Why Did “Milk” Go Sour?

(Getty Images/Andrew Walker)

Milk is kinda tanking.

The movie opened strongly, cracking the top ten when it bowed on Thanksgiving weekend, despite playing in only 36 theaters. The film, which took on an eerie relevance in the wake of California’s Proposition 8 debacle, made an astounding $38,361 per screen.

But since then, theater attendance for the critically acclaimed film about gay rights pioneer Harvey Milk has lagged.

“The Focus strategy was to take a good look at [Sean] Penn's work and position the film to roll out widely after the Oscars,” says film critic Roger Ebert. “Not a bad strategy.”

Others wonder if Focus Features, the arthouse division of NBC Universal’s Universal Studios that is releasing the movie, didn’t make a miscalculation.

“They might have rolled this out too slowly,” says OutinHollywood.com’s Greg Hernandez. “Post Proposition 8, there was a lot of buzz and anticipation for the film, but a lot of people who wanted to see it couldn’t see it.”

Focus Features employed a “rolling release” strategy, starting small and slowly expanding the film to over two hundred theaters through Christmas, where it performed well, if not exceptionally. But the studio deliberately kept the number of theaters low, waiting until the end of January to go wide, so they could capitalize on the publicity from the anticipated Oscar nominations, announced on January 22.

The Oscar nominations were announced two week ago, and sure enough, the film was among the contenders for Best Picture, as well as other major awards. The weekend after the nominations, two months after its initial release, the film finally went wide, although only to a still modest 822 theaters.

The first weekend of this wide release, it made $1.8 million domestically, averaging a lackluster $2044 per screen, making it only the 18th top-grossing film of the week. By contrast, Paul Blart Mall Cop made $4761 per screen in its third week of wide release.

Slumdog Millionaire, considered Milk’s primary competition for Best Picture, averaged $5508 per screen on more than double the number of Milk’s theaters, coming in the top five for the week.

This past weekend, the second weekend of Milk’s wide release, the film’s box office ticked up, to $2437 per screen. It’s now made just over $24 million domestically.

“These movie studios have a very delicate dance they have to perform,” says Dave Karger, Senior Writer for Entertainment Weekly (and the author of the Oscar Watch blog). “If they’d put Milk out all over the country, it probably wouldn’t have performed to blockbuster standards, and they would’ve risked being perceived as a flop.”

Indeed, studios closely monitor theater attendance, using sophisticated market projections to determine exactly how much interest there is in a film. The fact that Focus Features didn’t expand Milk wider any earlier is an indication that the numbers didn’t look like they could sustain the release, especially in the brutally competitive late December movie environment.

And to be clear, Milk is still an arthouse hit. “Milk is already well into profit, and is by no measure a flop, unless you were expecting a blockbuster,” Ebert says. “It will benefit enormously if Sean Penn wins the Oscar, as I predict he will.”

But the film has clearly struggled to expand beyond the urban areas where it debuted so strongly.

To be sure, Milk is not the only Best Picture nominee to see disappointing returns following the announcement of the Oscar nominations. The Reader and Frost/Nixon have also seen lackluster box office results.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, the fifth Best Picture nominee, went wide from the start and has enjoyed a very healthy run.

“Milk is playing in the least number of theaters of any of the five Best Picture nominees, though of the five, it had the third most nominations,” Karger says, admitting that the film’s relative failure surprises him.

“For better or for worse, [the gay subject matter] is still tough for a portion of the population,” he says. “It’s obviously a bigger draw in the urban areas than in the suburbs.”

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