Never an Absolution: 15 years later, a look at the 5 best films murdered during Titanic's 4-month reign of box office terror.

This winter will of course mark the fifteenth anniversary of the momentous box office run of Titanic.  For over three months, the James Cameron epic dominated the box office in a fashion unseen since E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial during its initial 1982 release.  The film sat atop the box office for an unprecedented fifteen weekends, a record for unbroken domination and the second most weekends at number one on history (E.T. had sixteen weekends atop, but only six of them were in a row).  From December 19th, 1997 until April 3rd, 1998, it caused crushed pretty much everything in its path.  Aside from a few offhand Fridays were a new film temporarily took the top spot (US Marshals, The Man With the Iron Mask and the re-release of Grease during its March run), but the first three months of 1998 were all about Titanic.  But while we must remember this astonishing run of utter and complete domination, which was the last of its kind, we must also take a moment to remember the many many films laid to waste in its path.  Oh there were a few survivors, such as the aforementioned Fugitive spin-off and the Three Musketeers sequel that happened to also star Leonardo DiCaprio, along with Adam Sandler's break-out smash The Wedding Singer (as well as um, Everest IMAX which slowly earned $87 million after opening on March 6th). But otherwise Winter 1998 was merely mass grave.  Ironically, there were actually at least several worthwhile films, now mostly forgotten in the dustbin of history, that bombed during those cold winter months.  So this is a place to remember five worthwhile pictures that were flattened by the mighty ship.  All deserved their moment in the spotlight, some have become cult favorites while others are barely remembered at all.    

Weekend Box Office (11-04-12): Wreck It Ralph sets a Disney animation record while Flight soars to $25 million on just 1,844 screens.

The holiday season started off with a bang this weekend, with three major openers, all of which over-performed or opened within reasonable expectations.  If Wreck It Ralph's (review) estimate holds, it will have the biggest three-day debut for a non-Pixar Disney cartoon ever.  Believe it or not, a regular Disney toon has never opened at or above $50 million over a Fri-Sun period.  To be fair, The Lion King's $42 million debut back in June 1994 would equal around $75 million today and Tangled earned $48 million on the Fri-Sun portion of a $67 million five-day Thanksgiving opening.  Still, with $49.1 million, Wreck It Ralph managed to top every non-Pixar animated feature that has opened in this holiday kick-off spot save Madagascar 2's $63 million opening in 2008.  It opened higher than A Shark Tale in 2004 ($47 million), Chicken Little in 2005 ($40 million), Flushed Away in 2006 ($18 million), Bee Movie in 2007 ($38 million), A Christmas Carol in 2009 ($30 million), Megamind in 2010 ($45 million), and Puss In Boots in 2011 ($34 million over Halloween weekend and another $33 million over this weekend last year). Inflation and 3D-bumps aside, this is a strong debut for a rather crowd-pleasing cartoon that should play well for the rest of the month even with heavy competition in three weeks from Dreamworks' Rise of the Guardians.  Like pretty much every major Disney cartoon since Bolt four years ago, this film is being touted as Disney's return to glory, but merely doing the numbers means that the Mouse House has a pretty big hit on their hands.

Review: Flight (2012) is generic and conventional would-be character study that never takes off.

Flight

2012
140 minutes
rated R

by Scott Mendelson

That Robert Zemeckis's Flight does not resemble the film that is being advertised (trailer) it not in itself a crime.  Marketing is often a game of misdirection and, considering Zemeckis's reputation for spoiler-filled trailers, it's a little ironic that his return to live-action film making is advertised is such a bait-and-switch fashion.  But while I'll honestly admit that I would have preferred the film being advertised versus the film that was delivered, the core flaw of this well-acted Denzel Washington vehicle is that it's not a very compelling version of what it is.  In short it's *not* a character-driven mystery involving a plane crash and how exactly it went down and who or what was responsible.  It is simply a character study of a functioning alcoholic.  What grounds Flight is the fact that it's simple not a very good film about a functioning alcoholic, as several major narrative choices work to lessen our interest and emotional investment.

Wreck It Ralph vs Flight in the Weekend Movie Preview.

