That’s a pretty audacious title and it’s probably going to rile up a bunch of people. And not just your general fanboy types, either. For the most part, console gamers — or, at least, the type of console gamer who likes to go online and talk about video games — tend to agree that it’s too early to make any conclusion about which console (if any) is going to dominate the market. They point out that it’s only been six short months, and cling to the belief that a combination of price drops, better marketing and the release of certain key software titles (most of which, coincidentally, end in a numeral of some kind) will cause significant shake-ups to sales figures over the next year. Conventional wisdom is that everything is still up in the air.
It’s time to get down to earth, however, and face a fact that’s always been evident when it comes to video games: the launch-window decides everything. There is no such thing as a come-back, a turn-around or an underdog story; the console people buy at the beginning of a product cycle is the console people will continue to buy at the end of the product cycle.
And, for this generation, that product is Nintendo’s Wii.
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A special bonus review! Spoilers for “Through the Looking Glass” below.
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Spoilers for “Weevils Wobble But They Don’t Go Down” and “The Bitch is Back” below.
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Spoilers for “4 a.m. to 5 a.m.” and “5 a.m. to 6 a.m.” below.
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In an effort to populate the “movies” category of this site with some semblance of content, I’m going to take a crack at analyzing the weekend box office charts over the course of this summer movie season.
I love summer movies, because they’re so stupid and ridiculous and — best of all — easy to see. After a long fall and winter of driving to distant theatres and having to pick between showtimes of 5:50 or 11:30 p.m. just to see whatever indie darling is getting all the attention, it’s a relief to be able to kick back and head to the megaplex just up the street and see the new release that’s playing every half hour without fail.
No longer am I confined to the tiny back theatre with an old couple and a guy who smells like marijuana and thinks Sharkwater is a comedy; now I’m in the throngs of the public, basking in the glow of a 4,000-foot screen, waiting through roughly six hours of car commercials, eating popcorn that cost me $6, and watching all sorts of stuff explode.
It’s pretty great.
All that said, summer movies aren’t just fluff. The Box Office figures generated every week are more than just really really big numbers displayed in a table or a list. We can actually use these numbers to determine trends in the attitudes of movie-goers and, further, extrapolate that in the hopes of further defining the popular culture of our day. Or, at least, that’s the idea.
You may notice that these numbers look startlingly familiar to the numbers published at the movies.com box office report. I can assure you that that is little more than a coincidence. These numbers are my own estimates, developed after spending most of the weekend outside local theatres with one of those little clicky-things you can use to track crowds. At first people were wary of me, but soon they came to enjoy my silent and consistent presence, much like how people come to like the plants in their apartment.
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