Movie Box Review

Deadline has some preliminary numbers for Friday's boxoffice, and as expected, REAL STEEL is headed for a weekend victory.  Assuming that it gets the Saturday bump that usually goes to pictures targeted at family audiences, Steel should reach around $26-27M for the weekend, in line with Mitch Metcalf's predictions.  That number will still leave it far from the $225M or so it'll need in studio revenues to break even on its production and marketing investment.  

THE IDES OF MARCH should also hit the $12-13M level of weekend expectations. Ides is a far lower-budgeted film than Steel (about 10% of the production cost), and if it can hang around in the market for a while, it could turn a decent profit.

Among holdovers, DOLPHIN TALE and MONEYBALL appear to be falling a bit more steeply than expected now that each faces direct competition in the marketplace, while COURAGEOUS is taking the big hit that a front-loaded picture will encounter in its second weekend.  50/50, on the other hand, seems headed for a very good hold, suggesting strong word of mouth.  DREAM HOUSE and WHAT'S YOUR NUMBER? are moving swiftly toward their appointments with homevideo.

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

Deadline has some early updated weekend numbers, and there are no major surprises from the Friday results.  The top 3 are DOLPHIN TALE, MONEYBALL and THE LION KING with $14M, $12M and $11M respectively, with the family pictures garnering the benefit of stepped-up Saturday matinee business.  

After that, 3 new titles--50/50, COURAGEOUS and DREAM HOUSE--are bunched together between $8.7-9M, meaning their actual rank won't be clear until Monday's actuals are annonced.  Courageous was the most front-loaded with Friday business, which is no surprise given the nature of its appeal, nor is the fact that 50/50 had strong word of mouth on its second day; what's odd is that Dream House seems to have also done well on Saturday, despite how bad it is.

In the third echelon, holdovers ABDUCTION, CONTAGION and KILLER ELITE, as well as the new WHAT'S YOUR NUMBER? are all between $4.8-5.7M, representing indifferent holds for Abduction and Killer Elite, nice continued business for Contagion, and a wretched start for the Anna Faris vehicle.

Stay with SHOWBUZZDAILY for more detailed numbers and analysis as additional boxoffice figures become available.

THE SOCIAL NETWORK fell only 31% in its second weekend, so MONEYBALL, which is headed for a fall closer to 40% (after a lower opening), continues not to be in Network's league financially.  The timing of a movie like this is tricky, because if it's out of theatres when the awards discussions start to become serious, it can lose momentum, and that's the danger for Moneyball.  (It will also face direct competition--from Sony, its own studio--next week from THE IDES OF MARCH.)

Summit spent a lot of time and effort trying to get people into 50/50 (Seth Rogen, who's a producer as well as star of the film, seemed to be interviewed everywhere), and with good reason, because it's an excellent movie.  Audiences who showed up seem to get it--to the extent Cinemascore means anything, 50/50 received an A- grade--but selling a comedy about cancer is just a tough nut to crack.  

DOLPHIN TALE is benefitting from the fact that it's actually a pretty decent family movie, but it faces competition next weekend from Real Steel (although Dolphin is by far the better picture).  To no one's surprise, Disney held LION KING in theatres even though the blu-ray is being released on Tuesday; it'll be interesting to see whether all these boxoffice dollars will help or hurt the video sales.

COURAGEOUS proves once again that the church audience is eager to be roused by movie marketing, and while the movie is unlikely to get any kind of crossover attention, it'll be quite profitable due to its limited budget and marketing costs.  (The movie's "A+" from Cinemascore is fairly meaningless, since the people they polled are exactly the people most likely to adore it.)

On the "disaster" side of the ledger, the producers of DREAM HOUSE took the movie away from its director Jim Sheridan, and that led to Sheridan and stars Daniel Craig, Rachel Weisz and Naomi Watts largely refusing to do any publicity for the film--which led to Universal not screening it for critics.  The result is a fairly expensive movie (which is indeed lousy, at least in its non-director's-cut form) that's looking at red ink.  Also, the discussion on whether Anna Faris is a "star" can end--she's not.  I liked WHAT'S YOUR NUMBER? far more than most (at the very least, it doesn't compare badly to most of Katherine Heigl's output), but no one out there is buying a ticket to see Faris, no matter how talented she is.

