Box Office Analysis: Walden Media, The Box Office Flop Factory

Few studios or filmmakers can create a dud like Walden Media. Now, admittedly, these guys aren't the only one financing the projects they find themselves in, and they don't distribute any of their projects. But they do have a hand in what films they get attached to, and the majority of them are adaptations of books that look incredibly generic in marketing materials. It's no shocker to me that the few hits they've been a part of (The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, Witch and The Wardrobe, Charlotte's Web, Journey 2: The Mysterious Island) had effective marketing campaigns or the presence of Dwayne Johnson.

Without those two things, you wind up with this weeks release The Giver. That one opened onto to $12.7 million, despite the presence of Meryl Streep, Jeff Bridges and Taylor Swift. The book it's based on is well-known, but like most conventional films The Weinstein Company distributes, it flopped. But that isn't even the biggest flop Walden Media has been attached to in recent times, with their 2006 release Hoot having the "honor" of having the worst opening weekend for a movie in over 3,000 theaters.

Just an endless row of flops are attached to Walden Media. The likes of The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising, Won't Back Down and Monte Carlo litter their reputation. Credit where credit is due, they're showing diversity in some future projects like Everest, which is a thriller about a mountain climbing expedition starring Josh Brolin and Jason Clarke. Still, going forward, less movies like The Giver need to be made, specifically from a marketing perspective.

Now, I haven't seen The Giver itself, so I can't speak about it on a filmmaking perspective, but in terms of marketing, which kept me and vast amounts of audience members away, it was a generic mess. Sure, ya got some big actors and a book people kind of sort of know, but what else do you have? Most of Walden Medias movies have that kind of marketing, which puts more faith in source material than actual storytelling in ad material. Hopefully, The Giver is one of the last movies to get such a generic approach from the fascinatingly off-the-rails company Walden Media.