Is Halo 3 putting Film Features In Shadow?

The film industry might have seen its latest embarrassment coming when a South Florida company announced the introduction of an "energizing" beverage called Game Juice, timed to crank up round-the-clock gamers and thus exploit the the release of Microsoft's Halo 3 video game that went on sale September 25. Was it Thoreau who said, "Beware any enterprise that requires new energy drinks."?

What happened on that release date has provided Hollywood with one of the better "the gorilla ate my homework" moments in recent history. As Claude Brodesser-Akner explains in Ad Age today, the anemic $14 million opening for Paramount's The Heartbreak Kid on the weekend following Halo 3's release is being pointed to by movie marketers as in great part due to the continuing popularity in what might be called Wayne's World (actually, ages 18-34) of the game. It thundered out of its staggering $170 million opening day en route to over $300 million.
Said the Ad Age piece:

Total industry ticket sales were only $80 million for the Oct. 5 weekend the film opened, a whopping 27% below the same weekend the year before, according to research firm Media by Numbers. That's the industry's worst performance for an October weekend since 1999.

Many film executives are convinced audiences stayed home to play Microsoft's carpal-tunnel classic, "Halo 3,"

You would especially want to point the finger at Halo 3 if you'd greenlit the victimized Ben Stiller starrer, a remake of a much-loved classic that in its latter day form has drawn such reviews as, "flat, flat, flat", "if I were in movie hell, I'd rather see Good Luck Chuckk again than return to this atrocity", and "exceedingly uncomfortable and grotesque."

Even some much more amiably received product, like the DVD for Knocked Up) was purportedly damaged by the "first-person shooter" video game, with its steely Master Chief who tries to save the world from aliens. Word is that Universal Studios Home entertainment topper Craig Kornblau sent out an internal memo citing the video game as the reason sales figures for the Knocked Up DVD were less than hoped, and even the TV ratings took a few unexplained hits that were ascribed to the addictive sweep of Halo 3.

Setting a record for any entertainment product's release, Halo 3 obliterated any feature film box office take in history, as well as such items as the Harry Potter book launches. As an online phenomenon, it engaged 2.7 million gamers on the web for a still- running tally that was clocked at 40 million hours, or , 4,500 years. (at this rate your eight grader won't graduate high school until mid-century, especially, as the Ad Age piece points out, with Grand Theft Auto 4 coming in April and requiring nearly quintuple the boy-hours to complete).

But don't fret too much over the film biz yet. The gaming audience is fairly choosy, and the industry's hits not that frequent. It will be interesting to see if the next (i.e., fourth) Halo iteration, now being crafted by director Peter Jackson and his team of wife Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens (in a joint interactive venture between Jackson's Wingnut and Microsoft), promises to advance the medium artistically. (Which may be why the once-bruited Halo movie Jackson agreed to produce has been back-burner'ed.)

What's more, the industry may have learned its lesson with the Stiller film--if you're going to counter-program against a behemoth like this, better bring some quality with you. For their part Microsoft is declining to gloat--well, mostly. "We know [comparing video games and features] is not comparing apples to apples. At the same time--it is dollars to dollars."

(Bill Gates and Halo 3 fans waiting for the midnight release of the game outside a Best Buy in Bellevue, Washington, outside a retail store on the video game's debut evening)