In limited release, TAKE SHELTER is headed for a heartening $17.5K at each of 3 theatres, but it's a troubling movie that is likely to have a hard time attracting a mainstream audience.  Fans of car wrecks showed up for MARGARET to the tune of around $3500 in each of 2--that's the movie that sat on the shelf for 6 years while its director and producers fought about the editing.  And MACHINE GUN PREACHER expanded from 4 theatres to 33; without the cushion of Q&As with the stars, its per-theatre gross dropped sharply to around $3K. 

Next weekend brings one movie looking for a massive audience (REAL STEEL) and one that would be satisfied with more modest returns and some awards attention (THE IDES OF MARCH).  An early word of advice:  go with the humans.

Deadline has updated early Friday numbers, and it's looking like another too-close-to-call weekend:  all the movies in the Top 5--MONEYBALL, THE LION KING, DOLPHIN TALE, COURAGEOUS and 50/50--have Friday grosses between $3.2-3.8M.  Courageous is probably the most front-loaded, due to its focused church-based audience (although it's per-theatre number will be very impressive), and while 50/50 should have good word of mouth and a higher multiple, it's still unlikely to have the Saturday bump of the holdovers.  Dolphin Tale is considered to have the best chance to narrowly take the weekend, as it seems to be heading for only a 30% Week 2 decline, better than Moneyball's (which itself should only go down around 40%, an excellent hold).  But it could still work out otherwise.  

DREAM HOUSE wasn't too far behind the leaders on Friday, but will probably have a terrible weekend multiple and end up with $7M or so for the weekend, while WHAT'S YOUR NUMBER? appears to be a complete disaster, headed for not much more than $5M for the weekend.  Last weekend's also-rans ABDUCTION and KILLER ELITE should both see 50% drops.

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

The Hollywood Reporter has some very office boxoffice numbers.  These are based on matinee business only, so they can be misleading as to what will happen over the course of Friday, let along the weekend.  But for now, the big news is that COURAGEOUS, a Christian-themed movie produced by Sherwood Baptist Church in Georgia and distributed by a division of Sony, is off to a fast start in only 1100 theatres, and could approach $10M for the weekend if it holds up.  However, films directed at the religious audience are often front-loaded with pre-buy church groups, so that's not necessarily where the weekend will go.

Even if Courageous does get that high, it probably won't be enough to get close to the weekend title, with LION KING, MONEYBALL and DOLPHIN TALE all expected to hold well with $12-14M each.  It would, however, put the movie in the thick of the new openings that are in many more theatres, with DREAM HOUSE also expected to do around $10M despite (deservedly) dismal reviews, 50/50 probably a bit less than that, and WHAT'S YOUR NUMBER? in the same neighborhood.

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

Romantic comedies that are actually romantic and comic are so rare these days, it doesn't matter so much that WHAT'S YOUR NUMBER? is in many ways thoroughly second-rate.  It delivers some laughs and a likable couple to root for, and as you're watching it, the part of your mind objectively noting all the flaws and sloppiness is gradually eclipsed by the part that shrugs and says "Awww."

It would be impossible, for example, to defend the very premise of the movie, which stems from a novel by Karyn Bosnak, adapted by Gabrielle Allan and Jennifer Crittenden.  Anna Faris plays Ally Darling ("Darling"?  Really, was that necessary?), a young woman whose younger sister Daisy Darling (Ari Graynor) is getting married, and in the way of women in romantic comedies, this makes Ally borderline insane about the need to be settled down.  She's particularly distressed when she realizes that her count of lovers has reached just about 20, and some study in Marie-Claire says that any woman who's slept with that many men will never find a husband.  So, obsessed with not exceeding her allotment, Ally decides to track down her 20 men in the hope that one of them will have morphed into her Prince Charming.  

