Yes, that’s a problem.

But here’s the bigger problem: 29 films topped the $100 million mark last year, but how many of those are worthy of an Oscar? “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” and ”X-Men: First Class”  were certainly good movies, but they’re not Best Picture material.

The problem isn’t so much that the Academy is out of touch (which it is), it’s that the product the industry created was so lousy last year, there really are no crowd-pleasers good enough to add to the list of nominations. And as someone who has seen the middling “Midnight in Paris,” the pretentious and impossibly dull “Tree of Life,” and the just pretty good “War Horse” — none of which is better than “Rise of the Apes,” “X-Men,” or “Resident Evil 4,” for that matter – the Academy is still guilty of stacking the deck with brand-tarnishing mediocrities.

Box Office Mojo:

After two years in a row in which the Best Picture race was populated with a handful of blockbusters, The Help is the only one of 2011’s nine nominees that has so far earned more than $100 million. On average the movies have made just $57.6 million prior to the nominations, which is up on the five-nominee years from 2004-2008 but way off from ten-nominee years 2010 ($119.5 million) and 2009 ($151.5 million).

Kyle Smith:

On paper, this year’s closers might look more formidable, but who knows anymore? No one predicted the bottom falling out of the sequels to “Valentine’s Day” and “Happy Feet.”

Here are the numbers:

1. New Year’s Eve: $13.7M — This is director Garry Marshall’s sequel to his “Valentine’s Day,” which opened in 2010 to a mammoth $56M. The concept seemed fool-proof: place a ton of stars around a beloved holiday and knit them together with a loosely plotted romantic comedy.

There are, however, five very good reasons “New Years Eve” flopped.

1. After his breakup with Demi Moore, women aren’t finding Ashton Kutcher all that adorable anymore, though you have to wonder what they saw in the marginally-talented metrosexual in the first place.

2. The sequel is populated with a whole lot more celebrities than stars.

3. “Valentine’s Day” wasn’t a big hit. Granted, the opening was  spectacular, but so was the subsequent drop off. In the end, it only ended up grossing $110M. Which brings me to…

4. “Valentine’s Day” was awful. Hollywood might have been able to put a dozen famous faces in the trailer to fool enough people into 3600 theatres on opening weekend, but after word got out, it crashed and became an advertisement for why no one should see the sequel.

5. Even if “New Year’s Eve” starred someone people care about like Halle Berry or Robert DeNiro, they also know from their “Valentine’s Day” experience that other than Kutcher, everyone else only shows up for a few scenes.

2. The Sitter: $10M — Jonah Hill is nothing close to a star and what made Hollywood think they could release an R-rated comedy into the middle of the Christmas season? Especially one with a trailer proud of the fact that the comedy revolves around a babysitter stripping young kids of their innocence? “Adventures in Babysitting” and “Uncle Buck” this ain’t.

3. Breaking Dawn Part 1: $7.9M — With a total haul of $260M, there’s no doubt this is a hit. However, with the closing chapter set for release next year, “Breaking Dawn” is not keeping pace with its predecessor. Summit Entertainment might be disappointed, but that’s what you call a luxury problem.

4. The Muppets: $7M — Kermit and company had enough problems without the left-wing entertainment media piling on. More about that here.

5. Arthur Christmas: $6.6M — A drop of only 11% over last week is the only good news for Sony. Three weeks in release and a $33.4M haul is bad news no matter how you spin it.

6. Hugo: $6.1M — Paramount added 768 screens and Scorsese’s 3D epic still dropped almost 20% over last weekend.  Any hope word-of-mouth would break this out is fading fast.

7. The Descendants: $4.8M — No doubt this well-reviewed George Clooney drama is an indie hit, but after adding 302 screens for a total of 876, the box office only increased 1%. The plan is to take it even wider next weekend, and if the per screen ($5500) holds up that could prove to be a wise move.

8. Happy Feet Two: $3.7M – $56.8M after four weeks, about $80M behind its predecessor at this same time.

9. Jack and Jill: $3.2M — Did anyone think that after four weeks in release, a goofy Sandler comedy would be $12M ahead of “Happy Feet Two?”

10. The Immortals: $2.4M — $80M domestic plus another $102M overseas equals a profitability possibility on home video. With no big names, this is doing better than I expected.

This Friday will see the release of “Chipmunks 3,” “MI:4″ (on 400 IMAX screens), and “Sherlock Holmes 2.” As a 20th Century Fox exec told the AP:

“I still want to think that our business is product driven, but we’re about to find out, because we’ve got some major films coming,” said Chris Aronson, head of distribution at 20th Century Fox, the studio behind “The Sitter” and “Alvin and the Chipmunks.” “There’s a lot of good stuff coming, and I think audiences are going to be primed.”

Hard to disagree with that. Every instinct tells me Hollywood will close strong.

No, I still haven’t seen it but the business side of Atlas Shrugged is of interest to me as a filmmaker, political writer and former Objectivist. Plus my friend Andrew Breitbart and my ex-wife Kat are both in movie – in the same scene. (Kat is wearing pink, Breitbart isn’t.)

Some people – like liberal blogger and (former?) friend Bob Cesca – want to say it’s doing very badly. This is from his subtly titled post Nobody Likes Atlas Shrugged.

Did you know there’s a movie version of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged?

No? Well, you’re not alone. The first part of a trilogy (!!!) based on Ayn Rand’s libertarian bible was released in limited theaters on Friday and it currently has an 8 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. That’s really awful.

