Movie Box Review

John Carter traveled to Mars; the movie with his name also looks beyond the US for some help.

OPENINGS:  JOHN CARTER (Disney) may or may not have grossed over $30M this weekend--we'll find out for sure tomorrow.  (Disney is claiming a not-unreasonable 31% Sunday drop, but it would take only a small slip to push the number below that threshold.)  The more important number, though, in terms of whether it'll be remembered as a historic flop or a mere financial disappointment, is the $71M (which includes pre-Friday grosses in certain territories) being reported overseas.  $17M of that was from Russia alone, but apparently Europe was generally not strong.  On the other hand, the picture is doing well in Asia, and has yet to open in China and Japan.  If Carter can get to a global total of $300M, it won't reach breakeven, but would avoid the embarrassment of a total failure.

A THOUSAND WORDS (Paramount), playing as a family comedy (which it really isn't), also had a good Saturday, but that only got it to a pitiful $6.4M.  However, that did beat Meet Dave and Imagine This, so this studio, as well, dodged complete ignominy.  SILENT HOUSE held even on Saturday despite the dreadful CinemaScore grade and is claiming (for now) slightly over $7M for the weekend.

HOLDOVERS:  THE LORAX (Universal) ended up with a Saturday that, while huge, wasn't quite up to the initial report (an 80% bump rather than 100%), so it's down 44% for the weekend, still extremely good.  More remarkably, PROJECT X (Warners) was almost in the same place with a 45% drop, excellent for a picture aiming at the teen-male demo.  SAFE HOUSE (Universal), THE VOW (Screen Gems/Sony) and THIS MEANS WAR (20th) continued to have very low drops in the low 30% range, while WANDERLUST (Universal) and GONE (Summit/Lionsgate) were heaved out of theatres as quickly as contracts allowed.

OSCAR WINNERS:  THE ARTIST (Weinstein) is claiming a mediocre 37% drop that, as with last week, relies on an very high Sunday estimate (a drop of only 25%)--last weekend's total was reduced on Monday, and the same may well happen tomorrow.  THE IRON LADY (Weinstein), with a more reasonable 35% estimated Sunday drop, is holding well, down only 31% for the weekend.  THE DESCENDANTS (Fox Searchlight) and HUGO (Paramount) are both on their way out of theatres.  A SEPARATION (Sony Classics) widened again to 281 theatres, and while it still dropped for the weekend as its per-theatre number fell, it's at $4.8M, a superb total for a subtitled Iranian film.  

LIMITED RELEASES:  For an R-rated comedy, FRIENDS WITH KIDS (Roadside Attractions) had a terrific Saturday bump of 53%, suggesting very strong word of mouth.  That pushed it to $2.2M in 374 theatres, with a per-theatre number that was below only The Lorax and John Carter in the top 20.  Roadside will widen the run next weekend to 600 theatres.  SALMON FISHING IN THE YEMEN (CBS) had a $13K average. but that was in only 18 theatres, which is only mildly promising.  FOOTNOTE (Sony Classics) and JIRO DREAMS OF SUSHI (Magnolia) had strong NY openings, averaging over $20K per theatre each.  WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN (Oscilloscope) went from 40 to 60 theatres, and had a decent $2600 per-theatre average.  BEING FLYNN (Focus), though, tripled its theatre count to 12 and still fell for the weekend, as its per-theatre number collapsed.

It's too little to make any meaningful difference for JOHN CARTER (Disney), but according to Deadline, the giant-budgeted spectacle didn't have a bad Saturday.  Preliminary numbers have Carter rising by around 30% over its Friday total, which could mean a weekend over $30M.  A nice weekend multiple, though, still won't touch the mountain of deficit on this one.  Deadline also reports very early international numbers, which indicate around $15M on Friday (plus $13M earlier in the week) in most of the world except Japan and China, suggesting a $50M or so weekend that's also not terrible, but far from what Carter would need to even dream of breaking even.

A THOUSAND WORDS (Paramount) also did well Saturday percentage-wise (up almost 50% from Friday), presumably because despite the PG-13 rating, as a silly comedy it's playing to a family crowd.  But those numbers are even more meaningless than Carter's--it's still headed for around a $6M weekend.  SILENT HOUSE (Open Road) could only hold even on Saturday, and is headed for a $7-8M total.

The weekend was owned by THE LORAX (Universal), which as expected had a huge Saturday, doubling its Friday, and what should be around a $42M weekend, down only about 40% from its big opening.  Other holdovers were in keeping with their Friday estimates.

