Weekend Estimates by Klady
Wrong I was… HSM3 nimbly leapt over the cutting stick… by a lot. Perhaps the tykes were scared off last weekend by the threat of crowds… perhaps there is a lot of repeat business… perhaps a 65% drop doesn’t suggest anything other than a huge must-see followed by a drop made more dramatic by Halloween.
Kevin Smith leapt back to a pretty average Kevin Smith opening.
If you don’t like Michael Clayton as a comparison to Changeling… how about W., which had a similar per-screen opening wide. How about Flags of Our Fathers? $10.2m on 1876 screens for $5,461 per. Final gross, $33m domestic.
Not a lot else of interest. Eagle Eye keeps crawling towards $100m. Synecdoche, New York is still showing muscle on 9 screens with an estimated $9360 per. And Body of Lies has proven to be a sequel to Proof of Life and The Beach.
Is it time to close the book on the one-trick pony known as Guy Ritchie? Enough already. His films are beyond tired.
I quite liked RocknRolla, and whether or not you like it, it’ll do very very well on DVD.
Long story short, they shouldn’t have put it into limited three weeks before it opened. They should have opened it wide with an actual marketing campaign. The movie was cheap, it’s probably earned back its budget in the UK already, and WB bungled its release here.
Ritchie’s pre-Madonna movies were decent, but in retrospect, given their diverging careers since, one has to wonder just how much of their quality was really down to Matthew Vaughn rather than him.
To understand the High School Musical Friday number, please review Disney’s Brother Bear release strategy in 2003, the last time Halloween fell on a Friday.
HSM3 making more than a Saw film fills me with joy inside for some reason.
If it was called Zack and Miri make a Sex Tape it might have done $5m more. The word porno worked against it.
DP is on the money. Expect GREEN HORNET to get its financing pulled. Rogen is no Downey. He’s a schlub and from recent accounts, an arrogant one to boot. he’s no great writer at all DP.. . all the apatow clan wish they were Paul Feig.
And Smith should have stopped making ugly films years ago. The guy is the real life equivalent of that Simpsons comic nerd with a camcorder.
And finally Ritchie will be direct-to-youtube from now on. Putting an end to that entire cycle of new wave Brit gangster that has been pissing on the grave of The Long Good Friday for sometimee
I like Smith’s early output, even stuff like Dogma and Mallrats which are not great films but are different enough to make me enjoy them.
Jersey Girl was horrendous, Jay and Silent Bob strike Back was a big goofy cartoon that did little to forward him as a director, and Clerks 2 was ridiculously over the top. When i saw the Zack and Miri commercials, here’s what i saw:
Protagonist Who Refuses to Grow Up/Mature
Sex Humor
Star Wars References
Relationship Melodrama
I don’t think i dislike Smith’s films. I just think he’s taking the same basic movie and remaking it over and over again. There’s just nothing there that shows any kind of growth as a filmmaker. I’ll see Zack and Miri because i’ve been watching the guys’ films for over a decade and i still hope that somewhere there’s a film he’s going to make that doesn’t involve dick, farts, and star wars.
You could describe his entire output as “dick and fart, with a heart”.
Great writer or not, JBD, the Apatow movies that have really worked have been personal stories, whether by Apatow, Rogen/Goldberg, or (to a much lesser extent) Segel.
“i’ve been watching the guys’ films for over a decade and i still hope that somewhere there’s a film he’s going to make that doesn’t involve dick, farts, and star wars.”
…but that’s the reason people watch Kevin Smith films in the first place.
i like to read the ‘five favourite films’ feature on ‘rotten tomatoes’ for some reason; i’m under no illusion that people’s fave flicks speak to their true character or personality, but the manner in which they describe how the films they most adore move them feels like a little glimpse into their soul.
both kevin and seth have very recently done their ‘five favourite films’ on rt, and while kevin managed to at least acquit himself by articulating what he finds so special about his choices with varying degrees of insight, i came away feeling disappointed in seth, who sounded more like one of the skater boys from another thread (do grown-ups actually say ‘rad’ nowadays? apparently so!) than a supposed writer. his inability (or unwillingness) to articulate much beyond ‘so rad’ and ‘so great’ made me cringe a bit and wonder just how he got to where he is. or maybe he was just acting the dumbass because he thinks it’s funny.
JBD, what exactly about Downey’s career before Iron Man lead anybody to believe he had a $100mil opening in him? The $4.2m gross for Kiss Kiss Bang Bang? The $33m gross for Zodiac? The $60m for Gothika? Come on…
Dr Wally, let’s pull the plug on Ritchie’s career once we get to see Sherlock Holmes (coincidentally starring Robert Downey Jr), okay?
“Eagle Eye keeps crawling towards $100m.”
What an an annoying and innacurate choice of words there, David.