So the big question today seems to be “But what does $56 million meeean?”

The question, of course, is in relation to the first weekend box-office take for Watchmen. The $56 million is quite a bit shy of the first bit of speculation, which pegged the movie taking in around $70 million or so in the first frame.

So is $56 million a success or a failure? The answer depends on who you ask but there are a few things to consider:

• It was rated R: Because of the more restrictive rating, obviously, not all the teenage boys that are necessary for big money via repeat viewings were able to get in.
• It was 2 hours and 45 minutes long: Anything over two hours begins to cut into the number of showings a theater can offer, even if they put it on five screens.
• The word of mouth after about 4AM Friday – when the midnight screenings let out – had to be for shit.

The last is the crux of the matter, of course. The movie was marketed as a superhero flick, as I said, very much in the lineage of The Dark Knight and Iron Man. But it wasn’t. I’m not going to get into a review of the flick (yet) but suffice it to say the superheroing doesn’t really ever get going, which is actually quite true to the source material. But people who were psyched up to see some good costumed action had to be sorely disappointed in the end result. We can get into stylistic points (Did the character’s “breathe” enough on screen? Spare me.) at a later point, but the reality is that this was not an action movie in the same style as the fun, jaunty ride that Iron Man was.

Tom asks an intriguing question when he wonders whether to be a success the movie has to have immediate box-office sizzle or if it needs long-lasting impact. I think it’s safe to say that, largely due to the massive marketing campaign as well as the fact that the source graphic novel likely has more mass audience awareness, we’re not going to be dealing with a DOA situation akin to what happened with The Spirit late last year. But I also think we need to become accustomed to the phrase “65% drop” in preparation for opening Variety next Monday.

Only some of that, though, can be attributed to the effects of whatever word-of-mouth is happening via text messages, blog reviews, Twitter messages and elsewhere. A good chunk of the falloff will also be due to the fact that seeing the movie on opening weekend was an event. There likely wasn’t a huge chunk of the population who were sort of vaguely planning on seeing Watchmen eventually. People needed to see it in the first three days. And most of those people did and those that were that excited to make plans but somehow didn’t make it are going to go anyway, whatever the goddamn reviews say. The lukewarm buzz isn’t going to persuade any conversions, but considering the density of the source material I’m going to speculate the odds of that happening even with positive reviews were minimal.

Watchmen isn’t Batman (well…except for Nite Owl). It may be a success in its own right and by its own set of measurements but expecting it to become, like The Dark Knight, a $1 billion earner probably isn’t realistic. That being said, it’s probablty six to eight months before we can start to look seriously at judging the real success – or lack thereof – of Watchmen. Let’s talk then.

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