Moral of the weekend:  If you're going to spend $250M+ on a movie, check first whether anyone wants to see it.

OPENINGS:  With a probable $27-28M opening, just how big a flop is JOHN CARTER (Disney) going to be?  Hard to tell until full weekend and international numbers are in.  But its sheer cost--probably at least $400M when worldwide marketing is included, and very possibly $500M--dwarfs such famous flops of the past as Ishtar and Heaven's Gate, both made in the 1980s when marketing costs were a fraction of what they are now, and even last year's huge bomb Mars Needs Moms, which cost around $100M less.  The movie is mediocre; the decision to green-light it at that budget was insane.  

At a far lesser level of failure (financially, at least), SILENT HOUSE (Open Road) is headed for a $6-7M weekend and probably won't crack $20M in total (especially with an ugly "F" from CinemaScore), but with a tiny budget and limited marketing, it won't cause anyone much damage.  A THOUSAND WORDS (Paramount/DreamWorks) is only hitting theatres after 3 years because Paramount would have had accounting consequences had it been held off the market any longer.  It's heading for a similar total to Silent House at a much higher cost.  The amazing factoid is that if it can manage to scrape together a weekend above $5.5M, it'll still be higher than 2 of Eddie Murphy's last 5 openings, beating both Meet Dave and Imagine That.  And this:  with the exception of the Shrek movies and Dreamgirls, Murphy's last $100M grosser was Dr. Dolittle 2 in 2001.

HOLDOVERS:  With no direct competition, THE LORAX (Universal) is having a strong 2d weekend, down only 40-45% from its giant opening (and easily winning the weekend).  More surprisingly, PROJECT X (Warners) is holding up fine, with a similar percentage drop.  SAFE HOUSE (Universal), THE VOW (Screen Gems.  /Sony) and THIS MEANS WAR (20th) continue to hold up best, with drops of only around 30%, while GOOD DEEDS (Lionsgate/Summit), WANDERLUST (Universal) and GONE (Summit/Lionsgate) are collapsing as they get dumped by theatres.

OSCAR WINNERS:  THE ARTIST (Weinstein)'s post-Oscar bump didn't last long, as word-of-mouth and a wide audience continue to elude the film (permanently, we can now say).  A 40% weekend drop puts it in line for around $45M in total.  THE DESCENDANTS (Fox Searchlight), in its final pre-homevideo weekend, and HUGO (Paramount), already available at home, face similar declines.  THE IRON LADY (Weinstein), though, is holding on well with only a 25% fall.

LIMITED RELEASE:  FRIENDS WITH KIDS (Roadside Attractions) is trying a quasi-limited opening at 374 theatres, with fairly decent results for that kind of release, probably close to a $5K average per theatre that should give it around a $2M start.  On a much smaller scale, SALMON FISHING IN THE YEMEN (CBS) should have an OK average of around $10K in only 18 big-city theatres.  The Israeli FOOTNOTE (Sony Classics), with rave reviews, is headed for a very nice $20K average in 2 NY theatres.  BEING FLYNN (Focus) tripled its theatre count to 12, and will be lucky to hold even for the weekend, as its per-theatre average plummeted.

NEXT WEEKEND:  The big arrival is the Channing Tatum/Jonah Hill comedy revamp of 21 JUMP STREET (Sony), which is garnering remarkably strong early reviews.  2 more offbeat comedies will open in smaller releases;  JEFF WHO LIVES AT HOME (Paramount Vantage) and Will Ferrell's Spanish-language CASA DE MI PADRE (Lionsgate).  

Deadline's preliminary numbers for Friday have JOHN CARTER (Disney) at around $10M for the day, which depending on how much it plays as a family movie on Saturday, should mean a $25-30M weekend.  That's not a horribly low number--it's one of the half-dozen highest openings of the year so far--unless you're trying to earn back a $350-400M investment, in which case, oops.  In any case, it's clearly 2d place for this weekend, behind Weekend 2 of THE LORAX (Universal), which also had a $10M Friday, but which will definitely ramp up with weekend matinees to a likely $40M total.  PROJECT X (Warners) is headed for a $10-11M 2d weekend with a $3.5M Friday, which means a standard 50% weekend drop--really better than average, considering the movie's fast-burning teen genre.

The weekend's other openings are well behind.  SILENT HOUSE (Open Road) has around a $2.5M Friday en route to a $6-7M weekend, unimpressive even for a low-budget thriller.  And as expected, the long-delayed Eddie Murphy flop A THOUSAND WORDS (Paramount), riding an extraordinary 0% from Rotten Tomatoes (that's 34 straight bad reviews), should pull in $2M on Friday for a $5-6M weekend on its way to oblivion.

