MCN Blogs
David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Posted Friday, January 9th, 1998 - Comments Off on Non-Holiday Box Office
Be Sociable, Share!

Non-Holiday Box Office

The first non-holiday weekend of the new year and not much to go on.The only new wide release is Fox’s forest fire actioner, Firestorm,starring the hugely popular (snicker, snicker) Howie Long. Last year,three pictures debuted in this slot. The Relic opened OK, followed by a weak Jackie Chan‘s First Strike and a disastrousTurbulence. My guess is that Firestorm will do a Liotta-like $4.5million for seventh place. The unsinkable Titanic will certainly maintain first place. The weekday numbers are off, with the holiday over, by about 60 percent, but I expect that the Fri-Sat cume should drop only about 15 percent because kids are back in school and another 7.5 percent or so because of reduced attendance on Friday and late Sunday. That means about $25.8 million.
As Good As It Gets seems to be in the passing lane, rushing past a remote-controlled Tomorrow Never Dies for second place with a 30 percent drop to about $8.6 million. Bond drops 40 percent to third with $8.3 million to pass the $100 million mark domestically. Mouse Hunt will take theDream Works box office crown, dipping about 35 percent to add $5.5 million cheese balls for fourth. Scream 2 should battle Jackie Brown for thefifth spot. Both look like 34 percent droppers, but will the long-term wear onS2 be worse than the ennui that seems to surround T3 (that’s Tarantino3). Both should hang out around $47.7 million. Firestorm will follow.Amistad should drop one spot to eighth with about $3.1 million. And Mr.Magoo should be tangling with Flubber for ninth and tenth with about$2.6 million each. The third of the Disney idiot trilogy, An AmericanWerewolf In CGI, should drop below the Mendoza line.
Reader Timothy Kooney sent us this over the holidays, responding to my Worst of 1997 list. It’s edited for space.
“Lost World should have ranked worst of the worst with a Surgeon General’s warning. This movie had it all: hack writing, bad acting, half-dimensional characters,B-movie suspense, inconsistent science, fractured plot,lead-pipe-to-the-head “humor”/irony and more. The dinosaurs were the most life-like creatures on the screen.”
TK adds about Jeff Goldblum:
“After Lost World, I think even the Prince of Darkness will be ready to get this babbling idiot off the screen. I don’t remember my Dante, is there a circle of hell for bad acting?”

Be Sociable, Share!

Comments Off on Non-Holiday Box Office

Comments are closed.

Quote Unquotesee all »

It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon