Movie Box Review

The probable effect of Irene is most evident in the weekend's limited releases, where loss of NY business would have been most damaging.  HIGHER GROUND, seemingly headed for a per-theatre average of $12K, could only manage $7600, while CIRCUMSTANCE, on track for a $8K average, made it to only $6200.  Similarly, some expansions were hit:  SARAH'S KEY, which looked to hold steady on Friday (while increasing theatre count by 35%), instead went down 17%.  And Sony Classics was unlucky in its last-hurrah expansion of MIDNIGHT IN PARIS, which increased its theatre count by almost 150% but saw grosses rise only 34%.

For the wider releases, the storm's effect was less serious.  THE HELP seemed hardly to be touched at all, probably because its audience isn't particularly centered on the East Coast, and the same goes for the genre movies COLOMBIANA and DON'T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK.  OUR IDIOT BROTHER could plausibly claim that Irene caused it some pain, but even another $1M for the weekend wouldn't have made its bleak result much brighter. 

Labor Day weekend is historically terrible at the boxoffice, and studios will have to decide whether the possibility of making up for some of this weekend's shortfall justifies increased marketing for next weekend, in an effort to bring some of those lost audiences back in.  The big studios will probably do little, if any, of that--this weekend's openings were unlikely to have much gas in them anyway.  Smaller distributors like Sony Classics and Roadside Attractions, however, may find the push worthwhile.  

Now that THE HELP has opened about as well as Dreamworks/Disney could have hoped, the next goal is a 2d weekend decline of around 40%.  That would match the hold of Julie & Julia, and would make a $100M gross for Help very realistic.  The film's only direct competition next weekend is the seemingly wan ONE DAY (which is only in around 1600 theatres, among other things).

The FINAL DESTINATION series would be over (or pre-reboot, as we might as well called discarded franchises these days) except that foreign results are more important than domestic here, and those numbers aren't in yet.

We'll see how the numbers play out, but right now, Sony is claiming the lowest Sunday decline for any movie in the Top 10, in what appears to be a desperately sad attempt to get 30 MINUTES OR LESS above a lousy $13M for its opening weekend.

The only notable new limited release was SENNA with a very nice $35K in each of 2 theatres, but there were a slew of expansions from slightly older films.  None of them seem hugely promising, but some did better than others (all numbers are per-theatre):  SARAH'S KEY $4600 in 101, THE GUARD $5900 in 47, THE DEVIL'S DOUBLE $2800 in 89, ANOTHER EARTH $1800 in 82, THE WHISTLEBLOWER $5100 in 22, and ATTACK THE BLOCK $2500 in 40.  Considering that even Final Destination 5 averaged $5800 in over 3000 theatres this weekend, there don't seem to be any potential breakout hits in this group.

Stay with SHOWBUZZDAILY for international numbers as soon as they're available later today, and Mitch Metcalf's report on this weekend's actual grosses tomorrow.

Well, there's something you don't see every day:  2 studios both content to forego bragging rights for the Sunday weekend estimates and wait for actual numbers on Monday, when public attention is lower. (Note:  The Hot Blog, which calculates its own numbers, has COWBOYS & ALIENS up by $100K.)  The important thing to remember is that this tie is only superficially equal:  it's wonderful news for Sony, which in THE SMURFS not only has a profit center but a likely new franchise, while it's terrible for Universal/DreamWorks, which will almost certainly show red ink on Cowboys. 

In a different sector of the boxoffice but nonethelsss gratifying is the overperformance of CRAZY STUPID LOVE, which had a healthy 7% increase on Saturday and beat last week's Friends With Benefits number with $19.3M.  Its main competition over the rest of the summer will be The Help and One Day.

HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS (PART 2) hit both its milestones:  it's the highest-grossing Potter in the US, and the 9th movie in history to reach $1B worldwide.  With a global weekend gross of about $80M this week, it's in good shape to become the #3 all-time moneymaker, behind only Avatar and Titanic.  (Transformers 3 is at $985M worldwide and will also reach $1B, but with less potential to get much higher.)

3 quirky international action movies provided the highlights of the limited debuts this weekend:  THE GUARD, THE DEVIL'S DOUBLE and ATTACK THE BLOCK all averaged $16-19K in 4-8 theatres, and all have potential to expand with some success.  SARAH'S KEY handled its first expansion well, with an average of $11K in 33 houses, but ANOTHER EARTH is showing little strrength, with a $5350 average in 20.