Now the only question is when they announce the start of  pre-production on LORAX 2.

OPENINGS:  It turned out THE LORAX (Universal) wasn't frontloaded at all.  Quite the contrary, its 80% Saturday bump put the movie through the roof, a triumph of great marketing over cruddy filmmaking.  Lorax is currently the 3d highest March opening ever, but only $185K behind 300 at #2, so even a slight overperformance on Sunday could lift it up.  PROJECT X (Warners) slipped a bit on Saturday, but even if its Sunday is overestimated, it should still be safely over $20M for the weekend, a very good score for a relatively low-budget studio release.  (The result, unfortunately, will be more lousy "found-footage" movies.)

HOLDOVERS:  Thanks to a nice spread of genres in the Top 10, most of the older movies are holding quite well.  The only 3 movies in the Top 12 to dip more than 45% were JOURNEY 2 (Warners), which was direct competition for Lorax, GOOD DEEDS (Lionsgate/Summit) with a 55% drop that was in keeping with Tyler Perry's pictures, and GHOST RIDER 2 (Sony), which was already mid-collapse.  Particularly notable were the tiny respective drops for SAFE HOUSE (Universal) - 34%, THIS MEANS WAR (20th) - 33%, and the (deservedly) much-maligned GONE (Summit/Lionsgate) - 36%.

OSCAR WINNERS:  THE ARTIST (Weinstein), the 2d least popular Best Picture winner of the last quarter-century (and the lowest among films still in theatrical release when the awards were given out) raised its post-awards theatre count by 80% and could only manage a 34% bump.  And even that number is shaky, because Artist is claiming by far the lowest Sunday decline of the weekend's top movies, so it may well slipi down (and fall out of the Top 10) tomorrow.  Similarly, its stablemate THE IRON LADY (Weinstein) is claiming a 30% weekend increase that relies on a tiny estimated Sunday drop.  Back in the non-Weinstein world, THE DESCENDANTS (Fox Searchlight) lost many of its theatres and fell 36%, and HUGO (Paramount) dropped 14%.  A SEPARATION (Sony Classics) tripled its theatres off its Foreign Language Film win, and gratifyingly went over the $1M mark for the weekend in 243 houses.  

LIMITED RELEASES:  BEING FLYNN (Focus) created little excitement with a $11K average at only 4 theatres, and TIM & ERIC'S BILLION DOLLAR MOVIE (Magnolia) could only get to a $4K average in 24.    IN DARKNESS (Sony Classics) lost the Foreign-Language Oscar but tried increasing its theatre count by 50% anyway--the result was a 17% drop for the weekend.  WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN (Oscilloscope), another picture that was hoping for Oscar love it didn't get, more than doubled its theatres to 40, and averaged a decent $3300.  

Deadline is reporting a fairly spectacular Saturday for THE LORAX (Universal), considering the size of its Friday:  $32M, representing more than an 80% increase from the day before.  As a point of comparison, Horton Hears A Who! increased only 40% on its second day of release.  If this number holds, it puts Lorax in line for a $70M+ weekend, and makes a $200M total gross very likely.  Also, with The Hunger Games, 21 Jump Street, Wrath of the Titans (and OK, John Carter) still to come, it suggests we may be kicking off a March of historic proportions.

PROJECT X (Warners) naturally had nothing like Lorax's Saturday, instead inching down a couple of hundred thousand dollars from Friday.  That should still be enough for a $20M or so weekend, quite good considering the picture's costs (and lack of quality).

Among holdovers, ACT OF VALOR (Relativity) is reporting a strong Saturday and could end up falling only 40% or so from last weekend. GOOD DEEDS (Lionsgate/Summit), though, will fall closer to 60%.  SAFE HOUSE (Universal), THE VOW (Screen Gems/Sony) and THIS MEANS WAR (20th) continue to hold quite well.

There are good movies and there are hits, and given the choice, there's never been any doubt which Hollywood prefers.

OPENINGS:  A March filled to the brim with wannabe blockbusters is off to a big start.  THE LORAX (Universal) may be a bad movie (spoiler alert--it is), but the studio sold the hell out of it, and the result looks to be the all-quadrant hit Universal dreamed of.  The opening day for Lorax was almost 25% higher than the Friday for Horton Hears A Who! in March 2008, and that one got to $154M, so $200M is certainly in reach (Horton happened to be a better movie, but we'll see if that means much).  Also helping:  no real competition until Mirror Mirror and Wrath of the Titans open on March 30.

