WEEKEND BOX OFFICE: Big Cars, Big Names, Big Money

Friday was my birthday. Every year when my birthday roles around, there are two things I wonder about. The first is whether all the snow will be gone by that day and the second is what horrific mess Hollywood will unleash on my special day. You see, April is considered in the industry to be the biggest dumping ground for films after January and the first week of April is the worst of all. This year was no different and nothing was expected to fare well. Certainly no records were expected to be smashed. Hollywood will learn a new lesson though now. April should not be dismissed and Vin Diesel should never be underestimated.


I’m sure no one at Universal saw this coming. They brought back the original cast of a waning franchise and instead of pulling in modest returns that would eventually justify its budget, FAST AND FURIOUS pulled out of the garage and way up in front of the rest. Not only did it outpace the entire domestic gross of the last installment, it also boasts the biggest April opening weekend ever and the second biggest opening for any film outside of the summer or holiday seasons and frames, behind THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST. It’s $20K per screen average exceeds every other title in release but its true test will be longevity. Fast out of the gate does not always mean a first place finish in the end. Still, if I was wearing a hat right now, I would tip my it to Universal; you definitely pulled a fast one on me and have left me somewhat furious.


This weekend’s only other Top 10 debut fell in line with expectations, as ADVENTURELAND opened in sixth place. The film stars TWILIGHT sensation, Kristen Stewart but she cannot open pictures yet and this is hardly her picture to open. Someone should have told helmer, Greg Mottola that teenagers don’t like their movies with perspective, just profanity. Meanwhile, indie favorite, SUNSHINE CLEANING snuck into the Top 10 in its fourth week of release. In its widest expansion yet, the film seems to have reached its saturation point, seeing its per screen average dip below $4K.


Two sophomore efforts debuted to solid starts this weekend in the art house world. LES CHORISTES director, Christophe Barratier returns with PARIS 36. Opening on just 7 screens, this amusingly theatrical romp pulled in an average of over $10K. And you would think that after making a splash and directing Ryan Gosling to an Oscar nomination in their first effort, HALF NELSON, that Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck would be looking to make bigger inroads toward Hollywood but they played things very indie with SUGAR. Unfortunately, the baseball film opened on 11 screens to the tune of a mediocre average of under $7K. Good word of mouth will be needed for both to flourish.

NEXT WEEK: April tries to earn back its reputation as a garbage month with DRAGONBALL: EVOLUTION (2100 screens). Seth Rogen will try to fly without a mustache in the second comedy this year to have a mall cop as a protagonist in OBSERVE AND REPORT (2500 screens). Neither will be able to trump Miley Cyrus though. HANNAH MONTANA: THE MOVIE will be rolling out on over 3000 screens. Cover your ears; the screaming girls are coming this way.

It isn’t exactly foreign, or alien if you will, to see an animated feature come out on top of the chart with massive numbers. This specific debut though certainly packed a particularly monstrous wallop. Dreanworks’ MONSTERS VS. ALIENS is Dreamworks’ second biggest opening for an animated film after last summer’s KUNG-FU PANDA. It is the third best March opening after Zach Snyder’s 300 and the second installment in the ICE AGE series. More importantly though, MONSTERS VS. ALIENS establishes the viability and profitability of the budding 3D market. Representing just 28% of the entire theatre count, 3D screens amassed 58% of the final weekend gross and will inevitably get all of Hollywood talking about the future of the cinema.


The box office saw two other Top 10 debuts this week. The first is yet another horror film, THE HAUNTING IN CONNECTICUT. Despite its certainly impressive debut, it will likely sink down the same route as the countless other horror films that open strong and die off faster than the first disposable victim in, well, all these equally disposable horror flicks. The week’s other debut goes to 12 ROUNDS, the latest Renny Harlin action film. The film was not heavily promoted and stars B-list action star, John Cena. This would most likely explain for the paltry $5 million it took in for a seventh place finish.


