There is little doubt that San Andreas will be my wife’s favorite film of 2015. The film is a $100 million earthquake melodrama. I’m sure regular readers know this about my wife, but just in case, she is a hardcore disaster porn junkie. She has watched every episode of Air Emergency and Seconds From Disaster and has seen pretty much every “stuff blows up, things go boom” or “Mother Nature strikes back” movie you can think of. If said spouse’s reaction to this trailer yesterday is any indication, then San Andreas is going to be Dwayne Johnson’s highest grossing film of 2015 and will give Star Wars: The Force Awakens a run for its money.
This trailer is pretty terrific in terms of doing the specific job it needs to do. It sells obscenely large-scale destruction while showing off its big movie star (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson) doing his “to the rescue” thing. The trailer also at least leaves open the notion that there is more carnage that hasn’t been revealed, which is of course key for selling a movie primarily on money shots. If audiences think they got the whole show in the three trailers that Warner Bros./Time Warner Inc. has released thus far, they’ll be less likely to go out to the theater. But this campaign thus far has been (seemingly) pretty good about selling the notion that the best is still to come, as well as offering just a barest hint of any plot or character melodrama.
I like that they seem to find a new downboat cover of “California Dreaming” for each new trailer, but I digress. It is still a little disconcerting that a film that looks this “big” and seems to feature this much eye-popping action and destruction is still considered one of the B-movies among would-be summer blockbusters. It doesn’t have a known property, it doesn’t have an iconic character, and it’s not rooted in nostalgic pandering, thus it’s almost an underdog. Yes, a $100 million earthquake movie starring Dwayne Johnson (and only Dwayne Johnson, at least in terms of box office pull, sorry Carla Gugino and Paul Giamatti) is considered something of an underdog. Of course, that $100m budget is key since it means that the film doesn’t have to break records in order to break even.
Hercules may have been a relative underperformer in terms of relative expectations, but a $243m worldwide on a $100m budget is nothing to sneeze at, especially when the film had little to sell beyond its lead star and its marketing campaign inexplicably made the film look worse than it actually was. But again, the Brett Ratner ensemble action adventure film was a relatively well-liked film that was probably the best “no press screenings” would-be blockbuster since Psycho. And its relatively low budget (yes, a $100m budget is now considered almost low for a major summer release) helps cushion the blow in a way that the $175m budget of Tom Cruise’s Edge of Tomorrow did not.
Warner Bros., New Line Cinema, and Village Roadshow would probably be thrilled with a $300m worldwide cume when all is said and done. The film does get two weekends after Mad Max: Fury Road and two weekends before Jurassic World. It opens against Cameron Crowe’s Aloha which stars Bradley Cooper, Emma Stone, and Rachel McAdams. It will be interesting to see if Cooper has any increased “I can open a movie” heat off of American Sniper, but that is for another day. Anyway, director Brad Peyton and writer Carlton Cuse’s San Andreas opens May 29th in 2D, 3D, and gloriously appropriate D-Box where applicable. As always, we’ll see, but maybe I should just let my wife write the review (presuming she doesn’t give birth to our third kid before we see it). After all, she’s the target audience.
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