Klady's Friday Estimates – Scrooged
Elf opened on November 7, 2003 to $8.96m and grossed $31.3m for the 3-day… and $173 million for the run. Does this mean that Disney’s A Christmas Carol will match that remarkable run? No. But we don’t really know. $150 million domestic off of this opening would not be surprising. Anything less than $110m domestic would be surprising.
Precious is going “exclusive” wider than Brokeback Mountain, but the results for the weekend are quite similar. BM did $38,309 on each of 5 screens on its first day. According to Klady, Precious is looking at $32,222 on each of 18. Given the wider berth, the Precious number is slightly more impressive to me. It is also opening a month earlier than BM, which is an interesting strategy, given that Brokeback waited all the way until nominations to go as wide as 1000 screens. It’s hard to imagine Lionsgate waiting so long.
Anyone who is surprised by the number on The Men Who Stare At Goats just isn’t looking at Clooney history. Aside from the Oceans movies and a slight uptick on the Pitt-led Burn After Reading, this is actually his best opening since The Perfect Storm in Summer 2000. It’s right where Leatherheads ($4.6m opening Friday) and Intolerable Cruelty ($4.1m opening Friday) opened.
This Is It is slowing, but it is still surprisingly strong and with the extension is not a bad bet to pass the Hannah/Miley Best of Both Worlds Concert’s domestic record of $65.3m after it is will end this weekend in the mid-50s.
(Edit, 2:47p – for Elf year error)
I saw an “Invictus” poster in the lobby of my neighborhood theater yesterday, and was surprised to see that it had a date (“December 11th”) affixed. This was in NE Ohio, mind you; not LA or NYC.
Is Warner Brothers planning to go wide on that date instead of employing their usual platform strategy for Eastwood’s year-end awards hopefuls? Considering the (relative) dearth of major studio wide releases slated for this December, I can almost see their logic.
Fox Searchlight’s decision to open “Crazy Heart” for awards consideration on December 16th officially puts the kibbosh on my fantasy/theory of FS opening John Cameron Mitchell’s “Rabbit Hole” next month. Guess we’ll have to wait until NEXT fall to see the film, even though it finished shooting in July and could very well have been ready in time for a last-minute awards season launch.
Maybe “Crazy” will be Jeff Bridges’ dry run for the career Oscar he finally wins next year for the Coens’ “True Grit.” (And am I the only one chomping at the bits for “Grit”?)
It’s kind of ironic that Sony Classics has more movies opening next month than any of the majors (“Broken Embraces,” “White Ribbon,” Gilliam, “The Last Station,” “A Prophet”). Hope they aren’t spreading themselves too thin: each of those movies deserve, and would greatly benefit from, SPC’s typical TLC marketing.
So “A Christmas Carol” is going to open with probably $20 million less than “GI Joe.” It has a chance to have longer legs, so maybe it’ll match it domestically, but given it probably cost almost the same to make and market…??? Maybe, let’s pray, a stake through the heart of motion-capture for a few years?????
Poor Richard Kelly…who is going to hire him now???
Nice piece of marketing by “Overture” on “Goats.”
Does Universal rejoice in the fact they pulled off a snall-budget horror opening the weekend after Halloween? Or do they scratch their head over the fact they couldn’t sell a big-budget horror (albeit a kiddie one) movie, before Halloween??
Yay for the ginormous opening for “Precious.”
Hell of a hold for LAW ABIDING CITIZEN and COUPLES RETREAT, the two movies that seemed to receive the most amount of venom from critics and pundits alike. That would classify as an F.U. to so-called Expert Opinion be Box Office Tracking.
‘Be’ should be ‘and’. This typing and drinking thing is hard.
Christmas Carol opened OK, not great. But I agree with others that it will have pretty good legs. Goats opened better than I expected. I guess DP is saying some might consider it a so-so opening, but all things considered, 12-15 mill opening weekend seems real solid to me for that film. Precious is obviously huge in limited.
Yeah I see anything above a $12 million opening weekend as a win for Goats. A strange looking R-rated comedy with a title like that going up against three other new wide releases. Not too shabby.
Big congratulations to Lionsgate on “Precious”…must be their ethnic diversity…such a wide range of blonde women expertise to draw upon
“Elf opened on November 7, 2009” – Man, that takes me back…
Yeah, I also expected Goats to open to less than this – but then I also figured it would be a platform release.
William Goss: It was a simpler time. The grass was greener. The skies was bluer. Friends were truer.
How many times are we going to read about a George Clooney vehicle disappointing by opening to around $12 million (give or take a million)? That’s the general opening weekend take of pretty much every pure Clooney vehicle since The Peacemaker (and even that was considered disappointing). Where is this magic all-by-himself starring role that Clooney opened to $20 million or more between 1997 and today? Hell, you toss in Batman & Robin, The Perfect Storm, and the three Ocean movies, and Clooney’s ‘average’ opening is still $20 million Expect this crap all over again when Up In the Air ‘only’ opens to around $12 million next month.
If Nikki Finke is to be believed (hold the sniggering please) Overture paid $5mil for Goats. I’d imagine they’d be reasonably pleased with a $12mil “soft” opening.
Saw Christmas Carol today. What is the critical problem with a movie finally having the special effects to pretty much literally duplicate the book? I thought it was a pretty good interpretation.
Doug, a lot of people hate mo-cap for some reason. I have no idea why really. It’s not like the eyes are really that fucking dead or anything. It’s just a different way to tell a story. Apparently people just prefer that story being told with REAL PEOPLE on REAL SETS blah blah bladiblah blah. It’s the future. BRING ME ON SOME MO-CAP!
I wasn’t even aware Goats was aiming for a wide release. But I guess this is what happens you cast actors that people actually like.
Movieman, such a shame about Rabbit Hole. Why must we wait? And it’ll be another year after that until The Danish Girl too.
The eyes are getting better: Jim Carrey’s eye-movements as Scrooge were pretty perfect.
Not quite so much for the secondary characters.
Yeah, Mo-cap is a little creepy. But instead of looking at it as creepy plastic reality-just look at it as really good-looking animation and it works.
wait on, motion capture isn’t inherently ‘creepy’ – it’s just a tool for animators – but zemeckis-style animation most certainly is.
i don’t know what he’s doing in his character design to get that weird ‘look’ (i can’t even describe what that ‘look’ is exactly tho the old adage “i know it when i see it” comes to mind), but i can’t imagine it’s intentional. the poorly rendered, lifeless attempts at photo-realism of ‘polar express’ and ‘beowulf’ were mega-creepy, but from the look of carrey’s scrooge character the infamous zemeckis ‘dead eye syndrome’ appears much less pronounced this time out (perhaps they used the new generation of mo-cap contact lenses to help with more realistic eye movement, goodness knows they needed some kind of help). in spite of that, and what would appear improved facial capture animation and rendering of light and texture for skin, etc, there is still something just ‘off’ about zemeckis’ animation, it’s just wrong and i don’t know about anybody else but it makes my skin crawl (perhaps that actually works in favour of the scrooge character this time out)
(for anyone interested in the basics of motion/facial capture animation, here’s a short clip from my neck of the woods about the facial capture process used for the character of ‘kong’ — still the gold standard in photo-real performance capture animation imho, at least until ‘avatar’ comes out. even tho ‘kong’ isn’t human as a primate he was mo-capped and animated the same way; regardless of how you feel about the film itself when you look into kong’s eyes he is alive in there and those aren’t andy’s eyes, they are an amazingly detailed artistic creation rendered by a team of highly-skilled animators)
http://www.motionanalysis.com/html/animation/videos/videos_kingkong.html