By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com
Friday Estimates by Klady – Meatballs With A Side Of Surrogates
Fugly.
No one can hide behind September this week. Just look at this weekend as it rolled out last year…
Eagle Eye – $9.8m Fri – $29.2m
Nights in Rodanthe – $4.7m Fri – $13.4m
Fireproof -$2.3m – $6.8m
Miracle at St. Anna -$967k – $3.5m
Choke – $477k – $1.3m
Those were the five newbies. $18.2m in new product on Friday. $54.2m over 3 days.
The top three new movies this year this weekend are slightly ahead of Eagle Eye‘s opening Friday alone.
Proud moments.
Love the folks at MGM… but with nothing to sell but Fame for month after month after month, it looks like they’ll be lucky to get a $10m opening out of it.
Surrogates is like the post-Avatar knock-off that came out months before Avatar instead of months after. But it has Bruce Willis being grizzled, which there is still an audience for. But the outdoor campaign looked like vodka ads… literally… like a recent vodka campaign mixed with Calvin Klein. And the result is better than Hostage or Perfect Stranger or 16 Blocks…. but not by much.
And the sickest part of this weekend… it could actually provide cover for more bloodshed at both MGM and Disney next week.
The story in limited releases is Capitalism: A Love Story, which is looking at a $45k-ish per screen over the 3-day weekend. Sicko did $69k on 1 screen in its first weekend. F9/11 did $39k per screen on 2 on a Wednesday and a Thursday before going to 868 screens on that first Friday (where it did $28k per-screen).
In other words… this number will be inconclusive… in Michael Moore dollars. Any other doc would be dancing a jig just grossing over $100k in a weekend, much less in the limited before going wide.
The title’s “I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell”
Sci-fi porn … pointless remake … Legion of Doom … no wonder the new releases all bite. “Capitalism” goes wide next week and will suffer the same fate.
At least “Inglourious Basterds” had its good points. Faster pacing would have improved the pic. Getting rid of that David Bowie song would have made the movie even better. Why oh why did Tarantino have to include 80’s rock in the middle of a spaghetti-western soundtrack?
The bloodshed at Disney, I presume, has nothing to do with the likelihood that the 3-D re-release of “Toy Story” may flop.
“Surrogates is like the post-Avatar knock-off that came out months before Avatar instead of months after.”
Eh? Maybe I don’t know enough about “Avatar’s” plot, but I was thinking it was about some futuristic underwater blue jungle cats or something.
I was thinking “Surrogates” was pretty much THE EXACT SAME PLOT as “Gamer” from three weeks ago, which also didn’t do very well. Isn’t the B-plot from GAMER about the future videogame where people can stay at home and live out their sexual fantasies in a brightly lit city with super-good-looking human avatars kind of, you know, the same movie? Only in Gamer it’s actual human slaves instead of robots.
(Not saying one ripped the other off… just kind of a coincidence.)
And, again, America is TERRIFIED OF SEX. From here on out, no studio should employ sexy advertising or sexy actresses or sexy posters or even movies with sexy plotting.
Everything should just be cartoons and total dickfests. The country is so pussy-ized by shrill housewives, that men run to the Internet in secret for their cheesecake, and the fraus put the 86 on anything overtly sexual because they’re jealous. If I were a studio head, I’d neuter all my movies down accordingly.
That is the lesson of THE BODY tanking and now Surrogates and Gamer too.
“That is the lesson of THE BODY tanking and now Surrogates and Gamer too.”
And here I was, all ready to blame Andy Griffith’s part in “Play the Game”…
Surrogates reminds me of Virtuosity. Pandorum of Event Horizon. Having not seen these new ones, I’ll assume the originals are better (as far as you can call them originals). Brett Leonard FTW.
Surrogate is more like a low-budgeted, but smarter and more thoughtful variation on I Robot. I liked both, but Surrogates has more on the mind.
“Surrogates is like the post-Avatar knock-off that came out months before Avatar instead of months after.”
It’s based on a graphic novel from like 3 or 4 years ago. So how can it be a knock-off? Come on man! USE THE GOOGLE!
Surrogates looks awesome (haven’t gotten to it yet), but was it here or HE where someone complained Mostow has to shoot everything in a Dutch angle? I don’t think it’s quite just that, but he’s the most obvious “Super 35” director going. Every shot has that open depth of field where everything’s in focus, and it’s clearly just a 1.33 frame that he randomly slapped some matte bars on. It’s all just shot and lit so dead-on.
Watching any Mostow in a theater, I can practically see the open-matte TV version that’ll play on HBO in a year.
PANAVISION, PEOPLE.
