Weekend Estimates by Forgotten Klady
Well… I certainly had more conservative expectations of the whole weekend based on Friday’s estimates than turned out to be the case. I still expect these estimates to come down a bit tomorrow, though still stronger than I would have projected. For The Vow to beat Dear John by over $11m in 3 days after being separated by $1.5m on their respective opening Fridays is a surprise. Likewise, Safe House started $1.1m ahead of Denzel’s The Book of Eli‘s Friday opening and is now estimated $6.5m bigger for the 3-day. And Journey To The Center Of The Earth did a pretty normal 3x opening day in its first weekend. Journey 2 is estimated at 4.2x the Friday estimate. Of the four openings, only the Star Wars 3D re-release is estimated at under 3x Friday… which would not be out of the norm.
In any case, even with these estimates, this is still only a record-breaker in obscure records. 2010 opened three movies on Valentine’s Day to $120m. 2012 opens four movies to an estimated $132m. So yes, a “record-breaking” Valentine’s Day. We are also at six $20m+ openings in February for the first time ever. But again, those six films opened to $174m. In 2010, the then-record five $20m+ launches opened to $191m.
I don’t want to piss on the garden here. It’s an excellent weekend and every one of these movies will be in profit… no Wolfman holdovers that require writedowns. (There also isn’t a hit holdover like Shutter Island.) The Vow is a cash machine that will not only buy houses for people associated with the film, but if Sony can convert Channing Tatum to a non-chick opener with 21 Jump Street, this mine will be even richer. Safe House could well keep doing business on good word-of-mouth from under 35s and become the 4th $100m grosser of Denzel’s remarkable career.
But one must keep their sanity in the best of times, the worst of times, and all in between. Really nice weekend… but not a game changer in any way whatsoever. Teens are not “coming back” to the movies. They never left. They just didn’t have things they wanted to see in numbers that held up to Avatar.
In Oscar scoring… Searchlight’s push for The Descendants continues to be effective. It’s already Alexander Payne’s #1 film worldwide and should become his #1 domestic hit sometime this next week. The Artist has settled into 800 screens and is now on the descent at $24m. This must be frustrating. Hugo‘s out there again on 700 screens, closing in on $65m, but still seen as a commercial disappointment in most quarters. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is quietly going to top out around $35m. The Iron Lady , doing similar numbers to The Artist for The Weinstein Company has got to be frustrating in a different way… a bigger than expected US audience… but all Meryl at awards time. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is also lingering in the low 20s, a very strong player in limited release, but never finding a wider base. And War Horse may have the quietest $78 million domestic in the race, passing up Moneyball and The Descendants, but somehow seen as old-fashioned tainted goods. For the record, DreamWorks/Disney has the #1 and #2 highest grossing films in the Oscar BP race this year.
Meanwhile, Sony Classics is getting A Dangerous Method past the $5m mark in spite of Oscar snubbing the film. And A Separation is doing some strong business. Rampart finally opened… and not badly… but I’m not sure that the low-budget-release wad hasn’t been shot there with Woody Harrelson doing all the rounds last week. And it’s nice to see Magnolia going out with the Oscar shorts on more screens to more business than in the past.
Glad to see that “W.E.” is doing OK despite generally hostile reviews.
Finally watched the screener last night and was (very) pleasantly surprised.
Riseborough and Cornish are both terrific, and Jason Isaacs steals every scene he’s in (and is smolderingly sexy to boot).
For my money, “W.E.” is a more entertaining movie than “The King’s Speech” (an apropos comparison since they cover much of the same historical turf). And I’m betting that if somebody other than Madonna had directed (say, Tom Ford or Hooper), my critical brethren would have been a lot kinder. Like Ford, Madonna has–no surprise–a drop-dead fashion sense, and proves to be a surprisingly strong director of actors.
More comparison/contrast? It’s actually a better piece of “filmmaking” than “Julie and Julia” which shares its dual timeframe narrative. (As much as I’ve enjoyed most of Nora Ephron’s movies, she’s never been the greatest of stylists.) And it’s infinitely superior to, and vastly more “cinematic” than, the overrated “My Week With Marilyn.”