Also opening well (and at least as bad) is PROJECT X (Warner Bros), the latest "found-footage" contraption.  Its $8.1M Friday is only slightly behind the $8.6M for Chronicle, February's found-footage picture, and while Project's trajectory downward may be faster (Chronicle rose 18% on Saturday on good word-of-mouth, which Project will be hard pressed to match), that could still put it in the neighborhood of a $20M weekend and $50M total, not bad for a picture that has a $12M budget and lower-than-usual reliance on expensive TV marketing.

HOLDOVERS:  ACT OF VALOR (Relativity) and WANDERLUST (Universal) should go down a standard 45-50% in their second weekends, but oddly enough, the given-up-for-dead GONE (Summit/Lionsgate) is holding extremely well and may decline less than 40%.  Amanda Seyfried fans?  GOOD DEEDS (Lionsgate/Summit) will fall the heavy 60% or so that's typical for Tyler Perry's movies.  Also collapsing this weekend is JOURNEY 2 (Warners), which held like a champ for several weeks but got poleaxed by The Lorax.  SAFE HOUSE (Universal), THE VOW (Screen Gems/Sony) and THIS MEANS WAR (20th) continue to hold well, although in the case of the latter, that will still only get it to around $50M.  Worth noting farther down the list is that PHANTOM MENACE 3D (20th) is now headed for only around $45M, which means with the cost of 3D conversion and marketing, the re-release may remarkably have to scrape just to break even--we'll see how quickly Attack of the Clones 3D hits theatres after this.

OSCAR WINNERS:  Even with the Best Picture Oscar and the giant publicity that comes with it, THE ARTIST (Weinstein) managed only a mild bump at the box-office.  Its theatre count increased by over 80%, but it's headed for only a 20-25% higher gross this weekend.  Artist now seems unlikely to reach $50M at the US boxoffice, which would make it the first Best Picture winner in current theatrical release (unlike The Hurt Locker, which was already on homevideo when the awards were presented) not to hit that mark since The Last Emperor in 1987, a film that made $44M at a time when those dollars had 25 years worth of higher value.  (For a real, inflation-adjusted equivalent, you'd have to go back to the pre-homevideo era.)  Meanwhile THE IRON LADY (Weinstein) rode its Best Actress Oscar to a 10-15% increase.  Winners in the lesser categories had no Oscar benefit:  THE DESCENDANTS (Fox Searchlight) dropped 20% of its theatres and will decline 40-45%, and HUGO (Paramount), now out on homevideo, lost about 15% of its theatres and will fall 20-25%.

LIMITED RELEASES:  The first major indie of 2012, BEING FLYNN (Focus) didn't muster much enthusiasm at the boxoffice (sadly, for good reason) and may only get to around an $11K average at 4 theatres.  TIM AND ERIC'S BILLION DOLLAR MOVIE (Magnolia), also available on VOD, is headed for perhaps a $5K average at 24.

NEXT WEEK:  The knives have been sharpening for weeks, but is JOHN CARTER (Disney) really as bad as the buzz suggests?  It will, at least, have the weekend almost to itself, as the "single-take" (not really) SILENT HOUSE (Open Road) and the long-delayed Eddie Murphy vehicle A THOUSAND WORDS (Paramount) are only opening in roughly half as many theatres.  2 romantic comedies also arrive in limited release:  FRIENDS WITH KIDS (Roadside Attractions), which has a terrific cast that includes Jon Hamm, Kristin Wiig, Adam Scott and Maya Rudolph, and SALMON FISHING IN THE YEMEN (CBS), with the somewhat less marketable Ewan McGregor and Emily Blunt. 

It may not be pretty, but surely it's true--Credit must go where credit is due.  In this case, that means the Universal Pictures Marketing Department, which as it turns out has done a splendid job these last few weeks of hiding just how thoroughly terrible the new movie of Dr. Seuss' THE LORAX really is.  

Considering how cinematic the works of Dr. Seuss seem to be, the films based on his work have a surprisingly bad track record.  Horton Hears A Who! managed to be mediocre, but How the Grinch Stole Christmas and The Cat In the Hat were two of the most painful family movies of recent years.  Part of the problem is undoubtedly that Seuss' picture books don't have enough story for a full-length feature, and thus have to be "opened up," usually badly.  (The 1966 TV Grinch was and is a short classic, but Ron Howard's movie is a bloated disaster.)  There's also something about Seuss' extravagant, anarchic imagery that seems to give filmmakers (and sometimes actors) the sense that they're free to indulge themselves, and that only too much can be enough.

