Poor Sony Pictures. They are under siege. First came the bruising hack into their emails that forced out studio chief Amy Pascal. The embarrassments keep echoing over the misguided Korea spoof “The Interview.” And you never know when a new dump of information is coming.
Now Adam Sandler’s “Pixels” has opened to a disappointing $24 million weekend. The animated film cost at least $88 million and probably more like $100 million given Sandler’s expenses. Thanks to the Sony email leak we know Sandler likes riding around on Sony jets.
So far this year, Sony has not had a good time. They’ve released four other films that were lackluster at best.
1 Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 Sony $70,709,001
2 The Wedding Ringer SGem $64,460,211
3 Chappie Sony $31,569,268
4 Aloha Sony $20,991,497
Totals: $187,729,977– that’s less than many films this year have made all together. Ouch!
The big hope now is that James Bond “Spectre” will be such a big hit that it erases these bad memories. The specter of “Skyfall,” the last — and maybe best– James Bond film looms large. A billion dollar world wide hit will certainly assuage all this pain.
Meantime, big Sony (not Sony Pictures Classics) has two films coming that are promising at least artistically– Jonathan Demme’s “Ricki and the Flash” with Meryl Streep will be entertaining. And Robert Zemeckis’s “The Walk” with Joseph Gordon Levitt has a lot of promise.
But “Pixels” is going to smart for quite a while after this initial weekend. For Adam Sandler at Sony, Game over.
