‘Land of the Lost’: Stuck in a box-office squeeze play

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There aren’t a lot of happy faces at Universal Pictures as the studio goes into the weekend brooding about the box-office prospects for its $100-million-plus ‘Land of the Lost’ special-effects comedy. Despite the presence of Will Ferrell, who’s virtually assumed creative control of NBC in recent days, being Jay Leno’s last guest and Conan O’Brien’s first guest on ‘The Tonight Show,’ the movie looks like it’s in trouble. (Yes, Virginia, NBC owns Universal, so the skids were greased pretty easily for that promotional coup.)

The reviews for ‘Land of the Lost’ have been terrible, with the film earning a hapless 26% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, giving it the unhappy distinction of scoring lower than even a forgettable piece of dreck like ‘Dance Flick.’ But the really bad news is that ‘Land of the Lost’ is being squeezed -- potentially losing a big chunk of its young audience to Pixar’s much-beloved ‘Up’ (which earned an astounding 98 on Rotten Tomatoes) while losing a healthy piece of Ferrell’s traditional frat-boy following to Warners’ ‘The Hangover,’ which has roared into the weekend with a huge buzz of enthusiasm from older teens and men eager to see a bunch of guys get uproariously trashed during a weekend in Vegas. (Even the critics liked ‘Hangover,’ giving it a high-flying 81 on Rotten Tomatoes.)

How did Universal get into this unhappy fix? In hindsight, you have to wonder what ‘Land of the Lost’ is doing on a date where it could see two movies shaving away a big chunk of its core audience. Uni marketing and distribution chief Adam Fogelson wasn’t talking, having already retired to Dick Cheney’s old secure underground bunker (OK, just kidding). But after canvassing a few distribution geeks, I managed to pull together a plausible scenario of Universal’s decision-making mind-set.

As it turns out, ‘Lost’ was originally dated in mid-July, but when Warners moved ‘Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince’ onto that date last year, Universal moved ‘Lost’ up to June 5, viewing it as an open weekend. At some point in the early spring, Warners moved ‘The Hangover’ up to the same weekend. Universal crunched some numbers, essentially asking the question: How well could a hard-R male-oriented comedy do in its opening weekend? Would ‘Hangover’ perform like Universal’s own ‘40-Year-Old Virgin,’ which opened to $20 million? Or would it perform like New Line’s ‘The Wedding Crashers,’ which opened to $32 million?

With strong word-of-mouth coming out of a heavy screening campaign, ‘Hangover’ has the feel of a ‘Wedding Crashers’-style hit, except it lacks the star power of the New Line film, which had Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson, who are clearly bigger drawing cards than ‘Hangover’s’ lesser-known leads. Based on those calculations, I’m guessing that Universal bet that ‘Hangover’ might do $24 to $26 million, while the studio suspected that ‘Up’ would perform on the lower end of Pixar movies, putting it at around $30 million in its second weekend of release.

The studio gambled that its all-audience, PG-13, Will Ferrell-starring comedy -- bolstered by some ‘Jurassic Park’-style effects -- could end up doing $35 million, if not more, giving it a pretty easy path to a winning weekend. After all, Ferrell had delivered a pair of low-$30-million openings with ‘Step Brothers’ and ‘Blades of Glory.’ So why wouldn’t he do even more, being chased around by an eye-popping dinosaur? But despite a mushroom cloud of publicity generated by its star, ‘Lost’ feels like a laggard. The teen boys on my block are all geared up for ‘Hangover,’ while my 11-year-old, still on a high from ‘Star Trek,’ is more interested in seeing ‘Up’ before he gets around to ‘Lost.’

My colleague John Horn, who is far more of a box-office expert than myself, was pretty pessimistic about ‘Lost’s’ chances after perusing the latest tracking numbers. He’s guessing that ‘Up’ would win the weekend with something close to $40 million, with ‘Land of the Lost’ and ‘Hangover’ fighting for second place in the $27- to $30-million range. Box Office Guru’s Gitesh Pandya, who’s also pretty savvy about the numbers game, has similar projections, with ‘Up’ doing $41 million, ‘Lost’ at $29 million and ‘Hangover’ at $23 million.

Universal’s real problem is that it’s made a film that feels like a bad financial bet. ‘Lost’ may well open to Ferrell’s traditional $30-million opening-week numbers, but unlike his previous comedies, ‘Lost’ cost more than $100 million, far more than what it cost to bankroll films like ‘Step Brothers’ or ‘Blades of Glory.’ As Paramount learned last summer with its equally costly ‘Tropic Thunder’ (which barely broke even), there isn’t much room for error in the land of $100-million comedies. And as Warners learned last year with ‘Speed Racer,’ which was based on a similar early-’70s kids TV series, young audiences may not be especially nostalgic for Grade-C material from that now-bygone era.

Maybe it’s time for studios to get some wet cement and wall up the entrances to their vaults of cobwebby pop culture schlock. ‘Land of the Lost’ has the tepid buzz of a movie that got its start from someone scraping the bottom of the barrel.