The Lorax was produced by Illumination Entertainment, which gave Universal its big hit Despicable Me, with Illumination honcho Christopher Meledandri serving as producer, over director Chris Renaud (also a director of Despicable).  As written for the screen by Cinco Paul (another Despicable vet) and Paul Daurio, Lorax is badly constructed, overly blunt and emotionally unsatisfying.  The first hour of the story is mostly a series of flashbacks:  young Ted (Zac Efron), on a mission to please Audrey, the girl of his dreams (Taylor Swift--who doesn't sing, even though the movie features several ghastly songs by Cinco Paul and composer John Powell), sets off to find her a real living tree.  This is a challenge, because Ted and Audrey live in Thneedville, a completely artificial town where the "soil" is painted concrete and the "trees" are inflatable.  Thneedville is run by O'Hare (Rob Riggle), who's gotten rich by selling the inhabitants bottled air less poisonous than the polluted stuff around them.

Ted is advised to seek out The Once-ler (Ed Helms) for tree-related wisdom, and finds him walled up in the only structure standing amid the wasteland outside Thneedville's city limits.  Once-ler, at great length, tells Ted the story of how he became the victim of his own ambition and greed, breaking his promises to the forest creatures and to the mystical Lorax (Danny DeVito), who speaks "for the trees," chopping all the trees down in order to build an industrial empire producing unnecessary Thneeds.  (This will not be Mitt Romney's favorite movie of the year.)    Eventually, Once-ler gives Ted the last remaining tree seed, and that leads to a final half-hour of chase scenes and supposedly heartwarming conclusion.

We know for a fact that it's possible to tell a whimsical animated fantasy about the dangers of corporate greed and human indolence, because it was called WALL-E and it was a masterpiece.  Rango, too, had a not dissimilar plot (evil industrialist villain, water instead of trees being withheld from the town) and melded its message with weirdness to brilliant effect.  The Lorax makers, however, don't evidence a fraction of the artistry that went into those films.  Even if one applauds Lorax's environmental message, the singleminded way it beats that drum becomes wearying, and the characters are all exceedingly flat.  That even includes DeVito's Lorax, beyond the couple of decent lines that are already in all the trailers and ads.  

The look of the animation (which, by the way, makes almost zero use of the 3D imposed on it) is reasonably colorful and Seussian in a general way, but for a story that hinges so much on the preciousness of nature, there's almost no memorable imagery here, not a single moment that brings home the message the picture is trying so desperately to send.  

The Lorax is dreary, a bore despite its brief running time.  These multimillionaire purportedly anti-corporate moviemakers have done nothing but grind a small, charming piece of literature into an outsized corporate product.  It's a Thneed.

The Academy limits the number of movie ads that can be aired on the Oscar telecast (until recent years, they didn't allow any), so as not to make the night look like the awards are shilling for the studios.  (God forbid!)  It's not clear whether that's the reason only 2 movie promos made it into the telecast itself or if no one else wanted to pay the hefty tab for an Oscar spot, but several other studios did crowd into the pre-show.  A quick rundown:

MIRROR MIRROR (Universal) - 30 sec - The studio took out 2 different 30 second spots in the pre-show, both of which played up the movie's comedy, but this time concentrating on the dwarfs (who can apparently adjust their size) instead of Julia Roberts, as the first ads did.  The movie opens March 30, so the more intensive part of its campaign should soon be underway.  

THE HUNGER GAMES (Lionsgate) - 30 sec - Pretty much the same spot the studio has been airing since the Super Bowl, with a few shots swapped out.  The campaign, so far, continues to emphasize the set-up of the Games rather than the more action-oriented Games sequences themselves that presumably take up the bulk of the movie.  Lionsgate is hoping this is going to be their Twilight, and with a March 23 opening around the corner, ads should be multiplying like crazy very soon.

THE LORAX (Universal) - 15 sec - A somewhat different spot from the ones we've seen.  It doesn't play up the quest part of the story (find the real trees!) or Danny DeVito and his "That's a woman?!?" line.  Instead, the promo plays off the question of whether Loraxes (Loraxi?) are real.  The movie opens Friday, so all its spots are now in heavy rotation.

JOHN CARTER (Disney) - 30 sec - Now Disney is attempting to make John Carter look like a critical hit, with quotes from reviewers no one has ever heard of (the cynical among us may doubt that the real reviews will be quite as thrilled).  The movie opens March 9 and as is widely known by now, the advance tracking is apparently dismal, so the spot is all action, trying to play up the spectacle bought by the reported $250-300M budget.

