Weekend Estimates by Kla-Boys & Aliedys
Interesting.
65% of this weekend’s Smurf audience were kids with parents. In that group, 65% were parents with kids under 12. It also appears that 2/3 of the audience was female.
Maybe all those boys under 12 were still going to see Harry Potter.
Boys over 12 were split between Cowboys & Aliens and Captain America, which did pretty well on weekend two, off “just” 61%. Thor, at this point in each comic book movie’s run, had a better hold… but it also had the advantage of less competition at the start of the season and in its niche. Look for Cap to land, domestically, in the same Marvel box office sweet spot.
Cowboys & Aliens is also in an odd sweet spot… 2011 Spielberg-exec-produced movies that aren’t sequels. (EDIT: “without a number after the titles.” As a commenter pointed out, Super 8 ends in a number). This opening is pretty much in line with Super 8, which is pretty much played out at $125m, just slightly better than 3.5 times opening. C&A cost at least twice as much as Super 8 – maybe 3x as much… maybe more – and probably won’t get to that figure domestically, but the hope will be that Craig & Ford can generate much bigger numbers overseas… though the “cowboys” part isn’t going to help.
Crazy, Stupid, Love. seems to be a victim of comedy exhaustion, combined with an older skewing audience that takes longer to get to the movie theater. The opening is within spitting distance of Friends With Benefits‘ opening last weekend. And though this one is more movie-star-studded, like FWB, it feels a bit less high-concept. Rom-Coms, not Raunch-Coms. Maybe if Steve Carell had his ass waxed in this one…
Potter continues to hold pretty well, and will pass Transformers: Dark of the Moon in the next couple of weeks to become the domestic leader of the summer. Tr3 is already in the 3-slot internationally with Potter still over $100m behind Pirates 4, with its eye on that crown.
There are four newcomers on 8 screens or less with per-screens over $15k. Miranda July leads the pack with the 1-screen premiere of The Future, followed by the Brendan Gleeson film The Guard, the Dominic Cooper Hussein-edy, The Devil’s Double, and Attack The Block, which is the highest grosser in the group, doing $16k per on 8 screens.
Woody Allen continues to push towards his first $50m domestic grosser, as Midnight in Paris loses screens, but is still playing pretty strong in key theaters that are holding.
“Crazy, Stupid, Love” overperforms its tracking. There are very few adult-driven films in this summer, so the box office leg of “Crazy, Stupid, Love” would be strong. Still, the PG-13 “Crazy, Stupid, Love” wouldn’t gross higher than several R-rated comedies in this summer.
The box office leg of “Friends with Benefits” isn’t very good….
I was little unhappy that Screen Gems was marketing “Attack The Block” mostly to geeks and almost ignoring everyone else ; the strong opening result of “Attack The Block” proves that I was wrong. I should have never underestimated the power of geeks, which become more and more important factor for box office. Anyway, “Attack The Block” would be reasonably profitable for Screen Gems and Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions; they are being rewarded for treating geeks well.
Little disappointed by the expansion result of “Another Earth”. By contrast, “Moon” could still got $8,541 PTA when the film was expanded to 21 theaters. It may proves again that Sony Pictures Classics is better at releasing some kinds of films than many other distributors.
It will be interesting to see Captain America’s foreign box office numbers. It could bomb.
Tracking as a way of estimating openings is a bastardization of tracking.
And should there be a benefit accrued to a film for crappy tracking? C&A’s tracking sucked too… does that make the gross a happier one?
A billion is in the books for Potter, and it’s number 1 in the franchise domestically and overseas…I’d say #3 all-time worldwide is in the bag.
Trannies is also a lock to pass a billion at this point.
“2011 Spielberg-exec-produced movies without a number after the titles.”
Super 8 ends with a number.
AHHHHH!!!!!! Very good, Brett.
That’s why I need an editor.
As mentioned in another post, extremely disappointed in Crazy Stupid, full of plot holes, mis-leading marketing (the A story is really a way-degraded rip-off of Rushmore, not Gosling/Stone). Bits of clever dialogue here and there…can barely recommend this for a rental.
Re: trailers & pre-show stuff…”Cinedigm,” wtf? Isn’t that the company that stole the Terminator’s robotic arm? Bad branding!
Everyone LOVED the trailer for 50/50, can’t wait to see it; also loved the new Sherlock Holmes trailer, didn’t see the first one, but, damn, Downy is a STAR!
Everyone HATED the trailer for Abduction, it was literally laughed off the screen both times I saw HP 7.2; will this mercifully usher in the Lautner apocalypse? This kid has no charisma, acting chops…and Singleton? Really?
Seeing the Future next week, hope it restores my faith in movies (really, really liked HP 7.2, but wanted to LOVE it).