Easily expected to be the biggest film this weekend, Wreck-It Ralph is the latest release from Disney Animation. The plot follows Ralph, the protagonist in the fictional video game Fix-It Felix, who tires of being the bad guy and leaves his game to find another in which he can become a hero. Along the way he encounters Tamora Calhoun, a sergeant in the Call of Duty/Halo style game, Hero's Duty and Vanellope von Schweetz, an 8 year old girl in racing game, Sugar Rush. But while Ralph is trying to realise his dream, Schweetz discovers a problem within her own game, one that could have dire consequences not only for the cast of Sugar Rush but the entire arcade - and it looks like Ralph leaving his own game could be the cause of all the problems. Development on Wreck-It Ralph began a number of years ago, as an idea from story artist Sam Levine. At that point the picture was known as Joe Jump and featured an over the hill character attempting to make the transition into modern videogames. Levine was making good progress on the project (enough for a rough synopsis to turn up online) but when John Lasseter took over as head of Disney Animation in 2006, the status of Joe Jump became unclear. While the Pixar honcho let Levine (and his writer) work on the project for a further year, it began to languish, and with little sign of moving forward, Joe Jump was put on the shelf and Levine was assigned to another project. While Lasseter was impressed by the core idea, he wasn't sold on the story itself. 

In an era of franchises & tentpoles, Tony Scott made "movies"

As is the case with unexpected 'obituaries', you find yourself writing or saying things that you wish you had said when the person in question was still around to hear it or read it.  I wish I had written this in November 2010.  Tony Scott's film legacy is two-fold.  For the first fifteen years of his career, Tony Scott was among those most responsible for the modern-day macho blockbuster.  His second film, Top Gun, basically paved the way for the modern big-budget big-scale action picture that happened to be set on planet Earth.  I'm no fan of the film, but it was, along with Rambo: First Blood Part II, easily the biggest-scale action picture of its day that didn't involve Star Wars, Indiana Jones, or James Bond. It turned Tom Cruise into an icon and was almost as much of a cinematic game-changer as Star Wars or Batman.  But it was the second half of his career, spanning from 2001 to 2010, that made me a fan.  While we can argue over whether the first fifteen years were superior or inferior to his final nine, his last decade of work cast Mr. Scott in a new, arguably more important light.  In an era dominated by mega-budget fantasy spectacles, Tony Scott was often the last refuge for the old-school 'movie'.  

Robert Zemeckis's return to live-action, the Denzel Washington drama Flight, gets a great (spoiler-filled?) trailer.

This may be my wife's most anticipated film of 2012.  She hasn't seen the trailer, but I know her well enough to presume as much.  It's ironic that this picture marks Robert Zemeckis's return to live-action twelve years after the double-wammy of What Lies Beneath and Cast Away, as this Denzel Washington vehicle is arguably just the kind of film that they've mostly stopped making over the last decade.  Yes the film seems like an unofficial remake of Piché: entre ciel et terre and yes it appears that Robert Zemeckis is once again spoiling the living hell out of his movies via the trailers.  But those quibbles aside, this looks like a terrific piece of old-school character-driven entertainment.  It's heartening to see that Washington isn't the only actor of color onscreen, as we also have Don Cheadle, Nadine Velazquez, and Tamara Tunie among others playing seemingly major characters.  And the last time Denzel Washington and John Goodman appeared onscreen together, we got Fallen, one of the best supernatural thrillers of the last fifteen years.  So watch this if you can handle the possible spoilers contained therein.  But otherwise know that Flight debuts on November 2nd, and it frankly looks terrific.

Scott Mendelson

Weekend Box Office (02/19/12): The Vow and Safe House fend off Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance and This Means War.

It was yet another 'photo-finish' at the box office over this President's Day weekend, but as always, it's the hard numbers rather than the arbitrary rankings that matter.  But since we need to decide which movies to discuss first, in order we shall go!  For the moment, it appears that Safe House will top the charts in its second weekend after barely missing the top slot last weekend.  It grossed $23.9 million over the Fri-Sun weekend and $28 million over the holiday.  Safe House will have grossed $82 million by Monday, a rather huge total for Mr. Washington.  In just eleven days, Safe House is Washington's 7th-biggest grosser, out-grossing such films as Training Day ($76 million), Man On Fire ($77 million), and Unstoppable ($81 million).  Barring a complete collapse, Safe House should become Denzel Washington's fifth $100 million grosser over the next weekend, with an outside shot of eclipsing the $130 million gross of American Gangster, which is currently his top grosser.  While we can debate how much credit co-star Ryan Reynolds gets for this one (he certainly didn't hurt...), Safe House is already his fourth-biggest grosser and will likely out-gross Green Lantern's $116 million total in a few weeks.  I'm frankly shocked at the strong legs for this one, as it's certainly one of Washington's worst genre entries in a long career with a number of solid adult-skewing action pictures (it looks like it was shot through a puke filter and edited in a blender, plus the script is so generic it could have been written in a Mad Libs book).  Still, star-power is a rare thing these days, and Denzel Washington clearly has it.  

