Movie Box Review

As schools close and vacations begin, a lot of money is about to flood into Hollywood for about 2 blissful weeks.  But not enough to make up for the rest of a doleful year.

SHERLOCK HOLMES:  GAME OF SHADOWS (Warners):  With a studio estimate that just barely managed to nudge above $40M--and needed an extraordinarily low 28% projected Sunday drop to get there--tomorrow's least surprising development would be an actual weekend number that starts with "39."  That cosmetic change aside, this is yet another big ($125M + $150M in worldwide marketing) budget Hollywood product that will need foreign aid.

ALVIN & THE CHIPMUNKS:  CHIPWRECKED (20th):  With 3 major family movies opening over the next week (Tintin, We Bought A Zoo and War Horse), Alvin may be chip out of luck.  The picture did manage an additional $14M overseas in a few markets.  (And Tintin is already done overseas, which could help beyond these shores.)

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE  GHOST PROTOCOL (Paramount):  The one success story of the weekend.  Paramount could hardly have hoped for a better start, and the idea of staging an "event" opening only at Imax and other large-format theatres was inspired (it didn't hurt that Warners gave the opening a Dark Night Rises boost).  Add to that a terrific $68M initial launch in 36 overseas territories.

YOUNG ADULT (Paramount):  On the other hand, the same studio was unable to create any excitement over its holiday movie for grown-ups, and the film is in serious danger of a quick fade.

CARNAGE (Sony Classics):  A $17K average in 5 NY/LA theatres just doesn't cut it in this, the most crowded season of the year for prestige titles.

EXPANSIONS:  TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY (Focus) had a small but very successful push into 16 theatres, with a robust $28K average.  A DANGEROUS METHOD (Sony Classics) broadened its run to 17 theatres with a far less impressive $9K average result.  SHAME (Fox Searchlight) faltered to a $6K average in 51 theatres.  The most important expansion of the season will happen on Friday, though, when Weinstein finally moves THE ARTIST to 170 movie-houses (and also brings MY WEEK WITH MARILYN to around 400).

HOLDOVERS:  NEW YEAR'S EVE (Warners) held fairly well with a 43% drop from last week, but the opening was so low that it doesn't matter much.  The bottom dropped out of THE SITTER (20th) with an unsurprising 55% plummet.  BREAKING DAWN PART 1 (Summit) is pacing below New Moon, and will be the lowest grossing chapter of the saga since the original Twilight.  The family trio of HUGO (Paramount), ARTHUR CHRISTMAS (Sony) and THE MUPPETS (Disney) are tightly bunched in the $3.4-3.6M weekend area, and about to be assailed by new competition--even though Hugo is getting generous awards attention, that hasn't pulled the film above the crowd, although its likely Oscar nominations should keep it in the market deeper into 2012 than the others.  J. EDGAR (Warners) lost half its theatres and is essentially done with a $35M total.  MARGIN CALL (Roadside) passed the $5M mark, putting it ahead of most of the fall's higher-profile indie competition.

The news didn't get any better for Hollywood on Saturday.  In fact, according to preliminary numbers at Deadline, the downhill ride got steeper for SHERLOCK HOLMES:  GAME OF SHADOWS.  The film had virtually no increase from Friday to Saturday, and if those numbers hold, its full weekend tally will probably be around $40M, below even reduced expectations.  (And that number could well fall still further when Monday's actuals are released.)  

ALVIN & THE CHIPMUNKS:  CHIPWRECKED had its Saturday matinee bump and at least remains on target for its reduced $23.5M estimate, and YOUNG ADULT should also get to its reduced level of expectation.  MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - GHOST PROTOCOL held steady on Saturday and should hit its $12.5M target.  As expected, NEW YEAR'S EVE will have a moderate drop from its low start, while THE SITTER was unable to sustain a second weekend. 

The last 2 weeks of the year will almost certainly bring better news for Hollywood, for reasons of tonnage alone:  there are 6 wide openings to come next week, compared to only 3 in the final weeks of 2010.  But for now, the stocking-stuffer of choice is coal.

