The only excuse I’ve heard from anyone as to why Edge of Tomorrow bombed at the domestic box office this weekend from those that said they didn’t like the marketing. Personally I thought the trailers worked, they got me more interested in it, especially when you take into consideration the Groundhog Day plotting and ridiculous title, the latter of which is what I’d like us to discuss.
Edge of Tomorrow is based on the graphic novel “All You Need is Kill“, which the film was originally titled. Then it was changed to Edge of Tomorrow and we all scoffed as neither title sounded particularly compelling, the first obscure and confusing, the second being generic and uninteresting. I admit that while writing this very post I almost wrote Edge of Darkness instead of Edge of Tomorrow, you know, that Mel Gibson movie from 2010, also from Warner Bros.
Today I read a post over at Hollywood Elsewhere where Jeff Wells is also attempting to figure out what went wrong considering the high critical praise the film received and the fact we’re talking about a movie starring Tom Cruise, who is thought to be a major box office star. Though, to the point of Cruise’s box office drawing power, if you look at his track record he’s never been the lead in a film that opened any higher than War of the Worlds did in 2005 at $64.8 million. Certainly the $29.8 million Edge opened to is still a terrible opening for a film of this sort, but as far as film’s Cruise has had top-billing it’s his eighth best opening of all-time.
The interesting thing about the Hollywood Elsewhere post is a commenter suggesting the film should have actually been titled Live.Die.Repeat, which is the hashtag slogan Warner Bros. was using to attempt to market the film on Twitter and featured far more prominently on the poster above than the actual title. Would that have helped? Is it all in the title? Is Live.Die.Repeat edgy (no pun intended) whereas Edge of Tomorrow is yesterday’s news (pun intended)?
