So, about a month after Pacific Rim was released and Godzilla's big show at San Diego Comic-Con, where do we stand?
Well, while a great and well-liked movie (it still enjoys a healthy 72% fresh Critical and 82% fresh Audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes), Pacific Rim has had mixed results at the box office. In America, it's flopped theatrically: according to Box Office Mojo, as of August 20 it has grossed merely $98.6 Million domestically on a $190 Million production budget. Globally, though, it's been a smash and has drawn over $380 Million in total so far. $100 Million of that is from China alone, which once again is demonstrating its importance as a market for Hollywood.
What's been fascinating (and somewhat frustrating) has been reading the reactions to all of this by the Japanese Daikaiju and Godzilla fandoms.
On the one hand, I understand why some have taken all this as a bad sign. I, too, was very disappointed by how poorly Pacific Rim did in the US and Japan - in particular in Japan, where the mere $3 Million opening weekend was a real punch to the gut. What I don't understand is extrapolating this result into wacky doom-and-gloom predictions like "Pacific Rim 'failed', so Legendary is going to cut support for Godzilla and won't market it" or "Pacific Rim bombing proves nobody likes Giant Monster movies anymore and the genre is dead." Neither of these (or the plethora of other assertions I've seen) make any sense.
Firstly, even granting Hollywood Accounting, it's becoming harder and harder to think of Pacific Rim as having "failed" when it looks set to gross at least $400 Million worldwide on a $190 Million production budget. It may not be the gargantuan hit we had hoped for, but it certainly didn't fail. Legendary and Warner Brothers have made their money, and from here on out it's nothing but profit. Besides, why would Legendary be discussing sequels if this didn't meet at least their margin for success? The movie has been #1 at the box office in China for weeks (and was #1 at the global box office as well), it'd be foolish for Legendary not to make a second film to milk that.
Next, there's this baffling idea that Legendary or Warner Brothers is going to cut support for next year's Godzilla film over Pacific Rim's box office returns. That...makes no sense. For one, because the two are totally separate projects that are going to be marketed VERY differently from each other: Pacific Rim was a new untested property banking on the popularity of Guillermo Del Toro and Giant Robots; Godzilla is a long-running franchise with an established fan base and global name recognition. Yes, they didn't market Pacific Rim well enough in America to really help establish this new brand, but Godzilla is an existing brand and a household name. It's going to inherently easier to market Godzilla and you can expect a much heavier ad campaign than we saw with Pacific Rim, not a weaker one.
Finally, this "Giant Monsters are finished" nonsense. This really picked up following Pacific Rim bombing in Japan, and in my opinion sounds very much like people trying to interpret how the whole world feels through the lens of the Japanese. Yes, Giant Monsters and Tokusatsu seem to have lost their popularity in Japan. But, if Pacific Rim bombed in Japan and flopped in America does it mean a general shift away worldwide?
Good Lord, of course not!
Firstly, the biggest reason Pacific Rim flopped in America was not because the film's subject matter was rejected, it was a one-two punch of marketing that played up the Giant Robot angle (which created the unfortunate impression of a Transformers rip-off) and pitting this new untested property up against an established big-name brand sequel: Grown-Ups 2. Subtract Grown-Ups 2 from that weekend, and Pacific Rim would have done significantly better.
I've also gotten the impression that people seem to think all recent big budget American Giant Monster films - Godzilla (1998), King Kong (2005), Cloverfield (2008), and Super 8 (2011) - as having all bombed. That's just completely wrong.
- Super 8 grossed $127 Million in America and $259 Million total worldwide on a $50 Million budget, a clear success.
- Cloverfield grossed $80 Million in America and $170 Million total worldwide on a $25 Million budget, another clear success.
- King Kong grossed $218 Million in America and $550 Million total worldwide on a $207 Million budget.
- Even the much maligned Devlin & Emmerich version of Godzilla grossed $136 Million in America and $379 Million worldwide total on a $130 Million budget. Hell, it was the 3rd Highest Grossing movie of 1998!
The most negative interpretation of this possible is that Giant Monster movies are "hit or miss", considering the two most recent movies were clear successes.
We, as a fandom, really need to stop with the doom-and-gloom, "The sky is falling!", nonsense. The sky ISN'T falling. It's just that Giant Monsters haven't blossomed into mainstream popularity as many had hoped. Failing to do that doesn't constitute failure, though. It merely just continues the status quo.
