While Hollywood curiously followed Tom Cruise’s box-office struggles this past weekend with an eagle eye, it ignored a much bigger train wreck.
Two weeks in, it's easy to see the full extent of "Jonah Hex's" scarring to Warner’s balance sheets. The film dropped 72 percent week-to-week and yielded a cumulative gross of just $9.2 million.
Save for the Rogue Picture’s low-budget comedy “MacGruber” — a movie shot for only around $10 million — no movie released in more than 2,000 theaters has grossed less this year after two weeks, not even CBS Films' ill-fated "Extraordinary Measures."
“Take what they typically make on a “Harry Potter” film, and they just lost it on this one,” said one rival-studio official.
Certainly, we’re not talking about that much red ink, but the loss will be substantial.
An official with knowledge of the failed DC Comics adaptation’s negative cost vociferously disputed circulating rumors that – with copious reshooting – the movie’s budget climbed as high as $82 million.
The budget grew no higher than $47 million, the official said. (Warner Bros. officials wouldn’t comment.)
Still, even at that more modest figure, the pain will be acute, with a handful of international release dates still scheduled over the summer not expected to yield a huge amount of upside for a film best described as a “supernatural Western.”
Meanwhile, released in over 2,800 locations, domestic prints and advertising spending for “Hex” wasn’t huge, but it wasn’t unsubstantial, either, with an official with inside knowledge of the production pegging the figure at around $35 million.
Added another official: “This one’s a wash.”
