Friday Estimates by Klady Ass OR Episode 3794 of How Tracking Fails
So, it looks like Jackass 3D will do a minimum of $40m to start and Red will do more than $20m. So much for seeing it coming. (Yes, I know some of you did in the BO Hell entry comments.)
For Jackass 3D, this represents a 73% jump from #2’s opening Friday – and others have the Friday number estimated higher – which is more than a 3D bump. Without turning this into Stephen Hawking’s blog, I would rough out that if the opening day audience for Jackass #1 grew 10% for #2 and the rest was the increase in ticker prices from 2002 to 2006, you might be looking at the audience growing another 20% here… plus ticket prices and the 3D bump. Neither of the first films did 3x opening day.
The Social Network had another excellent drop. And Secretariat‘s was even better, by Klady’s estimates. I’m looking forward to all of the stories in the media about the phenomenon of Secretariat and how brilliantly MT Carney is marketing it. Of course, that will never happen. And to be fair, the Secretariat number is much smaller. More fair would the comparison to The Town, which in its first 15 days – yesterday was TSN’s 15th – had higher grosses than TSN on all but 4, dropped in a similar way, and was about $2m ahead of TSN after 15 days. And i would assume that a much higher percentage of bank robbers have checked it out than the approximately 1% of Facebook users that have seen The Social Network, which is much likely less, as I would bet a significant percentage of TSN ticket buyers are not even on Facebook.
Look… I hate to be Mr Gray Lining to Social Network’s silver cloud. I really, really like the movie a lot. Right now, it’s Top 10 material for me, maybe Top 5 (I haven’t really thought that hard about the year.) But the media agenda of raising The Selected Film to the peak of the highest mountain to be given sainthood using allegedly empirical data that they conveniently forget is very similar for less beloved titles drives me to distraction.
I say, great, make the arguments about why you LOVE these films and that America and the world would be a better place if every man, woman, and child saw them. And I’m not kidding. Making the argument is the prerogative of every editorialist. But pretending it’s an objective argument drives me out of my f-ing mind!!! The creeping fear that voices of authority have lost that authority, so we have to pretend that there is a factual basis for our personal preferences, most often without really making a factual case, is the core of the horrible, disfigured idea of journalism that is currently dominating the conversation, whether at FoxNews or on movie blogs.
One last point on the weekend’s top grosser (in every way)… all those kids that newspaper editors think are interested in The Social Network… the ones who spend all their time texting, and tweeting, and Facebooking, and harassing online, and watching people wipe out on YouTube… they went to go see Jackass 3D on opening night and will be there a second time soon. They are interested in doing, not discussing. To really appreciate The Social Network, you need to have perspective on the kids in the film, not be an average freshman in college, still trying to figure the proportion of grain alcohol to nudity.
And now back to Red… which is not the greatest film ever made… but is, I think for most people, a solid entertainment. The actors in the film, all but Willis (and to some degree Morgan Freeman), playing against type, are fun and charming. Helen Mirren with an automatic weapon is actually better in context than out of context. Malkovich is a pleasure to watch. Karl Urban as the balance to the group is quite un-Bones-like. And Willis, in his relationship with Mary Louise Parker, gets to charm in unexpected ways too. Are there some messes left in Aisle Four? Sure. But a $20m-plus opening is exactly what a film like this needs to create a place at the table. It’s a solid sample and word-of-mouth will take over from there. I don’t see $100 million in its future, but $80 million would not be a big shock. And $80 million is the borderline to be Summit’s biggest non-Twilight film ever, The next film that’s directly in this film’s way is Unstoppable on Nov 12. That’s plenty of time for the takes-a-couple-of-weeks-to-go over-50 audience to find this film.
Hereafter and Conviction were leaked into theaters with Eastwood doing nearly double the gross on nearly half the screens. Both studios feel they have word-of-mouth audience movies – aka, not so good for critics – and hope to get some chatter going. I will actually write reviews of both films soon, but I will say here that Hereafter is a much richer meal than Conviction and while it will have more people who dislike it on principle, it will also have more people who love it and want to talk about it for hours and hours afterward. (A great DP/30 with Peter Morgan will land next week… in which he discusses the rough hewn nature of his script with remarkable candor.)
Carlos is this year’s Red Riding/che’ epic experience that you should have, though I gather the theatrical is not the whole 5.5 hours. It’s more worth the time than any 6 hours of TV you will watch this year.
(Edit: 3p – For really dumb error regarding the two Oscar-chasing exclusive releases.)
Nice opening for RED; TSN, SECRETARIAT and TOWN all drop less than 35%. Despite the studios’ best efforts to drive them away, it appears grown-ups are still going to the movies.
Sadly, major studios still won’t make more films for grown-ups (who can watch much more sophisticated dramas and comedies on TV). Here are the reasons:
http://thehollywoodeconomist.blogspot.com/2010/10/role-reversal-why-tv-is-replacing.html
EJE is a patso. I say that without having read the latest dreck.
