to see 70% of the final cut two weeks prior to release day. Constant tinkering and refining of visual effects were cited as a blaming factor, but after audiences responded dismally to the teasers as far back as the fall of 2010, a push-and-pull developed with Warner Bros. and DC Entertainment on whether to focus on Ryan Reynolds solely in the marketing or draw in the supporting alien characters to define a new brand. What resulted was a bit of both strategies put into place which, it is speculated, led to confusion amongst those interested but not familiar with the source material.
Good marketing/bad marketing/late delivery of final product...ultimately, the film is just not good. Rotten Tomatoes assigns a 21% ranking for the film, which trails dozens of points behind "Thor" and "X-Men" earlier this year. Ultimately, all of the drafts and rewrites and rewrites again, along with the problematic post-production woes are what contributed to the film's precipitous slide from Friday through Sunday. Typically, with this opening Warner Bros. could expect a film to gross $150-$175 million; however, tracking and trending may place this closer to the $120-$130 million range, which would require huge worldwide numbers to make the film profitable.
Chilly penguins freeze up the box office, there is no actual art in getting by it seems, and a Tree sprouts while Paris suffers a minor setback. All of this and the Top 40 rankings, as of Monday afternoon, after the cut!
