There as no slump then, there is no slump now! Why comparing cumulative weekend box office makes no sense and hurts our desire for better movies.

Brandon Grey at Box Office Mojo called the weekend box office 'listless'. Nikkie Finke at Deadline Hollywood called it 'a soft weekend'. And Brent Lang of The Wrap called it 'sluggish'. 'Weak' was the word as three mid-to-low budget films opened with both solid reviews and decent box office. Also on everyone's mind was the fact that this weekend was down this year by about 10% compared to this weekend in 2010. We've been hearing that talk quite a bit this year, as each weekend is considered a quasi-disaster because it didn't equal or surpass the respective weekend from last year. There is a reason I never discuss how well a respective weekend performed compared to the same weekend last year or the year before. It's irrelevant. Every year brings different movies and those movies perform in vastly different ways from the year before or the year after. More importantly, it feeds into the absurd 'this year must be BIGGER' mentality, even if the product doesn't justify that. Want to know why this year's first few months have been down compared to last year? A) Avatar and B) Alice in Wonderland.

Weekend Box Office (03/20/11): Adult genre fare cannibalize each other as Limitless, Lincoln Lawyer and Paul all open 'okay'.

I often complain about the lack of big-studio adult genre pictures while pointing out that the few such entries generally do well due to the paucity of such things in the marketplace. Alas, this weekend was a comparative embarrassment of riches, with three genre pictures, all starring adults, two rated R, and none costing more than $40 million. Ironically, all three films did moderately well, but at least two of them would likely have done even better without direct demo competition. The number one film of the weekend was Limitless. The Bradley Cooper/Robert De Niro thriller grossed $19 million, and proving a major win for the struggling Relatively. This was a real test of Bradley Cooper's star power and he delivered. The film benefited from an easily-explained high-concept (a pill that makes you the smartest man on Earth). The film played 52% female and 60% over-25. Since the relatively-well reviewed picture cost just $27 million, this is an easy win for everyone involved.

Weekend Box Office (03/13/11): Battle: Los Angeles hits hard, Red Riding Hood lands softly, while Disney's Mars Needs Moms crashes.

As expected, the heavily-hyped Battle: Los Angeles (teaser/review) topped the box office this weekend, grossing an estimated $35.7 million. If that number holds, it will be the twelfth-biggest March opening in history, and a rock-solid start for a would-be tentpole that cost (depending on who you asked) $70 or $100 million. There was talk that the picture would break out and perhaps reach $50-60 million, but that was frankly silly. We've been spoiled the last few years, with massive March openings like 300 ($70 million), Watchmen ($55 million), and the astonishingly-huge Alice in Wonderland ($116 million). But generally speaking, March releases that aren't animated don't reach $35 million. We didn't have a single live-action $35 million opener in March until 2005 (The Ring Two), and there have been only five others since then prior to this weekend (the three above examples, plus Wild Hogs at $39 million, 10,000 BC at $35 million), so getting anywhere close to $40 million in the third month of the year has to be considered a win, especially without any kind of 3D or IMAX advantage.

Review: Battle: Los Angeles (2011)

Battle: Los Angeles
2011
116 minutes
rated PG-13

by Scott Mendelson

Rare is the movie that loses points for being too realistic. But Jonathan Liebesman's alien invasion picture feels less like an epic and more like a genuinely plausible war picture. This is not a bad thing, and the film is generally successful at showing what the military response to such a domestic threat might be. The film is basically Black Hawk Down, with the faceless marauders being from outer-space instead of militant indignant people. While the marketing promises scale, the film merely delivers claustrophobic survival with no real deeper meaning that would give the carnage any real weight. Liebesman gets the details seemingly right, but the end result is a war picture where the fact that the invaders are from 'up there' seems almost beside the point.

Battle: Los Angeles gets a terrific trailer.

For what it's worth, this is the first film of 2011 that my wife truly wants to see. And frankly, I can't blame her. This looks like a terrifying and intense bit of science-fiction. Compare it to Independence Day if you must, but this is one of the rare Earth-set blockbusters that seems to have the sheer scale of that 1996 popcorn classic. And yes, I love any genre trailer that uses seemingly inappropriate music to increase the creepiness, as this trailer does at the very end. In this case, like the first teaser, the music choice is "Sun's Gone Dim and the Sky's Black" by Jóhann Jóhannsson. I've said this a million times, but the right song or music choice can turn a trailer into a piece of stand-alone art (see: Inception, Where the Wild Things Are, the True Grit teaser, and the second Star Trek trailer). Anyway, this one comes out March 11, 2011.

Scott Mendelson

Battle: Los Angeles gets a teaser.

There is apparently a lawsuit going on right now between Sony and the makers of Skyline, as apparently the Strause Brothers and company did special effects work flirting with directing the upcoming alien invasion saga, before going off and making their own low-budget version (think the lawsuit that drives the narrative of The Social Network). So it's an unsurprising bit of 'up-yours' that Sony has this shiny and impressive new teaser to debut on the very day Skyline opens. Sony seems to be saying: "Skyline was the cheap $20 million version, Battle: Los Angeles is the real deal." As for the trailer itself, it certainly seems to have an impressive scale, and I'm a fan of director Jonathan Liebesman. He was on the shortlist to direct Chris Nolan's Superman and he eventually got the gig directing Wrath of the Titans on the alleged strength of this picture. The only recognizable cast member is Michelle Rodriguez, and the soft and haunting soundtrack gives the teaser a weight that generic action music would have denied it. So far so good. This one comes out March 11, 2011.

Scott Mendelson