Weekend Estimates by Klady Lays Down Mit Bruno
Okay… let’s get into the blame game for Bruno only topping Borat‘s opening by $4 million after an opening day about $5 million ahead of Borat…. yawn…
People love being negative. This strong opening does suggest that, once again, there are people who just aren’t interested in this kind of comedy. And those people, it seems, are the people that the film mocks, not gay America or the city folks.
As I noted in my review, I think the only place for Sacha Baron-Cohen to go now is to a conservative character who rips into liberal America with all the gusto that Borat and Bruno savaged the flyovers. We deserve the abuse and the hours of free time on Fox News couldn’t hurt at the box office. His biggest challenge will be being funnier than The Yes Men.
But Bruno opening a bit better than Johnny Depp and a bit lower than Sandra Bullock painted as a negative is really about the media Emineming itself.
Notable on the weekend are the tiny drops estimated for both The Proposal and The Hangover. I think it is fair to say that some people voted with their wallets, going to comedies, but not Bruno, choosing more traditional boy and girl comedy fare instead.
And my comment yesterday, that I wasn’t so sure The Hangover would hit $250m, was turned upside down by this hold. It will. And WB won’t have to drag it like Superman Returns out to get it there.
The Hurt Locker expansion to 60 screens went pretty well. In terms of a real screen count – Bruno surely had more actual screens than the 2756 count… not the case with most indies – the film was behind only Humpday‘s per-screen on 2. On the other hand, the much less enthusiastically received Away We Go had a better per-screen when it expanded to 45 screens. I would love to be able to say that I see this great film cracking $10 million – re-release will be unlikely come January, as the film will surely already be on DVD – but I am not hopeful. Still, an Oscar nomination could ease the pain and earn the expenditure by Summit back in DVD… something much less likely for a more mainstreamed film going through the same cycle.
Did I mention I Love You Beth Cooper? No? Fitting.
(Correction to typos, 12:22p)
I think the original release pattern for Borat is looking smarter all the time.
I think that your dog must be embarrassed that it doesn’t gnaw on tired old bones as endlessly as you do, Joe.
Bruno, which I have repeatedly said would not do Borat business, is about $4 million ahead of Borat now and will likely be about $4m – $7m behind Borat by next weekend. This release pattern was fine, thanks.
Of course, none of this proves a single thing about Borat’s opening. The facts, which you really don’t care about so much as trying to prove yourself right, is that Borat had overwhelming media attention weeks before opening and ended up being released a couple of weeks after it peaked. The big opening on 825 screens could have been bigger. Obviously, that would have made their second weekend smaller. But all things considered, I think it’s not a reach in any way to suggest that Borat would have had a bigger opening that Bruno did had it been wider and the drop in the second weekend would have still led to a higher total after 2 weekends than the film had.
You might also note the fact that this opening is about the same screen count as the Borat expansion… not 4500 theaters… but about 2700. You are right to suggest that there is a limit to the property. Universal’s release pattern acknowledges that. And I have never suggested that they (or Fox) needed to go any wide than they have.
A couple of the Brunos in your first sentence should be Borats, but point taken.
I thought Bruno was about as funny as Borat, though relying even more on shock humor. I’ll bet even some people who thought they knew what they were getting into were taken aback by some of the material and images. But a laugh is a laugh, and I laughed.
I think the lower opening is due, certainly in part, to the fact that conservatives in the flyover states were never going to embrace a character like Bruno. If we got the city by city breakdown, I’m sure the big cities on the coasts had more than their fair share of the business, even as those in the midwest and rural areas probably didn’t.
Thanks, Yancy… fixing…
a_loco… the opening was up from Borat, not down… higher, not lower.
Bruno did break one record…the biggest Friday-Saturday opening weekend drop for a comedy…ever!
Come on everybody! Let’s talk POTTER BOX OFFICE! WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!
Oh yeah Heatfeld, who wants to see SBC rip into Liberal america? The people he rips into need to be eviscerated. If you lived outside of LA, and switched it up with the South. You would realize that these people deserve a shot or twenty.