Haven’t seen C,S,L. yet, but I don’t see how Gosling/Stone was marketed as the A story. Seemed like an ensemble push to me, opening with Carell/Moore, then Carell/Gosling, then Gosling/Stone, a little Carell/Tomei. Granted, the kid and the babysitter aren’t in the trailer too much, but since they don’t have “names,” that’s not too surprising.
I will say that the line from Carell after the kid offers some words of ‘wisdom’ — “How old are you again?” — does undercut some of my generally high anticipation for the film.
“…and Singleton? Really?”
I know we beat this drum two weeks ago, but when will people stop being STUNNED AND APPALLED that the almighty John Singleton is directing pulpy Renny Harlin type movies? That’s ALL he does, the rule not the exception.
And face it, Singleton was NEVER a very exciting or artistic director. He hit a certain early 90s zeitgeist with Boyz, but he’s long been a paycheck guy. Nothing wrong with that. I much prefer him doing low-rent action to doing howlers like Higher Learning.
Just saw that Mojo updated it’s worldwide to put Potter past the billion mark and Trannies3 just $17M short of it. Panda 2 is also now Dreamworks biggest non-shrek overseas hit. Pirates 4 is nearing $800M overseas, and much as I disliked it, can I honestly say that as a studio head that I would walk away from greenlighting a Pirates 5. That’s $800M. Pirates 1 made $650 domestic and international combined.
I still insist that Singleton’s “F&F” was the best in the series (to be perfectly honest, it was the only one I liked).
But yeah: “Boyz” was wildly overrated back in the day (thank the zeitgeist and the formerly almighty Siskel & Ebert), and Singleton was always more of a “craftsman” type director than an artist (“Poetic Justice” anyone????).
“Abducted” wouldn’t look half-bad (the supporting cast is certainly stellar: Weaver, Molina, etc.) if somebody other than the deadly, dreary, can-he-even-chew-gum-and-walk-at-the-same-time? Lautner was starring.
Maybe I’m going to have to do a Singleton retrospective because I don’t remember any of the earlier movies being “howlers”, although this could have been because at the time and place that I saw them they were “of the moment”. Like I get how you could consider POETIC JUSTICE or HIGHER LEARNING pulp-y, 1950s esq message pictures but wasn’t ROSEWOOD at least a pretty reserved prestige picture? I also remember BABY BOY being pretty strong. And maybe it was overrated at the time but BOYZ IN THE HOOD is a fantastic tear jerker and coming of age film. I’m a fan of his version of SHAFT and FOUR BROTHERS, so I have no problem with his newer stuff, but even if his baser instincts were always present, he did move from relatively elevated fare, whether correctly perceived or not, to explicitly genre stuff, no? Apparently, I’m really going to have reconceive THE SINGLETON CANON.
To be fair, Mojo updated because they got the e-mail alert from Hollywood Reporter. Mojo does not self-source foreign.
I don’t either. Which is why I didn’t mention foreign on those films in this entry.
Without spoiling Crazy Stupid Love, I will say its one if the few romcoms that genuinely surprised me. When stuff happens at the end of the second act, I can yell you that I didnt see it coming.
Some people will love how everything comes together. Some will find it convenient. Personally, I dug it.
I also liked where they ended it.
In Rosewood, Singleton took what was a depressing and harrowing story and in the end completely sold it out to have our hero gunning down about 50 white racists. Like if in the end of Schindler’s List, Liam Neeson punched Goethe out of a window and he was impaled on a giant spike of some kind.
JKill- “Four Brothers” is possibly Singleton’s best film to date.
I wasn’t crazy about his “Shaft” reboot, but it’s worth seeing for Jeffrey Wright’s fantastic performance as the heavy.
And while I can take or leave “Baby Boy,” I remember enjoying “Rosewood” at the time of its 1997 release more than any of Singleton’s prior (or future) “message movies.” That said, I’ve never felt any burning desire to revisit it either.
This is interesting. It’s weird how you remember movies when you haven’t seen them in a while.
BP, if that’s what ROSEWOOD is like that is very exploitation-y, so maybe that’s always been his thing and it was lost on me.
Movieman, Wright and Bale as the bad guys are why I found SHAFT so much fun. I would’ve gladly supported sequels to that, but apparently it was not meant to be. Oddly, there have been stirrings of a FOUR BROTHERS sequel, which I don’t quite get since it doesn’t lend itself to that. But yeah, I think 4B is his most successful genre movie, and possibly second overall to BOYZ, for me.
I saw Higher Learning in theaters, and I remember howling at the time. I imagine now it’s as dated as those 1950’s movies that demonized teenagers who speed.
I agree with everything Anghus said about CSL. There was almost nothing about it that I didn’t enjoy.
“It will be interesting to see Captain America’s foreign box office numbers. It could bomb.”
