Sunday Estimates by Klady

It’s interesting… at least to me.
The most $40 million+ openings in history has been nine. It’s happened twice, in 2001 and 2003. What happened to 2002? The first ever $100 million opening weekend, for Spider-Man. And every year since? At least one $100 million opening.
Coincidence? I don’t think so.
The problem is, as the system has been designed over time, it is almost impossible to overcome front-loading in the summer season. Even The Tre Trio looks now like they will end up, in the domestic box office, grossing in the order of their release; Spidey, Shrek, Pirates… but all three within $35 million of the same number… all well below their low-end hopes.
I expect Transformers to crack $40m next weekend, even for the three-day, even with three days in release before the weekend… but just barely. Harry Potter will at least double that number the weekend after. That will make six $40m+ openings this summer. Chuck & Larry, Bourne & Rush Hour should make it nine. And tying the record with nine such openings, with three $100m+ openings in the same summer, is quite an achievement. (Ratatoullie could well make it ten… breaking the record.)
But this is the story of how far the elastic can be stretched… and how far it cannot be stretched.
A new record doesn’t make it any more fun for Warners on Ocean’s 13 or Universal with Evan Almighty or Die Hard (which will cover the mess with the excuses a Wed opening offers) or even any of my Assumed Nine (plus one), a number of which could fall short. It also makes it harder for a hopeful like Hairspray, for which the odds of a shockingly big opening decrease with each other big opening that lands.
There have been nine $100 million domestic openings now. Only two were outside of May. One was Pirates last July. The other was Harry Potter IV, in November.
Do the math.

Friday Estimates by Klady

ADDED – I should have offered congratulaltions to 1408, which will easily be The Weinstein Co’s biggest opening of an original title in its 2.5 year history, the bigger opening over all being Scary Movie 4. It also appears to be the biggest thriller/horror genre opening of the year, topping The Messengers and kicking the ass of Hannibal Rising and Grindhouse.
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June Gloom continues… a bit.
Evan Almighty will be on the low end of expectations, desperate for a Saturday pre-teen bump to be anywhere close to “okay” for the film. Fantastic 42 dropped like a Friday stone that lakes Ben Grimm look like a lightweight. And with 37% to 41% the rest of the way, not too much happy news. Though a $3.5m weekend for A Mighty Heart is actually decent… considering that even the rave in the NY Times had to look past the film itself and into the politics of the day to find a reason to watch… not what people, even arthouse people, tend to go to the movies for, which is why Par Vantage has smartly sold the love story, which barely exists in the film.

Box Office Hell – June 22

Andy Jones

12:41p, Friday – I am sorry to say, Andy Jones has passed away.
He was in a screening of A Mighty Heart at The Arclight last night, with his brother, and suffered a massive heart attack. Brutal irony, that. And he didn’t make it to the hospital before he was declared dead by the paramedics.
E-mails are floating all over the place, remembering this singular, funny, dramatic, smart, wild, aggressive, did I say dramatic?, screaming, hair-color changing, sweet, vulnerable, ambitious, hopeful man. Someone is planning a blog page in his memory.
It was 10 years ago in March that I met Andy Jones. He always led with his sexuality, his race, and his ambitions. I became his co-worker, his friend, and eventually, his boss, which kind of killed the friend part. But no matter how rough he could get while angry, there was always a sweetness and vulnerability that made me (and many others) want to do whatever we could for him. No one who heard it will ever forget that laugh that somehow combined a squeal and a giggle. No one who encountered it will ever forget his rage at all the things he considered injustices. Or the questions that only Andy could come up with or would dare to ask.
Andy was an experience. The last dramatic one I had with him was a couple of years ago at Chris McGurk’s last backyard MGM party. Andy was with his brother, on crutches, and loaded… and still seemed able to float on that big frame as he flirted and overted as only he could. A happy memory.
Maybe Andy always seemed in a rush because he knew what his future held. He had that kind of intensity. And ironically, things always seemed to get in his way, whether it was his foot, the lack of a car, or himself. But he was always one fierce Mr. Man. And though we were not close in recent years, I miss him already.
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He hasn’t been as visible lately, but Andy Jones is a veteran of more than a decade covering the movie biz. I first met him when he was editor of roughcut.com, where he recruited me for a weekly column, which eventually led me to starting The Hot Button.
Andy suffered what was apparently a heart attack tonight at a screening. It was his second cardiac event and it is considered to be quite serious. I don’t know if he is alive or not as of this writing. But my thoughts are with him. And whether you believe in such things or not, it would be great if we all could offer a little positive energy for him tonight.
I didn’t want to go to sleep tonight without giving him a shout out. We have had our difficulties over the years, but he is, at heart, a kind man and far too young for any of this.

