A Chilling Way to Die at the Box Office Make a Western
For Seth MacFarlane, the weekend box-office numbers were brutal. His A Million Ways to Die in the West earned just 17.1 million, or less than a quarter of the estimated 70 million gleaned by Disney's Maleficent  and less than a third of the 54.4-million opening for MacFarlane's own Ted two summers ago. His new comedy also failed to reach the modest predictions, in the mid-to-upper 20 millions, of the industry's blogging touts. What went wrong? A few obvious things. Instead of Teds reliable marquee name Mark Wahlberg, as the guy whose best friend was a toy bear with an R-rated mouth, MacFarlane made himself the star for his first visible leading movie role. A Million Ways to Die received mostly negative reviews from the critics, and a poor "B" rating from the CinemaScore survey of early attendees. But MacFarlane's main crime? He dared to make a Western. READ Corliss's review of A Million Ways to Die in the West, Throughout the movies' golden age, the Western enriched Hollywood financially and artistically. But in the 1970s, the genre lost its audience appeal to fantasy films of the Star Wars stripe, which told more or less the same story  elemental animosities leading to an armed showdown  but at a faster tempo, and in outer space. The spectacle of men in kerchief and boots hanging around a seedy 19th-century town waiting to shoot or be shot suddenly seemed painfully slow. Directors still love Westerns, and when they've won their patrons' trust with a big hit, they often use that favor to make one. But Westerns often carry high production budgets and this quintessentially American genre doesn't often attract moviegoers abroad, where the box-office gravy is. Of Westerns released in the past decade, the one unqualified success is Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained. Made for about 100 million, it earned 425.4 million worldwide, 62 of that coming from foreign markets. The Coen brothers' True Grit remake was a domestic hit 171.2 million that tanked internationally 81 million, but the movie cost less than 40 million to produce, so we'll call that a success, too. After that, the results are mixed to bad. READ Is the Movie Western Too Tough to Die?, Recent flop Westerns include Cowboys  Aliens 163 million budget, 174.8 million worldwide gross and Johnny Depp's The Lone Ranger 215 million budget, 260.5 million worldwide. Keep in mind that the producing studios often spend 100 million to promote a movie, and that little more than half of its total gross comes back to them. So these movies  and The Alamo, and Depp's animated Western Rango, and Brad Pitt's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford  mostly spilled red ink. If there's an upside for MacFarlane, it's that he spent less making A Million Ways 40 million than he did on Ted 50 million. So his new movie won't lose much money. It also, alas, won't lure audiences back to the Western.