Scott Pilgrim vs. The World received a decent amount of good reviews, had a great advertising campaign and received a decent amount of buzz at Comic-Con, so what the hell happened?
The move opened this past weekend to a rather dismal $10.5 million, that’s compared to the films $60 million budget.
The movie, which stars Michael Cera as Scott Pilgrim is based around the idea that Pilgrim falls in love with a girl and must defeat her 7 evil ex’s so they can date.
Perhaps it was too difficult for comic book fans to put Michael Cera in the place of Pilgrim, even though I thought he fit the bill perfectly or perhaps the male bravado was eaten up this weekend by the guy flick ‘The Expendables’ but honestly it’s hard to tell where this film went downhill.
Another possibility is that the movie didn’t do a good job of targeting their demographics. It was a movie for guys, but not your typical action flick and while it offers romance, it’s not your typical chick flick, basically the movie was in limbo, trying to figure out what it was and where it should go. Pilgrim is also a jerk to begin with at the start of the film, becomes a little bit less of a jerk as it goes on, but ultimately he doesn’t have mass appeal triggered by redemption which often plays well to a larger viewer base.
Movies need to define themselves so they can attract a demographic that will bring in an audience and then that audience can bring in their friends, Cera simply doesn’t have the star power yet to carry a movie on his own and the premise behind Scott Pilgrim didn’t have the appeal for a larger audience, at least with $10.5 million in the U.S. on the opening weekend the movie should at least break even over time.
Wait, Micheal Cera as a jerk? I don’t buy it.
See Shana that was my issue as stated when writing this post. Even if he has redeeming features, Cera is always the lovable guy. Youth In Revolt largely failed for that reason and it was an “alter ego” being the jerk in that case.
The story of a guy that has to fight some girl’s 7 exes just to date her may have turned off people. No girl is worth dealing with her exes, let alone 7 of them.
Just date another girl. End of story.
The majority of the sales should have come from Toronto, where the movie takes place and the comic is very popular, however I know that I was able to see the movie two times from free pre-screenings that were easily obtained.
This was also the case with over 20 of my friends and I got the impression the entire city had already seen it a good 2-3 times before the movies release and thus did not even see it when it mattered.
The reasons you’ve given for why the film bombed would only have become apparent to movie-goers once they had *already paid to go see it*.
The film is doing badly at the box office, because people *aren’t paying up to go see it*. So, since the issue is “what has turned people off going to see Scott Pilgrim”? in the first place, comments such as: “Pilgrim is also a jerk to begin with at the start of the film, becomes a little bit less of a jerk as it goes on, but ultimately he doesn’t have mass appeal triggered by redemption which often plays well to a larger viewer base.” are wholly irrelevance since no-one could know this without having seen the film.
My thoughts on why the film has bombed is that 90% of the movie-going public are dumb-asses. I’ve seen The Expendables, and the popularity of this film absolutely proves my point.
Also, I think you missed a trick here. The title of your article clearly should have been: Box Office Bob-Omb.