Friday Estimates by Klady – Inglaugust23
There are various ways to chew over this opening for Inglourious Basterds. You can put it on Pitt’s doorstep, though it would be his best opening n the last couple of years. You can put it on Tarantino’s doorstep, though it is his best opening ever. You can put it on the space that a late August opening gives a movie with profile, though it will be, if it opens to more than $36.4m, the #1 all-time opening after the second weekend of August. (If not, it will still be only the third $27m+ opening in the second half of the month/after 2nd wknd/Aug 15 or later.)
The world didn’t change for The Weinstein Co yesterday. They did a very good job with what they have to work with. As I have written before, the “life and death” angle was well overstated. This may be Tarantino’s biggest opening, but the movie still has a long way to go before it pays to run Nine through the Oscar labyrinth with the goal of a win.
One thing is clear… Inglourious Basterds will be profitable. The math works out to breakeven – considering all revenue streams – being somewhere around $130m worldwide. Even with $100 million domestic not assured – and it’s not – $130m worldwide and better seems quite likely. This is clearly not Grindhouse, on which the company swallowed $20m – $30m.
But keeping perspective, this opening looks to be between G-Force and District 9.
Ironically, WB chose to roll out a Robert Rodriguez film, Shorts, on the same day as QT’s latest. All they need is a short in between with Jordan Ladd being comedically raped by a Nazi with a CG instrument to make it a Grindhouse 2 double feature. Anyway… the opening didn’t work, though WB didn’t spend a ton advertising it. Chicken/Egg.
Fox dumped Post Grad on Avatar Day. One IMAX screen got more attention from the studio than this wannabe Prada. Zzzzzzz…
There’s a lot of strong indie stuff at the theaters right now, but while Art & Copy did pretty well for a doc, World’s Greatest Dad and its one screen didn’t break out much, perhaps suffering for its VODness. X Game 3D opened wide… and averaged about 20 people per screen seeing it yesterday.
Again, how great is it that two crazy, out-of-the-box flicks like “Basterds” and “District 9” are tearing up the American box office?
And how awful is it that even though I know full-well long “Whiteout” has been on the shelf with all the rumors of “trouble” hanging over it, I still see those TV spots and know for a fact that I will be there opening day?
Revolution!
Well…the Weinsteins’ gamble paid off….even with the steep budget, $60 million+ worldwide on opening weekend is enough to ensure profitability eventually…
Fox’s third dump in the last month, all with female leads…on the one hand bad for female leads, on the other hand, I give them a tip of the hat for putting a dent in the careers of Hayden Panettiere, Ashley Tisdale and Alexis Bledel who I’m not a fan of. Next up is Sandra Bullock and Megan Fox for them…and those movies actually seem to have a marketing team attached..
Disney is going to lose money on PRINTS (!) on the X-Games documentary, with a maybe $700 per screen avg this weekend. Who thought this was a good idea?
Limited release flops left and right this weekend…VOD killed “World’s Greatest Dad,” $12,000 per on 3 screens ain’t gonna cut it for “My One and Only,” Neeson’s flick is DOA, …..
and behond the $100 per theatre for a BEN STILLER/JASON SCHWARTZMAN MOVIE!!! 25 tickets per theatre over the course of this weekend. ?Zzzyx Road”, eat your heart out!!! And RIP Paramount Vantage..
That’s behold…not behond…
“All they need is a short in between with Jordan Ladd…”
Wow, your irrational hatred of Eli Roth is really metastatizing.
Anyway, while this IB opening is bigger than I would have guessed and therefore makes me happy, I fully expect the movie to fall hard next weekend when people realize it’s not the movie they were sold (i.e. it’s another leisurely paced Tarantino talkfest with subtitles to boot).
X-Games 3-D should have played up the laws of physics angle so it could have been shown in science museum Imaxes. It is consistently fun to look at.
I remember the Whiteout panel at Comic-Con…three years ago. Wondered if it had come out and I just forgot about it.
