Why is “Dear John” so Underestimated?
To many it was a shock last weekend when the film Dear John blew by ticket sales predictions by almost double to become the number one film at the box office. This week, experts like Entertainment Weekly are predicting Valentine’s Day is going open huge and that Dear John “is going to be crushed this frame by the Valentine’s Day juggernaut. If it drops 50% it should consider itself lucky.”
That’s not going to happen and not just because Valentine’s Day is more horrible than anyone expects.
The photo at the top of this post is from around my neighborhood. Those are just a few of the very humble homes displaying service stars that represent active duty personnel overseas. And that doesn’t mean in Germany.
Dear John is a sappy love story. But it also revolves entirely around a soldier serving in Afghanistan (and Iraq). But the story itself isn’t about the wars themselves (Hurt Locker). And it’s not about soldiers dealing with the toll of being soldiers (Stop Loss, Taking Chance). It’s simply a love story very specifically focused on the romance between a young soldier and a young girl… in South Carolina. Besides being a not-all-that-bad (if heavy handed) weepy romance tale, that specific situation very much appeals to a whole segment of the nation that writers of Entertainment Weekly do not come into contact with often (which is ironic as they are probably EW’s audience). It’s the same kind of thing that happens when a Tyler Perry film or a small Christian film like Fireproof open huge and all of the mainstream entertainment scrambles to ask “how the hell did that happen?”
Dear John will not be number one this weekend. But I predict the film is going to do way better than expected, again. And it’s going to remain wildly popular with soldiers, soldiers’ friends, soldiers’ wives, girlfriends and ex-girlfriends, a group that doesn’t see itself represented very often on the conventional popular entertainment landscape.