BRAVE (Disney) - 30 sec - A very classy spot (carefully timed to run just after Best Animated Film was presented) with just one line of voice-over and gorgeous visuals.  It seems designed by Pixar to wipe the taste of Cars 2 out of our mouths long before Brave arrives in June.

TITANIC (Paramount) - 30 sec - You play Celine Dion, show Kate and Leo, have a few shots of the boat going down, and announce that it's now in 3D--that's pretty much the campaign, and what more do they need?  The spot ended with a quick URL for a website where people can buy tickets for a "sneak preview" the night before the official April 4 opening.

Of course, the most notorious movie "ad" of the night was Sacha Baron Cohen's shameless huckstering of THE DICTATOR, which bought the movie millions in free pre-release publicity about his expected awards antics.  The Academy, while letting him do this thing, kept him the hell off their air, including the official pre-show.  Nevertheless, he was able to get plenty of media attention by dumping an urn of "Kim Jong-Il's ashes" on Ryan Seacrest, live on E!   Mission accomplished.

Navy SEALs shoot up the Friday boxoffice.

OPENINGS:  The very aggressive marketing for ACT OF VALOR (Relativity) made it seem like it was a patriotic duty to see the film, and successfully hid the fact that it's mostly a sub-par B action movie.  The question now is whether its quality will catch up with it (or not).  GOOD DEEDS (Lionsgate/Summit) is Tyler Perry's lowest wide-release opening Friday ever at $5.6M (Daddy's Little Girls opened on a Wednesday), but not to worry--Perry will have a new Madea comedy out later this year.

Although daily numbers aren't available for her earliest vehicles, WANDERLUST (Universal), with a 2.2M Friday, also seems to be the biggest flop of Jennifer Aniston's starring career, let alone for one that pairs her with another big name like Paul Rudd.  Aniston has had something of a charmed movie career, considering the low quality of many of her pictures, but her luck may be running out.  GONE (Summit/Lionsgate) is just sad at $1.7M, and should send Amanda Seyfried on a search for the next half-decent rom-com or soap opera script that comes her way.

HOLDOVERS:  THE VOW (Screen Gems/Sony), SAFE HOUSE (Universal) and SECRET WORLD OF ARIETTY (Disney) are all sustaining well, but nothing is holding like JOURNEY 2:  THE MYSTERIOUS ISLAND (Warners), which is clearly pleasing its target audiences. The only thing that could keep it from beating the $102M US gross of the first Journey is next weekend's increased competition.  GHOST RIDER:  SPIRIT OF VENGEANCE (Sony) collapsed, and STAR WARS EPISODE I:  THE PHANTOM MENACE 3D (20th) continued to do so as well--it's starting to look like Phantom Menace may not even get to $50M, although it'll still put plenty of midichlorians in George Lucas's pocket.  

OSCAR NOMINEES:  As THE ARTIST (Weinstein) prepares for its coronation, it added about 20% more theatres and took a nice tick upward.  HUGO (Paramount) lost about 10% of its screens, but also went up a bit.  THE DESCENDANTS (Fox Searchlight), on the other hand, lost about a third of its theatres, and was somewhat down.

LIMITED RELEASES:  No notable openings or expansions this weekend, as the art-house audience is presumably occupied with Oscar Day.

NEXT WEEKEND:  March is unusually packed with event movies this year, and first up is THE LORAX (Universal), which the studio has been marketing as an all-quadrant tentpole, with spots aiming at kids (Dr. Seuss), teens (Zac Efron and Taylor Swift) and adults (Danny DeVito and Betty White)--including a fairly heavy ESPN push--and all of that doesn't even count the giant promo deals with a car company and restaurant chain.  A different sort of event is PROJECT X (Warners), an R-rated  "found footage" version of The Hangover (and produced by its director, as every promo is happy to tell you) about a teen party that goes very wild.  Also arriving is the year's first substantial limited release, Paul Weitz's BEING FLYNN (Focus), which is riding some good early buzz for its performances from Robert DeNiro and Paul Dano.

Tonight's Grammy Awards were inevitably somewhat haunted by the awful loss of Whitney Houston barely 24 hours earlier, a tragedy that seemed to have been going on for a decade yet was still shocking when it came to its fruition.  Nevertheless, the show found time to include innumerable music numbers, some of them saluting artists in the CBS demo like The Beach Boys, Paul McCartney, Glen Campbell and Bruce Springsteen, but also an odd Nicki Minaj salute to The Devil Inside, and what appeared to be Katy Perry's very public middle finger to Russell Brand.  Although the actual awards always seem to be of secondary importance on this broadcast, everything that wasn't nailed down went (deservedly, in one listener's opinion) to Adele. 