Continuing its squeaky clean expansion, SUNSHINE CLEANING just missed out on the Top 10, finishing in 11th place. The film officially goes art-house wide next week when it reaches 500 screens but at 167 screens this weekend, its gross improved 100% over last week and the Amy Adams/Emily Blunt vehicle maintained a per screen average of over $8K. A handful of other very limited runs saw impressive averages this weekend. Debuting this week on three and four screens respectively, Independent Spirit nominated, GOODBYE SOLO brought in $13.5K per screen and French export, SHALL WE KISS? secured an average of nearly $8K. Just like last week though, the highest per screen average belongs to VALENTINO: THE LAST EMPORER. The film added one screen this week for a whopping total of two screens and nailed down an average of $15K for a 38% increase over last week.


slumAnd the Top 10 says goodbye this week to one its longest mainstays. After a total of 12 non-consecutive weeks in the Top 10, Best Picture winner, SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE suffered a great descent this week. With its impending DVD release coming on Tuesday, the little movie that not only could but did, saw a drop of nearly 60% and a loss of over 1200 theatres. Still, at a total domestic gross of nearly $140K and a total of eight Oscars, I’d say the Danny Boyle picture definitely fared better than it would have had it been released straight to video, as it was originally intended.

NEXT WEEK: Sundance hit and directorial follow-up to SUPERBAD, ADVENTURELAND lands ion1800 screens. More importantly though, its time to reboot and revisit FAST AND FURIOUS with the entire original cast and two less usages of the word, “the”, on over 3400 screens.

SUNSHINE CLEANING

Written by Megan Holley
Directed by Christine Jeffs
Starring Amy Adams, Emily Blunt, Steve Zahn, Clifton Collins Jr. and Alan Arkin


Rose Lorkowski: Do you think all I can do is clean up other people’s shit?

When some lonely soul walks into a sporting goods store and blows his brains out all over the ceiling with a 20-gage shotgun from behind the counter, someone has got to come in and clean up that mess. Not only would it deter potential shoppers to find leftover bits of brain mass mixed in with the fishing poles but, more importantly, the violence that ripped through the fabric of everyday life needs to be cleaned from memory in order to return to our blissful existences. Enter Rose and Norah Lorkowski (Amy Adams and Emily Blunt), two sisters who reasonably could be a few steps away from the same fate as the man with the shotgun if they got to seriously thinking about their lives. Despite their troubles, the two have paired up to clean up the messes no one else wants to touch. What they lack in style, they make up with smiles as the two try to find life by facing death head on in SUNSHINE CLEANING.


The people who brought you LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE have brought you back to Albuquerque, New Mexico. They also tried to bring back that signature quirk you enjoyed so much last time, even going so far as to cast Alan Arkin in the role of a loud, unconventional grandfather. While they may not have succeeded in recreating that same kind of wide satisfaction, they have crafted a sensitive film that will definitely speak to the millions struggling in America today to forge their own path and bring some semblance of meaning to their lives. When we meet Rose, she is cleaning people’s houses just so she can afford her dilapidated little house. Her sister Norah can’t even be bothered to get out of bed to show up for her pointless waitress job. These are not girls with hope but they find very quickly that hope can come back into your life faster than you would expect and even when after you’ve given up on it.


As far as sisters go, Adams and Blunt are a pretty believable pair. You can tell they care about each other but you know that they also infuriate each other too. Adams’ mousy and unobtrusive demeanor gives Rose, a former prom queen whose popularity has been waning ever since, the delicate balance of hope and resigned defeat necessary to make her sympathetic and likable. You just know that when she exits the shower to repeat the affirmations written on a post-it stuck to her foggy mirror that she only half believes what she’s saying, if that. Blunt on the other hand is not looking for anyone’s acceptance, not even her own. She makes good on her own name and delivers Norah with a direct frankness that reveals more than she realizes. For Norah, hope is not something she tries to force into her life; no, hope for Norah, just finds her and sneaks its own way into her consciousness.


SUNSHINE CLEANING definitely brings the sunshine in but it does so in such a downtrodden fashion that it makes it all the more meaningful to catch a glimpse and easy to ignore the clouds in the sky. It is a healing experience that never feels as though it is forcing its cleansing on the audience or itself. Instead, the sisters just feel compelled to clean because their lives have been dirty for far too long. What they find beneath the grime is an unexpected and infectious grin.

WEEKEND BOX OFFICE: I Knew It

Nicolas Cage wasn’t worried. He knew that his latest action masterpiece, KNOWING, would come out on top. It was written in binary code or something on some scrap of paper that was buried in a time capsule for over fifty years. Does that sound ludicrous? You should see KNOWING then. And see it, you did, to the tune of nearly $25 million. The film’s future as the box office champ was sealed on Friday when KNOWING took in in one day what Cage’s last number one “hit”, BANGKOK DANGEROUS, took in all weekend. Critics were less than enthused about Cages latest stagy offering but when has that ever deterred fans from seeing one of his films?


