You might feel better about the Jem And The Holograms movie ruining your childhood when you learn that it’s just made history: It’s the first wide-release film to be pulled from theaters for underperforming. Yahoo! Finance reports that, rather than let the the poorly-conceived adaptation bring down its box-office average, Universal Pictures is pulling the plug on the film just two weeks after its premiere.
So just how low were the Jem movie’s box-office numbers? Well, the movie performed poorly enough for Yahoo! to put a finance reporter on the story to crunch the numbers (just kidding, you could do this math on your phone calculator). It took in less than $2 million in the two weeks it was in theaters, averaging just $160 per screen in its second week. Despite these dismal sums, industry insiders say the move is unprecedented. Jeff Bock, a senior box-office analyst, told Business Insider (via Yahoo! Finance), “[I]n all my days as an analyst, I’ve never seen a studio actually stop reporting after two weeks.”
Now, the Jem movie only cost $5 million to make (and certainly looked like it), so Universal won’t take a huge hit for it. And Universal did release three of the highest-earning films of 2015, which means the studio has a little mad money to play with, so get your Micronauts treatment ready if you want to beat any of these guys to the punch.