Jennifer Lawrence in the Triangle of Death
Timing is everything. For example, take famous basketball man Wardell Curry, or Steph as some might call him, who signed a very average contract extension for $44 million over 4 years because, in the season prior to signing, his ankles exploded in a fine white powder. In the three years since, Steph has won two MVP awards by ruining the very fabric of reality as if a god. At the same time, Timofey Mozgov, who very effectively sat down on the Cavaliers bench all post-season and is not the son of Apollo, signed a $64 million over 4 year contract because the Lakers really didn’t want to watch Roy Hibbert play basketball anymore. Timing is everything, and like Steph in 2013, Jennifer Lawrence in 2016 is about to get smote by it.
Jennifer Lawrence is very good at her job. You could argue that she is currently the best at her job and in her field there is an award to denote accomplishments called Oscars (it’s really the “Academy Awards”, but shut up). J-Law, being good and all, was nominated for an Oscar at 21 (Winter’s Bone) and won one at 22 (Silver Linings Playbook). She has also starred in two giant franchises (The Hunger Games, X-Men prequels) which made roughly a gazillion dollars. In comparison, at 21 my greatest accomplishment was finally watching one season of The Wire and at 22 it was almost watching one and a half seasons of The Wire.
J-Law has been nominated for an Oscar four out of the past six years. But you don’t need anyone to tell you how good she is. You’ve seen a Jennifer Lawrence movie. You’ve got a pretty good idea of how good she is.
Only recently has Jennifer Lawrence been able to capitalize on that success, as most of her profitable franchise work has been tied to long-term contracts (contracts she signed before she was a known quantity). After the Sony leaks revealed that Lawrence and Amy Adams were paid significantly less than their male co-stars on American Hustle, it looks like Lawrence stopped taking shit and started making them ducats. She reportedly made $15 million from Joy. For her upcoming movie, Passengers, she is to be paid a whopping $20 million.
I don’t throw “whopping” around lightly. $20 million is obviously a huge sum to do anything for 8 months. And while it is double the amount that her co-star Chris Pratt (who is apparently the actual lead. Its hard to say since so little information has been released about Passengers. Four months before release and there’s not even a trailer out yet) will make, it’s not an unprecedented amount. Scarlett Johansson will reportedly make $20 million for her role as Black Widow in The Avengers 3, although, unlike Passengers, that is for a movie in a series that has made $3 billion dollars worldwide already and is already paying Robert Downey Jr. an insane $50 million per movie. Sandra Bullock made $20 million for Gravity (plus a percentage of the profits, which added up to a straight up coconuts amount).
But it is still as rare as it is enormous, and the $20 million salary was too extraordinary for Sony executives, who asked J-Law to take a pay cut which led to threats of walking out by both Lawrence and the director of Passengers, Morten Tyldum. Sony eventually relented, and so J-Law will be making her $20 million, because takesies backsies isn’t a thing.
Here’s where that whole timing thing comes in. Sony is now heavily investing a large portion of a major budget in Jennifer Lawrence. Passengers is more or less a Jennifer Lawrence film now. Normally, this is a pretty safe bet as J-Law will almost certainly grant you a hefty return on investment. The problem is, Passengers is getting released at literally the worst time imaginable.
Passengers is a sci-fi movie about two space travelers waking up 90 years too early during a 120-year flight to a distant planet. It’s being released on Christmas weekend. A week before that, another sci-fi movie is scheduled for release. Cue the ruh-roh’s.
Rogue One drops a mere seven days before Passengers and will have an overwhelming marketing campaign behind it. It is also Star Wars, which is sort of enough.
Last year, Star Wars: The Force Awakens came out at around the same time. The box office results were not pretty for anything else that came out during that time:
Oof. Daddy’s Home did passably fine, but every other film that came out remotely close to Star Wars: TFA withered on the vine. In the Heart of the Sea, released a week before SW: TFA, died a lonely death after a 68% drop in box office receipts after a single week of a paltry $11 million take (helped by it being a pretty boring movie). Point Break, released a week later, may as well never have existed for all the impact it made. Even J-Law’s Joy fell flat.
Okay, those three movies were probably doomed to fail anyways, but that’s also sort of the point. There’s only so much money to be had any given weekend. Why release your big expensive movie on the same weekend as someone else’s when you can just release it in less lucrative but less competitive weekends and get a bigger piece of a smaller pie. What is Spectre came out a week before or the same week as SW: TFA? It would have been a real disaster, right?
But what if the roles are reversed and Passengers is actually The Force Unleashed-type bully while Rogue One is the Spectre-like wimp? Let’s imagine what the most optimistic, wildest scenario would be for Passengers and Jennifer Lawrence.
Passengers could be the greatest movie ever. Rogue One might be really terrible. Rogue One could be really terrible and there would be an entire week of people saying how terrible it is so that all the people who couldn’t get pre-ordered tickets for opening weekend might start thinking “Man, I don’t want to watch Rogue One anymore, but I still really want to see something involving space travel.” Maybe Rogue One, through the power of the Star Wars brand alone, makes $200 million on opening weekend but sucks and eats a hefty 65% attendance drop the next week for the release of Passengers.
Even if all this happens and everything goes absolutely right, there is still another problem. Somehow another big budget movie coming out that same weekend.
I do not have high hopes for the financial fortunes Assassin’s Creed, mostly because video game movies have always performed poorly, but also because Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard aren’t really known to be big audience draws despite being consistently good. Regardless, Fox and Ubisoft spent somewhere between $150–200 million real dollars on the production budget for Assassin’s Creed, which leads me to doubt that they’ll just roll over for Rogue One in terms of spending marketing dollars. They have to have some inkling that they’ll also need an unprecedented level of success to recoup their ridiculous budget. They’re going to be competing heavily for air time and ad space in the coming months.
So that’s one major box office opponent facing Passengers on the same weekend and a somewhat legendary foe competing for an audience the week before. That’s three films in the span of two weekends that have $100 million+ budgets, which is definitely a disaster for one of them and probably a problem for two. Do you know how many times this situation happens? If you answered “never times”, then you’d be correct. For example, this year Star Trek: Beyond, Jason Bourne, and Suicide Squad were $100 million+ budget films released over three consecutive weeks and suffered gross changes of -58.2%, -62.2%, and -67.4% in the weeks after their release respectively. If you’re wondering, those are disastrous, heart-rending drops. In all likelihood, none of those three films will make a profit.
Which brings us back to Jennifer Lawrence and her $20 million salary. She probably won’t be the problem if Passengers fails to turn a profit. Ultimately, the only thing J-Law can do is be as good in her role as she possibly can and then promote the everliving shit out of it. If there are two stars who could promote a movie to unlikely victory, it’s Lawrence and her co-star Chris Pratt.
But through factors beyond her control, she’s probably going to be the face of a movie flop. Pundits and executives are going to talk about how Lawrence wasn’t worth the $20 milion, which is a bummer because there are only a handful of other actor or actress who are as deserving.
But hey, timing is everything. Jennifer Lawrence just had the bad luck of the market properly valuing her service at the same time as Passengers being released in the triangle of death.
