'The Box': The movie audiences truly love to hate

It's no secret that "The Box" is a flop. The Cameron Diaz-starring horror thriller, released by Warner Bros. last weekend, barely eked out $7.5 million at the box office, which alone ensures that it only has one way to go (down) in terms of its box-office future.

But the real shocker is the grade it received from CinemaScore, the Las Vegas-based market research company that compiles Friday-night audience reaction to all of Hollywood's big new movie releases. The CinemaScore grade matters, since it's culled not from a bunch of snooty critics but from real paying moviegoers. Even more importantly, there's a very strong correlation between the grade a film gets and its future commercial prospects. An A signals a long happy life while even a C is pretty much of a death sentence.

Even though "The Box" got a not entirely embarrassing 48 from Rotten Tomatoes, the film has gone where few movies have ever gone before -- it earned a big fat F from CinemaScore. In fact, of the 33 demographic categories measured by the service, "The Box" got an F in 29 of the 33 -- and earned a D-minus in three of the four others. Males and females under 18 gave it an F as did 25-and-up males and 35-and-up females and virtually everyone in between. Its only demographic "sweet spot" was with 25-34 and 35-49 men, who gave it a D-minus.  

I called up Ed Mintz, who runs CinemaScore, to ask if he's ever seen a movie get such bad grades. "Not in a while," he says. "People really thought this was a stinker." The only three movies he could recall that scored as many Fs were all basically horror thrillers: "The Bug," a 2006 Ashley Judd horror film; "Wolf Creek," a 2005 backpackers-in-peril thriller; and "Darkness," a 2002 haunted house scarefest.

Since Mintz actually saw the film, I asked him why audiences hated it so much. Simple, he said. They hated the ending. It turns out that the film's ostensible storyline -- a married couple are given a box containing a button that, if pushed, will bring you a million dollars but simultaneously take a stranger's life -- was just the beginning when it came to the film's assortment of horrible moral choices. Since thousands of unhappy people have already Twittered about the movie's bizarre finale, I don't think I'm giving away any state secrets to say that Diaz -- who should begin a serious reappraisal of her career choices right now -- doesn't make it to the end of the film.

"It's like a horror movie version of 'Sophie's Choice,' " Mintz says. "I have to admit that I was sitting there, going 'That's the choice? They're going to kill off a movie star? Who'd want to pay $10 to see that?' I'd love to hear how they thought they were going to get good word-of-mouth from that ending. But that's the reason why the movie got an F. The public acted in vengeance. They got angry about where the story went and the grade definitely reflects that anger."

RELATED:

CinemaScore's box-office swami

Photo of James Marsden and Cameron Diaz in "The Box" by Dale Robinette / Warner Bros.

Comments

[Manuel]

Wow. That's pretty bush league. Why would you give away the ending. This isn't twitter and you are not a sixteen year old. You're supposed to be a entertainment journalist.

[William Goss]

The Ashley Judd flick was simply called "Bug."

[James Whitney]

Yeah, how could a horror movie be any good if the main character dies?

Psycho? Never heard of it.

I'm sure this movie is terrible but I really hope moviegoers aren't dismissing it because the main character dies.

[[a]]

OK, maybe thousands of tweeters (sp) have revealed the ending but that doesn't mean everyone checks tweeter, right? Not that I care about this one movie but it'd suck if I did. Keep that in mind..

[Biff Bronson]

I didn't think this movie wasn't nearly that bad, but if people did, they did. I would guess the F's come more from the strangeness of the middle section, not the ending. Successful movies every year come out where the star dies at the end (off the top of my head [SPOILERS]: I Am Legend, The Perfect Storm, Man on Fire, Gladiator, Gran Torino). Do we really think people are so attached to Cameron Diaz that they can't handle seeing her die in a movie? That seems pretty ludicrous. I doubt audiences were along for the ride for the first hour-and-a-half, just to turn on it at the end because someone who hasn't been in a hit that doesn't have "Shrek" in the title this decade got killed.

[Brett]

I don't plan on seeing the movie (at least in the theater), but I have to agree that "Well, it's already on Twitter, so here's the ending!" is a pretty dumb move on the writer's part.

[Existenz]

If you don't want to know the end, you could have easily stopped reading when the blog post says that it will be discussing the ending. Anyone who hates spoilers should avoid movie reviews in general and just go see the darn thing.

This ending didn't bother me as much as the end to The Mist, which was even more horrible and pointless. Ultimately I think the movie was too slow for people, it didn't offer any real answers or hope for humanity, and I'm sure many many women would think [MAJOR SPOILER ALERT!!!] that the young boy would rather be blind/deaf with his mom than without. And why wouldn't she write a suicide note so that her husband doesn't go to jail for murder? Pretty ridiculous.

[Rick Mitchell]

It's nice to see that you're finally basing your comments on films from a more worthwhile and apparently reliable source than Rotten Tomatoes.

[Buck Hakes]

Maybe the problem wasn't the ending, but the ending PLUS everything leading up to it. Maybe the problem had to do with the movie being a half-hour 1980s Twilight Zone script padded out to an hour and a half, with everything in that hour and a half being completely ludicrous.

But hey, he's the professional here. He must know better than us.

[mike]

i didnt think it was that bad. I think people are hating because nothing was spoon fed to them and there was some thinking involved...that being said i didnt like the ending, not that she died, just the ending in general