So how did Think Like a Man succeed where Red Tails came up short?  In retrospect, a lot of obvious factors added up:

1. Drama win awards, but comedies do better box office. That’s not a black or white thing, that’s a green thing.  There’s a reason we all know Adam Sandler but only film geeks would immediately recognize Michael Fassbender.

2. Catering to the audience vs. pandering the audience.  Both films threw out the ‘we NEED you to support us’ line (which is very true, but that’s an argument/post for another time).  There were drastically different tones though: George Lucas proactively used his publicity tour to passive aggressively shame us into going (because Hollywood wouldn’t make the film).  The group behind Think used the conceit of the book (relationship advice) to offer their own relationship advice everywhere.  Which leads me to…

3. Unavoidable promotion.  Between the TV show Scandal, and Think Like a Man, I can never remember, ever, two projects with black leads so heavily promoted.  I wasn’t the only one to joke about it but this is true, whether we had interest going in for either project, there was NO doubt we knew they were coming.  As an aside, now that I have watched the first few eps of Scandal, I dig it.  But the point being, the marketing groups behind both projects are the real stars.  I speak from experience, the number one goal isn’t ‘Do you think this is good?’ That’s number two.  Number one (especially in the time we live in) is ‘Are you aware/have you heard of our product?’ Having said that…

4. It’s not bad.  The general consensus for Think Like a Man in the reviews I’ve read and the texts I got over the weekend were the movie was good to great.  At worst, it reminded people of the black comedies that came out in the 90s.  Films that weren’t Hall of Famers, but fun for a couple of hours.  In other words, the audience loved it because it stayed in its lane.  There’s no crime in that.

So there’s a lot to learn from this weekend, and personally I don’t think any of it has to do with the film itself.  Marketing, casting (which I didn’t get to, but I mean, look at that poster), expectations.  Time will tell on who will build on this and who will treat this (yet again) as an anomaly…