So far, so hypocritically pretending to be sexually liberated while actually being completely morally retro.  But wait:  across the hall from Ally lives a dissolute, womanizing, good-looking and frequently unclothed aspiring musician named Colin (Chris Evans), who agrees to help Ally find her exes in exchange for getting refuge in her apartment from his own one-night stands.  Do you really need me to say who turns out to be the perfect man for Ally?  Who cleans up his own act and and is the only one who appreciates Ally for the woman she really is?  And that just as this is becoming clear, Ally will find herself pursued by a man who is, in every superficial way, Perfect, meaning that she'll have to make A Choice?

I mean, ugh.  Absolutely.  And yet... The script has some snap and off-hand surprises, and more importantly, it has Faris and Evans.  Faris has been waiting to be the Next Big Thing for so long that it feels like a broken record, and it looked like The House Bunny was going to be her ticket--but even though that movie was a hit, she's still not A Name.  She's even better in Number than she was in Bunny, because she gets to be smart instead of Judy Hollidayish dumb-yet-wise.  And Evans, who seems to be trying to prove himself in every genre at once this year, from the action heroics of Captain America to the serious drama of Puncture, does a softer version of the sleazy-guy-who-turns-sensitive that Gerard Butler's been playing in movies like The Ugly Truth and The Bounty Hunter, and it works.  He and Faris have a real comic rapport that's sexy and comfortable, and it makes them a pleasure to watch together.

The movie also has an unusually strong supporting cast, with people like Blythe Danner as Ally's disapproving mother, Eliza Coupe and Heather Burns as two of her friends, Andy Samberg, Chris Pratt, Anthony Mackie, Joel McHale and Martin Freeman as some of the exes, and Dave Annable as Mr. Perfect. Mark Mylod, who's been a house director on Entourage, keeps things moving briskly toward the predetermined ending and lets Faris and Evans do their stuff. 

It's more than a little uncool to admit enjoying What's Your Number? because every step of the way, it would be perfectly fair to characterize the movie as cliched, predictable and as subtle as a CG robot battle.  But a little wit and charm go a long way in this genre, and while Number isn't--well, it certainly isn't Crazy Stupid Love--it's an enjoyable piece of undemanding fluff.

No doubt the enormous success of THE LION KING hasn't been lost on anyone at Disney, and we can expect to see 3D reissues of more classic animation over the next few years, leading into yet more homevideo editions.

If not for Lion King being in the market, DOLPHIN TALE would almost certainly have won the weekend, so Warners' decision to stick with its opening date (because it was the same week they'd released Legend of the Guardians last year?) may have been misguided.  Dolphin gets one more weekend (which one has to assume it'll have to share with Lion King again, since it's hard to believe Disney will really pull that from the market as planned), then it'll have to face Real Steel for the family audience.

MONEYBALL didn't quite get to Social Network's $22M opening, even though Brad Pitt is an infinitely bigger star than Jesse Eisenberg.  The baseball subject matter may have turned off some potential audiences (although one wouldn't have thought the corporate infighting at Facebook would pack them in), and although Moneyball got rave reviews, they didn't quite have the "this is an instant Best Picture frontrunner and you have to see it" vibe.  It's going to face competition quickly, from 50/50 next weekend and then Ides of March, so we'll see how it holds up.

ABDUCTION does seem to have made it to $11M (pending actuals tomorrow), for whatever that's worth to the Lautner team.  KILLER ELITE will make whatever real money it's going to make overseas.  

Although DRIVE had the best hold of last week's openings, a virtual 50% drop for a film with 92% on Rotten Tomatoes is disappointing, reinforcing the fact that audience response was not in line with the critical acclaim--not a shock, since Drive's limitation is that it seems to have been made for film critics.

In limited release, MY AFTERNOONS WITH MARGUERITTE expanded from 2 theatres to 27 and did a not-much $2700 per theatre, while Gus Van Sant's RESTLESS went disastrously from 5 to 17, with barely $1K in each.  MACHINE GUN PREACHER premiered with a good $11K in each of 4 theatres, but until Gerard Butler and Michelle Monaghan stop doing Q&As, we won't know the movie's real strength.  PUNCTURE, which also had some Q&As for opening weekend, pulled a decent $9K in each of 4.  Most impressive, though, was the gay romance WEEKEND, which got stellar reviews in NY and made $25K in one small theatre there; it arrives in LA next week.