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Well, the numbers are in, and they don’t look good: in its mere third weekend, Watchmen is down to fifth place on the box office charts, its take a mere six million dollars. Worst of all, it hasn’t even hit the 100 million dollar mark yet, which most of us thought it would do within a week. For those of us who followed the film’s development for months (even years) before it came out earlier this month, we’re just sort of left to wonder: what happened?

It was probably a number of things, not all of which has to do with the movie itself. Though we could really only tell in hindsight, this movie was horrendously marketed. Yeah, they released some cool images that we all drooled over, but what did they really tell us about the movie itself? Nothing. It didn’t matter too much for the massive comic community who was going to see the film even if they had ended up casting Robin Williams as Rorschach (they really considered doing this), but it makes a huge difference to everyone else in the world, who, let’s face it, has the buying power to make something like this fly. I wholeheartedly believe that the mainstream audience would accept something with this degree of violence (The Passion of the Christ, anyone?), but not if they have no idea what they’re getting into. And for those who hadn’t read the novel but saw it anyway (as well as for those of us who had): what did the final product really mean? It depends. I really hated the movie, but I know that there are a lot of people who didn't. But case in point: the reaction was mixed. There was no way to draw enough people to make a summer movie fly in the winter if it was anything less than a knockout.

But if you really dig into the numbers and do some investigating (which is a fancy way of saying ‘looking at a few lists on boxofficemojo.com’), the failure of Watchmen is part of a disturbing trend with far-reaching consequences in the industry. If you look at the list of Films with the Biggest Second Weekend Drop, you’ll see that Watchmen dropped 67.7% in its second week, but also that its already the sixth movie to crack the top 100 in this year that isn’t even three months old yet. Street Fighter: The Legend on Chun-Li, Notorious, Miss March, Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience, and Friday the 13^th (with a pretty staggering 80% plunge) also made the cut. So what’s going on here? There are a couple of possibilities:

1) The movies suck. It’s entirely possible. A new Street Fighter film which wouldn’t have been cool when the game was at the height of its popularity and the notoriously panned Miss March were among those picked. But being really bad is hardly ever an obstacle to box office success, and the rest of them received middling if not enthusiastic reviews, so that can’t be the only factor here.

Or…

2) We’re not interested in seeing movies past their opening weekends, whether the movie in question is any good or not. This is really, really bad, because that means if the only way Hollywood can make money on a movie is to blast all of its efforts into getting us into a theater in the first three days of its release, then that’s all its going to do, and we will endure disappointment with huge ad budget upon disappointment with boring lead performance upon disappointment that just plain sucks, but we saw it anyway because we read the comic it was based on. Don’t think it won’t happen. Even the fanboys who defended aren’t talking about the Watchmen movie anymore.

So how do we combat this? As a person trying to make it in the film industry, you might have to question my sanity, but to me the answer seems clear: see fewer movies. That’s right. We, as Americans, see too many movies, or at least see them on the opening weekend (think: if you don’t see it on the opening weekend, do you see it at all?). Wait until the second weekend, or at least wait until some of your friends see it and tell you if it’s any good or not. It'll help us filter out what is halfway decent from what is only quarter- or eighth-decent. That’s the only way we’ll be spared this:

Be honest: you’d see it, wouldn’t you?