Ask Hollywood’s favorite politician, Hillary Clinton. It’s always easier to blame someone else for your misfortunes. From Kevin Fallon at thedailybeast.com:
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY THE DAILY BEAST
In what was the worst Memorial Day box office weekend since 1999, the fifth Pirates of the Caribbean movie—the one that everyone kept forgetting was coming out—got lost somewhere in the Bermuda Triangle, despite riding in on an ostentatious $230 million ship. While certainly not chump change, its $78 million gross is hardly the treasure haul the Johnny Depp franchise, which at its height opened to twice that amount, is used to.
And the relentlessly promoted new, raunchy Baywatch comedy starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Zac Efron similarly arrived at the box office like a rotting beached whale. It earned just $28 million over the weekend when pundits had been tracking a debut of $50 million.
The connection between both box office bombs—beyond their susceptibility to water puns—was that they both had also been decimated by a tidal wave of horrendous reviews from critics.
And in the wake of the dual box office shipwreck, industry publication Deadline reported that insiders close to the movies are not happy with critics for warning people off these sinking ships. (Puns are over, I swear.)
The Deadline piece cited the rancid Rotten Tomatoes scores for the films—32 percent for Pirates; 19 percent for Baywatch—and argued that the aggregation site, which runs its scores on movie ticket purchaser Fandango, is to blame for the bad box office returns. Not, you know, the fact that the films were bad themselves.
