Counterprogramming at its finest
Imagine you are a parent who's been eagerly awaiting the Super Bowl. Now imagine that your child comes home on Friday bouncing off the walls about some Hannah Montana movie. And not just any movie but a movie that the kid has to see in the theaters because it's in 3D. And because it's the already huge Hannah Montana, your child HAS to see it this weekend or else she'll be the only one at school who didn't see it. Are you really going to risk your Sunday sanity by saying no? You probably already let your daughter down once by not being able to score tickets to the actual concert, do you really want to have your child whining and crying when you're trying to watch the Super Bowl? And if you are a spouse, are you not going to appease your child rather than sitting around watching a game you have no interest in?
This is the epitome of counterprogramming. You pit kids against parents (and even dividing the parents in some cases), make seeing it in the theaters a necessity, and have it based on a property that is already huge so that peer pressure will be raging. This is how you make just under 30 million while showing a film on only 683 screens. It should be interesting to see how much staying power the Achy Breaky Offspring has. Unless the 3D is very impressive, I can't imagine many parents (who've already spent money on the CD's) being willing to take the kids to see the film again.
This week's box office should also probably teach Hollywood the lesson that nobody is really all that interested in seeing Jessica Alba act. In fact, she couldn't even match the box office of last year's Super Bowl horror film "The Messengers". She's a pin-up girl, not a screen attraction. Part of me thinks that if you switch Lake Bell and put her in "The Eye" and Alba in "Over Her Dead Body" the box office would have been pretty much the same. Honestly, the biggest draw this weekend after Hannah Montana was the laughing shark of "Strange Wilderness" because that is pretty much the ONLY reason anyone went to see that film which somehow managed to make 3 million dollars.