What he should do is just act. He’s fucking talented, diverse, and I would rather support his films than Jim Carrey’s. NOW… POTTER BOX OFFICE! WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!
i know it was a simple mistake Dave on the Brunos and the Borats, but man did i laugh. I kept picturing an old man going “you kids with your Brunats and your Boros”
I’m not so much surprised by the small drops in the top-ten of the G to PG-13 stuff, as a big youth-driven R-rated opener always means that everything else gets an uptick (ie – kids sneaking in). Check out the opening weekend of Eight Mile back in November, 2002… even I Spy only dropped 31%.
But even as someone who really likes the movie, I’m shocked by the 14% drop of The Hangover. You have Bruno, an R-rated comedy aimed squarely at the same demographic, and The Hangover still has the smallest weekend to weekend drop of its run. Forget passing Beverly Hills Cop, this thing may end up threatening Meet The Fockers or Home Alone for the top-comedy of all time crown. Not a certainty or even a likelihood of course. But at this point, the continued success may mean that Hangover may keep screens in the weekends ahead while newer, less successful stuff (I Love You Beth Cooper, for example) lose them instead. I’m guessing that’s already happening (it lost 455 screens last weekend but only 68 this weekend).
It’ll be crushed by Harry Potter. But I think it will have legs due to the fact that everybody has seen The Hangover, and it is the only R-Rated comedy out there right now (I think).
It’ll be profitable. And it’ll be a decent end to SBC’s characters. I wish Ali G –still my favorite– had a better movie. But I look forward to him moving on. He was very charming on Letterman. He was quite good in SWEENY TODD. And he was hilarious in RICKY BOBBY which I love despite many people’s distaste for it. Ferrel, Reilly, Gary Cole and Cohen are one of the best collection of comic actors in one movie in recent times.
DP wrote: “I think the only place for Sacha Baron-Cohen to go now is to a conservative character who rips into liberal America with all the gusto that Borat and Bruno savaged the flyovers. We deserve the abuse and the hours of free time on Fox News couldn’t hurt at the box office. His biggest challenge will be being funnier than The Yes Men.”
Or being funnier than The Colbert Report, which obviously covers this ground very well.
Bruno made $7.5m here in Australia. To quantify, that’d be like making $75m in the US. So, it’s quite a huge success down here for one reason or another.
Any theory, Kami?
“University of Queensland research has shown Australians are more likely to be homophobic than racist.
Research conducted by Professor John Mangan, from UQ’s School of Economics, and a colleague from the University of Ulster, Northern Ireland, looked at the amount of bigotry in Western countries with some surprising results.
Meaning that you think that homophobes are drawn to the film, Christian?
I don’t know what it means, but the stats are interesting. Either people don’t give a damn or like some of Bruno’s targets are unawares.
I just saw “I Love You, Beth Cooper” for my rotten tomatoes show gig and man….epically awful. Like, so bad I’m not sure how it got made and I’m sure it wasn’t cheap. Just…not funny, not entertaining, pointless. There was 4 walkouts in the first 20 mins and 2 of the walkouts were tweens!
I was actually more offended by it’s awfulness than anything that could offend me in “Bruno” or “The Hangover,” neither of which I’ve had time to see. Ugh. I need a brain bath now.
“I’m shocked by the 14% drop of The Hangover. You have Bruno, an R-rated comedy aimed squarely at the same demographic…”
I have not seen Bruno yet, but intend to. But your assertion is incorrect. That is why people are having a hard time discerning if Bruno is a hit or a disappointment. The Hangover is a mainstreamn comedy the average adult can find something to relate to in. We have all had “nights like these”.
Bruno’s demographic is a slightly expanded variation on the Jackass extreme humour demo. I’d take a date to Hangover. I do not think I would want to have a date that would want to see Bruno. This is not an urban/rural, right/left thing. I honestly can’t see Obama sitting down and finding Bruno a fun night at the movies.
I think the problem people are having with SBC’s latest is it is not what his fans want it to be.
His fans want it to be a complex social commentary exposition on homophobia and hypocrisy in America. But I guess it is not that.
The character of Bruno is too extreme. Remember Alan Alda in the brilliant Crimes and Misdemeanors; “If it bends its funny, if it breaks its not funny”. I suspect that for many people, Bruno breaks.
