According to a Variety article that I commented on yesterday, during the past four years new sources of funding like private equity money have created a ‘surplus of movies’ that are forcing Hollywood to release ‘heavyweight’ movies across a wider spectrum of dates, other than on just around Easter, summer and the year-end holidays. During the past five years the biggest budget releases have normally been focused on these dates, but higher budget ceilings are slowly creeping up around other months.

The months of May, June and December stand out as being the points of highest investment. The three highest spikes in the graph are in May 2007, November 2008 and December 2009, respectively for Spider-Man 3 ($258 million), Quantum of Solace ($230 million) and Avatar ($250 million). August  was slow before 2007, before it was considered part of the summer blockbuster season.

Looking at the first quarter, with the exception of Astérix aux jeux Olimpiques in 2008, January held budgets below $70 million. In fact the last time Hollywood launched a January release with greater than a $75 million budget was in 2000 with Fantasia 2000. This February no studio released a major picture. March has seen the most steady rise, reaching $130 million this year with Watchmen. Inversely, April has been falling, perhaps since studios prefer to delay big releases until May.

Based on the extraordinary box office performance during the first quarter of 2009, perhaps studios will overcome their fear and place more blockbusters there in the future.

This past weekend Watchmen opened with an estimated $55.7 million. This is the sixth largest opening for an R-rated film, and the twelfth-largest for a movie adapted from a comic book. Still, Watchmen was heavily hyped and was expected to open stronger given its similarity to 300, another Warner Bros. comic book movie also directed by Zach Snyder that made $70.8 during opening weekend. Watchmen opened up in 508 more theaters than 300 but made 27% less on opening weekend. Three major factors seem to have limited Watchmen‘s performance:

1. MPAA Rating: Watchmen and 300 both had R-rating, which greatly limit potential customers. To allow for a wide potential audience most superhero movies are rated PG-13. A few like The Fantastic Four 2: Rise of the Silver Surfer are rated PG.
2. Unfamiliar Superheroes: As Box Office Mojo believes, the Watchmen‘s appeal was limited because its, ‘superheroes were not previously well known to the general public.’ 300 was also based by a not well-known comic book by Frank Miller, but its storyline and characters were much more recognizable as they stem from the historical Battle of Thermopylae.
3. Long running time: Finally, as cited today in the Wall Street Journal by Dan Fellman, President of Warner Bros. domestic distribution, Watchmen has a considerable length (163 minutes), which inherently lowered its daily screenings and hampered ticket sales. A commitment to almost three hours may have also dampened the enthusiasm to watch the movie.

This last point made me try to compare running time and performance between similar movies. I located approximate estimates for the amount of screens during opening weekends of The Dark Knight, Spider-Man 3, Iron Man, 300 and Watchmen, and calculated a rough approximation of how many shows each movie played on during its opening weekend (based on a 10 a.m. – 12 a.m. working time per screen and a one hour margin between shows). Based on opening weekend grosses I then extrapolated how much was made on a per screen and a per show basis.

Even though Watchmen was released on over 50% more screens than 300, it probably had only 20% more shows given its longer duration. In any case the movie seemed to have less appeal, averaging about half per screen and a third less per show.

I am also including a graph format of this comparison which may be easier for performance comparison.

I also decided to divide the per show gross by $12 to arrive at an approximation of how many people were at each show.

Granted this is an imprecise comparison since certain theaters and showtimes attract more customers (Box Office Mojo informs that less than 3.5% of theaters accounted for 10% of the opening weekend’s revenues for Watchmen). Also ticket prices vary between theaters and the years these five movies were released. Still, I think this calculation provides an interesting perspective to compare the titles.