Drama moved to television more than 20 years ago… long before CG, 3D, or foreign theatrical being a strong as it is now.
I hate people making the same dumb argument with whatever new twist turns up every 3 years, getting it wrong for decades.
Perhaps his next column will be about why studios stopped making comedies. Oh, wait, they haven’t. And they still rarely work overseas.
Malkovich playing a funny crazy dude is against type?
How is Hereafter having a per screen average of $25,000+ the same as Conviction’s $8,000 ?
Glad to see I Want Your Money bomb disastrously. I guess the Teabagger/Republican rage at Obama doesn’t generate into ticket sales. The saddest thing isn’t dramas moving to tv, it’s FOX “news” becoming the highest rated news channel and masking opinion as fact to spoon-feed the illiterate masses.
Jackass 3D I called the $100m months ago
DP where’s my kewpie doll?
So obvious. A true 3d gimmick film.
Amazed no one else thought of doing one
I am with JBD. Why did it take this long to have a 3D gimmick film? I am not sure if anyone else could have pulled this film off but the Jackass guys. Nevertheless, I guess Jackass 4 is all but a certain now which is a good thing, even if the guys look pretty old in 3!
IO there was already a 3D gimmick flick released…it was called Avatar.
Damn it, Monco! You know I didn’t want to go down that road, but you took me down it anyway! Good show, sir. Good show.
I completely inverted that… bad mistake… fixing…
never let me go is what people should be seeing. fucking incredible.
TV has been the place for character-driven drama and comedy as well as meaty female roles for nearly 20 years. It may have been groundbreaking in fall 1995 when Entertainment Weekly ran a cover-story exclaiming ‘why television is better than the movies’, but it’s not news and hasn’t been news for quite sometime now. God it drives me nuts when pundits write the same darn thing over and over again and don’t realize or don’t care that it’s a really old story.
Like several famous villains/intense brooders before him, Malkovich is at that great place in his career where he’s too well-known and/or old to be very scary/menacing, so he’s using his creepy image as a vehicle for comedy. It worked for De Niro, it made Chris Walken more famous/popular than ever, and it’s been working well for Malkovich (witness his wonderful and surprisingly warm turn in The Great Buck Howard). I was always sad that we never got to (theoretically) see JT Walsh go through this third act turnaround, and I eagerly await Michael Wincott going the same route (if only because he barely works anymore).
Agreed, it’s a refreshing sight to see so many critically-approved (acclaimed is a strong word), mid-budget grown up dramas/comedies doing well right now. Alas, I’m willing to bet that the studios take note of the fact that Jackass 3D nearly had a bigger opening day than many of the respective adult fare had their whole opening weekend and act accordingly.
Except for the bees–and the flying debris in the pre end credits sequence–the 3-D in “Jackass 3” felt….kind of non-existent.
Which is more than I can see for the 3-D in “My Soul to Take” which was flat-out invisible to my eyes.
You’ve already blocked out the 3D anal noisemaker, flying dildo and shit globules?
“My Soul to Take” had a flying dildo?
Yeah movie, you totally are ignoring some of the best use of 3D ever. Once this 3D craze is said and done, Jackass 3D will definitely stand out as one of the high points of this 3D era. Seriously.
Foamy: Although I’ve not yet seen “My Soul To Take,” I’m guessing there are shit globules throughout that, too.
IO: Completely agree. Given that much of “Avatar” resides on a hard drive, I’d say “Jackass 3D” represents the best fully live-action, feature-length digital 3D film yet.
HEREAFTER POWER.
Damon is SO, SO good in Hereafter. Totally relatable, lonely-guy sadsack and even though I think she’s over 24, BRYCE DALLAS HOWARD is SO FETCHING. The way she acts in this is EXACTLY the kind of girl I like. EXACTLY. All earnest and DEMURE and ENDEARING and AWESOME. Plus she is a FIRECROTCH.
And Cecile de France RULES. Maybe Clint was a big HAUTE TENSION fan. It’s a love/hate movie, I guess, as evidenced by the bickering date couples arguing about it once the lights came up and the muted crowd response, but I really, really liked it, and think people who key into its downcast mood will dig it.
Great opening scene. And Clint is slowly but surely turning the color back on in his movies… Some of the shots here almost looked like SUDDEN IMPACT again.
Maybe it’s my previously acknowledged “depth perception” problem, but 3-D rarely has any discernible impact on me.
The 3-D effects in the trailer for that upcoming Summit Nic Cage movie seemed more pronounced than anything in “Jackass.”
The whole 3-D bandwagon still feels like just an excuse to charge an additional $3 (or more) for a movie ticket.
I liked “Jackass:” I just didn’t think the 3-D did a whole lot to enhance the “theatrical experience” for me.
movieman: Didn’t know about any depth-perception problem. That would certainly explain stuff you missed. Didn’t see the “Drive Angry” trailer yet. My rule for 3D is that if it was shot in 3D, I’ll pony up for it. Otherwise, it’s just “Clash of the Titans.”
Which was pretty dreadful in any dimension.