By Leonard Klady Klady@moviecitynews.com

3-Day Labor Day Estimates

Posted Sunday, September 4th, 2011 - Comments Off on 3-Day Labor Day Estimates
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A Last Gasp of Summer

Preliminary numbers give summer season 2011 a slight 5% box office boost from the prior year with an estimated $4.18 billion tally. That translates into about a 2% dip in admissions with Warner Bros. getting the season box office crown with more than $1 billion in revenues. An estimated chart will be available Monday with a final chart later in the week.

The last long weekend of summer once again saw The Help at the top of the list with an estimated $14.3 million (all figures reflect 3-day estimates). The frame’s three new national releases followed with the thriller The Debt displaying better than blah results of $9.6 million ($11.5 million since its Wednesday launch). Apollo 18, a sort of Blair Witch on the Moon, grossed $8.6 million and the biting Shark Night trailed with $8.2 million.

The session also saw a burst of other new releases anxious to sell a few tickets prior to Labor Day. The inspirational Seven Days in Utopia garnered $1.2 million at 561 pews while Mexican thriller Saving Private Perez saluted with $620,000 at 161 venues.

India provided two potent bows with the Hindi Bodyguard grossing $767,000 at 89 theaters ($1.1 million since its Wednesday bow) and Tamil-language Mankatha stirring up $223,000 at 29 sites. Also noteworthy was the $46,800 total for Chinese import Detective Dee: Mystery of the Phantom Flame from three engagements. Otherwise new entries were dull or worse including a poor showing for Pour l’amour de dieu in Quebec where local productions have been experiencing a generally torrid summer response.

Business overall experienced a 12% boost from last weekend when Irene’s wind and rain took its viewing toll. Last year the leader board was fronted by debuts of The American and Machete that had respective long weekend grosses of $16.7 million and $14.1 million.

Tracking for the incoming product was generally off the mark. The Debt was predicted to arrive with an extremely dull $5 million to $7 million. With exit polls showing an audience composed 76% of viewers aged 35 years and older there’s the implication that an older crowd is as difficult to pin down as pre-teens when it comes to their viewing choices.

Conversely both Apollo 18 and Shark Night were expected to perform significantly better than actuals would indicate. Both films skewed toward 25s and younger and the latter capitalized on their receptivity to 3D gimmickry.

Adults were once again out in force for the likes of The Guard, Senna, Higher Ground and Sarah’s Key.

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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