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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

BYO Box Office

Klady is going to do a 4-day tomorrow.
Nothing really surprising since yesterday from my perspective.
The Lovely Bones, by studio estimate, had a nice 10% bump on Saturday… which probably means that a younger audience is finding the film, as was the marketing intent.
One thing that has caught my eye is that Brothers has quietly grossed over $28 million, which puts Oscar chasers An Education, Nine, A Serious Man, and The Messenger in the financial rear view. I am pretty well convinced that had Lionsgate treated this movie as an equal to Precious instead of as an afterthought (I finally got a screener… 4 days ago… and not from Lionsgate, but from Relativity Media), it would have outgrossed Precious and would have had a real shot at a nomination… and Tobey Maguire would have been a lock for a Best Actor nod.

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3 Responses to “BYO Box Office”

  1. movieman says:

    I’m not sure whether it’s fair to compare the box-office performance of a (fairly) wide release title like “Brothers” with films like “An Education,” “The Messenger” and “A Serious Man” which never went beyond a couple of hundred screens.
    And despite its myriad flaws, “Nine” could have certainly hit “Brothers”‘ $30-million mark if it had been released at a less frenetic, cannibalistic time—like, say, “Brothers” which surely benefitted from its post-Thanksgiving weekend wasteland date.
    I’m still not convinced that the film–or Maguire who’s fine, if hardly revelatory if you’ve been a Toby fan since “The Ice Storm” like me–would have been legit awards contenders even with more support from Lionsgate. In fact, it was probably a wise decision to open as wide as they did in early December. The generally lukewarm reviews wouldn’t have given it much marketing ballast if LG had taken the usual “platform-at-Xmas; nationwide-in-January” strategy. Maybe it would have stalled out entirely and never gotten beyond a handful of major markets.
    That said, LG’s woeful mishandling of “Precious” probably cost it an additional $25-million (minimum) at the b.o., not to mention the chance to make good on its early front-runner status in the Best Picture race.

  2. Gonzo Knight says:

    A Serious Man could have been a $20+ million dollar grosser, easily. Never enough screens, never enough confidence.

  3. EthanG says:

    Only comment is given the tiny drops among female targeted films (Complicated, Blind Side, Leap Year) and large ones among male ones (Daybreakers, Youth in Revolt) and that theres no female-targeting film coming next week….it’s the time of reckoning for all those fanboy/fangirl Kristen Bell fans!!!
    There’s should be a MASSIVE pent-up demande for a female film by the time When in Rome hits…so no excuses!

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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