It's hard to overstate the glee that surrounds a movie's abject box-office failure—especially when that movie is on its face a symptom of everything that's wrong with Hollywood. So when the long-gestating Jem & the Holograms adaptation crashed and burned in spectacular fashion this weekend, the cries came fast and loud. No one wants movies based on ’80s cartoons! yelled one camp. That's what you get for straying from the source material! yelled another, frankly harder to understand, faction.
And sure, the movie now has the ignominious distinction of having very worst performance of any non-animated wide release in box-office history ($1.3 million on 2,413 screens comes out to a paltry $547 per screen). But consider this: While Universal may have lost a bundle on the marketing—or at least a bundle of dimes, judging from the low visibility of the movie's promotional campaign—the studio that made the movie is essentially untouched.
Since its inception in 2009, Blumhouse Productions shot (mostly horror) movies on a tiny-ass budget, then watched them hugely overperform at the box-office. And when a movie costs les than $5 million to make, even a sub-$30 million performance qualifies as "hugely overperforming." Take a look at this.
All told, that's an investment of $129.2 million to make 30 movies, which grossed a total of $2.07 billion dollars. If Blumhouse was a stockbroker, the SEC would be at the door with a battering ram.
Jem cost $5 million to make. FIVE MILLION DOLLARS. That's the cinematic equivalent of the $22 standing desk. And it happened not because Universal got greedy after seeing what happened with Transformers, but because Blumhouse founder Jason Blum and director Jon M. Chu liked the cartoon and wanted to make a modern-day version. So what if it made $1.3 million in its opening weekend? It's still going to recoup—if not overseas, then in digital sales to dab parties of twentysomethings who are convinced it's the next Ishtar.
Yes, the movie turned its back on the cartoon's fantastic, over-the-top elements; yes, the result was the worst kind of "safe"; yes, the teen girls who the movie was targeting deserve better. But it was also a drop in the bucket. Let's all reserve our schadenfreude for the big studios who spend tens or hundreds of millions of dollars on misguided dreck like Jupiter Ascending, Mortdecai, or This Month's Comedy About Vince Vaughn Trying to Recapture Youth Through Hijinks.
