GREEN LANTERN Provides A Useful Lesson In Why Box Office Rankings Mean Nothing

Please do not misread the headline on this article. By no means am I suggesting that box office results mean nothing. In a day and age when making and releasing a film costs millions upon millions of dollars, box office results mean quite a lot because, quite simply, all that money spent needs to come back somewhere along the line or everybody's out of business. But rankings? And the idea that being at the top of the pile makes you more successful than titles farther down the line? That's laughable. And Green Lantern has just proven it.

According to current estimates Martin Campbell's Ryan Reynolds starring adaptation of the DC comic book has opened in first place with an opening weekend take of $52.6 million. Which is quite a lot of money, so the folks at Warner Brothers must be dancing in their offices, yes? No. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Because, you see, Warner Brothers essentially bought that opening weekend 'win' with an enormously expensive ad campaign that I've seen estimated - repeatedly - in the neighborhood of $100 million, which is more than plausible given how ubiquitous the posters and ads have been for a very long time now. That stuff all costs money, and lots of it. Which means that even if the estimated spend is off by a significant margin Warner Brothers still didn't bring in enough money from the opening to even cover their ad spending, never mind the $200 million or so they spent making the movie. So while they got to first place the cost of getting there has put them in a position where the film is guaranteed to bleed money. Whoops. Had they cut both the advertising budget and the opening weekend take in half they actually would have ended up significantly farther ahead.