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Leonard Klady

By Leonard Klady Klady@moviecitynews.com

Posted Sunday, January 23rd, 2005 - Comments Off on The Bill Chill: Snowdance Hits Theaters
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The Bill Chill: Snowdance Hits Theaters

You can’t fool with Mother Nature and she came down with a fury in the Northeast and Midwest, shivering movie going to the bone. The cinematic force majeur was likely to wither admissions by 20% to 25% of unrecoverable income with exhibition and distribution sources trying to emulate Happy rather than Grouchy and Sneezy.

The frame was nonetheless led by an upbeat debut for Are We There Yet? estimated at $18.8 million and a passable result of $6.8 million for Assault on Precinct 13 that ranked the thriller sixth in the weekend lineup. However, millions were left in the snowdrift as storms battered the East Coast and beyond and a healthy chunk of the nation decided to take a Snow Day.

Business for the frame should just creep past $100 million to keep it even with the 3-day portion of last weekend’s Martin Luther King holiday. It was nonetheless a significant 29% decline for the same period of 2004.

The hijinx of the Ice Cube comedy vehicle Are We There Yet? led the session as expected but with a muted potency that predicted a debut in the area of $25 million. It should still provide a nice profit … just not quite as large as it might have been in the absence of inclement weather.

More nettlesome is the fate of the remake of Assault on Precinct 13 from 1976 centering on the siege of a police station. It was effectively ramped up on the production side and its Wednesday and Thursday box office generated a $1.5 million box office that suggested weekend results in the low teens. Instead it crawled to $6.8 million and will need strong international and ancillary response to meet its nut.

Holdover titles were rocked by declines that generally cut business by half with no respite from areas unaffected by the white menace. In a business where momentum is vital, it repped a crushing blow for the New Year. Only the addition of new theaters soften the blow for expansions of award contenders including Million Dollar Baby, The Aviator, Hotel Rwanda and The Phantom of the Opera that await final word from the Academy Tuesday morning.

Fortunately, the weekend was only lightly sprinkled with new titles in regional, specialized or exclusive engagements. Bollywood’s Kisna bowed on 82 screens to a disappointing $130,000 weekend while there wasn’t much interest in the adaptation of kid lit favorite When Zachary Beaver Came to Town in 23 playdates in Texas, Utah and Kansas. It barely generated $10,000 from areas untouched by bad weather, so the commercial body blow was doubly severe.

Best of the exclusives was European Film Award winner Head On from Germany. The sprightly drama grossed roughly $11,000 from a single Manhattan site.

– by Leonard Klady

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