Brokeback Mountain Passes the $3 Million Mark

[eslgr8]

Posted: 12/19/05 at 3:04am

Still playing on I believe something like just 60 screens, Brokeback Mountain took in $2.36 million this weekend, entering the top 10 at #8, according to imdb.com The total gross is already $3.33 million. The drama averaged $34,783 per theater! There should be no doubt that this film will recoup its $12.5 million cost. I think it will hit $50 million, if not more, even if conservatives and homophobes stay away. And even if it only makes half of that, it's a money maker, with big DVD sales ahead as well, especially in areas where theaters shy away from showing the film. Maybe I'm too optimistic, but after all the nominations and awards with the "must see" buzz surrounding it...this movie is going to make lots of money!

Updated On: 12/19/05 at 03:04 AM

[paradox_error]

Posted: 12/19/05 at 5:17am

It's going to do really well in the European Market I think, as well as countries like New Zealand and Australia.

It's quite exciting how successful it is!

[luvtheEmcee]

Posted: 12/19/05 at 9:28am

When I went to see it last night, the show I planned to go to was sold out, so I went to a different movie theatre, and all but one of their showings was sold out, too. The theatre I saw it in was *the* biggest movie theatre I have ever seen in my life. I have no idea how many seats it had, but it was massive. And I think that was sold out, too.

That made me happy.

[FOAnatic]

Posted: 12/19/05 at 9:39am

It's only playing in one theatre in DC and it took me three days to finally get tickets.

But, man was it worth it!

[Patronus]

Posted: 12/19/05 at 10:36am

anjilly has been sick so we haven't felt like going out to the theatre but I am planning on seeing it Tuesday or Wednesday night if she is better.

[BlueWizard]

Posted: 12/19/05 at 11:27am

I'm FINALLY seeing it tonight.

As I've said, the marketing brains for BROKEBACK are geniuses. I thought it was foolish to have the movie on so few screens for so long (even less than a regular indie film), but it's creating palpable buzz with the sold out screenings and word of mouth. The momentum that's building is staggering, and I think it will carry the film well into the big award season.

Updated On: 12/19/05 at 11:27 AM

[eslgr8]

Posted: 12/19/05 at 11:46am

The L.A. Times reports how how well the movie is doing in "the burbs."

"It was the first time since Disney's animated "Pocahontas" in 1995 that a movie in fewer than 100 theaters cracked the top 10 box office ranking, according to tracking service Nielsen EDI Inc."


'Brokeback' finds a welcome in the 'burbs' Updated On: 12/19/05 at 11:46 AM

[RobbO]

Posted: 12/19/05 at 11:49am

blue, it's really not genius. it's standard marketing for a smaller, independent-type movie to open as brokeback has done. it is done just as you said, though, to create anticipation and a strong word of mouth campaign.

[eslgr8]

Posted: 12/19/05 at 11:51am

It may not be "genius," but this method has probably never been used as successfully before. $34,783 per theater. Amazing!
Updated On: 12/19/05 at 11:51 AM

[RobbO]

Posted: 12/19/05 at 11:53am

last week's per theatre gross was, i believe, a record but $35,000 (while spectacular) is not a record.

edit: it is, in fact, a record for a movie showing in such limited release. congrats!

Updated On: 12/20/05 at 11:53 AM

[BlueWizard]

Posted: 12/19/05 at 12:36pm

Here's an excerpt from a great editorial by Frank Rinch yesterday:


December 18, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
Two Gay Cowboys Hit a Home Run
By FRANK RICH

WHAT if they held a culture war and no one fired a shot? That's the compelling tale of "Brokeback Mountain." Here is a heavily promoted American movie depicting two men having sex - the precise sex act that was still a crime in some states until the Supreme Court struck down sodomy laws just two and a half years ago - but there is no controversy, no Fox News tar and feathering, no roar from the religious right. "Brokeback Mountain" has instead become the unlikely Oscar favorite, propelled by its bicoastal sweep of critics' awards, by its unexpected dominance of the far less highfalutin Golden Globes and, perhaps most of all, by the lure of a gold rush. Last weekend it opened to the highest per-screen average of any movie this year.

Those screens were in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco - hardly national bellwethers. But I'll rashly predict that the big Hollywood question posed on the front page of The Los Angeles Times after those stunning weekend grosses - "Can 'Brokeback Mountain' Move the Heartland?" - will be answered with a resounding yes. All the signs of a runaway phenomenon are present, from an instant parody on "Saturday Night Live" to the report that a multiplex in Plano, Tex., sold more advance tickets for the so-called "gay cowboy picture" than for "King Kong." "The culture is finding us," James Schamus, the "Brokeback Mountain" producer, told USA Today. "Grown-up movies have never had that kind of per-screen average. You only get those numbers when you're vacuuming up enormous interest from all walks of life."

In the packed theater where I caught "Brokeback Mountain," the trailers included a National Guard recruitment spiel, and the audience was demographically all over the map. The culture is seeking out this movie not just because it is a powerful, four-hankie account of a doomed love affair and is beautifully acted by everyone, starting with the riveting Heath Ledger. The X factor is that the film delivers a story previously untold by A-list Hollywood. It's a story America may be more than ready to hear a year after its president cynically flogged a legally superfluous (and unpassable) constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage for the sole purpose of whipping up the basest hostilities of his electoral base.

By coincidence, "Brokeback Mountain," a movie that is all the more subversive for having no overt politics, is a rebuke and antidote to that sordid episode. Whether it proves a movie for the ages or as transient as "Love Story," it is a landmark in the troubled history of America's relationship to homosexuality. It brings something different to the pop culture marketplace at just the pivotal moment to catch a wave.

[...]

Though "Brokeback Mountain" is not a western, it's been directed by Ang Lee with the austerity and languorous gait of a John Ford epic. These aesthetics couldn't be more country miles removed from "The Birdcage" or "Will & Grace." The audience is forced to recognize that gay people were fixtures in the red state of Wyoming (and every other corner of the country, too) long before Matthew Shepard and Mary Cheney were born. Without a single polemical speech, this laconic film dramatizes homosexuality as an inherent and immutable identity, rather than some aberrant and elective "agenda" concocted by conspiratorial "elites" in Chelsea, the Castro and South Beach, as anti-gay proselytizers would have it. Ennis and Jack long for a life together, not for what gay baiters pejoratively label a "lifestyle."

But in truth the audience doesn't have to be coerced to get it. This is where the country has been steadily moving of late. "Brokeback Mountain," a Hollywood product after all, is not leading a revolution but ratifying one, fleshing out - quite literally - what most Americans now believe. It's not for nothing that the proposed constitutional ban on same-sex marriage vanished as soon as the election was over. Polls show that a large American majority support equal rights for gay couples as long as the unions aren't labeled "marriage" - and given the current swift pace of change, that reservation, too, will probably fade in the next 5 to 10 years.

The history of "Brokeback Mountain" as a film project in itself crystallizes how fast the climate has shifted. Mr. McMurtry and Ms. Ossana bought the screen rights to the Proulx story after it was published in The New Yorker in 1997. That was the same year the religious right declared a fatwa on Disney because Ellen DeGeneres came out of the closet in her ABC prime-time sitcom. In the eight years it took "Brokeback Mountain" to overcome Hollywood's shilly-shallying and at last be made, the Disney boycott collapsed and Ms. DeGeneres's star rose. She's now a mainstream daytime talk-show host competing with Oprah. No one has forgotten she's a lesbian. No one cares.

