Box Office Archive for April, 2007

Friday Estimates by Klady

Is there really anything to say?
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32 Comments »

Sunday Estimates by Klady

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9 Comments »

Friday Estimates by Klady

Not very interesting or surprising Friday.
The only real surprise is that Screen Gems’ Vacancy got box blocked by the non-Screen Gems Screen Gems film Disturbia thanks to very strong word of mouth for Paramount’ baby phenom. It’s no exactly cause for panic at Sony. What seemed to be an okay date suddenly became an overmatched date. On the other hand, I’m not sure Vacancy ever became clearly defined as anything but a thriller and I haven’t been seeing many stories on Beckinsale or Wilson in recent weeks.
Meet The Robinsons will likely do its Saturday jump thing to move up to the five or four spot.
In The Land Of Women is not really a surprise miss, but it will be a marketing example to be examined, as Warner Indie tried an innovative campaign, mixing a straight sell and, essentially, an EPK (Electronic Press Kit) pitch. The message was, “Adam Brody = HOT… Kristen Stewart = HOT” but the result was lukewarm, not unlike a junior version of Luke & Kate.
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11 Comments »

Box Office Hell

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Order Up!

Here’s an early summer exercise for you…
These are some of the summer titles that I expect to live on the lower end of the wide release box office list.
What order would you put them in?
A Mighty Heart (ParV)
Bug (LG)
The Comebacks (FoxAtomic)
Death Sentence (Fox)
Georgia Rule (U)
Good Luck Chuck (LG)
Hot Rod (Par)
License To Wed (WB)
Lucky You (WB)
Mama’s Boy (WIP)
Martian Child (NL)
Mr Brooks (MGM)
Mr. Bean’s Holiday (U)
The Strangers (Rogue)

67 Comments »

Sunday Estimates by Klady

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21 Comments »

It's Not Just The Weinstein's Problem

Would it be a failure of the Weinsteins became another Imagine or, for arguments sake, year 2003 Miramax? I don’t think so. Building a distribution machine is very expensive and very difficult. It has become an institutional business. Anyone with the money and access to talented people can make a movie. But wide release distribution is not something you just walk into … even if you can luck into a success or two.
The rest…

1 Comment »

Friday Estimates by Klady

That’s a really nice number for Disturbia. Gerry Rich and the Paramount team figured out how to a Screen Gems opening for what is basically, a Screen Gems movie. And that is not damning with faint praise.
The Ashley Judd genre is officially dead, as Halle Berry puts up her worst opening since Monster’s Ball.
Pathfinder dies the death it has been foretelling for a year now.
Redline does fairly well for an truly independently distributed movie… certainly compared to Pathfinder.
And all the talk about Grindhouse grinds it up even futher. It’s a good thing that the New York Times is there to sweep the mess under the rug for The Weinsteins.
The truth is, it is very similar to what happened to DreamWorks. TWC entered the marketplace at the worst possible time to build their dream and they have been caught with their financial pants around their ankles. And the NYT suckage and the arrival of Michael Moore with a $50 million grosser and even adding a west coast gossip to their east coast bee-otch, Mr. Friedman, ain’t going to change the inevitable shift of the next 6 months.
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EDIT – Pulled “The family audience continues to show its muscles as Are We Done Yet? holds all too well. ” because the typo in the chart became apparent. Also, chart replaced with the correction of AWTY? to 55% off.

42 Comments »

Indie Theater Plays Grindhouse 8 Blocks From The Clinton

This is how one ends up going down the toilet.
I didn

8 Comments »

Sunday Estimates

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27 Comments »

Friday Numbers by Klady

12:07p Update
Things look grim for The Grind.
The issue this weekend of being #1 is really a non-issue. If Blades of Glory does $25m for 3 days and Grindhouse did $24m, that would be disappointing

23 Comments »

Box Office Hell – April 6

This is one of the more interesting weeks in a while. There is a wide disparity of opinion on Are We Done Yet?, which may or may not be caused by the fact that so many prognosticators got burned the last time out. Meanwhile, very early chants of “25” on Grindhouse seem to have stuck while no one is going out on the 300 limb, predicting a big surprise. These numbers are about a third of 300‘s opening. Sin City, 29 – Kill Bill v2, 25 – Hellboy, 23. The safe range of geek love combined with major magazine covers.
Also, I hadn’t realized that the shot of the car smashing through a drive-in billboard for Scary Movie 4 might have had a second meaning. The Dimension film has April’s second best opening ever with $42.2 million. Were QT/RR planning on smashing through that number as they made the film?
Finally, The Matrix opened Easter weekend, March 31, 1999, to $27.8m and went on to $171m and major importance in film history. Listen for that figure in analysis come Monday.
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Quote Unquotesee all »

It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon