Why did this film earn such a small $5mil? It has two big stars, nominated for Best Picture at the Golden Globes and 3 Academy Awards...Was it the length, marketing, subject matter? It seemed as if this film would have done better financially than Todd Field's previous, In the Bedroom, but that film made almost $40mil.
shareMy guess was Its marketing. The movie had a 26 million budget, so I'm not sure why the studio settled with an obscure art house box office score. Yet who knows, It could have been the themes (an affair, pedophilia) that turned a lot of people off.
shareHere's a link to the movie's box office performance:
http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=littlechildren.htm
Note that the movie's widest release was only 115 theaters. This makes me think that there was a tiered release strategy, the kind where a distributor opens the movie in a few locations to attempt to gather good word-of-mouth and critical kudos. If that happens, the distributor will expand the movie to a larger run.
Maybe the good reviews weren't enough to get people interested in this movie?
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/little_children/
http://www.metacritic.com/movie/little-children
The people that disliked it really, really seemed to have disliked it, sort of like "American Beauty". But that movie did well at the box office, and this one didn't.
Who can tell what will appeal to the mass audience?
All Art is pretense.
The fact it was nominated for Golden Globes and Oscars is irrelevant, since it had stopped showing in cinemas well before it received such nominations. 15m isn't bad for a film on a 26m dollar budget... keep in mind word of mouth would have resulted in DVD rentals/purchases which probably bumped up it's profitabilty a fair bit.
I'm writing this signature in bold so people know it's a signature
''It has two big stars, nominated for Best Picture at the Golden Globes and 3 Academy Awards...Was it the length, marketing, subject matter?''
films getting oscar noms are not always those that make big profit- Take into account too that it is an art house type film-not really a studio blockbuster type so profit in these kind of movies at the box office is hit or miss [often times miss] and they are expected to make their cash away from the box office. Having said that, i'm surprised as hell the budget cost 26 million for this.