ANOTHER startling snapshot of this progress can be found in a culture-war skirmish that unfolded just as "Brokeback Mountain" was arriving at the multiplex. The American Family Association of Tupelo, Miss., a leader in the 1997 anti-"Ellen" crusade, claimed this month that its threat of a boycott had led Ford to stop advertising its Jaguar and Land Rover lines in glossy gay magazines. Last week Ford, under fire from gay civil-rights organizations and no doubt many other mainstream customers, essentially told the would-be boycotters to get lost by publicly announcing that it would not only resume its Jaguar and Land Rover ads in gay publications, but advertise other brands in them as well.

As far as I can tell, the only blowhard in the country to turn up on television to declare culture war on "Brokeback Mountain" also has an affiliation with the American Family Association. By contrast, as Salon reported last week, other family-values ayatollahs have made a conscious decision to ignore the movie, lest they drum up ticket sales by turning it into a SpongeBob SquarePants cause célèbre. Robert Knight of Concerned Women for America imagined that the film might just go away if he and his peers stayed mum. Audiences "don't want to see two guys going at it," he told Salon. "It's that simple."

So he might wish. The truth is that the millions of moviegoers soon to swoon over the star-crossed gay cowboys of "Brokeback Mountain" can probably put up with the sight of "two guys going at it." It's the all too American tragedy of what happens to these men afterward that neither our hearts nor consciences can so easily shake.

[eslgr8]

Posted: 12/19/05 at 9:34pm

Frank Rich is a spectacular straight ally of the gay community, and this powerful column shows why. Thanks to my Canadian friend BW for drawing my attention to it.

[BlueWizard]

Posted: 12/19/05 at 9:37pm

I just came back from BROKEBACK! I'm thinking about writing a review, but I feel everything has already been said about the movie.

[ShbrtAlley44]

Posted: 12/19/05 at 9:59pm

It was so wonderful :) :)

[jacobtsf]

Posted: 12/19/05 at 10:01pm

I NEED to see this movie. Of course it comes out AFTER I leave NYC for the Poconos. I might have to make a special trip into the city for this one.

[DG]

Posted: 12/20/05 at 8:14am

From Variety:

"After its gay cowboy love story "Brokeback Mountain" rode roughshod over more mainstream competish in Texas, Arizona and Florida, Universal specialty film arm Focus Features is accelerating expansion plans. Focus brass said Monday that it will roll out "Brokeback" on 300-400 screens by Jan. 6, altering its original agenda of putting the film on 250 screens by Jan. 13.

That decision by Focus co-heads James SchamusJames Schamus and David LindeDavid Linde came after the Ang LeeAng Lee-helmed pic -- starring Heath Ledger and Jake GyllenhaalJake Gyllenhaal as cowboys who spark a taboo romance while ranching together during the early '60s -- lassoed the No. 8 spot in the top 10 over the weekend from a scant 69 theaters.

Total cume is just under $3.5 million to date, and pic's final gross for its second frame was $2.5 million, with a per screen average of $36,455. That's even higher than Sunday-morning estimates that not only impressed industryites but drew national attention.

Move to broaden the pic's presence comes as "Brokeback" is riding a wave of critics' honors and media attention without its distributor having paid a single dollar in TV advertising for the $14 million pic."

[RobbO]

Posted: 12/20/05 at 8:31am

from boxofficeguru on 12/19: Awards season frontrunner Brokeback Mountain expanded from five to 69 theaters and jumped into the top ten with $2.5M in ticket sales from a very narrow release. Leading all of this year's films with seven Golden Globe nominations, the Focus Features love story averaged a spectacular $36,355 per venue and raised its total to $3.5M.

No other film playing in fewer than 100 theaters has entered the top ten over the last four years. Brokeback will continue to ride into additional locations each week.

[eslgr8]

Posted: 12/20/05 at 12:06pm

I didn't realize that there hadn't been a single TV ad yet. Truly amazing how powerful reviews and word of mouth can be. I love the way Brokeback Mountain's success must be making the "Christian" wackos crazy. (I use quotes because no one following the teachings of Christ could behave the way these loonies do.)