Box Office Archive for March, 2011

Weekend Estimates by Klady

It’s the biggest opening of 2011. It would have been the fourth best opening to this time last year, behind Alice in Wonderland, Valentine’s Day, and Shutter Island. 5 animated films have out-opened it in the months before summer: Ice Age, Ice Age 3, Monsters vs Aliens, Horton Hears A Who, and How To Train Your Dragon. All of those animated movies did over $150m at the box office. No one knows what Rango‘s legs will be like.

As I said yesterday, not a sensational opening. But hardly a bad one. $50 million, a number hyped by competitors, would have made it the best opening for an animated film opening before March 27 in history. But I would still say a little more than “Johnny is Rango” might have pushed the number up a bit. Remember that the big sell on Ice Age was the “squirrel” with the nut, not Ray Romano.

The Adjustment Bureau is not a box office car wreck. It’s no superstar either. God bless Matt Damon.

Beastly is now the perfect center of CBS Films’ box office opening prowess… #3 of 5 openers.

Kind of a boring movie weekend… just after everyone seemed to get hyped up on the idea of it being a big weekend. Rango ain’t Alice… but even at $60 million, no one was getting close to Alice this weekend. Listen to the box office boo birds if you like, but prepare to fell stupid in 6 months.

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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