I didn't miss Red One after all

One of the greatest Christmas movie calamities I can remember was the release of a 2004 film called Surviving Christmas, starring Ben Affleck, James Gandolfini and Christina Applegate. I've written about it on this blog before and recounted its salient talking points before, but that was back in 2010, and repeating a story every 15 years is, I think, quite alright.

Famously, the movie was released so early in the "Christmas season" (October 22nd) and performed so poorly at the box office ($15 million worldwide gross) that they released it on video in time for that very Christmas, to recoup any little bit of their $45 million investment. And that was in an era when the window between theatrical release and home viewing release was as wide as it has ever been. Releasing a movie on video a mere two months after the theater -- when theaters would, ideally, still be playing it -- was unheard of.

But times have changed, and in retrospect, there seems to be a certain brilliance to the move, even if it was born out of desperation. The drawback Christmas movies have always had is that they may do big business in the theater, but the home video market is likely to have significantly depleted profitability due to the fact that there is no point to release it there a mere three to four months after it was in cinemas. Because no one wants to watch a Christmas movie in February, you wait until the following year, at which point it's old hat -- or at least, no different than any other old movie a person chooses to rent or buy.

I have to think Surviving Christmas did make a little extra money on video just by virtue of being a "new" movie -- people always love the new -- and by being easily available at home when they still wanted to watch Christmas movie.

Nowadays, it was likely always the plan to release Red One on Amazon Prime in time for this Christmas, which they did last week -- even though they released it only a month before that in cinemas. That's in spite of how well it did in theaters, which was reasonably well: $175 million globally. That's nothing compared to a budget of -- am I reading this right? -- $250 million, so yes, it's not a hit, though it's more of a hit (percentage-wise) than Surviving Christmas was. Obviously not what they were hoping for, but it's not going to tank the studio or anything. 

I had resigned myself to missing Red One. Not with a huge amount of regret, but I do like to watch a new Christmas movie or two each year, and not just limit myself to the pap and dreck that's released on streaming. (That's an oversimplification, as some of the Christmas movies I've enjoyed most in the past ten years -- Klaus, Spirited and Jingle Jangle -- all went straight to streaming.) It was easy to see that Red One would lose out in a crowded field of awards contenders when vying for my limited viewing time.

But then the other weekend, I took my younger son to the theater to see Moana 2 as part of a birthday party for one of his friends. He was looking at one of the trailers playing in the lobby for Red One, with a certain knowledge of its existence and essential details that could have only come from interest (or watching something about it on YouTube). That was when I experienced a small amount of regret, as it could have been a way for us to usher in a Christmas season that has been slow to get started, in part because we are going overseas tomorrow, and therefore have not gotten our own tree or done much in the way of decorating. 

Then all the sudden, there it was, available for streaming. 

And I felt just like the Surviving Christmas viewers of 2004 must have felt, only with significantly more optimism. 

I had hoped to watch it with my ten-year-old on Saturday, but we are also building a deck -- don't ask -- and my wife was concerned about a preplanned engagement to watch the movie cutting short our deck time. However, it was clear we were ahead of our pace, so she happily approved the potential viewing. Only when I put it to my son, offering him either Saturday or Monday as possible dates, he opted for the Monday -- a small, but ultimately unimportant, setback.

I did watch it with him on Monday, on the hottest day of the year so far, when we were cocooned inside our air conditioned living room, feeling almost as cold as the polar climates depicted in the movie. 

I think he might have slightly preferred not to watch it, since kids have short attention spans these days, and the video games he would have otherwise been playing are more natural fits for that. The evidence of this was that at one point during the movie, he had to get up and "twirl around" behind our couch for a few minutes. Yes, he's prone to being antsy, but it doesn't mean he's not enjoying or doesn't have the patience for the activity in question. He might even do it during the brevity of a Simpsons episode.

But he hasn't yet turned 11 -- that's just a few weeks off -- so I still have him as a captive audience for another year or two, as a kid who would rather make his dad happy if all it takes is spending a little bit of his unlimited fungible free time. This time next year, it might already be that much harder to watch Red One.

And in the end, the movie was not a huge hit with him. He called it "alright," then tried to hastily upgrade his assessment when he saw my surprise at his middling level of approbation. (It turns out, his reaction to the movie was more in line with the general outlook than my own.) Probably two hours and three minutes is too long for this movie, but not when you consider how absolutely bursting with ideas it is -- both good and not so good.

Me? I had cause for my optimism. I ended up giving it a 7/10 in my just-posted review on ReelGood, and I'd be lying if I said there weren't moments when I flirted with an 8. Clearer heads prevailed, and by the time I actually wrote the review, I realized the things I had to say were more in line with a 7. 