The child in the car scene in Hangover gets a pass because
a) Phillips is smart enough to not show it
and
b) all parents have either been absent minded enough where something similar has happened or you just wished you could leave the child behind for a moment. Not cool. But not necessarily malicious. You can relate to it on some level.
Phillips bends the situation to find humour.
In Bruno…if it depicts or even shows a still of him having sex with men in front of a child…that is something that is a concsious and malcious decision. No rational parent could ever do that. Cohen breaks the humour. It’s ugly, perverse and grotesque even if photoshopped. We can’t relate.
Most humour comes from being able to relate to a character. Bruno (who I have seen on the show) is so extreme that if people are upset by him it is not because they are homophobic, it is because he is a self absorbed ass. Borat has a root for him underdog quality. Not so with Bruno. He is the worst parts of modern pop culture come to life.
Obviously, many in the gay community agree with this or GLAAD would not have issued a statement. Cohen is talented but he is not astute social critic. He is merely the class clown with no sense of self awareness.
Also,
I agree that Cohen doing a right wing version would be funny, but probably would run into the same trouble. Evangelicals would probably not get the joke and still think they are being mocked. I worked with some last year…worst gig of my life. Couldn’t wait to get back to the secular world!
Kinda asking for trouble, opining so definitively on a film you haven’t seen, no, Nicol?
Dave,
I’m used to the trouble in these parts:) And my view is different than most. I may need to see a film to opine on its aesthetics; on whether or not I would like it or not. I suspect I will like much of Bruno and not like much. Same as Borat. I may even like it more because it seems to satirize celeb culture as much as anything else.
But, like you, I have seen enough film in my life and studied it enough to observe what it means in a cultural sense and what it represents.
I will see Bruno…the AMC in TO is offering a free large popcorn and drink deal…and if I change my view I will admit it. Promise!
But what I wrote, from my perspective, is more about observing pop-culture that the film itself.
I do not have to see Night at the Museum to guess why many families like it or why many cineastes do not.
So is the fact that Bruno made half its opening weekend B.O. on Friday an indication that SBC has a rabid fan base and/or Bruno is essentially a sequel? Or is it because the Friday night crowd hated it and tweeted thusly? Either way, I have a feeling this result will fuel the “twitter-effect” argument, much to your chagrin DP, I’m sure…
Dave, I don’t believe that – like Christian is implying – that a large % of Australian homophobes went to see the movie as a way of mocking gay people. That question about “living next door to” seems a big strange since I imagine the idea a lot of people would have in their head is two gay men living next door to them in their three-bedroom upper class suburban family home, and a lot of the people who would live like that aren’t the kind of people who would use one of their five annual cinema trips to see a movie like Bruno (or whatever the statistic is? three movies a year? I can’t recall).
No, I think the reason for Bruno‘s success – much larger here on a per capita basis than America – is because we are a country with a much smaller population and so when Bruno comes here and makes news by appearing on one of our highest rating TV programs and by doing big publicity stunts the saturation is wider. No matter than SBC does in America – appear on Letterman, show up at a premiere dressed as a donkey’s dick, etc – there are still a lot of people who just aren’t hear it. But when you only have 20 million people, most of which are centred in or around major capital cities, then it’s easier for word-of-mouth (if you wanna call it that) to spread.
A lot of our highest rating programs are news based and he was all over that. He appeared on a program called Rove, which got some of the highest ratings in that programs history, plus ads for the movie have been everywhere during shows like MasterChef, which is usually the highest rating program each night of the week. There were a lot of people getting the message.
I dunno, that’s just a theory.
Nicol, good post above. As someone who has never had a night even remotely similar to the one in The Hangover, I assumed that its appeal stemmed from a few things: a simple premise sold extremely well, a good title, and a perfect release date. With the benefit of hindsight it seems like the only surprise about it being a hit is that anyone is surprised. My mother, who is 59, loved it because as she put it, in the end it’s a sweet movie about male friendship. Now my mother is easily offended. The Apatow movies are not for her. I don’t think she has seen The Wedding Crashers nor do I think she would like it. For someone like her to love The Hangover certainly seems to speak to its mass appeal.