It didn’t. 48.5 mil in 31 territories this weekend. Solid numbers. Not a huge hit, but far from a bomb.
I, too, agree with everything said about “Crazy Stupid Love.”
What a great movie — with multiple surprises.
I can never bring myself to watch ROSEWOOD, since it was penned by the man who gave us TOMCATS. Unfair, perhaps, but there you go.
So MIDNIGHT IN PARIS continues its boxoffice domination. Cowboys, Aliens and Blue Smurfs cannot stop its awesome power. Even though the screen count went down, the grosses stayed consistent. I know this, because I personally visited every screen playing the film, all 471 of them. How did I do this, you ask? With my magical teleportation device. The only problem is that the laser beam attached to the entry portal of my teleportation device scorched one of the pages of my autographed first edition copy of WITHOUT FEATHERS. It might have been because there was dried semen all over the page in question (apparently, the presence of extra genetic material confused the software that runs the DNA recombinator). Hopefully I can find another one on Ebay. Also, GOLF IN THE KINGDOM made less than the entire U.S. gross for SHADOWS AND FOG. Another victim falls.
There are no 75-year old withered Jewish men in my neighborhood. Everywhere I look, it’s Blacks and Latinos and Filipinos. I don’t know about you, but it just BURNS me when I look and see a withered 75-year old Jew with young Asian squack young enough to be his adopted daughter. HE SHOULD BE WITH ME!
HE WILL BE MINE
HE WILL BE MINE
HE WILL BE MINE
WOODY POWER
WOODY POWER
WOODY POWER
YES
David- you need to do DP/30 with Woody Allen
ask him why
he took restraining order out on me
I want to be at taping and
hold him and love him
why no DP/30 with woody?
good idea
watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0wwPl7N7OY
Well played.
Vague CRAZY STUPID LOVE MINI SPOILER TO FOLLOW….
Loved SO much of CSL, that I wish they wouldn’t have felt the need to (at least twice) go for some sitcom-contrived “shock” twist that inadvertantly makes L.A. seem like the smallest town it’s been portrayed as since “Crash.” I sort of, in a weird way, agree with the complaints that nobody behaves in the way real human beings do to the plot particulars, but all the emotions and quiet scenes and character touches were perfect…
Also EMMA STONE OH MY GOD LOOOOOK AT HER, so CHARMING and FUNNY in this. YEP YEP.
Also Carell needed to tax that hot-ass babysitter from Top Model. MORE PLEASE.
So after Cowboys and Aliens and Scott Pilgrim, can we call movies ‘born at Comic Con’ as a sign that the film will underperform?
The only “comic” I care about is Allen Stewart Konigsberg.
LOOK AT HIM!
I think your feelings about a film can be shaped by circumstances that really have nothing to do with the film itself, but will forever spring to mind whenever you think about that film. By sheer coincidence, I saw Rosewood at the 1997 Berlin Film Festival just a few hours after seeing Calling the Ghosts, a documentary about Croat and Muslim women who were raped and beaten by their Serbian captors during the Bosnian civil war. These women, like most of the other prisoners in their internment camp, had lived for years alongside their Serbian neighbors, and had assumed these people were their friends. Just like the black townspeople in Rosewood thought they knew, and were known by, the good white folks in the nearby town of Sumner, the same white folks who savagely attacked them in 1923.
And there was that scene in Rosewood where the white mob dumps dozens of black corpses into a massive grave. Once again, the scene was all the more chilling for me because I viewed it in the context of a film festival where ample evidence of man’s inhumanity to man abounded. I couldn’t help thinking of other things I had seen in Berlin — documentaries and dramatic films about wartime horrors, and, even more joltingly, an exhibition at The Topography of Terror, a museum on the site of the former Gestapo headquarters, that showed Nazis disposing of their many victims in pretty much the same way the racist thugs dumped the black bodies in Rosewood.
All of which explains why I walked out of Rosewood thinking: Hate is a virus. It takes different forms, but the symptoms never seem to change very much. Not exactly an original idea, I’ll grant you, but that’s what went on in my head. I have never seen the movie again since that day in Berlin. Truth is, I’m not sure I ever want to. I can’t argue with anyone who wants to criticize Rosewood because, frankly, I remember my reaction to it more vividly than I remember the film itself. But that reaction was powerful enough to leave a lasting impression. How much of that was John Singleton’s doing, and how much of that was seeing his movie when and where I did, I cannot tell you.
THE PURPLE ROSEWOOD OF CAIRO.
LOOK AT HIM!
“So after Cowboys and Aliens and Scott Pilgrim, can we call movies ‘born at Comic Con’ as a sign that the film will underperform?”
“We killed at Comic-Con!” will now become a harbinger of doom; and someday there will be a stigma against the phrase and anything resembling it, just like saying “Good luck!” to an actor on Broadway. “Mmmm…I dunno…” will be the “break a leg” of our generation.