There's no way to slice or dice the numbers for COWBOYS AND ALIENS and make them any less sad.  The picture cost at least $165M (that's the amount Universal will admit to), plus another $150M or so for worldwide marketing, and as Mitch Metcalf notes, it's now on track to gross less than $100M in the US.  Oh, and traditionally, westerns are among the toughest sells overseas.  

So the movie is a loser, badly marketed and not all that entertaining (my review is here).  What does that mean for the people involved?  Not as much as you'd think:  over the next couple of years, Daniel Craig will have James Bond and Girl With the Dragon Tattoo franchises to keep him warm; Harrison Ford retains his screen legend status (although as with Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts, it's now more of an Emeritus title); Olivia Wilde isn't closely enough identified with the movie for it to do her any damage; director Jon Favreau may want to make nice to Marvel and return to Iron Man for the next installment; producer Steven Spielberg is still Steven Spielberg (although his 2 holiday-season movies may now be scrutinized more closely).  Ron Howard's dream of directing the massive Dark Tower series may have taken a further hit (who would want to hand him hundreds of millions for another fantasy western?), but DreamWorks bears the brunt of the financial impact, covering 50% of the budget, and they'll need The Help, Real Steel and War Horse to perform in the next few months.

Cowboys' humiliation, of course, is made infinitely worse by the unexpected power of THE SMURFS at the boxoffice.  With Smurfs in the lead on Friday, it's hard to imagine a scenario where it doesn't win the weekend (or to be more cynical, hard to imagine such a scenario that would survive the release of Actuals on Monday).  The movie certainly didn't make its money off good reviews (or, probably, off the star value of Neil Patrick Harris)--that goofy brand just turned out to have some punch in it even after all these years.  And international markets love 3D family movies even more than the US does, so Smurfs should do very well abroad.  Other than Sony, the happiest studio of the weekend:  Disney, which has its Muppets revamp opening for Thanksgiving.  (Most nervous studio:  Paramount, which currently has Martin Scorsese's 3D family movie Hugo opening on the same day.)

CRAZY STUPID LOVE opened just slightly below Friends With Benefits' Friday last week, and with its appeal to an older audience (and higher quality--my rave is here) has a chance to do better than Friends' 3% decline last Saturday.  Although there's another comedy opening on Friday, The Change-Up will be going after a younger, more male crowd, so Crazy should be able to linger in theatres.

CAPTAIN AMERICA didn't benefit from the collapse of Cowboys, and its 61% drop dwarfs the 48% that Thor fell on its 2d weekend.  (However, with kids out of school in July, the Captain midweek numbers have been better than Thor's.)  As we've noted before, the real verdict on Captain won't be known until it reaches wide international release.

By the end of the weekend, HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS (PART 2) may hit 2 historic milestones:  in the US, it should become the most successful of the Potter franchise, beating Sorcerer's Stone's $317M take; and worldwide, it should be the only film in the series to reach the magic $1B mark (and only the 9th in film history).  The 2 remaining boxoffice questions for the film:  can it beat Transformers 3 in the US for #1 movie of the summer?  (It has a good chance, because the tiring Transformers will start to shed theatres quickly in the next few weeks.)  And can it beat the last Lord of the Rings' $1.12B to become the #3 film worldwide of all time--and the highest not directed by James Cameron?  (Again, if international numbers hold up, the odds are with it.)

Along with the limited release numbers Mitch Metcalf reported earlier, it's worth noting that Miranda July's somewhat esoteric THE FUTURE is riding some great reviews for an impressive $30K in one NY theatre, while the extremely entertaining French film POINT BLANK will probably make an underwhelming $5K in each of 6.  SARAH'S KEY expanded to 37 theatres and should hit a not bad $9K in each, but ANOTHER EARTH faltered with its expansion to 20 theatres, with only about $5500 in each.  Worst of the expanders was SNOW FLOWER AND THE SECRET FAN, which added 50% more theatres but still fell for the weekend, with its per-theatre down to around $2K.

Next weekend is, in a sense, the last big studio weekend of the summer, with the final mega-movie in RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES.  After that, August will be filled out by 3D epics like the new CONAN (and not about the talk-show host, which might have been more fun), a FRIGHT NIGHT remake, a SPY KIDS sequel/reboot, a GLEE concert picture, and FINAL DESTINATION 5.  So bad news if you don't like wearing those plastic glasses.