Two other wide releases tried hard to top Cage but could not. If only they too had read that code from fifty years ago, they would known it was never going to happen. Still, the Paul Rudd-Jason Segal bromance, I LOVE YOU, MAN, has nothing to be ashamed of with its second place debut. The film did similar business to Rudd last film, ROLE MODELS, and Segal’s first starring effort, FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL. With good word of mouth, the film could experience similar strong holds as their predecessors and find its way to a $60+ million gross. Coming in for a somewhat disappointing third place finish in Tony Gilroy’s follow up to MICHAEL CLAYTON, DUPLICITY. Sure a $14 million gross for reasonably wide release is decent business but this picture stars bonafide movie stars, Julia Roberts and Clive Owen. Their charisma alone should have carried this to a much stronger start. Reviews have been mixed so returns should dwindle fairly quickly, as should the two stars’ asking prices.


In limited release news, Sundance favorite from this year, SIN NOMBRE, opened strongly, while Sundance favorite from last year, SUNSHINE CLEANING continued its successful expansion. SIN NOMBRE walked away from Sundance with the cinematography prize as the prize for dramatic direction and this weekend, opened to the tune of a $12K per screen average on six screens. SUNSHINE CLEANING, jumped its theatre count from 4 to 64 and saw its returns explode over 200%. The Amy Adams-Emily Blunt indie comedy is being well received and jumps its count to over 250 next week. Meanwhile, the largest per screen average of any film in release belongs to VALENTINO: THE LAST EMPEROR. The documentary about the great fashion designer opened to over $20K per screen on just one screen in all of North America.


NEXT WEEK: The latest Renny Harlin action flick, 12 ROUNDS finds its way to 2,200 screens. It’s been a whole week without a wide horror release so THE HAUNTING IN CONNECTICUT steps in to fill the void next week on 2,600 screens. And the Dreamworks Animation folks are hoping for a big score with the big film, MONSTERS VS. ALIENS (3,500 screens).

Source: Box Office Mojo

WEEKEND BOX OFFICE: Race to Watchmen Mountain

No one considered the race to be much of one with any actual contest. WATCHMEN may have had a sturdy but not epic debut last week but certainly no one expected the spring’s most anticipated film to fall off by nearly 70% in its second week. And so RACE TO WITCH MOUNTAIN, a film I can’t imagine anyone was anticipating on any level whatsoever, was able to finish with a surprising first place. More embarrassing still, the race wasn’t even close.


Disney’s pursuit of fusing amusement park rides with big adventure movies in order to drive business back and forth between the two continued this weekend with RACE TO WITCH MOUNTAIN. With no other family fare in sight, save for CORALINE, which held up well despite the fresh competition, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson was able to get those little space alien kids back to their home planet on top of the big, scary mountain (I didn’t actually see the movie so I’m guessing here) and give Disney a solid opening. The week’s other debuts went from decent (THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT) to embarrassingly bad (MISS MARCH). Well, MISS MARCH’s box office returns are proportionate to the intelligence of the premise so maybe it isn’t as embarrassing as it is appropriate.


Now, I have to get back to WATCHMEN. Warner Brothers is claiming that the 67% drop falls completely in line with other event pictures. They are right about that. After all, it only ranks 89th in terms of overall largest second week drops isn’t nearly as steep as the 80% plummet posted by FRIDAY THE 13TH last month. Still, I imagine they must have been making this statement through ground teeth. This was supposed to be a blockbuster and now it looks like it may go on to make as much as a movie about a mall cop. Where were the devout fans that have been supposedly waiting for years for this film to hit? Not only did they not show up in hordes (or in costume) for the premiere but those who did didn’t even care to see it a second time this weekend. It is all very un-geek-like.


And speaking of unexpected, a little female-skewed indie comedy starring Amy Adams and Emily Blunt, managed a debut per screen average of over $53K. SUNSHINE CLEANING, distributed by Overture pictures, opened on just four screens but brought in the highest per screen average of any film this year. The pic expands to 50 screens next week.

Overall, the box office was down 17% over last year, the first decline it has seen all year.

NEXT WEEK: Nicolas Cage knows too much (for a change) in THE KNOWING (3000+ screens); Jason Segal and Paul Rudd aren’t afraid to say I LOVE YOU, MAN (2500 screens) and Julia Roberts and Clive Owen reunite for the first time since CLOSER in Tony Gilroy’s first feature since MICHAEL CLAYTON, DUPLICITY (2400 screens). Look for the Black Sheep review of their latest adventure, as well as a previously unpublished review of the award winning MICHAEL CLAYTON, later this week.

Source: Box Office Mojo