WEEKEND BOX OFFICE: Demons Over Angels

Two years ago, around this same time, director, Ron Howard and novelist, Dan Brown, unleashed THE DA VINCI CODE on the planet. It pulled in about $77 million in North America and blew away everyone’s expectations. The book itself was a phenomenon and that spilled over onto the screen and across the planet. That said, people may have flocked to see it but they didn’t leave happy. Howard and Brown are back again with ANGELS & DEMONS but it seems to me that despite their angelic efforts, the demonic taste their last outing left in people’s mouths has ultimately won out.


ANGELS & DEMONS has brought in an estimated $48 million in returns but that is a far cry from the opening gross of its predecessor. Reviews for both the book and the film were better this time out but there was no urgency this time out. Still, the haul was still solid and no one call ANGELS & DEMONS a disappointment. This is especially true when you factor in the international returns. ANGELS & DEMONS, the continued adventures of Tom Hanks as supreme symbologist, Robert Langdon, pulled in a little over $104 million in 96 countries to easily capture the international crown with a total of $152.3 million. Not to take away from this success but THE DA VINCI CODE did bring is $155 million internationally and a grand total of $232 million. I’ll stop harping; ANGELS & DEMONS is not THE DA VINCI CODE after all and fans can also appreciate that because it is definitely a better film too.


Howard, Hanks and Brown (not a law firm) only narrowly captured the top position in North America as last week’s champ, STAR TREK, came in just behind with $43 million. A 42% drop for a fan heavy summer blockbuster is extremely respectable. This is especially true when you consider the 65%+ drop of WOLVERINE in its second weekend. WOLVERINE tapered off this week with only a 44% drop but in just two weeks, STAR TREK has nearly totaled more than WOLVERINE has in three weeks ($147 million vs. $151).


As there were no other debuts in the Top 10, which did about 4% better than the same weekend last year when PRINCE CASPIAN debuted with $55 million, we can go straight to the excitement happening below it. The oft delayed, THE BROTHERS BLOOM, starring Adrian Brody, Mark Ruffalo and Rachel Weisz, finally came out and actually did well. It didn’t capture the honor of having the highest per screen average around but it did fare better than ANGELS & DEMONS, with an average of over $20K on just 4 screens. The highest per screen average around actually went to French export, SUMMER HOURS, starring Juliette Binoche. The film in which siblings let go of their past during an estate sale pulled in over $24K per screen on just 2 screens. This week’s only other major platform debut was a disappointing finish for the Steve Zahn/Jennifer Aniston indie, MANAGEMENT. The film debuted on 212 screens and brought in less than $2K per screen. Promotion was pretty minimal though so I guess that was what management expected.

NEXT WEEK: ANGELS & DEMONS does not stand a chance against the overcrowded weekend that is coming. First off, on the smaller fare front, THE BROTHERS BLOOM will expand. Steven Soderbergh’s brilliant and beautiful, THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE hits 30 screens across the country. And Jessica Biel debuts her British farce, EASY VIRTUE. When it comes to bigger movies, I think the biggest casualty will be the Wayans Brothers spoof, DANCE FLICK (2300 screens). It’s going to come down to two intensely different movies battling it out for the top spot. Ben Stiller returns in NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM 2 (4000 screens), hoping to repeat the long-term success of his first family hit. McG and Christian Bale though are back with a reenergized franchise on Thursday as TERMINATOR SALVATION (3500 screens) finally declares war on the multiplexes.

Source: Box Office Mojo

ANGELS & DEMONS

Written by David Koepp and Akiva Goldsman
Directed by Ron Howard
Starring Tom Hanks, Ayelet Zurer, Ewan McGregor and Armin Mueller-Stahl

Camerlengo Patrick McKenna: Science and religion are not enemies. There are simply some things that science is too young to understand.

It all appropriately starts out of focus. If there are secrets that have remained elusively intact throughout history, they belong to the Roman Catholic church, buried somewhere deep within the Vatican archives. And if there is one fictional character capable of deciphering these cryptically encoded secrets, it is Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks). While originally written as a prequel to THE DA VINCI CODE, author, Dan Brown’s ANGELS & DEMONS has been translated to film as a sequel to the controversial counterpart. Last time out, the general consensus was that the book was better than the movie and, from what I gather, most Brown fans consider ANGELS & DEMONS to be a better book. Ron Howard, the director of both projects, has got a lot to live up to. As the film comes into focus though, it becomes clear that Howard has ignored the fans prayers and this film in the likeness of the first.


The two uncredited stars of ANGELS & DEMONS are introduced in the first few scenes. They are science and religion. Howard gives us religion by inundating the viewer with extreme close-up’s of was seals on parchment and incense burners. The iconography is meant to be grandiose and looming but actually comes across as dated and cliché. Science comes in the form of anti-matter. A team of scientists is about to whipe opposing protons and atoms at each at an incredible speed inside a great big tube underground that could potentially devastate most of Europe if the experiment were to go awry. Needless to say, it does not and subsequently, science and religion meet in the experiment’s success with what is called the God particle. It also just so happens that a pope has just died and the process has begun to choose a new one. Someone on the inside of the Vatican walls decides that this period of transition is the perfect time to use this God particle to bring down God’s representation here on earth.


