Why did Dredd flop at the box office?

The film Dredd was released in 2012, it was rated very highly however was described as a flop as it did not make a lot of money back, compared to what was spent on making it. In this piece of work I will be analysing why this is and I will also be comparing it to a similar film released in the same year, Batman The Dark Knight Rises The first reason why Dredd may flopped is because the budget, $45 million, was minute compared to that of similar films which were released in the same year. Avengers Assemble, Spiderman and obviously The Dark Knight Rises all had budgets 4 or 5 times the size of this. This highlights the fact that Dredd would have had to been an outstanding film if it was to dominate in the film market which evidently it was not. Adding onto this the film may have had a low budget as people never had faith in the film. This would come about as the producer would have had to apply towards the public funding body to receive investment for the film. As Dredd is a remake of a film which was only rated 18% on the highly credible site Rotten Tomatoes this could be why it was not approved the development grant as people thought it would mirror the original film. This obviously differs a lot from Batman, there had already been 3 successful Batmans before this and also the producer had also been involved in Memento and Inception which would help the cause. Obviously we can see that Dredd was up against the odds even before production had started and this did not help that the director of the film, Pete Travis, was relatively unknown. He had only ever produced one film that gained theatrical release before this, this could also be a factor in why the public funding body may have thought the film may fail. On the contrary the director of Batman, Christopher Nolan, clearly had experience in the blockbuster department so this film also had an advantage. One of the main reasons that Dredd may not have reached its full potential is that the actors/actresses of the film were not really stars. Karl Urban was probably the only person who could have been considered to be as he had starred in 3 big films before this; 2 Lords of The Rings and a Star Trek. The other 2 main characters Ma-Ma and Anderson were played respectively by Lena Headey and Olivia Thirlby. Headey had only starred in 1 highly rated film before this, 300 where and Thirlby was referred to as the girl from Juno. Comparing this cast to the original Dredd shows how poor it actually was, with Sylvester Stallone and Rob Schneider taking up lead roles in this. Additionally, the stars of The Dark Knight Rises consisted of Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine and Christian Bale and that is only some of them. Anne Hathaway also excelled in this. Clearly, the cats of Batman, a rival film, was extremely better than that of Dredd, giving it another disadvantage. As well as this the film had a restricted amount of viewers as the certificate rating that the film was given was 18. It is very unusual for a superhero film to be given a rating so high, especially a Marvel film. A lot of people who visit the cinema are teens and with the lower quadrant of the category unable to see the film, the box office gross would definitely be lower. The 3 other films that it rivalled, which I mentioned in the first paragraph, all had 12A ratings meaning that all of the four quadrants would be able to see it and they were classed as

family films. Critics believed that the film should have had a 12A or 15 released alongside the gory official release as the intake would have been higher. Moreover, this also adds onto the fact that the film was a big seller on DVDs, it reached number 1 on the UK DVD charts and is still among the top 200 selling DVDs on amazon now. Marketing is essential for a film to be a blockbuster and not a flop, however it is important that the marketing and the producing of the film equal up and one of them is not over pushed. This is the case in the film Dredd, some reports said that Lionsgate spent around $25 million dollars on the advertising and the marketing of said film. Clearly they should have spent less on this and more on the production of the film. 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. Batman clearly varies from this as people already knew that there would be a new one coming out as it was the last in the series and the trailers were released a long time before the broadcasted on the big screens. Another marketing obstacle which Dredd created itself was that it was only available to watch in the cinema as 3D. This meant that some people 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. A review on Rotten Tomatoes said that the film was more suited to 2D home media backing up my point. Dredd was shot digitally in 3D using RED MX, SI2K and Phantom Flex high-speed cameras. This shows how the producers and directors wanted to excel on special effects and why they perhaps only released the film in 3D. The Dark Knight Rises also used this technology but filmed it in 2D as well so more people would be able to watch it. Summing up all of the points that I have gathered I can come to the conclusion that Dredd was up against too many other films in the same genre, as superhero films are very common. I can also say that clearly the marketing was very poor as not a lot of people went to see it and those who did rated it highly, showing that if the marketing was significantly better and more people went to see the film then it may have turned out to be a proper blockbuster.