35 Weeks To Oscar (Oy!)

You’ll notice no one is pressing their Oscar luck as of the end of June … not even DreamWorks Oscar powerhouse Terry Press. It’s no country for bold talk at 42 West, where Miramax and others get consultation. Charlie Wilson may be going to war, but Tony Angellotti is keeping it in dry dock while QE2 & Ridley’s Boys go at it. Karen Fried has 3 or 4 films to Focus on, but she’ll let Ang Lee translate himself before she starts doing it for us. And Paramount Vantage isn’t babbling in at all, even with four high profile films aiming at the gold ring.
Last year was the year of early hype Front Runner doing everything it was expected to do… except get nominated. So this year’s trend will be Silence Is Golden… until that fails some film that seemed inevitable, so next year there will be some other trend.
Make no mistake, Oscar’s elves are already well into their cobbling plans. Those named above will be cranky about being named and those not named will be quietly cranky about not being named, as the game is already afoot.
The Rest…
The Chart…

Love It!

I’m not dissing the movie, but how can anyone who loves quote whoring not LOVE what I think is the first sighting of father/son quote whoring team, Ben & Jeffrey Lyons together in the ads for A Mighty Heart.
Magic!

A Mighty Hearty/Sicko

I was a little surprised when I got an e-mail this morning about how much I didn’t like Sicko. My sense of both of these films is that I am mixed… not mixed positive, not mixed negative… truly mixed. I admire a lot in both works… and in the end, I feel like both come up well short of their ambitions. Still, I can’t imagine telling anyone that they must or must not see either film. Swiss… no wars… great health care… the cookoo clocks work and the cheese runs free…
And so…
It’s a brutal experience for a critic and, I suspect, for a normal audience. Michael Winterbottom does probably his best work behind the camera, but he shows almost definitively that he is the Tony Scott of the indie universe … story coherency just isn’t his milieu.
Is it a love story? Yes. Is it a political thriller? Yes. Is it a police procedural? Yes. Is it a tale of the futility of hate? Yes. Is it a journalist’s story? Yes.
It’s all of those things. And it’s none of those things.
More on A Mighty Heart
There is plenty to like in Sicko, his newest film. But it suffers what his documentary work, starting with Roger & Me, has so brilliantly avoided … an indecisive tendency to lose the audience in the effort to overreach.
It’s not giving anything away to tell you that the film essentially offers two perspectives. One is Moore’s look at some ugly stories of American healthcare and an insurance industry that would rather you die than be sick and spend their money. The other is Mike Tours The World, as he learns that lots of places have healthcare that is paid for with taxes and not insurance and deductibles.
My experience of this film is that with just over two hours of running time is not enough to properly tell both stories so, particularly in the American part, Moore is forced to resort to the dubious simplicities that make Fahrenheit 9/11 a laugh riot with no lasting impact on society.
More on Sicko

Who Pays?