The Grammys aren't quite the Super Bowl when it comes to movie ads--studios don't pay millions to promote films that won't be opening for months--but it's still a show that gathers a relatively young (especially for CBS) and clearly, considering the featured movies, female audience, and as such it serves as a showcase for quite a few films opening soon.  Here's what the show had for movie fans:

THE LORAX (Universal) - :30 - Featuring stars Taylor Swift and Zac Efron, who have been known to warble a tune every now and then.

THE VOW (Sony/Screen Gems) - :15 - The only current release in the show, this spot was notable for making Vow look much more like a romantic comedy than it actually is.  This could indicate the studio's hope to broaden its audience beyond the weepie crowd as the picture continues in theatres.

JOHN CARTER (Disney) - :30 - One of the few action movies that figured into the evening (possibly on the theory that a shirtless Taylor Kitsch transcends genre).  This was the first promo that attempted to explain just who John Carter is and what what he's doing on Mars, which made it a welcome relief after the incomprehensible Super Bowl spot.

THIS MEANS WAR (20th) - :30 - The film is opening Friday (with sneak previews on Tuesday night), so its ads are in high rotation throughout all network schedules.  One change in this spot from the first wave is that it shows the moment when Reese Witherspoon realizes that both her beaus Tom Hardy and Chris Pine know each other.  This makes her appear a little less clueless, and also allows her to deliver the music-appropriate line "I'm Yoko!"

PROJECT X (Warners) - :30: - Yet another "found footage" movie, this time recounting a teen party from hell and (not coincidentally) produced by Todd Phillips, director of the Hangover movies.  This is a very young-skewing picture, so its promos probably won't be making many more appearances on CBS.

THE HUNGER GAMES (Lionsgate) - :30 - Mostly the same promo that aired on the Super Bowl, but slightly re-edited to emphasize heroine Katniss' feelings about leaving her sister in lieu of spectacle.

21 JUMP STREET (Sony/MGM) - :30 - The same cut-down version of the theatrical trailer that's been running for a while.  It'll be interesting to see if the giant success of The Vow prompts some Channing Tatum-intensive spots between now and the opening.

ACT OF VALOR (Relativity) - :15 - The other action movie of the night, this promo, despite its short length, found time to name the country music stars who supplied songs for the soundtrack.

GOOD DEEDS (Lionsgate) - :15 - The latest from Tyler Perry, it appears to be about a man named Deeds who decides he has to start doing good.  No one can accuse the title of being false advertising.  (Coming soon from Tyler Perry:  "Return of the Man In Woman Clothes.")

WANDERLUST (Universal) ) - :30 - Like most of the spots for this Paul Rudd/Jennifer Aniston comedy, this plays up the "Omigod, they're hippies!" aspect of the commune where the lead couple goes to recharge their batteries.

In these heady moments after the NY Giants' triumphant victory over the New England Patriots (I'd say "Sorry, New England fans," but I wouldn't mean it), let's take a moment to look at the other major event of the evening:  the ads for upcoming movies.  (Mitch Metcalf will offer a separate take on NBC's use of its promo time during the broadcast, which somewhat surprisingly wasn't as Smash-intensive as one might have expected.)

The average cost of a 30-second ad on the Super Bowl is $3.5M, so this isn't where you'll see promotion for the latest Sundance sensation.  With just a couple of exceptions, the ads were almost all for big-budget action extravaganzas, split between movies opening in the next few weeks and summer tentpoles looking to generate some buzz.

They were also, without any exception at all, unimpressive--basically lazy cut-down versions of trailers that have already been running for weeks if not months.  

Actually, the most interesting movie-ish ads of the night were the ones that weren't for movies at all, but which used motifs and stars from Hollywood.  These included an Audi ad inspired by Twilight and its young vampires (are bright headlights really such a selling point that it was worth $3.5M to plug them?), a follow-up to last year's VW ad that featured Star Wars characters--including a junior Darth Vader--in an outer-space caintina, a Hyundai piece in which all the employees sang the theme from Rocky (way to be topical, Hyundai!), the much-hyped Honda ad that riffed off Ferris Bueller's Day Off (but disappointingly featured only Matthew Broderick from the original cast).  Most notable of all was probably an ad for Dodge that didn't relate back to any specific movie, but which by using Clint Eastwood as its gnarled, spirit-of-America spokesman seemed like Hollywood history personified.  (It also resembled a Presidential campaign spot so closely that you half-expected it to end with "My name is Clint Eastwood and I approved this ad.")

