Why Was 'Dredd' Such A Flop At The Box Office?

The film 'Dredd' was released in 2012, it was rated very highly pre production however was described as a flop or ‘box office bomb’ as it did not make a lot of money back, compared to what was spent on making it. Here, I will be analysing why this was and I will also be comparing it to a similar film released in the same year, ‘Avengers Assemble’.

The London 2012 olympic games may have hindered the success of ‘Dredd’. At the time the world had its eyes on the media in order to follow the events unfolding at the games. Thus, creating a primetime opening for advertising. Consequently, advertising prices would have risen due to these factors and with ‘Dredd’ having a low budget this may have been implausable for the film-makers.

The first reason why ‘Dredd’ may have flopped is because of its budget; which was $45 million. This is a relatively small budget for a ‘hollywood’ film and was tiny compared to that of: Spider-man, Batman and Avengers assemble; all similar films released in the same year. For a film such as ‘Dredd’ to have dominated the box office with a budget 4 or 5 times less than the blockbusters mentioned before, it would have had to be an unbelievable movie.

A factor that would have contributed to the film’s low budget was that investors had little faith in it. This could have been down to its poor reputation from the 1995 film.  Unlike that of Spider-man which was following three successful movies which would have appealed to investors and would seem to be the more ‘safer’ option. The fact that the director of ‘Dredd’, Peter Travis was relatively unknown previously did not help the films cause. Unlike that of the director of ‘Batman’ Chris Nolan, who already had experience in directing major movies.

Marketing is an integral part of a film’s success, however it is important that the marketing and the producing of the film ‘equal up’ and one of them is not overdone. This happens to be the case in the film ‘Dredd’, some reports said that Lionsgate spent around $25 million dollars on advertising and marketing. One would assume that they should have spent less on this and more on the production of the film in order to increase its chance of success. Even though the makers of ‘Dredd’ spent this much money on the marketing, an official trailer was only published one month before the film was released so people may not have heard about the film leading to lower anticipation. ‘Avengers assemble’ was the complete opposite to this. ‘Avengers’ had ‘blanket’ marketing across all forms of media. This means that both fans of the comics and those unaware of its existence could not escape its advertising which is obviously going to increase both anticipation and target audience. ‘Avengers assemble’ managed to get advertising on television, the tube, newspapers, buses, websites and even through things such as ‘Soundcloud’ and ‘Spotify’. Another marketing obstacle which Dredd created for itself was that it was only available to watch in the cinemas in 3D. This meant that some may not have gone and watched it as they may just not like 3D in general or would have preferred to watch the film in 2D. On the other hand, ‘Avengers assemble’ was available to be viewed in both formats.

Another reason why ‘Dredd’ may have not lived up to its pre-production hype could have been it’s cast. The movie featured a lot of ‘B list’ actors. Famous people but not those you would associate with the term ‘star’. Compared to the cast of ‘Avengers Assemble’ which features an array of Hollywood actors proven to be able to carry a film on their own; for example Chris Hemsworth in ‘Thor’. There may be an argument that Karl Urban could be classed as a ‘Hollywood star’ as he had featured in big film previously, namely two of the Lord of the rings’ trilogy and ‘Star Trek’. The other 2 main characters ‘Ma-Ma’ and ‘officer Anderson’ were played  by Lena Headey and Olivia Thirlby respectively. Headey had only starred in one major film before this, ‘300’.

The fact that ‘Dredd’ was given an 18 certificate also added to the films woes. For a film of this nature to be given such a high viewer rating is highly unusual. This meant that only two of the four quadrants that add to make the ‘four quadrant movie’ classification could only go and see this film. Obviously with a smaller potential audience to that of ‘Avengers assemble’ which was given a rating of 12A you would anticipate the figures produced at box office to be considerably lower. This also adds onto the fact that the film was a big seller in DVD format, it reached number one on the UK DVD charts and is still among the top 200 selling DVD’s on amazon now. The fact that ‘Avengers assemble’ had a 12A certificate meant that young teens could go to the cinema and see it. The fact that this age group are the highest attendees at cinemas also helped ‘Avengers assemble’ in its success.

In conclusion I believe that ‘Dredd’ faced an uphill battle even before its production to be a great success at the box office and that films within its same genre released around the same time with much larger budgets also increased it’s struggle to succeed. Personally, I enjoyed the movie but amazingly quality of a film isn't always what determines it's success.