SHERLOCK HOLMES:  GAME OF SHADOWS (Warners):  The point here isn't a potential 20% domestic shortfall on one movie that may well be made up overseas, where the market is booming for big-budget action.  The scary thing, not just for Warners but for all the studios, is that with increasingly rare exceptions, the US audience seems to be less interested than it used to be in the giant product that's been the cornerstone of the industry for more than 3 decades.  Other than Harry Potter (a special case, as the 8th and final chapter in a continuing saga), virtually every franchise entry this year has underperformed its predecessors domestically.  Will those ticket-buyers come back?  We'll find out in 2012, when huge additions to the Marvel, Batman, Spider-Man, Twilight, Lord of the Rings and other franchises are rolled out.

ALVIN & THE CHIPMUNKS:  CHIPWRECKED (20th):  Ironically, all the family movies that crashed into each other over Thanksgiving weekend so as to avoid this presumed juggernaut could have spaced themselves out a little.  The moment seems to have passed for the squeaky threesome (6 if you count the Chipettes)--although, again, Mitch Metcalf's anticipated $140M US gross, combined with homevideo (people still buy DVDs for kids) and overseas boxoffice, will keep this franchise profitable.

MISSION:  IMPOSSIBLE - GHOST PROTOCOL (Paramount):  Some good news, albeit loaded with asterisks.  A $24K weekend theatre average in 423 theatres is a terrific number... but by confining itself to Imax and other large-format screens, the studio boosted the ticket price considerably.  And don't forget those Dark Knight Rises extended trailers in the 70mm houses.  Nonetheless, an excellent start for an industry that needs one.

YOUNG ADULT (Paramount):  Last time around, Paramount unveiled Jason Reitman's Up In the Air in the fall at Toronto and other festivals, and felt like the movie had peaked too soon and left potential awards on the table when it finally opened in December.  So this time, they kept Reitman's Young Adult under wraps until awards season.  Unfortunately, the move seems to have backfired:  apart from some (well-deserved) attention to Charlize Theron, the movie is getting limited acclaim, and with a likely $3200 average in about 1000 theatres, it may be doomed by New Year's.

CARNAGE (Sony Classics):  Despite impeccable credentials (Polanski, the Foster/Winslet/Walz/Reilly combo, Tony Award-winning source material) and some strong reviews where it's supposed to count, the film is headed for a deeply unexciting $17.5K average at 5 NY/LA theatres.

HOLDOVERS:  NEW YEAR'S EVE (Warners) should slide less than 50%, but that's not nearly enough to save it.  THE SITTER (20th), as expected for its genre, will have a deeper slump and head for the exits.  THE DESCENDANTS (Fox Searchlight) continues to do no better than OK; despite a great deal of awards love this week, its per-theatre average will be around $3500.  HUGO (Paramount) and ARTHUR CHRISTMAS (Sony) are both holding well, but at very low numbers, around $1200-1400 per theatre, and THE MUPPETS (Disney) took a bigger fall to hit the same neighborhood.  The Weinstein Company continues to play a very slow hand with MY WEEK WITH MARILYN and THE ARTIST, neither of which expanded this week, and had modest per-theatre dips.  (Both will go wider on Dec. 23.)   Fox Searchlight did expand SHAME from 21 to 51 theatres, and as a result, the per-theatre average will drop sharply to around $6K.  

Next week, as noted, the holiday avalanche arrives.  On Wednesday, THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO (Sony) and THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN (Paramount) open for their very different audiences, along with the wide expansion of MI4.  Those are followed on Friday by WE BOUGHT A ZOO (20th).  Then Christmas Day brings WAR HORSE (DreamWorks/Disney) and Summit's counterprogramming THE DARKEST HOUR.  Plenty for families, with a couple of dark dramas for the adults.  Will it work?  Stay tuned.

Uh oh.

Deadline has what are admittedly very preliminary numbers for Friday's boxoffice.  But if they hold, this holiday season may not be a festive one for Hollywood.  SHERLOCK HOLMES:  GAME OF SHADOWS appears to be headed for a $16M Friday (including a little over $1M from midnight screenings), which would likely mean around a $45M weekend.  While that's not a terrible number, it pales next to the $62M opening of the first Holmes movie in 2009 (which started on Christmas Day), and would be far below Mitch Metcalf's weekend prediction.  The opening would be just about equal to the that of Tron: Legacy on the same weekend last year, and that film only reached a total gross of $172M, compared to the $206M for the first Holmes picture.

