Box Office Archive for January, 2009

Friday Estimates by Klady

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iPhoning this in, but as I consider Fox’s second $20m+ opening this month, it strikes me that the way that the attack on Rothman will continue is through the Rotten Tomato score and not the box office… not unlike the perameters of the false “box office slump” story were changed from overall gross to by-the-weekend gross to ticket sales (an estimated irrelevance that has now become a feature of any negative bo story) in order to keep the negativity going.
The real negative story on Taken is that Fox let B13 get away.

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This Slumdog Moment Brought To You By The Film's Publicist…

SLUMDOG OPENS TO GREAT SUCCESS IN INDIA
Slumdog Millionaire Exceeds Expectations in Achieving the 3rd Highest Opening Day Box Office Amongst all Hollywood Studio Releases in India
Slumdog Millionaire opened in India on 351 screens this past weekend to universally positive press reviews. It now holds the record as having the 3rd highest opening day numbers amongst all Hollywood studio releases in India ever. The first is Spider-Man 3 and the second is Casino Royale. The box office increased by over 33% on its second day of release. It also now holds the record for the highest box office figures for any Fox release in the country. The per screen average of Slumdog Millionaire is higher than the #1 film, Raaz 2. The total box office for the weekend is just under $2 million US dollars.

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Friday Estimates by Klady – 1/24/09

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Not much of note, even at this late hour.
A $19 million opening for an Underworld film without – even pretending to have – Kate Beckinsale is fine.
Slumdog is getting a nice Oscar bump, but with about 2.5x the screens, not overwhelming.
Ben Button’s pop is smaller.
Gran Torino remains a commercial film, appropriately without big Oscar noms, and people still want to see Clint force people off of his lawn.
WB seemed intent on proving they had no idea what to do with NL leftover Inkheart... and they were right. The failure doesn’t make it any less embarrassing that 3 of WB’s top five films of the last year came from the all-but-dead NL.

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Weekend Estimates by Klady

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11:55a corrected chart for cut off figures
Not too much to add.
The Ben Button Friday cume was off, so that’s why that number doesn’t match the Friday chart that was posted yesterday.
It looks like this year’s December films will match 2001 and 2003’s record for 4 films released that month cracking $100 million before Oscar nods. On the other hand, it will be the first year since 1999 that there will not be a single $200 million+ film coming out of December.

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Friday Estimates by Klady

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Gran Torino = Commercial Movie. Is anyone actually surprised?
I still think they should have opened wide earlier. They would have eaten into Button a little over the holidays, but I feel their final gross domestically would have been at least $20 million higher.
Bride Wars may be a little dissapointing becuase of the Anne Hathaway advantage, but it will land right about where 27 Dresses did for Fox last year.
The Unborn is a decent horror/thriller opening, likely to switch spots with the brides by the end of the weekend.
The holdover drops were to be expected coming off the holiday.

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Friday Estimates by Klady

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THE OSCAR NUMBERS (as of today)
The Dark Knight – $531m
Wall-E – $224m
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – $67.7m
Slumdog Millionaire – $25.5m
Milk – $15.9m
Doubt – $15.5m
Gran Torino – $7.7
Frost/Nixon – $5.4m
The Reader – $2.5m
The Wrestler – $1.3m
Revolutionary Road – $690,000
Defiance – $39,100

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Box Office '08

The box office in 2008 was healthy. But it was a better year in the upper middle class than it was for the blockbusters

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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