I’m kinda stunned by the way GI Joe is refusing to plunge like a stone. It’s drops are pretty healthy for a modern blockbuster. I haven’t seen it yet, but surely all those people can’t ALL be watching it in slack-jawed ridicule can they? If they are, i’ll probably buy the DVD and enjoy the heck out of it for all the wrong reasons, like Congo or The Happening.
“Inglourious Basterds” isn’t out of the woods until that annoying Friday to Saturday difference get measured out. If there’s a big drop, then the story coming out of that is going to be a lot different.
I think IB is going to have very good WOM. The audience I saw it was an interesting mix of young, median and the very old…
J-Mc… What the hell are you talking about? How do you get to Eli Roth in that comment… just because he directed the trailer… does that have anything to do with the comment… was the comment in any way negative about the short, Jordan OR Eli?
Sometimes you are an idiot savidiot.
“Disney is going to lose money on PRINTS (!) on the X-Games documentary, with a maybe $700 per screen avg this weekend.”
X-Games 3D is digital only, so there aren’t any print costs.
Well, we could turn it around and suggest that Jeff’s irrational defense of Eli Roth is becoming hysterical…. LOL.
Seems like an obvious and quite reasonable extrapolation to me, David. In fact, I’m puzzled by your reaction.
Nice use of ‘LOL’, Joe.
When I said experiment with Twitter I didn’t mean change your whole layout! whoa.
“When I said experiment with Twitter I didn’t mean change your whole layout! whoa.”
(trying to be civil)
David…that Twitter window for Inglourious Basterds comments is an interesting ahh…experimentation with innovation for the blog; but I don’t feel that it contributes the expanding of viewpoints with the format that…umm
Oh fuck it. I hate this wretched fucking thing! There’s already enough goddamn meaningless noise on my cable news channels with their spastic “BREAKING NEWS” graphics flipping around like an epileptic pancake alongside those diarrhetic tickers giving me the much-needed Jon and Kate Goselin updates every 15 seconds, and this thing is just as intrusive and annoying as trying to watch music videos while a third of the screen is taken up by idiotic text messages from 12 year olds saying insightful things like “Nickelback Rawks!!!”. Blecch, blecch, BLECCCHHHHHHHH!!!
Sorry. That wasn’t very construction.
I like to think I’m informed about upcoming movies about as much as anyone, but I had to check IMDB to see that the previously referred to Ben Stiller movie was the Marc Pease Experience. I’ve never heard of this at all anywhere. How terrible can it be to be dumped like this?
Ha, I too was looking for info on Marc Pease bec I’m generally a fan of Schwartzman and Stiller. But there’s no trailer anywhere for the film, no publicity photos, and the film’s “official” website gives the firefox error message that the site is not working. I’ve actually never seen a film dumped so poorly.
“X-Games 3D is digital only, so there aren’t any print costs.”
It’s still in 3D, whether digital or not, so there are no prints in the traditional sense, but they are going to lose money on the expense of shooting in 3D, natch.
Regardless, you don’t send into 1,400 theatres, and average $400 per on opening weekend and come out without losing some significant money.
“X-Games 3D is digital only, so there aren’t any print costs.”
3D costs are digital’s version of print costs…just as how we still CC people on email…and email isn’t carbon. $400 per theatre on opening weekend is so far below the Mendoza line (usually 2,000) of a wide release, they’d still use money if the movie was shown using overhead projection slides.
“X-Games 3D is digital only, so there aren’t any print costs.”
Digital/3D movies are shipped/uploaded to theaters’ digital projection systems’ via hard-drives so yes there are costs…probably not as costly as 2-to-3 film cans but still…
Plus there are various types of digital projectors, thus requiring “keys” to unlock the programming. Unless you’re only playing one screen in NY and LA, it’s still cheaper to go 35mm–plus you’ll need to preserve the movie on film, as digital media will corrupt in time.