With the superpowers wielded only by Hollywood studio estimators, CAPTAIN AMERICA:  THE FIRST AVENGER has leaped ahead of Thor to claim the biggest superhero opening of the year.  But Captain America and HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS (PART 2) are the only pictures in the Top 10 predicting a Sunday drop of less than 20%, so we'll see tomorrow if those numbers hold up.  (By way of comparison, Thor fell 28% on its first Sunday.) 

TRANSFORMERS:  DARK OF THE MOON has hit $882M worldwide, which makes it the most globally successful of the series (even though domestically it won't come close to the Transformers 2 gross--despite 3D ticket prices).  The film just opened in China, where authorities still ration out US films, and had a giant $40M weekend, and it doesn't open in Japan until next weekend, so it should join the global $1 Billion club.  (Harry Potter will be permitted its China opening in early August.)

FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS will be the only R-rated summer comedy so far this season not to reach $100M, although for a moderately budgeted film it will still do well enough.  Reports are that it's been skewing female and slightly older than expected (the audience is mostly 25+), which would suggest a leggy run... if Crazy Stupid Love weren't opening on Friday.

On the indie front, MIDNIGHT IN PARIS continues to astonish:  after a 10 week run, and losing 12% of its theatres, it went up this weekend.  The runner-up indies of the season, TREE OF LIFE and BEGINNERS, continued to be rock solid, with Tree down only 10% from last week and Beginners basically dead-even (although Tree's $11M gross is still just a slice of its $30M cost, while Beginners $4.6M is already over its $3.2M production budget).  On an even smaller scale, the miniscule, marvelous THE TRIP (basically 2 funny English guys driving through the countryside and haranguing each other) has grossed $1.2M, a very good number for such a tiny picture, while the documentary BUCK has already reached $2.6M (both these movies are from IFC).  The Weinstein Company's SARAH'S KEY had a good opening of $23K per theatre at 5, while Fox Searchlight's less mainstream ANOTHER EARTH was right behind with $20K at 4.

Somewhat surprisingly, the first trade reviews for COWBOYS & ALIENS are very solid, so its reportedly weak tracking may improve through the week.  The terrific CRAZY STUPID LOVE should also benefit from good reviews (its early Rotten Tomatoes number is 83%).

Be sure to look for Mitch Metcalf's Actual Boxoffice and International analysis as soon as numbers are available. 

SARAH'S KEY - Watch It At Home:  Misses a Difficult Mark

There may be no cinematic minefield more dangerous for filmmakers than the Holocaust.  For films entering that difficult territory, the choices of tone, approach and imagery may not just be called into question, but outright offend audiences, and viewers have very personal standards.  I considered Life Is Beautiful to be almost unwatchably reprehensible, but the movie wasn't just a worldwide smash hit ($229M), but the winner of major Academy Awards (thanks for that, Harvey Weinstein).  On the other hand, for me Schindler's List is a genuine masterpiece, but there are more than a few who passionately believe it's a middlebrow distortion of the horrors it depicts.  Despite the potential for controversy, the subject matter can lead to a surprising amount of success at the boxoffice; besides Life and Schindler, recently The Reader made over $100M worldwide.

And so, SARAH'S KEY has joined the group of Holocaust-driven movies.  Based on the bestselling novel by Tatiana de Rosnay, it's directed by Gilles Paquet-Brenner (whose track record is little known in the US), and adapted for the screen by the director and Serge Joncour.  Like THE READER, it's structured as a story that flashes back and forth between World War II and the present.  In 1942, the young Sarah (Melusine Mayance) is captured with her family by the Paris police and (in a real life incident) imprisoned at the Vel d'Hiv bicycle stadium on the way to the concentration camps.  Sarah is further haunted by the fact that she "rescued" her young brother by locking him in a closet when the authorities came, and carries the key to that door with her always.  Meanwhile, in the present day, Julia (Kristin Scott Thomas), an American journalist living with her French husband in Paris, discovers in the course of her research on the Val d'Hiv roundup that her husband's boyhood apartment--where the two of them and their daughter are planning to renovate and move in--may have been Sarah's original home.