But a 7 can be a pretty positive review, and it's way better than the half-star (out of five) I would have given Surviving Christmas if I'd been in charge of the star rating on the old site where I reviewed it. (In a now strange-seeming procedural move, some editor at the site gave a film a star rating based on available consensus, and it didn't matter if what you wrote was relatively out of sync with it.) (I just went to my old review site, AllMovie, to check to see what the star rating was, and this is how I discovered the fairly momentous news that the writing we all did back then appears to have been largely scrubbed from the site, replaced by a Wikipedia plot synopsis and a place for people to add their own reviews. This would be an even bigger deal if I hadn't printed out all my reviews at the time, though I must admit that this is a thought-provoking turn of events for me as a critic that may require its own separate post at some point. For what it's worth, the current star rating for Surviving Christmas is a quite-laughable three stars out of five.)

In any case, since this is a time of year for Christmas movie recommendations, I can give you one for Red One. It doesn't have any chance of entering the canon of classic Christmas movies, but it's a lot better than the average pap and dreck released directly to streaming -- and not only because it has that desirable imprimatur of having gotten released on the big screen just a month ago. 

Trying to capitalize

This post is only tangentially about the Oscars.

The official nationwide release date of Jason Reitman's Up in the Air was December 23, 2009. In other words, exactly 76 days before it was released yesterday on DVD. That's barely two-and-a-half months. On www.moviefone.com, it's still listed in a pull-down menu of current theatrical releases categorized as "Popular Movies," and in fact, it's still playing at two theaters near my house, only one of which is a second-run theater. It doesn't even open in Japan until a week from Saturday, though that's hardly the most relevant piece of information I'm presenting, given the delays we sometimes see in the international release of Hollywood films.

The point is: Why the quick trigger on getting Up in the Air out on DVD and BluRay?

Well, the answer occurred to me pretty quickly: They wanted to release it the Tuesday after the Oscars, at the moment of its greatest possible relevance to prospective renters and buyers. Optimistically, they hoped people would rush out to rent/buy the best picture winner, which it looked like Up in the Air might just be when critics started buzzing about it last fall. Instead, Up in the Air quickly went from hero to zero, picking up none of the six Oscars for which it was nominated. Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire used a similar strategy, hitting the shelves on Tuesday as well. But its wide release was November 20th, more than a month before Up in the Air, so this didn't strike me as strange. (And, it should be mentioned, things worked a bit better for Precious at the Oscars, as it picked up two statues.)

But the real point in me mentioning the DVD release of Up in the Air this morning is that it made me realize there is no objective standard for the gestation period between theatrical release and video release of a particular movie. We tend to think of it as three to four months after the movie was released, but it's not as simple as that. It's really a matter of what's the right time for that movie.

First and foremost, you don't want to cannibalize a movie's potential box office by releasing it on DVD too early -- and since Up in the Air is still probably playing in a hundred theaters around the country, there was that potential. It's the reason we probably won't see Avatar on DVD until at least July or August. The movie had its wide release five days before Up in the Air, but it only just started making under $10 million at the box office this past weekend, and will probably play in some theaters into April. Then a July or August DVD release won't seem so strange.

An extreme example of it being the right time for a particular movie is Christmas movies. Releasing a Christmas movie three or four months after it was in theaters doesn't make a bit of sense, because no one wants to watch a Christmas movie in April. So if you miss a Christmas movie, you have to wait until the following November to see it. That is, with one prominent exception that I love to reference. The disaster known as Surviving Christmas, which starred Ben Affleck and James Gandolfini, was released so early in 2004's "Christmas season" (on October 22nd), and performed so poorly at the box office ($11.1 million), that they released it on DVD in time for the very same Christmas, desperate to recoup any of their investment. Hey, it was the right time for that movie.

And then there are the examples of the films that take a weirdly long time to come out on DVD. My favorite film of 2009, Duncan Jones' Moon, had its limited release on June 12, 2009 (limited is as wide as the release got). I saw it in the theater in early July, but my wife didn't. Needless to say, I was eager to show it to her, and expected to be able to do so by October, November at the latest. It finally became available on January 12th of this year, exactly seven months after it was released. What made that more agonizing is that I visited a Blockbuster sometime in late October/early November, and Moon was listed with a mid-November release date on that board of upcoming releases behind the checkout stand. When I went back later and had the January 12th date quoted to me, I figured I must have imagined seeing the title up there. Only in researching it now do I realize someone must have made a mistake -- that November 16th date was when it was released on DVD in England, the director's home country.

I guess the fact that some movies come out on DVD only 76 days after they're released in theaters gives me some hope. I'm making a conscious effort to save money this year, and part of that effort will be not to see so many films in the theater that will leave me wishing I'd paid rental prices. If any of the first batch of 2010 films gets that quick of a release, I'll only need to wait another two weeks for them to come out.

Like Daybreakers, for example. I wanted to see Daybreakers in the theater, and in fact wrote about that back in January. But not so fast, Vance. I now see Daybreakers has been given a June 1st release on DVD. That's 144 days after it was released in theaters, and about 120 days after it left them.

Like I said, you never can tell.