The Hot Blog Archive for June, 2005
Early Box Office Analysis
1. Mr. And Mrs Smith – 18.6 m
2. Madagascar – 5.0m – off 38% Fri-Fri
3. The Longest Yard – 4.4m – off 49% Fri-Fri
4. Star Wars: III/R-Sith – 4.0m – off 44% Fri-Fri
5. Shark Boy & Lava Girl – 3.9m
6. Cinderella Man – 2.9m – off 51% Fri-Fri
7. Sis, Traveling Pants – 2m – off 44% Fri-Fri
8. The Honeymooners – 1.8m
9. Monster-In-Law .- 9m – off 53% Fri-Fri
10. Lords Of Dogtown – .7m – off 70% Fri-Fri
Number 1 With A Hail Of Bullets – Mr. & Mrs. Smith
Hello From Seattle
I came up here on Tuesday… still a big laggy from London and yet another hotel room… but beginning to feel a bit more in the zone.
Nothing has been so exciting in the last few days that it has screamed “Blog Entry” in my ear.
The idea that a major paper was once used again by a studio to push its agenda on closing a deal forward by falsely telling the paper that it was considering not doing the deal – all top secret sources, of course – wasn’t enough to rile me up.
Mr. & Mrs. Smith wasn’t bad enough to make me crazy (or to respond to the crazy guy who tried to get himself into a righteous furor over it). Haute Tension isn’t good enough for the opposite. The Honeymooners was kept at an appropriate distance. And though Mir-ly-a-facade/Dimension was generous with Lava/Shark screening opportunities, I travelled through all of them.
Anne Bancroft’s passing is sad in many ways. Mr. Brooks has been suffering with it in silence for a long while and they kind of informed friends a few weeks back. One wonders whether her exit from Spanglish, which was rumored in some quarters to be memory problem based, was directly connected to the illness… costing us one last bit of her magic.
Anyway… films here are good… festival good… mornings in the market good… sleep, not so good…
I’ll try to visit more often this weekend.
Casino Entries
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9 Comments »Marketing Dollars
On Slate, Edward Jay Epstein writes:
“Consider the perverse logic of Hollywood: In 2003, the six major studios
Question of the Day
Is there a worse director in Hollywood to take over the reins of X-Men 3 than Brett Ratner?
And what will Salma Hayek play?
Jessica Alba in The Fantastic Two
Paging Tara Reid!!!!
Thanks to Reed Richards’ genius, Sue Storm has a uniform that dissapears when she does… but apparently, it doesn’t always reappear when she does.
This Is Why I Rip The NY Times
It is not A.O. scott’s Job to be a box office analyst, but thanks in great part to poor reporting in his own paper, his Sunday column leads with a fact that is, in truth, a misstatement.
“For the third spring in a row, the box-office grosses and the number of tickets sold for first-run theatrical releases had fallen, data that provoked concern and speculation in Hollywood and in the industry trade papers.”
The fact is that Jan – April 2005 is down from Jan – April 2004 by $205 million… or about 8.8%.
Jan – April 2004 was up $232 million from Jan – April 2003… or about 11%.
Jan – April 2003 was down $144 million from Jan – April 2002… or about 6%.
But the perception remains because of journalism that finds the answers that fulfill the hypothesis instead of asking the questions that simply offer the truth.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s not all great news. But now we are on to the really dangerous part. Tony Scott, a good and honorable man, is left spinning an opinion that is flawed in many ways, the biggest of which is the simple misstatement of the reality of the box office… led there by no less a source than the New York Times.
“From where I sit, not bad is very bad indeed. The commitment to meticulously engineered mediocrity suggests that the American movie industry, in its timid, defensive attempts not to alienate the audience, is doing just that.”
Using the arbitrary
Early Box Office Analysis
More excitement for those Star Wars boo birds!!!
Third place!!! The horror!
Meanwhile, Star Wars: Episode III
The Latest In Tourist Attire or Eyes Wide Shut II?
Bootleg Art?
“Almost nobody owns a print of their favorite Hollywood movie. But pre-recorded, studio-issued sell-through videotapes feed the home viewer’s illusory sense that they own and are watching a film. In reality what they’ve paid as much as $40 for is a small, cheap conversion of celluloid frames into video fields. Bootleg videos make no claims to be the film itself. They are commercial Video Art first, and a record of a film second. Each bootleg represents a limited-edition record of a movie from the subjective POV of an anonymous auteur, the man with the camcorder. The “worst” bootleg — a blank tape — is the ultimate minimalist video. And then there’s the Holy Grail: the bootleg in which the surreptitious camcordist is recording at the moment that he’s busted by a multiplex security guard and kicked out of the theater — an inept studio movie that abruptly shifts gears to become a first-person surveillance documentary. Be assured that it’s out there somewhere, and you can own it.”
The Whole Article