Weekend Box Office: (05/27/12): Men In Black 3 tops Memorial Day while The Moonrise Kingdom slays in limited release.

The Men In Black franchise returned to theaters this weekend after a ten year hiatus and, for better or worse, performed exactly the same as the prior Men In Black films. The first Men In Black debuted with $51 million over the Fri-Sun portion of its July 4th weekend back in 1997 while Men In Black 2 earned $52 million over the same portion in 2002.  To wit, Men In Black 3 earned an estimated $55 million over the Fri-Sun portion of the weekend with a projected $70 million Fri-Mon holiday gross. 3D-bumps and ten years worth of inflation puts a damper on the numbers (in today's respective dollars, the original's debut would be about $88 million while the sequel would be about $71 million), but the consistency is arguably a little remarkable.  It's arguably only a 'dissappointment' due to the unexpectedly high budget of the threequel, which shut down production for six weeks in the middle of filming in order to work out script kinks.  At a cost of anywhere from $220 million to $300 million, Sony was in the unenviable position of needing an 'out of this world' debut (sorry) to justify the expense, and this otherwise hearty haul wasn't it.   Having said that, it's still Will Smith's third-biggest Fri-Sun debut behind his last two blockbusters from 2007 (I Am Legend's $77 million opening) and 2008 (Hancock's $62 million Fri-Sun debut over July 4th 2008).

Weekend Box Office (05/13/12): Dark Shadows no match for The Avengers as the Marvel pic earns $103m in weekend two.

I've long said that, generally speaking, any would-be blockbusters slotted for the second major weekend of summer are doomed to somewhat under-perform, unable to break out of the spotlight hogged by whatever film kicks off the summer.  Since 1996 (when Warner Bros. officially kicked off summer with Twister in the first weekend in May), only two times has a film debuting on this very weekend actually topped the box office, and both times were due to a Hugh Jackman franchise film so disappointing audiences that moviegoers were more-than-ready to lap up whatever came next.  In 2004, Troy opened with $44 million against the second weekend of Van Helsing while Star Trek rode a wave of good publicity to $79 million against the crash-and-burn second weekend of X-Men Origins: Wolverine.  Other than that, the second weekend of summer is littered with either smaller films that didn't need to reach blockbuster status (The Horse Whisperer, Daddy Daycare, Monster-In-Law, Bridesmaids, etc) or would-be blockbusters that crashed hard on opening weekend (Dragonheart, Battleship Earth, Poseidon, Speed Racer, etc).  Falling into the 'close-but-no cigar' category would be Robin Hood from 2010 (which opened with a solid $37 million but still needed massive overseas dollars to recoup its $200 million budget) and this weekend's Dark Shadows.

Review: Confused, rambling Dark Shadows (2012) sucks the life out of longtime Tim Burton/Johnny Depp fans.

Dark Shadows

2012
113 minutes
rated PG-13

by Scott Mendelson

Dark Shadows is a movie with pretty much nothing to say.  It uses its culture-clash and fish-out-of-water narrative not for any kind of social meaning or parable, but purely for cheap offhand laughs.  It is filled with wonderful actors who all look spectacular but have little or nothing to do.  The film tries to play around with mixing supernatural horror, cheap comedy, and genuine soap opera theatrics, but nothing really meshes as it should.  It looks gorgeous as most Burton films do, the actors do what they can with very little, and the 70s soundtrack is filled with a mix of well-known classics and lesser-known hits.  Whether it is better or worse than Planet of the Apes or Alice In Wonderland is a moot point, it's simply yet another very bad Tim Burton film.  In short, Tim Burton's Dark Shadows can best be described in the same manner in which Alfred Hitchcock derogatorily referred to Ingrid Bergman: So beautiful... so stupid.

In a spoiler culture, the biggest offenders are the studios.