Similarly, ALVIN & THE CHIPMUNKS:  CHIPWRECKED appears to be having a $7M Friday, on its way to a $24-26M weekend.  This would again be far lower than the $44M opening of the first Alvin on the parallel weekend in 2007, and while the second Alvin isn't apples-to-apples because it opened on the Wednesday before Christmas, the opening day number would be a shocking 60% below Alvin 2's $18M start.  

MISSION:  IMPOSSIBLE - GHOST PROTOCOL is closer to Mitch Metcalf's prediction with a $10-11M weekend, and it can't be usefully compared to the other Mission pictures because it's playing in only 423 theatres for the next 5 days.  However, those theatres are mostly Imax, meaning significantly higher ticket prices than the norm, and some of them are boosted by featuring the extended trailer for the upcoming Dark Knight Rises.

In a smaller opening of 973 theatres, YOUNG ADULT, which has gotten little of the critical or awards help it needed, seems to be headed for a muted wide expansion that will reach around $3K in per-theatre gross.

With MISSION:   IMPOSSIBLE - GHOST PROTOCOL, Brad Bird makes the very unusual transition from animation auteur to live-action director.   Of course, since his animated work includes The Incredibles, one of the snazziest and smartest action-adventures of recent years, the leap isn't as great as it might be for others.  And for a while, it appears as though Bird might triumphantly transfer his genius for space, movement and timing to real people and settings:  the opening sequences of MI4, an assassination and a jail-break (staged to Dean Martin singing "Ain't That A Kick In the Head"), have a deftness and visual buoyancy that are completely new to the usually heavy-handed, moody universe of Mission: Impossible. 

Then, alas, the plot kicks in, and for all Bird's skill and occasionally wonderful touches (in the scene where Cruise famously climbs a massive Dubai office tower, Bird practically turns an high-tech climbing glove into a Looney Tunes character), MI4 becomes another big-budget spectacle too overloaded and generic for its own good.  Any thriller that has as its MacGuffin the search for nuclear launch codes is at least 20 years too late, and MI4's storyline, credited to Josh Appelbaum and Andre Nemec (longtime members of producer J. J. Abrams' writing brotherhood) seems to have been thawed out from late in the Cold War.

It's a shame, really, because MI4 gets a lot of important elements just right.  Considering that Bird had never worked with live actors before other than as voice recordings, it's remarkable how good he is with the performers.  Tom Cruise is infinitely more bearable here than he was in Knight and Day; Cruise is letting his age show (albeit in the way that Hollywood stars with unlimited resources permit themselves to age), and his slightly haggard, slightly tired air is becoming--it gives some weight to his derring-do.  Although he mugged unforgivably in Knight and Day, when he keeps himself in check, Cruise has always had a flair for subtle comedy, and Bird draws that out of him, especially when he interacts with Simon Pegg as another member of the IMF team.  (Pegg is also kept under commendably tight rein.)  Until he's defeated by the movie's one thudding attempt at a plot twist, Jeremy Renner is a fine addition to the group, a 1970s type action star who carries his own wariness and edge.  Paula Patton rounds out the leads, and here again, while she of course has her badass catfight scene, Bird doesn't play her for the obvious angle of beauty-plus-violence.

Apart from its rote and overly padded (133 minutes) storyline, MI4 ends up derailed by its utterly bland villain, that dealer in nuclear codes, who has a ridiculous motive and as played by Michael Nyqvist (Blomkvist in the Swedish Dragon Tattoo films), no presence at all--I kept waiting for the revelation that he was just henchman to the real villain, but no such luck.  Of the baddies, only Lea Seydoux (the sweet girl Owen Wilson meets at the antique stand in Midnight In Paris) has any evil heat.  The picture is also oddly unbalanced, with the best action sequences coming at the beginning and middle (that climb up the Dubai office tower), with a relatively weak conclusion out of a second-caliber Bond movie.  (What would these pictures do without bombs that come equipped with Abort buttons?)

Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol is fair entertainment, especially if you have the opportunity to see it in real Imax, because chunks of the film were shot in that format, and the giant shots of Dubai, Budapest, Moscow and other locales are breathtaking.  Here, as in every other way, the picture makes great use of Grade A Hollywood craftsmanship:  photography by Robert Elswit, music by Michael Giacchino (incorporating, of course, Lalo Schifrin's immortal theme), editing by Paul Hirsch, production design by James D. Bissell.   MI4 is far better than its main competition for the action-movie franchise audience this holiday season, Sherlock Holmes:  Game of Shadows.  But there was potential here for an adventure as thrilling in live action as Brad Bird's Incredibles is in animation.  That, it seems, was ultimately a mission truly not possible.

NEW YEAR'S EVE (Warner Bros):  So much for that franchise.  New Year's was expected to have a softer start than Valentine's Day, which opened on a holiday weekend that included the titular day itself.  But there's "soft" and then there's a 65% decline from Valentine's opening day.  New Year's will have a longer playing time than Valentine's did, probably hanging in a large number of theatres for 4 weeks.  The trouble is that by the time holiday moviegoing seriously begins, New Year's will already be out of gas, unless it gets a word-of-mouth Christmas miracle.  The picture should still turn a profit for Warners, but don't hold your breath for "Arbor Day."

THE SITTER (20th) :  And the answer to whether Jonah Hill can open a movie on his own is... no.  The picture was low-budget, so Fox won't get hurt by it, but the attempt to make some quick money by counterprogramming the season's franchises and family fare didn't work.  The good news for Hill is that his next pictures are the high-concept 21 Jump Street, and Neighborhood Watch, which puts him back into an ensemble where Ben Stiller and Vince Vaughn will be doing the heavy lifting.

THE DESCENDANTS (Fox Searchlight):  Increasing theatre count by 50% didn't yield much payoff:  the likely $5K average for the weekend is lower than what Juno ($10.5K), Black Swan ($8700) and The King's Speech ($6500) did in parallel spots of their releases.  Descendants, and Searchlight, will be hoping for some big critical help next week, as the Los Angeles Film Critics, Golden Globes and American Film Institute all announce their choices.

HUGO (Paramount):  Very similarly, while a big 800-theatre increase will keep the weekend total fairly stable, the per-theatre number is crashing to a very mediocre $2300.  Things will only get tougher as major holiday competition starts to flood in, so the critics will again need to help out.

OTHER HOLDOVERS:  New Year's Eve hit BREAKING DAWN PART 1 (Summit) right in its target audience, and after running day-to-day ahead of New Moon all week, on Friday BD1 went back down to virtually even.  It now seems clear that the picture won't reach New Moon's $296M total.  Meanwhile, audiences finally discovered ARTHUR CHRISTMAS (Sony)... 3 weeks late.  It's heading for an excellent 15% drop, but the numbers are already so low that the final total will be more of a moral victory than a financial one.

TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER SPY (Focus):  Off to a great start, with a likely $80K average in 4 NY/LA theatres, one of the year's highest.  Of course, the question is how broad the appeal of the film's labyrinthine plot and low-key storytelling style can get.  

YOUNG ADULT (Paramount):  A somewhat less impressive likely $40K average at 8 theatres, particularly because the presence of Charlize Theron and the curdled comedy genre were supposed to make this one an easier sell.  The question isn't whether Theron will be nominated for Actress awards where as long as there are multiple nominees, but whether, in this year of Meryl Streep, Michelle Williams and Viola Davis, she can actually win anything.

SHAME (Fox Searchlight):  Almost doubled its theatre count to 21, and will still fall for the weekend, with a good but not great $13K average.  This film is the poster child for needing some award and nominations help.

THE ARTIST (Weinstein):  A very, very slow expansion boat for this speciality item.  It added 11 theatres for a total of 17, and should have a fairly solid $17K average.

MY WEEK WITH MARILYN (Weinstein):  Held at 244 theatres, and still not setting marquees on fire with a likely $3K average.