Update – Fox feels that the Live Free or Die Hard is not being hidden at all. The screening on Monday (for the Wednesday release) is a gutsy all-media and there was a Friday screening for schedule concious print critics on the Fox lot. So there, David Poland!!!
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Who is paying for The Little Projectionist Who Noodged?
Real journalists. As usual.
Fox’s next big release, Live Free Or Die Hard, will screen once for non-long lead/non-junket journalists in Los Angeles, next Monday, opposite a parade of other screenings in town and the LA Film Festival. RSVPs are being tightly watched.
In other cities, a screening is being offered… no guests… and the explicit threat that anyone who breaks embargo before the day of release will be removed from the Fox screening list in future.
I assume the reaction in some quarters will be to make fun of Fox for becoming more strict in enforcing the rules that have always been in place in an agreed-upon, unspoken way. These are likely the same people who are enraged that Fox somehow didn’t explicitly tell Noodge that he wasn’t supposed to review a private trade screening from his projection booth.
(ABOVE CORRECTED 12:45a, 6/20 – It was a trade screening, not a private, recruited test screening.. whih I feel is even worse.)
In other words… Fox (or any studio) can’t win. The expectation is that they should just make all their private, very expensive info free… like The Pentagon Papers or Watergate.
Of course, the studios still have only themselves to blame in that when people they need for promotion say that rules are there to be broken, it is still business as usual. So it is hard to kiss up to that hypocrisy.
But as has always been the case with this conflict, the people who actually do this for a living and who do play within the rules are the ones who get the comeuppance of those who really couldn’t care less.

Monster's Bond?

It

FYI

I will be on G4’s Attack Of The Show with the fired F42 projectionist/critic this afternoon.
I am resisting attempts to get me to wear a nun’s habit. (ha ha)
(I was also on my somewhat regular Monday spot on CNBC this morning… but who the hell that reads this blog is up at 6:30 in the morning, edt!?!?!?!)

Rat Is The New Penguin

Ratatouille is not only the best animated film of this year and the best animated film to land in American theaters since Spirited Away, it is the best work of Brad Bird’s already legendary career, and the best American film of 2007 to date. If that is not enough, there are only a couple of films due this summer that have any hope of matching this film for quality.
Now … with all that hyperbole, what is truly remarkable about Bird’s next great step is its subtlety.
The rest

Sicko Piracy Updated

Google, the site I didn’t choose to name earlier, has removed the offending full-length stream as of this morning and another couple that went up subsequently. Meanwhile, YouTube yanked any reference to the 14 part stream of the film that was up all weekend.
And that is the studio vs video streamer fight in a nutshell. They can argue that the rules don’t demand that they find a way to enforce copyright as things are uploaded. But as mainstream sites with massive audiences, the damage in delivering pirated materials to a worldwide mainstream audience is the most significant challenge to the studios so far.
I got a quick

Sicko Piracy Gets Hotter

Since Friday, a very mainstream streaming video site has had Sicko up in full… according to the site, just under 2000 people have viewed the film. Even worse, the site has a new downloading system, so it’s not just streaming the film, but you can download it to your computer.
Pirate sites are a problem. This is a much, much bigger problem. And the fact that it has not been noticed and removed since Friday is truly remarkable. (After seeing it for the first time tonight, I have informed the distributor and flagged the video as “inappropriate,” though “pirated material” is not one of the options… only sexually related choices.)
I honestly think that most people want to pay for what they consume if the prices are not onerous. I think that the record business suffered as much for keeping the price of CDs inflated as anything else in the growth of internet sharing. But when it becomes mainstream, which is what the studios and others keep complaining about with YouTube and others while YouTube and others keep claiming that they are behaving within the internet boundaries, it

Mike Tucker: Back In Kabul

Filmmaker Michael Tucker (Gunner Palace/ The Prisoner: How I Planned To Kill Tony Blair) is back in Kabul, working on what he hopes will be his last US-In-Iraq/Middle-East doc… but things are not as calm today as expected…
“Woke up this AM to the biggest car bomb in one year. Thirty people killed. I focused on them cleaning the streets–the blood, the bits of flesh, the sweeping and mopping. If this happened in New York, it would stop the world, here there is no choice but to go on. It’s horrible, sad and very real.”

(Edited – 6:49p)

Sunday Estimates by Klady

If Fox’s number on F42 is $1.6 million over the original rip-off’s opening weekend, you can be pretty sure that they are really a little behind the first film this weekend. (Mojo got a figure of $1.3m from the studio.) Essentially, a non-event. And that was pretty much the tone of this weekend. Nothing was really shocking, for better or worse.
Ocean