Playing Movie Madness gives you some idea why Hollywood executives spend weekends tearing out their hair (and Monday paying somebody to put it back in).
Let’s say you’re Paramount trying to revive the "Mission: Impossible" franchise: You go out and get red-hot J.J. Abrams and a nice cast that includes Oscar winner Philip Seymour Hoffman and you miraculously end up with a really nice movie.
U.S. audiences, though, are indifferent.
Meanwhile, Bryan Singer vacates the "X-Men" series, so Fox hires Brett "After the Sunset" Ratner and cast additions like Kelsey Grammer. Ratner delivers a routine CGI slog, and it makes $120 MILLION IN FOUR DAYS - smashing the Memorial Day holiday record held by Steven Spielberg and "Jurassic Park."
For "X-Men: The Last Stand" backers, this is tremendous news. Unless something miraculous happens with "Nacho Libre," the mutants are going cruise to the final four, where they’ll be well-positioned to compete with other titles.
Why?
Because the current competition is collapsing. "The Da Vinci Code" plummetted 56 percent weekend-to-weekend - the biggest drop in Tom Hanks' career. The falloff makes "Da Vinci" much more susceptible to apparently turbo-charged "Cars."
It’s getting interesting!
Neither the Vatican nor the Priory of Snotty Critics could stop "The Da Vinci Code," which made $77 million at the box office this weekend. That's a big number - second only in adult-themed weekend gross to "The Passion of the Christ" and you don't have to be a Harvard-educated symbolist to decode the pattern there.
Even better news for those backing "Code," -- its audience was more than 50 percent ancient (Over 30), so it should hold up well against "X-Men: The Last Stand." As a drama, it should also have its own niche next to Vince Vaughn's "The Break-Up" (June 2) which insiders report is not tracking particularly well next to blockbuster titles. Also encouraging -- more than half the opening weekend audience hadn't read the book.
The news was good but not great for "Over the Hedge." Its $39 million take was only average for computer-animated films. It looks like a kids-only title, and even though it will have the family-film field to itself over Memorial day, it's not going to pull in teens or adults the way "Shrek" did. And "Cars" arrives in two weeks.
"MI3" collapsed to $11 million, although it drenched the hapless "Poseidon," which managed only $9 million.
Those of you picked "The Da Vinci Code" to win Summer Movie Madness may be doing some nail-biting this weekend and in the weeks ahead.
After a screening for critics at the Cannes Film Festival yesterday, the press has not been especially kind:
But Lou Lumenick of the New York Post gave it four stars.
Go figure.
Gary Thompson's review will be in the Daily News and online Friday. In the meantime, "X-Men," "Pirates" and "Cars" are looking better every day.
If Tom Cruise is considered box office poison because his movie opened at $48 million, somebody should slap a Mr. Yuk sticker on Lindsay Lohan.
Her lame comedy "Just My Luck" opened at $5.5 million, which is to say it also closed there. If you had "Luck" as an upset special, you're out of same; ditto "Poseidon" which posted only $20 million and finished second to MI3 ($24 million).
And MI3 isn't exactly slaying them - its take dropped 49 percent week-to-week, in part because "Poseidon" is in more or less the same action-effects genre.
What this likely means: MI3 is almost certainly going to get crushed by "X-Men: The Last Stand." Looks like the only thing that can stop "X-Men" now is a phenomenal showing by "The Break Up" or "Nacho Libre" down the road. For that to happen, people would have to be dying for a decent comedy. Wait a second - there is legitmate word-of-mouth hit out there, and it's.... "RV." The Robin Williams slapstick comedy saw it's audience drop a scant 14 percent. It's almost a month old, and still beat Lohan's picture by $4.5 million.
TIP SHEET: Blogsoffice has seen "Cars," and it while it ain't bad, it ain't no "Finding Nemo." Could be an opening in that bracket for Adam Sandler or Tom Hanks, who incidentally is hyping "The Da Vinci Code" in the London papers by saying, "the story we are telling is loaded with all kinds of hooey and fun scavenger-hunt kind of nonsense."
Why didn't Oliver Stone think of that?
WISHFUL THINKING DEPT. Robert De Niro is reportedly interested in buying the New York Observer. This got Blogsoffice thinking: Wouldn't Will Smith make a great publisher? We'd certainly be willing to go back and revise our reviews of "Hitch." Even "Bad Boys II."