Dear genre filmmakers - If you want your surprise reveals to be surprising, don't make the opening credits the ultimate spoiler.

SPOILER warning - this post contains third-act spoilers for a handful of recent and not-so recent thrillers, including Safe House, which just opened on Friday.

I'm not going to go into too many details about Safe House, but I will say that it's such a painfully conventional thriller that it could have been written in a Mad Libs book.  If I crack that it would have possibly been a riveting thriller in 1988, that's not entirely an insult.  In 1988, the film would have seemed a little less boiler-plate and its now-standard political cynicism wouldn't have been quite as formulaic.  Moreover, the picture likely would not have been shot with a puke-filter over the camera and wouldn't have been edited within an inch of its life, rendering its shoot-outs and fight scenes incomprehensible.  It's not especially more violent or action-packed than something like Andrew Davis's The Package (another genre entry that also somewhat deals with getting a dangerous prisoner from point A to point B), but the moments of action and violence were cleanly shot and coherently edited.  But its most frustrating element is something that has been a problem for decades.  Like so many thrillers over the last 20-30 years, a large chunk of the tension in Safe House depends on trying to uncover which of the alleged good guys may actually be a bad guy.  And like so many genre entries of late, the would-be mystery is anything but mysterious due to some inexplicably obvious casting.

Weekend Box Office (02/12/12): Everybody wins as The Vow breaks records, Safe House opens huge, Journey 2 best Journey 1, and Phantom Menace 3D feels the Force.

Wow.  Just wow.  Four major releases debuted this weekend and every single one of them opened with superb numbers.  On one hand, that means that every respective demographic was ably served this weekend.  On the other hand, one can only wonder how much cash was sacrificed by opening these four movies on the same weekend.  Anyway, the top film of the weekend was the Rachel McAdams/Channing Tatum romantic drama The Vow.  The $30 million Screen Gems drama, which by the way is NOT based on a Nicholas Sparks novel (it's a true story), debuted with an eye-popping $41 million, a record for the studio.  That's well-over $10 million more than the $30.4 million debut of Dear John, which was the previous record-holder for an opening weekend for a pure romantic drama.  The film played 55% under-25 years old and 72% female.  Obviously everything clicked on the marketing for this one, and Channing Tatum is now the official king of the romantic drama, having headlined the first one to open with more than $30 million and now the first one to open with over $40 million, while Rachel McAdams is the queen, now holding the first and fourth-biggest opening weekend for an unfiltered romantic drama ($18 million for The Time Traveler's Wife).  Where it goes from here is an open question, as Dear John did not have the strongest legs, topping out at $80 million (or just below the $81 million gross of Rachel McAdam's The Notebook).  On the plus side, The Vow doesn't have the same-demo blockbuster Valentine's Day nipping on its heals like Dear John did.  Plus, even if The Vow has the same quick-kill performance (2.6x weekend-to-final multiplier), it will become the first pure romantic drama (no explosions, no action scenes, no mass-disaster in the third act) to cross $100 million since Jerry McGuire in 1996.

Weekend Box Office (02/05/12): Chronicle and The Woman In Black both debut to around $20 million while Big Miracle tanks.

As I wrote yesterday (HERE), I don't care which of the two big releases end up at number one for this weekend.  Chronicle and The Woman In Black are both low-budget over/under $15 million releases that are somewhat abnormal in terms of what's considered a mainstream release, both were exceedingly well-marketed (as opposed to 'saturation marketing'), and both are unqualified hits after their first three days.  But since I have to choose which film to discuss first, I will pick Chronicle (review), which A) I've seen and B) is the unofficial #1 film this weekend with $22 million (as opposed to The Woman In Black, which made 'just' $21 million).  Chronicle announces the arrival of director Josh Trank (and writer Max Landis, son of John).  The quite compelling and thoughtful character study, which is plays with the genre trappings of as super-hero origin story through the 'found footage' format, cost just $12 million and drew a large chunk of young audiences of both genders (it played 45% female).  I have no idea what the legs will be like on this downbeat morality play (it received a B from Cinemascore), but I'd argue its artistic and box office success pretty much kills Warner Bros's planned live-action Akira remake and hurts Sony's The Amazing Spider-Man (which is advertising itself as a more low-key and emotionally-gritty superhero origin story... whoops).  Come what may, a very good and creative little movie just opened very well, and that's a win for everyone.

