I've returned to something that bothered me earlier in the year--movies buying commercials during the Super Bowl--this time with some numbers in tow. To buy one commercial slot during Super Bowl XXXVIII in January it cost $2.3 million. According to NATO (that is the National Association of Theatre Owners, not the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) the average movie ticket price in the US in 2003 was $6.03. Thus, just to gross enough money to recoup the $2.3 million spent on one Super Bowl commercial for Starsky & Hutch, it would have to convince approximately 380,000 (roughly the population of Minneapolis) to go see the film, and it would help if these people would not have decided to see the film based on the rest of the ad campaign. Another way to look at it is that they spent more than 8% of the openning weekend's gross to air one (1) commercial six weeks before the film was released. The film was released by Warner Bros. and Miramax and the Super Bowl was on CBS, and so I don't know of any corporate synergy at play here. I don't get it.

On the other hand, it's sad to say, but I don't really think spending $2.3 million more on the film's quality (I have not seen the film, which had a budget of $60 million.) would draw more filmgoers either. However, I'd love to see what kind of film someone like Robert Rodriguez could make with a budget of just the cost of airing one (1) Super Bowl commercial. The tenth place film at the box office during the July 4 weekend (Two Brothers) earned a gross of $3.9 million.