I dunno. Watching Dark Knight on the computer, I like the old school frame on the IMAX scenes better than the Panavision stuff. Maybe it’s the high res that lets them get lens lengths that are closer to the human eye.
Surrogates isn’t remotely like Virtuosity, thank God. But Pandorum is similar to Event Horizon, only worse. I know people hate PWS Anderson, but you better recognize that PWS is a better option than a cheap knock-off protege.
It looks like LA is one of the places where Paranormal Activity isn’t screening – does anyone know if it’s going to screen here any time soon?
Chucky, good job on actually seeing a movie for a change. Nonetheless, you are incredibly wrong – the Cat People song is one of the best things in Inglourious Basterds.
How long before somebody writes a long-winded “think piece” entitled, “Why/When Did People Stop Going to the Movies?”
I can already see the lead.
“Sure, parents continued to dutifully take their rugrats to the latest 3-D CGI ‘toon (“Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs”), and Tyler Perry’s loyal-to-a-fault African-American audience turned out in force–opening weekend anyway–for “I Can Do Bad All by Myself.” But the majority of American moviegoers chose to vote by boycotting the very same multiplexes that kept them entertained for much of 2009 with the cinematic equivalent of Happy Meals (“Paul Blart: Mall Cap,” “Taken,” “Madea Goes to Jail,” “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,” “Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs,” et al)…..”
VIRTUOSITY *RULES*. BRETT LEONARD 4 LIFE. Is he one of those dudes like Marco Brambilla and Demian Lichtenstein who came on like a frontal assault with some 600-million budgeted shit then never did anything again, ever? But Lawnmower Man, Virtuosity, and that serial killer thing with Alicia Silver-bone back in her heyday? GOOD DIRECTOR.
Anyone in this country who’d rather see 3-D MEATBALLS than SEXY ROBOTS GETTING BANGED or MEGAN FOX BEING HOT or DENNIS QUAID YELLING should be sent to Guantanamo and waterboarded.
NATION OF INFANTS; Christ, can you imagine like YOUR OLD MAN or YOUR UNCLES or your high school football coach going to see FUCKING CARTOONS?
GROW. UP.
A lot of people give that movie shit but IMO, next to Brainstorm, it’s the best “real” jack-in tech movie in the last 30 years. I don’t count Matrix because it’s so much in the fantasy realm. Brett is one of the few guys that could do those movies right. Surrogates looks like it could challenge but it feels watered down in the trailers I’ve seen.
The serial killer flick I think called Hideaway was a mess but had supercool visuals. I remember a really demented opening steadicam shot of a bloody living room. Brambilla’s Demo Man was also very underrated at the time.
I love the original Fame but do not think it is the name brand that MGM wanted it to be. Most people do not even remember the toughish R rated film by Parker and instead remember the cheesy TV version that ran for eons in the 80’s. When I taught a class on musicals lately even I forgot to include the original Fame in my lecture on modern musicals.
Not really surprised it underperformed.
“Why oh why did Tarantino have to include 80’s rock in the middle of a spaghetti-western soundtrack?”
Because – and he’s admitted this in interviews – he wanted to. Plain and simple. It’s box office wouldn’t have been bettered if it wasn’t there so I don’t think he cares if anyone has a problem with its presence.
LexG, I would relax and lighten up a bit – last month, the audiences surprised even me and made to very hard-rated films blockbusters – District 9 and Inglorious Bastards – and I think both films kicked ass. It’s all about how you market these films.
And sorry: “Anyone in this country who’d rather see 3-D MEATBALLS than SEXY ROBOTS GETTING BANGED or MEGAN FOX BEING HOT or DENNIS QUAID YELLING should be sent to Guantanamo and waterboarded.”
Actually, audiences paid to see all of those things in mass numbers, this past summer – remember Transformers and GI Joe???? Maybe, they just don’t need to see them again, so soon.
@jeffmcm: “Paranormal Activity” is playing only in college towns, no big cities.
“Anyone in this country who’d rather see 3-D MEATBALLS than SEXY ROBOTS GETTING BANGED or MEGAN FOX BEING HOT or DENNIS QUAID YELLING should be sent to Guantanamo and waterboarded.”
I think Hollywood is allowed to release a kids film every few months. There hasn’t been anything out there for kids since “GI Joe,” and no cartoons for kids since Ice Age 3. Plus, most of the films in the top 10 just straight up suck.
Chucky: I KNOW. I’m asking about the future distribution plans.
Jeff…see the link I posted in the weekend b.o. thread further up the page. They’re trying a curious tactic of asking fans to DEMAND it in their home city.
L.A. is winning so far.
IOIOIOIOIOIOIO: The Avatar script treatment has been available on the internet for 10 years or so.