By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com
Friday Estimates by Klady
Horton Hears A Who will push to get to Ice Age‘s opening number of $46.3 million, but will come up short. Still, it will be the best non-summer, non-holiday animation opening other than the Ice Age movies. It will also repesent Fox’s fourth entry onto the list of 20 best CG animation openings, still the only studio to crack the Disney/Pixar-DreamWorks stranglehold.
The trouble with this film is that the film skews a little too young to have a bigger opening weekend audience, no matter how hard Fox shoves it down our throats. Fox could have pushed the quirkiness of the film to teens, but in doing so, might have turned off the parents of the little kids. Look for a touch more psychodelia in the second weekend ads to come.
10,000 BC may break even. But the film, picked up by WB for the 300 slot after being passed on by Fox and Sony, is relying on what will eventually happen in Japan and France to make a buck (and DVD, obviously).
The movie may be okay in the end, but the cautionary tale is there… cool CG imagery is not enough… it has to be the right CG imagery to capture the imagination of potential audiences. Conversely, the ads for the DVD of I Am Legend look better than the ads for the movie, even focusing on the CG images that were a problem for some… TV vs theatrical. Expect the film to be even bigger in DVD than its considerable success in theaters.
Never Back Down is the latest “urban” effort to undertrack. No real surprise there.
Universal’s Doomsday reminded us yet again that not every studio can market every movie. The Neil Marshall movie would have been opened to double the number at Screen Gems. They just know how to sell the crap out of the female-led action movie. And Universal handing the film to Rogue to market wouldn’t neccessarily have been better either, as they haven’t had success in that genre. But isn’t that the idea? Why rev up the machinery of the big studio to sell the non-Tomb Raider?
On the flip side, a movie like The Bank Job would have been well served by a big studio release… even though Lionsgate is great at selling small window films. Hitman did $40 million domestic… with a less known star than Bank Job.
And Jumper, ready to fall out of the Top Ten next weekend, reminds us that Doug Liman is still a very interesting (and often undisciplined) filmmaker – Jumper: The Series could be a big hit – but that he really needs stars to be put into the middle of his madness to give the marketers something to give to audiences to hang onto when they sell the wild ride.
And Doomsday crashes and burns…
Thank god ‘urban’ movies can now have mostly-white casts.
Well, a good number of white teenagers like to imagine they’re black anyway.
Dave, a question for you – leading off from your I Am Legend comment. Will WB make a push for The Golden Compass on DVD? They made, what? $70mil theatrical, $300mil+ worldwide. If the DVD is enough of a success in America would they consider making the sequels?
Kamikaze, I read somewhere last week that the remaining 2 books from the Golden Compass will be made into movies.
I read that producers want to make them. Whether they’ll be given money to is something else entirely.
I read an article that said WB would consider making the sequels because they could afford to make the movie without selling off the foreign distribution rights. If they do that, they could probably turn a profit, because the film did quite well overseas.