The Oscars are tomorrow night, and that means one thing: Brokeback hysteria. So this is a good time to take stock of the Brokeback box office phenomenon.
Remember Brokeback's rolling start? They said that it would open in a few select (read: gay-friendly) areas, then roll into a crescendo as the Oscars approached. Well, it didn't happen. Yet people are still touting it as a box office success. Consider this nauseating story at Box Office Mojo. It lists Brokeback as the number one box office success among the 2005 movies. Why? According to the story's own numbers, it ranks, at best, ninth (and that assumes the Top 10 Box Office list actually sets forth the Top 10, which it apparently doesn't). Many movies performed better--much better, two or three or four times better. But Brokeback is still being touted as a box office success.
I'm not sure it was even number one for a spell. I earlier fell for a story that said it was number one, but the story was bogus. The "number one" figure was based on a four-weekday span. When did they start measuring "number ones" by a weekday span that excludes the weekend? Why did they start doing it with Brokeback?
Brokeback's lack of success is even more pronounced when you remember that it had weak competition. 2005 is widely considered one of the worst box office years in a long time, and much of it was due to the poor slate of movies.
Furthermore, Brokeback isn't hitting that Oscar tidal wave crescendo that its distributors hoped for. Right now, it's fourteenth in the weekly box office, behind such heavyweights as The Pink Panther (which has been widely panned) and Date Movie (ditto).
Where is all that Brokeback success?
It simply doesn't exist, but no one is admitting it. It's been a box office slumper, and everyone is denying it.
(Postscript: It was devilishly hard to find stories that compared Brokeback's box office figures with other movies. It seems no one wants to write about it. I had to piece together the post set forth above, and I never was able to find a comprehensive list of the box office results for all 2005 movies. If anyone knows of one, please email it to me.)
