Movie Box Review

The Hollywood Reporter has preliminary boxoffice numbers for Friday, and early indications are good for IMMORTALS, which appears to have already earned $13.5-14M (including $1.4M from Thursday midnight screenings).  That should get it to an overperforming $33-35M for the weekend.  A couple of cautions about these extrapolations, though:  Friday was Veterans Day, which means unusually high numbers for the day and a weekend boxoffice multiple potentially lower than usual, and Immortals' kind of fanboy appeal also often leads to a front-loaded weekend.

It looks to be a tight battle for second place over the weekend, with JACK AND JILLand PUSS IN BOOTS both at $8-9M on Friday.  Both could be in the $24-26M range for the weekend, and either could pull ahead.

As expected, J. EDGAR (in a much smaller 1900 theatre run) is considerably behind, aiming for a long run with around $3.5-4M on Friday on its way to $10-12M for the weekend.  That would be in line with director Clint Eastwood's Hereafter last year, which made $12M in its first wide weekend at 2200 theatres, ultimately leading to a $33M US gross (and more than double that overseas).

TOWER HEIST had an OK but not exceptional hold with around $4.5M on Friday for probably a $13-14M second weekend--certainly not enough to suggest strong word of mouth will turn things around for the movie.

Stay with SHOWBUZZDAILY all weekend for updated boxoffice numbers and analysis...

Once upon a time, there was a series of fantasy adventures by a hugely bestselling author, and a grand, ambitious plan to film them all.  In the end, they were adapted into gigantically successful movies, and the last one set the world's record for the most successful opening weekend ever...

But this is not that story.

Filming Stephen King's The Dark Tower series would dwarf the difficulties of bringing Harry Potter to the screen.  The Tower books, inspired by a Robert Browning poem, are set in a variety of different dimensions, with a surreal, genre-jumping storyline that's crazily complicated (apart from the official 7 volumes, it seeps into more than a dozen of King's "non-Tower" books and involves characters from his entire career) and no central conflict as clear as Harry vs. Voldemort.  And then there's the ending, which I won't spoil here.

The news that Universal has ditched its plan to try to film all this with a combination of 2 feature films and 2 TV series is, frankly, a relief.  I don't think anyone outside of the Ron Howard and Brian Grazer households thought Howard was an ideal match for the dark, stylized, Moebius strip material.  The idea of turning some of it into a pair of network TV series always sounded cockeyed, and from Universal's point of view, it was doubtless going to cost bazillions of dollars (and be hard put to avoid R ratings).  

The Dark Tower has tantalized filmmakers over the years, and no doubt it will continue to do so (for that matter, Howard, screenwriter Akiva Goldsman and Imagine are now free to try to sell their version somewhere else).  Possibly Guillermo del Toro, Alfonso Cuaron or Terry Gilliam could do it justice, if there were a practical way to pull it off.  For now, though, everyone seems to have dodged a gunslinger's bullet.