‘White House Down’ Went Down, Chan-Chan Will Be Okay

White House Down debuted in a very distant fourth place this weekend. To the surprise of many, the second White House-being attacked movie flopped, earning $25 million for the three day frame (making The Heat’s success look even greater, which I love). While the first White House-being attacked movie, Olympus Has Fallen, came out in March and earned $30 million – only a $5 million difference – that film, with much less-star power, a smaller budget and a March release, went on to gross almost $100 million. Though White House Down has only been out for 3 days now, it’s safe to say that it won’t be able to top Olympus and will probably crawl past the $50 million mark, which isn’t great. Like, at all. How did this even happen?

First and foremost: maybe audiences aren’t that dumb and are catching on to competing studios releasing the exact same movie twice a year. Sure, Mirror Mirror didn’t set the box office on fire but it did decently and has had a nice life on home video. But also, the two Snow White-themed films were completely different from one another – you know, besides having the exact same story. Mirror Mirror went after children (this sounds wrong but you know what I mean) and Snow White & The Huntsman went after teenagers and adults. White House Down and Olympus Has Fallen looked identical and were going after the same audience. Audiences weren’t really able to tell the difference or invest their money into something they already saw 3 months ago. So there’s that. Also, the marketing wasn’t great. It didn’t look good and that’s the important thing here. You can sell almost anything as long as the marketing is stellar, case and point: Identity Theif. But this was just lazy, lazy marketing. Channing is a sell, sure, but the marketing for The Vow, Magic Mike and 21 Jump Street were all fantastic (the marketing for The Vow is still the best I’ve seen in forever) and all in combination with the appeal of Channing and his co-star.

They all have their share of flops. This was bound to happen. Am I surprised? Of course. Especially when I placed it at #10 on my top grossing films of this summer, so ya, I’m not too pleased. But this is the power of Tatum – if this were Jennifer Aniston, we’d be declaring her box office poison and adding this to her list of flops. But because Channing Tatum practically owned 2012, he’ll come out unscathed. Notice how no one is blaming him? It’s not his fault. It’s the marketing, it’s the movie, it’s Jamie Foxx; everyone is blaming anything that isn’t Channing, which begs the question:  if he is such a big star, shouldn’t this have done well? We’ll, we can’t really say but while his stardom is still rising, his appeal is still being measured. What do we like to see him in? Was this too cookie cutter? Too obvious? Didn’t I see Die Hard 30 years ago? Who knows. But again, he’ll be fine.

Roland Emmerich on the other hand…