In the LA Times on Tuesday, Patrick Goldstein looked at the hype the media injects onto the movie industry and how movie studios are handling it.  One of the challenges is to keep the expectations of the media inline with what the studios are predicting when it comes to opening numbers at the box office.

They used last week’s release of Star Trek as an example.  Studio marketers have the job of downplaying the movie, so when the box office numbers return, there isn’t an outcry from the media that it was a failure.

Goldstein’s example follows:

As John explains: “… I was told by Paramount, that even if ‘Star Trek’ grossed $60 million — a perfectly good outcome for the studio, the way it saw it — the weekend grosses would be considered a disappointment, because I had set the bar too high.”

And Paramount’s efforts to tamp down expectations worked. Most box-office predictors had the movie opening to a $65-70 million number, so when it actually ended up grossing $75.2 million, the stories were all positive, with influential publications like the Wall Street Journal writing that the film “beat industry predictions.” Ah, another successful example of media management.

Do you have difficulties weighing outsiders expectations with your internal expectations?