Zola Should've Learned From The Real Cancun's Mistakes
The Twitter based film Zola failed at the Box Office because it didn't pay attention to history.
Toxic. Bad for mental health. Society destroying. These are all claims leveled against Twitter, the source material for Zola, a film that opened at #9 and a disappointing $1.2 Million this past weekend. But 20 years ago, they were also leveled against another emerging form of media: Reality Television.
In the early Aughts, Reality TV was cheap to produce and there was a limitless supply of people eager to exploit themselves for a shot at their 15 minutes of fame. Due to the massive success of CBS’s Survivor and the shows that followed after it, Reality was thriving on TV.
Enter veteran reality producers Mary-Ellis Bunim and Jonathan Murray, creators of MTV’s groundbreaking The Real World and Road Rules. Like anyone who’d conquered television, they set their sights on tackling a higher form of entertainment — the movies.
So in 2003, Bunim-Murray and director Rick de Oliveira filmed sixteen “real” young adults as they celebrated Spring Break in Cancun, Mexico. The film was shot from March 13 - 23rd and set for release on April 25th of the same year, a staggeringly fast turnaround.
It was also cheap. The production budget for the film was only $7.5 Million, which was incredibly low for a major motion picture. For context, 2003’s American Pie threequel American Wedding — a similarly youth skewing August release — was budgeted at $55 Million.
With low overhead, an eager workforce and quick editing, Bunim-Murray and the films distributor New Line Cinema thought The Real Cancun would create a lucrative new blockbuster genre — Reality Movies.
They were very, very wrong.
The Real Cancun opened wide in 2,261 theaters and grossed a pitiful $2.1M to place at #10 for the weekend. It plummeted 71% in its second weekend, snagging just $612,495. In its third weekend, it dropped another 78%, pocketing a paltry $133,950 in only 224 theaters. By weekend four, it was down to 71 theaters and $37,454. By the fifth, it was gone.
So why did Cancun shed theaters like coeds shed their tops at a Wet T-shirt Contest?
Because the filmmakers didn’t understand the public’s relationship with the source material.
Sure, some once disreputable source materials have turned into blockbuster genres — comic books being a prime example. But Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman — arguably the template for all successful panel-to-screen smashes — deviates enough from the source material and doesn’t throw the fact that it’s based on a comic book in the viewer’s face. Distancing the film, even slightly, from the source material allowed comic book films to slowly become more mainstream and eventually dominate the Box Office.
But in 2003, the general public wasn’t proud to be Reality TV fans. It was akin to admitting you got off on watching/being involved in car wrecks — hence the earlier B.O. failure of David Cronenberg’s 1996 film Crash.
Viewers devoured schlock like Who Wants To Marry a Multi-Millionaire, Are You Hot?: The Search For America's Sexiest People, and Mr. Personality in the safety of their own homes, away from the judgmental and prying eyes of the public. The ad campaign for the Real Cancun leaned so heavily on it being the first Reality Movie, that people turned their backs on it. The resounding failure of The Real Cancun destroyed any hopes for a Reality Movie genre. In fact, it’s rumored that MGM’s proposed Girls Gone Wild big screen adaptation was scuttled due to Cancun’s poor performance.
Zola has a similar marketing problem. The based on a Twitter thread angle of Zola’s marketing push has been omnipresent, and the fact that it’s being treated as a selling point is a miscalculation of Cancun level proportions.
The public just isn’t ready to look at Twitter threads as reputable source material.
An average person tweets when they're angry, bored, tired and sitting on the Shitter. In fact, I’d say a good percentage of people who read the Twitter thread Zola is based on were sitting on The Throne at the time. Now, I can’t speak to the quality of Zola. Unlike The Real Cancun — 34% Rotten, 29% Audience Score — Zola has been well received — 87% Fresh, 67% Audience Score. But quality doesn’t matter when the source material it springs from is so tainted and toilet based.
Instead of leaning into its Twitter derived nature, the filmmakers should have steered clear of it. Now, Zola has doomed Twitter threads to the dustbin of unusable source materials alongside trading cards, stickers, prank phone calls and sexy dances. So welcome Zola, take off your top and have a margarita. The Real Cancun is waiting for you.