Why Denzel Washington is the last old-fashioned movie star...

It is no secret that I often whine about the lack of mid-budget, star-driven, adult-skewing thrillers in this fantasy-tent pole era.  And while there has certainly been a slight resurgence in the form over the last year, it still remains a fact that most of the stars of today and yesterday (or their respective agents) would rather hitch their tent to an established franchise rather than try their hand at the star vehicle.  In a time when Tom  Hanks tried (needlessly I'd argue) to cling to relevancy by stepping into the Dan Brown universe and where even Will Smith was so traumatized by the 'failure' of Seven Pounds that he went speeding back to Men in Black (and may end up doing another Independence Day), Denzel Washington is arguably the last of a dying breed.  He is a true movie star in the purest sense of the term and a reminder of the kind of movies, like Safe House (trailer) that were once made by such stars when the term had any real value.

Denzel Washington/Ryan Reynolds thriller Safe House gets a terrific trailer.

If you've read me for any amount of time, you'd heard me complain the lack of mid-budget star-driven thrillers.  As such, you can imagine that this thing looks right up my alley.  Denzel Washington is playing a villain for the first time since American Gangster four years ago this week, and he looks refreshingly low-key this time around and a solid foil for Ryan Reynolds.  The supporting cast is sharp (Vera Farmiga, Brendan Gleeson, Liam Cunningham, Sam Shepard, Robert Patrick, and Tim McGraw) and the trailer effectively uses Jay-Z's "No Church in the Wild" for a solid mix of tension and emotional investment.  A word of warning, the trailer may end up being a bit spoilery, as it heavily hints as a possible antagonist while clearly showing stuff that likely doesn't happen until the third act.  This Universal release drops February 10th, 2012 and it's instantly near the top of my 'must-see' list in the new year.

Scott Mendelson  

Weekend Box Office (11/28/10): Tangled and Harry Potter 7 face off over crowded Thanksgiving. Burlesque, Faster, Love and Other Drugs open soft.

Like a combination of Thanksgiving holidays past, it was a combination of Harry Potter holding down the fort against all newcomers, while a Disney animated property broke out of the gate. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part I still won the three-day and five-day weekend derby, but Disney's Tangled had a smashing debut that set a record for a three-day opening weekend for a standard Disney cartoon (IE - not Pixar). The Disney fairy-tale scored $48.7 million over the Fri-Sun portion of the weekend and amassed a whopping $68.7 million since opening on Wednesday. Inflation and 3D price-bump aside, this best the $42 million opening of The Lion King way back in summer 1994 (which was one of the top-five opening weekends ever at the time). It's also the second-largest Thanksgiving opening weekend in history, behind the $80 million five-day and $59 million three-day opening weekend of Toy Story 2 back in 1999 (that $57 million debut was the third-biggest ever at the time). The lesson here is a simple one: Disney REALLY should have opened The Princess and the Frog in wide release over Thanksgiving last year.

Weekend Box Office Review (11/14/10): Megamind repeats, Unstoppable opens strong, Morning Glory underwhelms.

Megamind was at the top of the box office for the second (and final) time this weekend. The second super-villain animated film the year took in another $29.1 million. The 36% drop was less than the 41% drop for Despicable Me's second weekend (which was $32 million), but the latter had $118 million by day ten while Megamind has grossed $88.8 million at the end of its second weekend. Among other Dreamworks titles, Megamind had a slightly higher second weekend than How to Train Your Dragon ($29 million), but it lags $3 million behind in ten-day totals thus far. Megamind is chasing the $198 million total of Monsters Vs. Aliens. It's $15 million behind after two weekends. Whether it approaches the $180 million gross of Madagascar 2 or the $155 million final take of Over the Hedge is a matter of how well it can withstand the blinding white heat of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part I.