Discuss Nothing but Trouble
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1st 3 Ps of Marketing - Product, Price, Place
posted by DRDMovieMusingsSTAFFMOD on March 17, 2025 at 3:28 PM
The "4Ps of marketing" — Product, Price, Place, Promotion — are applied to each industry, and that includes the movie business.
I stumbled upon this brief snippet in which Dan Aykroyd is asked about Chevy Chase, and he mentions Nothing but Trouble, a "fun, very serviceable comedy" he directed and co-starred with Chase, and he digresses a bit to suggest that "we were doomed" — DOOMED! — because...it opened on the same weekend as The Silence of the Lambs, and Sleeping with the Enemy.
It made me ask, was he right? Or was he crying victim and making excuses? There's meat on this bone to chew on. Let's get to it!
Product
Given this movie currently presents with a TMDb rating of 52% AND a losing Cinemascore of D+, these two data points suggest to me that the main issue with this movie was more internal (the movie itself) rather than external (competition). The history of movie-making is chock full of movies that did not do great box office business but stood the test of time to be recognized as great movies. Doing poorly at the box office is not an automatic indictor of a movie's quality...but the Cinemascore and the ratings together begin to paint a picture about a movie's intrinsic quality.
Price
"Price" is an interpretation here. It's not so much about the retail price charged to consume the product, but the numbers required to make a profit. In this case, it's more a function of the production budget spend since, back in 1991, a movie ticket was a movie ticket for the most part.
In that respect, I can share some tasty insights out of my movie ROI database, in which I've got 84 titles released in 1991 that, together, had an average production budget of $22M, average revenue of $62M, paying ReelROI(tm) of $2.81.
Comparing the three movies in question here (TSotL, SwtE, and NbT) is kinda hilarious!
The Silence of the Lambs had a budget of $19M (below average) and paid $14.35!
Sleeping with the Enemy had a budget of $19M (below average) and paid $9.21!
Nothing but Trouble had a budget of...(are you ready for this?) $40M (almost 2x average for movies released in 1991!) and paid $0.21! Egad!
Now, I'm NOT saying you can't make money in 1991 on a budget of $40M. Terminator 2: Judgment Day had a $100M budget and paid $5.20. JFK had a $40M budget and paid $5.14 I might also observe that another "chick flick" released that year called Fried Green Tomatoes also paid quite handsomly, $10.86 on a budget of just $11M while a movie like Backdraft had a budget of $75M and paid just $2.03. Seems movies with leading men have a higher presumption of box office success as indicated by their willingness to spend crazy money, while movies with women leads must proceed cautiously in order to be profitable in an environment wherein they're less likely to pull in tons of money...feel free to argue against this observation, but the data makes this angle compelling, and resonates with other aspects of Hollywood that we already know are well-documented.
But, the question is, what kind of movie are you trying to make? Movies like T2 and The Silence were significant in the history of film and had something to add that make their budgets a better bet. So, we come back to the movie itself.
Place
All THAT said, that 3rd P - Place - and how movie-makers make decisions that can help - or hurt - their chances for financial success, is under-appreciated yet worth speaking to.
In other comments, I've mentioned that movies like Top Gun: Maverick and No Time to Die were both in the can for a long time before they settled on a theatrical release date, both production teams were very clear that these were big screen movies and the limited ticket sales coming out of the pandemic shutdown did not support the kind of theatre action they made these movies for.
So, they waited. The had their product, and the promotion, and they made deliberate, calculated decisions about placement, which is, in the case of movies, WHEN the movie would be available for viewing. Both of these movies did terrific box office business, because the production teams took ownership of the release timing. Kudos to them.
You can't just throw any old movie out there and just assume it'll connect to your audience, it's on the production team to decide if they're "making a movie or a film", and execute the project to maximize its potentials.
My hobbyist summary
My somewhat informed opinion is that Mr. Aykroyd, with all due respect in that he is a legendary actor/movie maker, should not be crying about being doomed and making excuses - 1) spending too much money on a 2) not-great-movie and then 3) throwing it out there any old time assuming it'd stick just because is a three-strikes-your-out recipe for precisely the kind of box office results they got.
But I could be wrong! What say you?!
Reply by rooprect
on March 17, 2025 at 6:20 PM
Man I just lost some respect for Dan Ak. Surely he’s been in enough great movies and stinkers over the years to know what you just said: box office returns (specifically opening weekend?) and other fleeting market conditions have little to do with a film’s enduring quality in the long term.
Nothing But Trouble was just a weirdly written movie. I can’t say if it was good or bad but it was definitely too weird for my liking. On one level you had Chevy delivering his standard wisecracks, but as if to deliberately sabotage itself the overall presentation was just really disturbing (loosely based on the true story of a sadistic murdering judge in a deep woods southern town).
Akyroyd’s own comedic contribution was to play the judge with total malice, without a hint of humor or winks at the audience, as he brutally murders the hapless defendants who appear in his court. His visual appearance is terrifying, a walking corpse whose nose turns into male genitalia as the story progresses. This literally would’ve been a good horror flick if not for Chevy’s incongruous wisecracks. Ultimately this brand of dark violent comedy didn’t hit the mark with audiences or critics.
…. oh but according to Danny it failed because it was playing across the street from Silence of the Lambs? sheesh, take some responsibility man!
Reply by DRDMovieMusings
on March 17, 2025 at 8:29 PM
I'd never even heard of this movie, let alone seen it, so it's great to hear from someone who had a reaction to having seen it.
I watched the trailer and, while it did not, in any way, make me think "I want to watch this movie".
The trailer gave me that quirky vibe of a Beetlejuice (released before) or Death Becomes Her (released after) two comedies with a macabre edge to them that both were successful...so there certainly was an audience for this brand of dark violent comedy, if done right; our data points indeed indicate it absolutely missed the mark with audiences and critics.
Right?! Man TF up and own your sh!t. There's no way to KNOW, beforehand, how a movie will perform at the box office. Every bomb was a movie that the makers thought "this should be good!" But, when there's data available that paints a picture, it should be an opportunity to learn and hone your craft, not make BS excuses like a little boy talking about the dog eating his homework.
Reply by rooprect
on March 17, 2025 at 8:43 PM
lmaoo forreal!! I think what offends me so much about Ak's fingerpointing is that he's insulting the audience (we're so dumb we stand outside the movie theater picking our noses wondering if we're gunna see Silence of the Lambs or Nothing But Trouble) AND ironically he's selling himself short artistically. I didn't realize this until I read what you just said:
Come to think of it, absolutely! The late 80s-early 90s showed us a big shift in comedy toward darkness. Beetlejuice was one of the first films I remember taking such an irreverent approach to death, and it was a huge success on all levels. So Danny's gamble of pushing the horror aspect off the deep end was actually a sound artistic bet. I think he just went too far, or didn't understand that dark humor still has to have likeable characters to keep it from being upsetting. For example the movie Lucky is about a serial killer who compulsively murders innocent people, and some of the murders are actually kinda upsetting. But our murderer is played by Colin Hanks with a perpetual deer in the headlights expression so we can't stay mad at him for long ;) Of course Lucky was trounced by critics and audiences alike so what do I know...
The best example of a dark comedy with loveable 'bad guys' really is Beetlejuice (which reminds me I need to check out the sequel already. It's another one of those nostalgia sequels we've been discussing lately and I'd love to see if they pulled it off.
Anyway, yeah in context with the times this wasn't a total WTF departure from comedy, and actually if Danny boy had manned up and admitted that he took a comedic gamble that just didn't pay off, then I would've totally applauded him for trying. Instead he comes off as a bitter old man which is never a good look!