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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Friday Estimates by Klady

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Horton Hears A Who is almost exactly in line with Ice Age‘s box office run, which ended up at $176 million domestic. Actually, it will be a bit ahead after the second weekend… but that will probably be made up for by the more front-loaded box office as years pass. I expect Horton to top $150m domestic and not quite to get to $175m.
The $200m mark is still elusive to anyone but Disney/Pixar and DreamWorks Animation… but Fox is by far the strongest third player in the field, pretty much completely on the shoulders and visions of one man, Chris Wedge. The money Rushmore in modern animation, so far, is Lassetter, Katzenberg, Wedge, and Miyazaki (the most undervalued with the stunning financial success of his work everywhere but America).
I’m sure that no one at Lionsgate could talk, even off the record, about how frustrating it is to be stuck selling “a Madea movie” without using Tyler Perry’s best marketing tool… Madea. But Perry is desperate to “cross over” and he continues to make big profits with his films, so it is hard for the studio – as it would be for any studio – to push back. Still, you have to give Perry this… this will be his best “non-Madea” opening yet… even though Medea is in the movie. And that will be the discussion on Monday morning. Did the promise of Madea in some of the publicity draw that bigger audience or did the film make it without her?
Fox dumped Shutter, as they often do with little movies that just don’t have “it.”
Drillbit Taylor‘s marketing campaign was an uninspired as Owen Wilson’s unwillingness to do press. And really, as hard as it is to open a movie without your star promoting it, there is no excuse. Movies open WITHOUT any stars who open movies all the time. Gerry Rich has done a pretty damned good job for Paramount overall. But his love of the “big head” one-sheet was replaced by the “big foot/big crotch” one-sheet here… and Owen Wilson is not a big enough star to sell a movie that way. Sorry. At the last minute, they switched up the campaign to try to go after the Superbad audience (a movie that was opened without stars… and even with Apatow’s name, we found out with Walk Hard how irrelevant that really is… you gotta sell the movie!), but the impression was already made… the bad impression.
The sad story of the moment remains The Bank Job, which people love the way they loved The Italian Job, but could not take advantage. Expecting $100 million with Jason Statham in the lead was not appropriate. But barely cracking $20 milllion? That sucks. Lionsgate is a strong marketer in the genres in which they excel, but bottom line, they sold the movie like it was the direct-to-dvd of an I-Job sequel and never got close to the adults they needed to triple their gross. A shame.

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15 Responses to “Friday Estimates by Klady”

  1. jeffmcm says:

    Pretty small drop for Horton, kinda weak first day for Drillbit.

  2. I imagine Fox will be quite pleased with the results for Shutter. $4.6mil for a “dumped” title that looks like it was low budget?

  3. ployp says:

    Read the spoiler for Shutter.
    SPOILER ahead….. (for those who have seen the original)
    It follows the original very faithfully. The story just shifted from Bangkok to Tokyo.
    End of SPOILER
    I’ll wait for the DVD. I don’t think the story translates to a western audience. You guys just don’t have the belief in ghosts that Thais, or East Asians, do. I guess the same happens with The Eye. The original was a hit here. Shutter was also very successful. What do you think made The Ring a hit with the west? I haven’t seen the original, but the remake did scare me. The Ring felt very ‘asian’ to me. I still have to see the new The Eye (on DVD of course, not wasting money to see it in the theater).

  4. Bob Violence says:

    I’ll go out on a limb and guess that The Ring did well because it was actually a pretty decent movie, even put alongside the original (I know a couple people who insist it was actually better). As far as I’m concerned, the original version of The Eye didn’t have much going for it beyond the visuals (but what visuals!), and those didn’t survive the transition.

  5. Well The Ring was centered more around the video tape/technology, not so much the ghosts/spirits as other films have been. The Grudge was also at the forefront of the remake trend so it got by on good marketing and genre intrigue.

  6. jeffmcm says:

    It’s not just that The Ring was video-heavy, but that it had pretty good production values and managed to translate itself into Western terms. We here still have our ghost traditions, as the likes of The Others and 1408 will show. And yeah, the Ring remake is better than the original.

  7. movieman says:

    “Shutter” is fairly mediocre, but I actually found it easier to sit through than either of the Raimi-produced “Grudge”s or the remakes of “Pulse” and “The Eye” (for starters).
    Rachael Taylor (who I don’t even remember from “Transformers”) is great eye candy–and doesn’t seem to be that bad of an actress–and it was a hoot seeing David Denman from “The Office” looking so very un-Roy like. No great shakes overall, but there’s a lot of other worse movies out there right now (including “10,000 B.C.,” “Meet the Browns,” “College Road Trip,” “Never Back Down,” “Doomsday” and the insidious “Vantage Point”).
    I’m personally sick of Tyler Perry and his crappy movies. Except for “Daddy’s Little Girls” (thanks mostly to the performances of Gabrielle Union and Idris Elba), they’re screechy eyesores and (frequently) painful to watch. “Meet the Browns” is more of the same mess.
    It’s kind of interesting that the most successful recent African- American dramedy was the non-Perry “This Christmas” which–though hardly a masterpiece–was better than any of writer-director Perry’s “joints.” Of course, a case could be made that Perry’s b.o. track record helped pave the way for that movie’s success.

  8. ployp says:

    The production value is something I forgot about. Plus, having Naomi Watt must’ve helped.
    The original The Eye, I felt, sucked. Cheap scares. But Shutter, real scares, good story and the ending came as somewhat of a surprise to me.
    Do you think that having the story, for The Ring, take place in the US helped? Well, on a second thought, Alba’s The Eye also takes place in the States.
    I haven’t seen 1408. To me, Asian ghosts are out for revenge. Western ghosts are just there to scare people. (The Others is perhaps an exception) Furthermore, while we don’t generally see Asian ghosts, western ones are very visible and are more like monsters. I can’t think of many good western ghosts right now. The ones that pop up in my head are plain bad (ie. Jeeper Creepers). Moreover, Asian ghost movies don’t center on the ghost’s. We hardly see what the ghosts are seeing.
    Anyone seen the Spanish The Orphanage? The trailer tooks scary.

  9. jeffmcm says:

    The Orphanage is terrific. Easily the best ghost movie I’ve seen in years.

  10. “And yeah, the Ring remake is better than the original.”
    See i hate the remake (and hate the remake’s sequel even more). Completely unscary. Whereas the original was just terrifying.

  11. Stella's Boy says:

    I just watched Ringu and The Ring back-to-back, and Ringu is vastly superior to the remake.

  12. jeffmcm says:

    Can you elaborate? I think the original is kind of clunky both visually and story-wise, the acting is less good, and the girl isn’t nearly as scary.

  13. L.B. says:

    Gotta disagree on that last point. The ending of the American RING didn’t do jack for me (though it freaked out plenty of people I know). The ending in the Japanese version scared the crap out of me. The way she moved, the closeness of the quarters…it all added up for me much more than the remake. The Japanese version didn’t attempt to make her as much of a character as they did in the American version, but that didn’t bother me so much.
    And it might have had more “clunkiness” than the remake, but nothing that got in my way. The slickness of the remake actually detracted from the overall horror for me in the remake.

  14. jeffmcm says:

    No, usually I don’t need a movie to be ‘slick’ and agree that it’s often an impediment (for example, Texas Chainsaw Massacre ’03) but in this case it was like a rough draft vs. a finished version of the same movie (not that Japanese actors are cruder versions of Naomi Watts and Martin Henderson).

  15. The like the unslickness of it. It feels like some lost VHS horror movie.

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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