The Hot Blog Archive for April, 2009
Friday Estimates by Klady – 4/18/09
State of Play is a couple hundred thousand dollars ahead of the opening day numbers of Body of Lies.
17 Again is right in between the opening days numbers for He’s Just Not That Into You and Bride Wars.
Crank 2 is running about 25% behind the opening day numbers of Crank.
The big 1st-Friday-to-2nd-Friday droppers are Hannah Montana and Observe & Report, neither a huge shock. Hannah’s drop is a little less severe than the Friday-to-Friday for Jonas 3D and about 10% worse than the drop for the Hannah concert film. O&R had a disproportionately large Friday number, so the % drop for the whole weekend should end up significantly lower. Still, the drop puts the film behind Zack & Miri – off just 37.7% in its second weekend – as of today and the space between them will only get wider as the run continues.
Monsters vs Aliens is looking at landing around the original Ice Age numbers, which is first or second best for non-summer/non-holiday/non-sequel animation, assuring sequels.
Fast & Furious continues to chug along towards the domestic numbers of the first film of the franchise and will probably get there just in time to be shut down by the summer wave. But it is already ahead internationally and thus, ahead on the overall gross worldwide. I don’t care much about ticket counters, but the $50 million in additional production costs do matter in assessing the two films and so, the new film is still more than $70 million away from being “as successful” as the original in big picture terms.
(EDIT, 11:50a – Chart error corrected.)
The Return Of Box Office Hell
And the premiere of MCN Weekend…
LOVE This…
From a collection of David Strick shots from the LAT…
SAG Tragedy
I don’t have a whole lot to add to what I wrote almost 4 months ago (below).
Expect the threat of am industry shut down forced by an AMPTP lock-out to leak out over the weekend, probably on a blog. The threat will be intended to scare SAG voters to ratify, but may become real, as if a shutdown is coming, it will be before the fall TV season would normally start production for the fall. The AMPTP could deal with a May/June shutdown if it becomes necessary.
This contract is a disaster for middle-class actors and I am going to be disgusted when the anti-Rosenberg forces try, as they already have with some success, to pin it on him. This contract was function of an AMPTP that committed to a strategy that worked brilliantly with all the unions – divide and conquer – and the internal drama at SAG that took the focus off the very real problems with this deal.
As one radical in the union said today, “Now it’s up to the membership to take their union back!”
Good luck with that.
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Dec 22, 2008
The
The Future News On SAG
April 19, 2009 – Rumors have surfaced in Hollywood that if the agreement between SAG and AMPTP is not embraced by the membership of the union, the studios, already making cutbacks and suffering losses, will be forced to lock out the actor’s union within days and to, essentially, shut down the town. An unnamed studio executive, who asked for anonymity because he is a conniving scumbag who is using this outlet to send out his threats without taking any responsibility for it, said,
Review – HBO's Grey Gardens
Grey Gardens, the feature film on HBO that premieres this weekend, is a mixed bag. Jessica Lange is perfection. Drew Barrymore does some of her best work ever in a dramatic role that hooks into her personal flamboyance and sadness.
But the film, which lays heavily on the making of and repeated recreations of the documentary by The Maysles, feels a bit like Cliff Notes on the rest of their lives. Is the true narrative not that interesting? Or were the writers trying so hard to allow for emotional ambiguity that they never found a strong storyline? I don
Review
Zac Efron is cute. Leslie Mann is cute. Thomas Lennon is Tony Randall.
Can I stop there?
Michelle Trachtenberg, at 23, is getting a little creepy playing 17-year-old goth virgins, though it certainly is not her fault that she has perfect skin and young looks and unless she wants to take jobs where she has to take off her clothes to prove she is a 20something, she
BYOB – The Weekend To Come
Kim Voynar’s column this week gets into the O&R date rape muck again…. well worth reading.
My perspective remains pretty much the same, even after a two-day edit/discussion with Kim on her column. I think both sides of the discussion tend to overreach the scene itself. It can be argued that it is or is not a date rape. The content of the film does not offer real answers, only moments that can be interpreted as one chooses to interpret them.
Kim gets to the bigger issue, which is whether discussions about things that are on that line of political correctness are allowed by The Dogmatics. I would argue that the same is true for those on the side of political incorrectness. Far too many people are dismissing arguments that it is a date rape as hysterical or “not getting it.” And I find that on both sides use the examples of filmmaker comments, etc, that best make their side of the argument and avoid those things that suggest they are wrong. Not cool. As much as saying that it absolutely could not have been consensual on some ugly, but real, level, claiming that it absolutely could not qualify as date rape is an extremist position.
My personal argument comes back to the filmmaker. Did Jody Hill develop this scene to spur debate… or was he just using sex and drug abuse to create a shock punch line? The former would have be kinda brilliant… the latter, to me, given the content of the scene, inexcusable. But that’s just me…
Summer Survey #2
Okay… using the prior survey as a way to narrow the summer’s most promising box office films down to ten, here is a smaller list to work with and a different way to work through it. Good luck.
Summer Movie Survey #1, Results Pt 3 – Thrillers
Please Note: I am posting all of these because people took the time to fill out the survey. I do not really feel that 199 self-selected surveys are anything close to scientific polling. What they are really best at is, to my eye, showing how many of these titles are virtually unknown to people, to the point where they put them in the completely wrong category, though I think some of the picks were meant as jokes.
Summer Movie Survey #1, Results Pt 2 – Comedy
Summer Movie Survey Results, Pt 1
Okay… so the survey says that 199 people have completed their survey. The results are hardly shocking, but might be of interest. I was amazed by how many people started and abandoned the survey… over 2800 starts that didn’t get finished. That should offer some bracing perspective on online surveying.
More info… and surveys that I don’t have to sort by hand… to come…
More Futurism
I actually think this is a bit absurd and when I got my annual note about the countdown to the new Potter trailer, I rolled my eyes and started thinking about writing about how I think that this kind of countdown stuff is reaching its point of cultural irrelevance… much the same feeling I have – with due respect to a site and a staff I really do respect and appreciate – when I get my fifth indieWIRE alert of the day about some tiny distributor picking up some tiny film for the cost of a lunch and a print… at some point, all the “must see now” alerts become “must wait til it happens to float past me.”
However, I haven’t seen this specific kind of thing before… and so I post…
6:03p – And now… after the trailer ran… looks like another Potter film… it seems that all they left behind was a noisy/cute Hulu promo every time someone loads the page… and no repeat viewing option for the trailer… hmmm….