Midnight in Paris lost 25% of its theatre count but recorded a mere 32.4% drop in its gross, the smallest in the top 15. And once again, it enjoyed a remarkable surge in takings from Friday to Saturday (42.9%, far and away the biggest jump in the top 12).
Plus it added Bad Teacher to its tally of victims. Next weekend should see Winnie the Pooh added to the list.
Meanwhile, its gross of $15.7 million in France has made it Woody’s most successful film ever in that country. Huzzah!
And don’t accept any second-rate substitutes.
Yes, it kills me that the multiplexes are filled with second-rate Woody Allen “substitutes.” Such as, um, let’s see…was WHEN HARRY MET SALLY this summer?
Yancy, I don’t know about you but when I go to the multiplex I’m swarmed by the new works of Ed Burns and Eric Shaeffer, and it feels me with intense anxiety. And every time, eventually once the trepidation has worn off and the words of one Steven Kaye start to float through my mind, I just take a deep breath, pull out a wadded bill from my pocket, smack it down onto the ticket counter, and say, “One for MIDNIGHT IN PARIS. Accept no substitutes.”
And by feels, I mean fills. Damn typos. Sigh…
“Midnight In Paris” spam is the best spam ever.
Spoilers
Saw Cowboys & Aliens last night, and it’s been awhile since I had such a “meh” reaction to something. As a huge fan of creature features, I wasn’t expecting so many scenes of the aliens attacking in broad daylight, so that was kind of fun (though C&A is another reminder of how rote movie aliens have been lately). Couple of pretty damn good set pieces too, with my favorite probably being the one in the upside down steamboat. And the cast is solid. Always nice to see people like Clancy Brown and Walton Goggins. What was up with Craig’s accent though? He sounded odd and I couldn’t figure it out.
At the same time, the genre mash up doesn’t really work. Maybe it plays better on the page. On screen, it just didn’t completely gel. Too much of the writing is unintentionally funny and the plotting is paint-by-numbers and pretty dull. I can see why audiences mainly stayed away (maybe 15 people at a 6:45 showing). I only went because my wife wanted to see it. Not terrible, but I don’t care if I ever see it again nor would I recommend it to anyone.
Saw Crazy Stupid Love last night. Surprisingly at my local 24-plex, it was only playing on one screen. I mean it won’t win any Academy Awrards, I thought that it was funny and enjoyable. I kinda wonder if it would have broken out if it came out in early June. being after HB, FWB, and a week before the change-up, it seems to be squeezed out. I think that it would have been more successful if it came out during the whole X-Men/Super 8 time when there was lacking a good romantic comedy. That is probably why Bridesmaids had great legs in June. Good movie, but $165 million domestic? Wonder when Universal will be banging out a sequel. Hopefully they will learn from last summer’s mistake and not take the Bridesmaids to Morocco.
No comment on Klady’s assessment that more adults than kids sat through the Smurfs?
Just waiting for someone to chime in that Smurfette is “teh hott!”
Yeah, I LOVED Crazy, Stupid Love….it is one of the few films this summer that works. POSSIBLE SPOILER….I thought the surprise twist was very well written and tricky…the info is all there if you look back for it. END SPOILER: The audience at the arclight LOVED this movie. Long applause afterwards. I hope word of mouth comes around to keep this film playing.
Who else here is tired of both Steven Kaye and his substitute?
Raises hand.
Joe, that’s interesting regarding ROSEWOOD. My only viewing of it was a very positive, visceral one that I had watching it with one of my brothers, so the dissonance between what I remember versus what most seem to think the movie IS is pretty fascinating. I too am not sure I want to rewatch and re-evaluate, although I’m quite tempted now.
—————————————————-
The more I think about it, the more I love CRAZY, STUPID LOVE. I hope it catches on because I found it a joy to watch, and it’s sticking with me in a way few newer films do. Also since this blog will soon evolve into heated awards discussions once summer ends, I wouldn’t mind CSL getting a few nominations…
Back to the Future 2 took place in 2015. So, we got four more years until hoverboards show up. Woo Hoo!!!
The C&A vs Smurfs storyline has completely saved Marvel from the little discussed fact that Captain America dropped 60% from last weekend. Not unheard of, but NOT good.
The mixed reaction I get from C&A has been fascinating. Several friends have told me its their favorite summer film in year, Several others said they were bored out of their skulls.
Looks like only palmtree is at least somewhat intelligent.
“What was up with Craig’s accent though? He sounded odd and I couldn’t figure it out.”
I thought he sounded like a young Paul Newman with a splash of Nick Nolte thrown in.
I much prefer the original Steven Kaye. Funnier with less effort. (No offense to the faux-Kaye.)