If there is one 'trend' in film marketing this year that has raised the ire of pundits and bloggers around the web, it is the practice of studios cutting what amounts to a 'teaser for a trailer'.  Summit has done this for the last couple Twilight films, but the would-be trend reached an apex with two major science-fiction summer tentpoles.  First, Fox has been cutting teasers for nearly all of its 7,000 trailers for Ridley Scott's Prometheus.  Second of all, Sony cut a 30-second teaser for its first trailer of the Total Recall remake which was to debut during a Sunday afternoon basketball game at the beginning of last month.  Everyone complains about it, but pretty much all of the movie news sits post the embeds of these 'trailer-teasers' as quickly as they are released. This week Warner Bros. unleashed an online viral game of some kind which apparently unlocked specific shots of the new Dark Knight Rises trailer.  By mid-day, someone had combined all of the shots into a video file and basically was able to present what amounted to the first half of the trailer.  Thus Warner Bros. ended up releasing the whole thing online Monday night rather than (as I presume was intended) waiting to premiere the 140-second preview in theaters attached to The Avengers on Friday.   We've now reached the point where Lionsgate released this Terry Crews-hosted 'teaser' for the upcoming Expendables 2 trailer where Crews openly admits that 'trailer-teasers' are now a mandatory marketing tool (from JoBlo).

A whole bunch (9) o' character posters for Tim Burton's Dark Shadows...

I think Empire got these posters first, but thank you to Bohemea for making all nine into one easily-pasted image (Blogger is terrible with trying to line-up multiple pictures in an orderly fashion).  Anyway, above is the final theatrical one-sheet and below are the nine visually-striking character posters.  With just six weeks to go, Warner Bros has finally started the marketing campaign.  And I say good on them for waiting!  Now all they need to do is not release another trailer and not saturate the Internet with clips two weeks prior to May 11th and they can prove that studios don't have to spend a gazillion dollars on a year-long ad campaign for major releases.  Anyway, enjoy.

Scott Mendelson

Summer 2012 is the unofficial summer of IMAX domination...

Simply put, during the first twelve weeks of summer (May 4th to July 20th), there are six, maybe seven major movies all debuting in IMAX for at least the first week of their respective theatrical runs.  Three of them are in May, one is in June, and two or three are in July.  What are they you ask?  Well...

Déjà vu all over again. Warner Bros hides Tim Burton's Dark Shadows just as they hid Tim Burton's Mars Attacks!. And why it's a good thing...

There's a new Tim Burton coming out from Warner Bros. in just over two months.  Aside from a couple stills and some half-hearted interview statements from the cast and Mr. Burton, we haven't heard or seen a thing from it.  No posters, no trailers, no TV spots, nothing.  It's October of 1996, and I'm of course referring to Mars Attacks!.  Many of my readers are too young to remember way-back-when, but the near-absence of marketing materials for Tim Burton's $80 million private-joke (which today plays like half-blockbuster deconstruction and half-right wing political fantasy) was a source of frustration for a 16-year old Tim Burton fan who was eagerly awaiting that first preview.  Today we stand in the same boat with another Warner Bros-funded Tim Burton 'comedy'.  But just over fifteen years later, what was a source of frustration is now a pleasant surprise.  Nine weeks to go, and I really don't need to see an onslaught of spoiler-filled marketing materials for the upcoming Dark Shadows.  Ten weeks to go, and I have absolutely no idea what kind of film Tim Burton and his merry band have delivered.  I don't know what it looks like, what the tone is, or all-that much about the plot.  And in this era of 'spoil the movie a year in advance', that's a special thing indeed.

A cast photo for Tim Burton's Dark Shadows.

From left to right, we have... Helena Bonham Carter as Dr. Julia Hoffman; Chloe Moretz as Carolyn Stoddard, Eva Green as Angelique Bouchard, Gulliver McGrath as David Collins, Bella Heathcote as Victoria Winters, Johnny Depp as Barnabus Collins, Ray Shirley as Mrs. Johnson, Jackie Earle Haley as Willie Loomis, Jonny Lee Miller as Roger Collins, and Michelle Pfeiffer as Elizabeth Collins Stoddard.  

Anyway, it looks pretty sharp, and Depp's make-up certainly looks less weird than the paparazzi photos that made him look like Michael Jackson.  I know nothing of the Dark Shadows television show and would prefer to keep it that way so as to judge this picture as open-mindedly as possible.  It's no secret that I'm not the world's most optimistic Tim Burton fan at the moment, but the horror-fan has never actually dabbled with vampires before, so it would seem that this is something more than a paycheck job.  It is probably too much to hope that Warner Bros. lets this out with an R-rating, but that would certainly be a step in the right direction.  Come what may, the picture will be released on May 12th, 2012 (alas, the second weekend-of-summer death slot), so we'll see.

Scott Mendelson