Caught a screening of Rampart this week (it doesn’t open here in Boston till 2/17).I thought it was astonishing, clearly one of the best movies of 2011, and it’s sad that the bungled qualifying release means it can’t get any award recognition. A Fassbender/Gosling/Harrelson/Oldman/Shannon best actor race would’ve been the coolest thing ever.
Not surprised The Vow opened so well. A great marketing campaign and interesting enough of a premise for a chick flick.
Wait, how did JOURNEY get from a 6.5 Friday to a 27 weekend?
Movieman was right: Luis Guzman’s performance in JOURNEY 2 almost has to be seen to be believed. Can something be considered “shucking and jiving” when it’s just an esteemed Latino actor playing a buffoon? Guzman is SO unfunny it crosses over into GENIUS territory, especially since the rest of the movie– save for HUDGENS LOOK AT HER, The Rock’s likable presence, and the cool flying bees– is such a wash that my eyes and ears could barely focus; Anytime Vanessa’s glazed rack or cute butt wasn’t on screen, or Guzman wasn’t CLOWNING, I was thinking about laundry.
What the f^ck is W.E? Nowhere else in life do people so get off on referring to initials and assume common cultural acceptance than Hot Blog posts. LoTR I get. TDK I understand. I’ve yet to figure out are people on this board exceptionally lazy, pretentious or both.
Am I the only one whose eyes glaze over posts and skip ahead or do you guys try to guess along each time like a game of Where’s Waldo or Sudoku? Is it really that much easier to refer to every title as its initials? How I Met Your Mother would be pretty tedious. I can see why HIMYM is used so frequently. The key word is frequently. Must make for some interesting messaging at work.
“What did you do this w/e”
“Watched TV”
“Oh really, what did you watch?”
“TV”
“Yes, what did you watch?”
“I’m saying I went out to watch TV”
“Oh, is something wrong with yours?”
“Wrong w/what?”
“Your TV”
“???”
“Why would you go out to watch TV”
“It just came out”
“Yeah, like in 1954”
“What are you talking about”
“NM”
“I just said I went to see TV”
“Fine, dude, I’m busy”
“Maybe you should take your wife to see it”
“We’ve got one at home”
“Bootleg?”
“Yo, are you stoopid? Shuttie, you’re buggin'”
“I’m just saying it’s a good movie”
“They have a movie called Television?”
“LOL, I was talking about The Vow”
“Oh, tee freckin’ hee. How quaint. Can’t wait ’til GFY comes out”
“Good for you?”
“Close enough”
W.E. is W.E. That’s the full title.
you know, i love the artist. but the whole box office expectations thing is just odd.
yes, im sure its frustrating to TWC that its stalling at $24 million. But again, what did we expect from a silent film? How much juice is there to squeeze from a movie with such a limited mainstream hook.
I watched James Cromwell pitching the movie on the Today Show. And he sold it well. He said something that sums up why people love the movie and why people aren’t going. I’m paraphrasing, but basically he said –
“It’s a movie that requires the audience to bring something to the story.”
It’s an experience. Challenging for the typical movie goer. It’s kitsch. Homage. A history lesson. It’s unconventional. Do these words describe an across the board four quadrant film. Or they describe an art house film with limited marketability?
The Weinsteins can spin a small movie into awards gold, but they can’t turn it into a cash cow, no matter how much they want to.
We should all be stunned that it got to $24 million so far. Which i believe is still better than Tinker Tailor, The Iron Lady, Tree of Life, and a few million behind Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.
I don’t know what number denotes The Artist as a success. I thought it was there when it passed $10 million here in the U.S.
This post feels like Steven Kaye style ball jiggling. But i keep seeing people talk about the dissapointment of The Artist. What was the over/under before it came out? Was anyone seeing it at Cannes and saying ‘this one’s going to be a license to print money in the good ol’ US of A’
Oh, never mind. No hard feelings, movieman?
LOL.