And the reviews are generally bad. Some are sort of mixed, like this one by Kyle Smith from the New York Post…

Though a bit stiff in the joints and acted by an undistinguished cast amid TV-movie trappings, this low-budget adaptation of Ayn Rand’s novel nevertheless contains a fire and a fury that makes it more compelling than the average mass-produced studio item.

The low-budget / casting angle comes up in many reviews and I certainly raised them myself. But the original reviews of Atlas Shrugged were…well, awful. Really awful. And not all the data is that negative. On IMDB right now it has a kind of okay 6.8 rating. And on Box Office Mojo, it’s got a solid B with 74% giving it an A.

Criticism is all opinion, however. How did it do business wise?

Box Office Mojo’s Brandon Gray wrote a glass-half-empty piece…

Atlas Shrugged: Part I was the top-grossing limited release of the weekend, generating an estimated $1.7 million at 300 single-screen locations.

For a pure independent release, Atlas Shrugged: Part I’s opening was fine. But for the first-ever adaptation of Ayn Rand’s influential mega-selling 1957 novel that had far more media hype than any other independent movie could dream of, it was disappointing.

(snip)

Boosters of Atlas Shrugged: Part I might point to the movie’s per theater average to spin it as a success (ex. “it did almost as much per theater as Scream 4!”), but spin is all it is. It’s a common ploy to cling to per-theater average to rationalize a soft run. Obviously, it’s generally easier for a small release to have a higher per-theater average than one at over 3,000 theaters (at any rate, Scream 4 was a disappointment itself).

If the people behind Atlas Shrugged: Part I claim success, they are invited to reveal the capacity the movie played to at each theater. If the movie only had screens with tiny capacities and sold a high percentage of the available seats, then that would be a legitimate positive point to latch onto.

Finally, anecdotes – I spoke to a few people who saw the film. They said there were good 7 o’clock crowds and a lot of enthusiasm. Repeat business could be a factor. If business only shrinks by 20% the second week or if they expand theaters, the film could make back a decent amount of the reported $10,000,000 budget on US theatrical. I don’t expect foreign to do much but the film could do well on DVD and should get a cable buy as well.

So will there be a Part 2? ‘I’m leaning towards a yes but I actually think the smart move for investors is to give Part 2 MORE money than they gave Part 1. That may answer some of the ‘low budget’ criticism that Part 1 is enduring.

Below that headline are nearly 700 confused and curious words digging into the strange, exotic phenomenon of American moviegoers flocking to an unpretentious, family comedy starring one of America’s few remaining bankable actors who co-stars with 4 guys who have spent 15 years building audience goodwill.

The author of the piece is Steven Zeitchik, and while my confusion with his confusion remains, let’s at least give him points for not pulling a Patrick Goldstein. Rather than speculate until he reached his own conclusion, Zeitchik actually practiced a little journalism:

We spoke with a few distribution experts and movie veterans, and they offered numerous theories. There’s the one that Sandler is back in a comedy that’s recognizably him (apparently, “Funny People” reminded these filmgoers that they liked Sandler, but not enough for them to like the movie).

Or the theory that many of the men who went to see “Grown Ups” recognized some of themselves  in it. These would be the thirty- and fortysometings who look back fondly, with no small amount of gross-out pleasure, on their adolescence, and at Sandler, the living embodiment of it. … Bolstering this theory is Sony’s data that nearly half the “Grown Ups” audience was over age 25. …

This is interesting:

But the most interesting  explanation may lie with a surprising Sony number: More women saw the movie than men (about 52% to 48%, according to the studio). On its face, that one’s a head-scratcher. You wouldn’t think that women would see themselves in the male characters or, for that matter, in the characters of the one-dimensional wives and girlfriends.

I don’t find that to be anything close to a head-scratcher. What could have more universal appeal than the familiar comfort food of “Grown Ups?”

And what does gender have to do with anything? If women only went to films with “characters they can see themselves in,” at least half the films released today wouldn’t star women.  

Zeitchik might have been assigned the story, so I’m not blaming him, but when the movie industry’s newspaper of record expresses surprise over the no-brainer of no-brainers scoring big at the box office, there’s a disconnect.

Shouldn’t someone at the L.A. Times have at least a rudimentary knowledge of what appeals to the everyday American movie-goer? I’m not even suggesting they like the everyday American moviegoer. Or if they don’t want to do that, they could at least bookmark Box Office Mojo and discover that when Adam Sandler makes and Adam Sandler film, his batting average is right around 100%.

First and foremost, I’m a movie lover. Nothing competes for my attention in this regard, including dollar rentals and the like. But I’m just not buying anywhere near the number of new releases I did just ten years ago. Obviously, this is anecdotal evidence, so make your own comparisons:

1998  – I purchased 15 of the top 20 money makers…

1999 — 18 of the top 20.

2000 — 16 of the top 20.

2001 — 14 of the top 20.

And nothing’s changed. My tastes are the same. I still enjoy and don’t regret a single purchase (well, maybe “Planet of the Apes” — but I keep watching thinking it will get better). Now flash-forward to the last few years  and the numbers collapse:

2006 – 5 of the top 20.

2007 — 9 of the top 20.

2008 — 6 of the top 20

2009 — 6 of the top 20 (thus far, that I intend to purchase)

Box office attendance has been much steadier than DVD sales, so the crash in the home video market might have something to do with the ”fool me once” rule. Gambling, sight unseen, on a night out at the movies is an American tradition – something to do — a kind of event. Purchasing the same film to take home with the idea of watching again and again is a completely different buyer’s decision, one where you ask yourself if you want to relive your theatrical experience.

In my case, increasingly, the answer’s been no, and in many cases, hell no.

Sometimes the simple answer really is the right one … or the one the industry just doesn’t want to face.