You can see, watching the film, why this parallel structure was employed:  Julia's presence allows the film to explore the way even now, 40 years after Marcel Ophuls' epocal The Sorrow and the Pity, the French still resist acknowledging that their own people directly sent Jews to their slaughter.  (Reportedly, the novel has had a similar effect on the nation as Julia's story does in the film.)  But there's no way to equate the power of the two storylines, and this has the unfortunate effect of distancing us from Sarah and her ordeal--particularly because Scott Thomas is such an arresting actress that even with a relatively weak plotline, her presence dominates the film. This only becomes worse when the present-day story brings in the topic of abortion, which is dealt with in the most cliched way imaginable (Spoiler Alert:  people who watch mainstream movies and TV could easily believe that abortion clinics don't actually perform the procedure at all--they just exist so that women can show up there and then change their minds.)  

The result in Sarah's Key is a slick production that tries to balance a tragic story with one that's ultimately feel-good, and succeeds only in damaging both.  Scott Thomas is excellent as always, not to mention in this case invaluably fluent in both English and French, and Mayance is strong as the young Sarah (although it's not clear why Sarah had to be such a blond-haired movie star beauty).  In supporting roles, Niels Arestrup (he was the old crime boss in A Prophet) brings emotional weight to his role as a farmer who figures in Sarah's life, and late in the modern-day story, Aidan Quinn does an enormous amount with just a couple of scenes opposite Scott Thomas.

A question--perhaps an unanswerable one--that's been raised since Holocaust stories became part of popular culture is whether the infusion of standard drama into such horror, by its very nature, acts as a disservice to the magnitude of the event--makes the ultimate in indigestible history into something easier to swallow.  Opposed to this, of course, is the very real educational function that these stories can provide, and the fact that people simply wouldn't watch a depiction of the actual Holocaust without some avenue of dramatic escape.  Sarah's Key tries to tread that line and falls into superficiality and sentimentality; it's not a bad movie, but it's an unworthy one.

Unlike nearly all the other action epics this summer, CAPTAIN AMERICA:  THE FIRST AVENGER is rolling out slowly overseas, with only a couple of dozen territories getting the picture this weekend.  That will postpone a call on its ultimate boxoffice fate, because in this genre, international results are crucially important, contributing more than half of ultimate boxoffice--and because Captain America (retitled in 3 territories to remove any US stigma) could meet resistance in some areas.  Worth noting:  while the difference between its A- Cinemascore rating and Thor's B+ is meaningless, the fact that the Captain had about 50% more young viewers than the Norse god could suggest a more frontloaded boxoffice than Thor had.  For now, Captain America is, by a (not to be unduly suspicious of studio estimators) remarkably thin margin, the biggest superhero opener of the season. Also in its favor:  reports that next weekend's Cowboys and Aliens is tracking weakly (so expect the TV airwaves to be bombarded with last-minute promos for that one in the next few days).

A 73% drop for HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS (PART 2) wouldn't be historic--just in the Top 30 of all-time second weekend falls--but more subjectively, it would be the worst drop ever for a movie as well-reviewed and generally well-regarded as Hallows 2 is.  (The massively front-loaded Twilight series has never gone beyond a 70% second weekend fall.)  Any lingering fan hope of a Best Picture nomination probably went out the window yesterday.  Mitch Metcalf will tell us over the course of the weekend whether Harry's all-important foreign numbers are slipping as badly.

The FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS number is a bit disappointing, especially considering generally solid reviews. (Mine is here.)   It's a picture that would normally benefit from good word of mouth and some extended playing time, but with Crazy Stupid Love, The Change-Up and 30 Minutes or Less about to flood the comedy pipeline, that may be time Friends doesn't have.

Amazingly, MIDNIGHT IN PARIS lost 10% of its theatres this weekend and yet its Friday boxoffice number barely moved.  It could now realistically be on its way to a $50M US gross.  A BETTER LIFE expanded again, by 20%, but because its per-theatre number fell, its Friday boxoffice is down 35% from last week.  Similarly, Fox Searchlight's SNOW FLOWER AND THE SECRET FAN (for which the only important credit is "Produced by Wendi Murdoch," AKA the wife who so zealously protected her billionaire hubby--and owner of Searchlight--from shaving cream last week)  more than doubled its theatres and saw its per-theatre number fall by almost half.  

The roughly $20K per theatre for ANOTHER EARTH is better news than the same number for SARAH'S KEY, since the latter is a slick international co-production based on a bestselling novel and Another Earth is a very low-budgeted indie. (And one well worth seeking out--my review is here.)  THE MYTH OF THE AMERICAN SLEEPOVER has been getting excellent reviews, but seems likely to do only about $12K in one NY house.