No sweat Triple O.
anghus: If THE ARTIST weren’t the Oscar frontrunner right now, I’d be pleasantly surprised by its $24 million take, too. But if that’s WITH the Oscar bump? Maybe a bit of a disappointment. THE HURT LOCKER at least had the excuse of being out of theaters for a couple of months by the time of the nominations.
Why are the Magnolia releases of the Oscar shorts treated as a single film for box office purposes? They’re two separate programs, one for live action and one for animation, and each one requires a separate admission price to watch.
Harrelson is far and away the best male performance I saw this year.
Ang, it’s a frontrunner for the most prestigious film award and it’s been that way since November. It’s not taken off with the American people and that’s why I wrote what I wrote before about the film. It still will get the Oscar and that seems to be the reason this movie exist in the first place.
Also, can Robin Wright get some special award for waltzing in and nailing it in supporting roles in three year-end releases? What a great actress.
War Horse was so unfairly treated by critics. It’s especially ironic that with so many releases with nostalgic themes that War Horse was the one beaten to death.
I don’t really understand why War Horse is savaged for using the ontological structures of the 40s/50s hollywood epics but the Artist is praised for using the ontological structures of the 20s/30s hollywood dramadies. I’d rate the films about the same, love them both, and think Spielberg was every bit as effective at capturing the sense of Hollywood (from Yearling to She Wore a Yellow Ribbon to Bridge on the River Kwai) as Hazanavicius was at capturing the sense of Hollywood (from City Lights to A Star is Born to Citizen Kane).
But then consistency has no place when critics have an axe to grind.
As for Star Wars, is that disappointing, par for the course, or an over achievement? In any event, Titanic will do at least double, and I don’t think 50 mil is out of reach.
I’m a little surprised that Episode One didn’t inch up a bit; it actually did more than I predicted, but everything else did a solid 10 million more than I would’ve expected, while Star Wars only went up a few million. I’m surprised a lot of families seem to have opted for Journey 2 instead… but then again, that movie was even more available than Phantom Menace (Journey 2 actually being the widest release of the weekend while Ep1 was, if I’m not mistaken, the smallest of the wide releases)… and Ep1’s per-screen was a bit more, so there you go. Comparable openings, I guess, and not bad for a thirteen-year-old movie that JUST got a high-profile Blu-Ray release, is on Spike TV more or less monthly, and isn’t exactly an older-fan favorite (though I suspect a new generation of kids will love it).
So I’d say it’s a little above par, right between the two Disney rereleases (and Disney is far better at making their movies scarce in the marketplace). Though I’m not clamoring for 3D rereleases per se (I’ve only seen Ep1 of the recent ones, probably won’t see Titanic even though it’s an awesome movie), I do kinda like that 3D is bringing back the rereleasing strategy; I like the idea that people who never saw this stuff theatrically will be able to. Certainly the Ep1 3D isn’t too intrusive, so it doesn’t alter the experience much — although on the other hand, at points it doesn’t really feel worth the extra five bucks on the ticket price, either. I’m always torn about 3D work; if it pops out too much, it can look cheesy or cheap or distracting, but if it’s so subtle that I barely notice it, it seems like a waste of money.
I’m debating whether to catch Ghost Rider 2 that way. It was shot in 3D and fits my general criteria, which are that the movie is total exploitation silliness, or being done by a real master like Scorsese or Spielberg where I’d like to see how they use the format… but I’m getting the vibe that it’s one of those subtle-but-not-all-that-interesting 3D movies. Even Drive Angry, shot in 3D and enjoyable as it was, didn’t really have many exploitation-movie money shots in the format.
Oh, and movielocke, I agree about War Horse; I’d say it’s a better movie than The Artist, actually, because it has a little more going on than the surface-level fun (and it is a lot of fun) of The Artist.
“Ghost Rider …. It was shot in 3D….”
Nope, it was post-converted. Nevedeline and Taylor like thier little hand-held rigs too much.
Oh! I thought they were shooting it that way. Makes more sense given their aesthetic that it was converted… and also makes it an easier call to see in 2D, assuming it’s easy to do.
I bet E.T., A.I., M.A.S.H. and C.H.U.D. really freaked out triple option. Ha ha. Sometimes the movie title is initials.