THE DA VINCI CODE, initially book and inevitably the film, were decidedly controversial. Brown presented theories about Jesus’ lineage that would essentially question a serious chunk of Catholic history. ANGELS & DEMONS however, is certainly more violent but also much less an attack on the religion itself and much more just a mystery that takes place in religious settings. Hanks returns as Langdon. He is not surprisingly solid in the role but he doesn’t bring anything new at the same time. Langdon must solve a series of puzzles that were created centuries prior in order to map out a course that will lead to four cardinals that have been kidnapped and threatened with murder. What makes ANGELS & DEMONS distinctly more gripping than its predecessor is Langdon’s time limit. He must figure out the puzzles and hit certain points in Vatican City at certain hours and he seems to be constantly playing catch-up. In this regard, the new Langdon is sharp but human after all.


It is fashionable if not just facile these days to base a premise on the promise that the end days are coming. Given its religious context, ANGELS & DEMONS is one of the few films to deal with the subject that actually seems justified in doing so. It asks the question whether the end will come at the hand of God or the hand of man but goes even further to suggest that the hand of man is just an extension of the hand of God. Unfortunately, Howard’s hand lacks the gravitas of the Creator’s.

THE DA VINCI CODE

Written by Akiva Goldsman
Directed by Ron Howard

Writer's Note: I don't bother masking the conspiracy theory at the root of this film. Read at your own risk.

Ordinarily, I would think it grossly unfair to criticize a work directly regarding its translation from book to film. The literary medium offers its readers the opportunity to imagine the events unfolding any way they would like while the cinematic medium does all the imagining for you. In the case of Ron Howard’s adaptation of author Dan Brown’s international phenomenon, THE DAVINCI CODE, there isn’t much imagination happening on the filmmaker’s part though. Avoiding comparison here would actually be the great injustice as the immense anticipation that preceded the release of this film was all to do with the ultra-wide popularity of the book. Brown’s novel is easily digested. It’s lead characters, Robert Langdon and Sophie Neveu, are being chased by numerous parties throughout lavish and romantic European settings. The chase and threat of capture keeps people turning the pages and the international flavour makes people feel as if in the presence of culture. For likely many others, and myself, these were the least intriguing elements of the book. What kept me coming back and barreling through hundreds of pages at a time was the book’s unapologetic and relentless blasphemy against the Christian faith. Brown immerses the viewer amidst characters and settings that exist to varying degrees in real life, thus blurring the lines between fiction and non. Somewhere in between the facts and the fabrications, Brown drops his theoretical bomb – that the ever-elusive Holy Grail, the cup of Jesus Christ, is in fact not a cup at all but rather a person, a woman. The woman in question is the infamous Mary Magdalene and the chalice is her womb, the carrier of the bloodline of Jesus Christ. Yes, you heard right, folks! Jesus got it on with the prostitute and she went on to have his child and their descendants are still here on earth today. I am not for attacks on Christians without purpose but this is not an attack so much as an alternate theory to the foundation their shaky religion rests upon.

I can understand why the Vatican is concerned about the impact this film could have. If you forget for a second, it’s easy to get sucked into all this lore and accept it as fact or at least as potentially true. That being said, it is borderline insulting of the Vatican to presume the film-going public is not intelligent enough to know the difference between history and plain story. Their concern is not for the entire film-going public though, it is more so for the middle of the road viewer who just passively absorbs images without thinking. When I think of these filmgoers, I think of the ideal Ron Howard fan. Howard doesn’t make bad movies (OK, HOW THE GRINCH STOLE CHRISTMAS was bad) but he also doesn’t make spectacular movies (and no, I don’t have an example to refute that). THE DAVINCI CODE has all the elements one would expect from a large-scale Howard production, from big names to big locations. But what it attempts to mask with size is not a lack of substance but rather a lack of control over that substance. Howard coaxes performances from the cast that are inconsistent and hollow. As Langdon, Tom Hanks is sensible, curious and introspective. Ian McKellan plays Leigh Teabing, a Holy Grail expert as playful and cheeky. On the other hand, the usually deep Alfred Molina is farcical and Audrey Tautou looks lost and confused as Neveu; at times she barely seems to know where to stand.


One of the book’s major criticisms, aside from it relying too heavily on conspiracy theories and barely bothering with style, is that it reads like a high-spirited Hollywood blockbuster. Ironically, Howard’s film interpretation plays out nothing like one. It is tiring at times and stale at others. The hackneyed script by frequent Howard collaborator, Akiva Goldsman, cuts out numerous Grail factoids from the book that lend to the theory’s credibility but yet still manages to get frequently bogged down in Grail history throughout the film. The result is slowed pacing during scenes that are meant to be suspenseful. Lengthy background explanations take place during car chases and moments when killers are waiting to attack in the next room but the danger never presents itself until the explaining is all done (leading me to wonder if perhaps the attacker took a bathroom break). With the action forced to wait its turn, the viewer feels the flaws and loses their patience. Howard has taken a book that seemed to have been written with a film deal in mind and made a mess of the already carefully laid plans. As cheap as it is to say this, I must. You’re better off reading the book.