In the Hollywood Reporter, Ray Richmond and Anne Thompson take issue with the widespread media coverage of MI3's purportedly lousy opening weekend.
In fact, the near-$50 million take was exactly in line with pre-release tracking, and though it didn't do quite as well as previous MI's, they opened on juicier holiday weekends. Factor out the memorial day weekend boost, and MI3 did almost exactly as well.
Plus, it's already made $120 million worldwide. General perception that the movie is a borderline box office bomb surely reflects anti-Tom Cruise sentiment, but it could feed the idea that the movie itself is bad, when in fact it's pretty good. That kind of false perception is exactly what rival studios would like, which makes you wonder who was responsible for the optimistic "projections" that analysts touted.
Having seen both "Poseidon" and "Just My Luck," I'd say "MI3" has every chance of holding up well against those two titles. It's a far more entertaining movie.
Delivery room dictator Tom Cruise must be pleased: The "Mission: Impossible" franchise is his baby, and when MI3 arrived over the weekend, it hardly made any noise.
The sequel grossed $48 million, far less than projections of $55- $70 million, also less than previous installments had generated. Box Office Mojo declared: "This Franchise Will Self Destruct in Three Movies."
Startling fact: you can now make almost as much money making fun of Tom Cruise ("Scary Movie 4" opened at $40 million) as you can featuring Tom Cruise.
This is mostly bad news for Movie Madness players who made MI3 a final four pick. It's crucial that MI3 failed to match the opening weekend take of the other "Mission" movies - crucial because they opened on Memorial Day weekend, just like "X-Men: The Last Stand," the movie MI3 must beat to make it out of the Mission bracket.
But the news isn't all bad - exit polling indicates that MI3 has excellent word of mouth, which should mean a fairly long and healthy run, especially if it holds up well against "Poseidon" this week. Early trade reviews indicate this could happen: the Hollywood Reporter called "Poseidon" both "numbing" and "uninvolving" and Variety wasn't much kinder.
And Paramount has this hopeful spin - MI3's weaker-then-expected opening-weekend numbers are almost exactly in line with last year's "Batman Begins," which went on to post $203 million.
Finally, you just can't place a value on the box office impact of an A- review in the Philadelphia Daily News (because it's zero. Our advocacy of "United 93," for instance, helped propel it to a week-to-week drop of 55 percent.)
Interesting trend: "Poseidon" runs a scant 97 minutes, and MI3 was barely over 2 hours (under, if you leave before the credits). It’s good for box office, because it means more showings can be crammed in to a day. More importanly, though, it seems to signal an end to the era of box office bloat. Even Al Gore’s global warming movie is less than two hours.
The lackluster opening of "Mission: Impossible III" should be lesson one in what a good publicist is worth.
For years, when Hollywood PR czarina Pat Kingsley managed Tom Cruise's image, her true brilliance was keeping what's become the real Tom hidden from public view. Think about it - it had been 20 years since "Risky Business," and nary a negative word had been uttered about Cruise.
Since Cruise canned Kingsley a little more than two years ago, he's become fodder for stand-up comics, an "Oprah" punchline and a "Scary Movie" parody.
Whereas Kingsley would have been able to sense how a little Tom might have gone a long way in promoting MI3, Tom Inc. went overboard with the personal appearances - Europe, Mexico, New York, Letterman, TRL, the View, Diane Sawyer, etc. Throw in the coverage about the birth of baby Suri, the "Dateline NBC" "investigative" pieces and more and it was Tom-all-the-Tom. People already weary of his in-your-face enthusiasm were forced to OD on him.
MI3's opening weekend signalled withdrawal. Continued box office weakness for MI3 will constitute a far greater problem.
If Kingsley were still on board, who knows what she might have been done to keep Cruise under wraps. But if MI3 had opened at $70 million, could anyone question how much such good publicity would be worth?
This is a blog for players of Summer Movie Madness, where Gary Thompson and Tattle's Howard Gensler will weigh in on how the movies are doing, and you can do the same.
To start with, take a look at the bracket to refresh your memory, and then go ahead and share with the world the reasoning behind your own choices to win or lose this summer. Make some predictions! After all, everything is time-stamped so you can triumphantly point it out to people later, or, as the case may be, not.