Anyway, here were the movie spots themselves.  Note that this list covers the Super Bowl telecast itself (including the pre-kickoff half hour) and not the pre- or post- shows.  Lionsgate, for one, saved a few bucks by airing its Hunger Games ad during the pre-show.  For whatever reason, the movie commercials were mostly crammed into the game's 2d quarter.

SAFE HOUSE (Universal) - 30 seconds pre-kickoff:  One of the many trailer cut-downs, for a movie opening next Friday.  Mostly a quick-cut montage of things blowing up, interspersed with Denzel Washington looking intense and Ryan Reynolds looking clueless.  (As it happens, that's a fairly accurate summary of the movie.)

THE DICTATOR (Paramount) - 30 seconds pre-kickoff:  This spot for the Sacha Baron Cohen comedy opening in May at least put in a little effort by including an NBC gag (albeit a lame one).  After that, it recycled what appear to be the movie's 2 big jokes:  Megan Fox playing herself for a Kardashian gag (ha ha, they're hairier than she is) and the track race where Cohen's dictator shoots all his competitors.

BATTLESHIP (Universal) - 60 seconds 2d Quarter:  Universal spent $7M on this spot to tell us 2 things:  whatever the title says, Battleship is really Transformers 4, and please forget about the "battleship" part.  There were far more shots of round fiery alien things (which seem to have borrowed Mickey Rourke's laser whip from Iron Man 2), jet planes, and buildings blowing up than there were shot of the title boat.  Also, Liam Neeson is stalwart and Taylor Kitsch is heroic, which could conveniently be compared to--

JOHN CARTER (Disney) - 30 seconds 2d Quarter:  Another Kitsch vehicle (in this one he's shirtless), and the worst ad of the evening, thanks to an amateurish looking visual concept that had the footage from the movie receding until it was tiny and fading into a mosaic of the movie's title, made up of even tinier footage.  It made the Disney marketing department look like they'd all just gotten their first iPad app.  The footage itself continues to make the incredibly expensive Carter, which opens in just a month, seem like Dances With Wolves set on a planet full of Jar-Jar Binks lookalikes. 

THE LORAX (Universal) - 30 seconds 2d Quarter:  The oddest choice for a Super Bowl ad (one has to wonder whether the preponderance of Universal titles indicates a cut rate for NBC's home studio), this animated Dr. Seuss comedy opens next month.  The promo itself was mostly footage from the trailer, and continues to push hard on the Danny DeVito "That's a woman?!?" line. 

STAR WARS EPISODE 1:  THE PHANTOM MENANCE (20th/Lucasfilm): Thinking of Jar-Jar Binks... in case you didn't know, this ad told you it's back this Friday, and in 3D.  Jake Lloyd fans, order your tickets now.  

THE AVENGERS (Paramount/Disney) - 30 seconds 2d Quarter (the 2-minute warning slot):  This is the kickoff movie to the summer movie season, and it used its 30 seconds unimaginatively but effectively.  The whole spot was basically summed up in its final shot, which circled around for a roll-call of all the familiar characters who will appear in the movie:  Iron Man, Captain America, The Hulk, Thor, Scarlett Johansson as whoever she played in Iron Man 2, etc.

G.I. JOE - RETALIATION (Paramount) - 30 seconds 2d Quarter:  Um, where exactly was G.I. Joe in this?  We saw plenty of The Rock, and the spot made clear that Bruce Willis (playing Joe Sr) is in the house, but there wasn't a clear shot of Channing Tatum in the whole thing.  The result just looked like a generic boom-boom movie (maybe The Expendables 2?), although it did try to establish how cool it's going to be by citing Jay Z.  The movie doesn't open until late June, and should use the time to work on its message.

ACT OF VALOR (Relativity) - 30 seconds 4th Quarter:  The gimmick of this picture is that the cast is made up of actual Navy Seals who are on active duty (don't they have other things to do?), and Relativity accomplished what was no doubt its goal:  show things blowing up and make it look like this relatively low-budgeted flick is as filled with high-velocity action as the epics surrounding it.  Apart from that, the movie remains a mystery.

That was it:  nothing from the upcoming Sony (Men In Black 3, The Amazing Spider-Man), Fox (Prometheus, Abraham Lincoln:  Vampire Hunter) or Warners (The Dark Knight Rises) blockbusters, those studios having decided that their millions could be better spent when their movies are closer to launch. 

By the way, the best ad of the night in any genre?  The Doritos bit with the homicidal but very clever dog.