Weekend Box Office (01/13/13): Zero Dark Thirty tops while Gangster Squad disappoints and Haunted House overperforms.

After nearly a month in limited release, Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty (review) finally went wide this weekend and it grossed $24 million to top the weekend box office. The film now has a $29 million cume.  All eyes were on this one, with the big question being whether critical acclaim and film punditry would translate into mainstream interest.  Obviously the current 'does the movie promote torture?' controversy brought the film all kinds of free publicity, but I'd argue it scared off just as many as it brought it.  By the way, no it doesn't endorse torture because... well just watch the movie again (essay 01/essay 02)!  Anyway, the closest comparison is the Martin Luther King Day Jr. weekend wide-release debut of Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down eleven years ago next weekend, which pulled in $33 million over four days and $28 million over Fri-Sun.  The 'hunt for Bin Laden' film's debut is a bit lower, especially when inflation is accounted for (BHD's 3-day total is around $38 million in 2013 dollars), but the Scott picture was pretty much a nonstop action picture while Bigelow's is an icy and often cold 2.5 hour procedural where even the climactic action sequence is meant to disturb more than excite.  The film played 59% male and 62% over 30. Sony did a great job selling this one somewhat falsely as a triumphant action drama, although they didn't seem to make as much of an effort to bring in females for what is indeed a female-centric character drama (Jessica Chastain is terrific here).  Despite a merely okay  2.6x weekend multiplier, expect pretty strong legs as this becomes the defacto water-cooler Oscar contender (Oscar nomination essay 01/Oscar nomination essay 02), the one everyone has to see in order to participate in the national dialogue.

Weekend Box Office (01/06/13): Texas Chainsaw 3D tops the first weekend of 2013. Promised Land tanks.

Texas Chainsaw 3D topped the box office this weekend with a robust $23 million.  That's a bit behind the $33 million opening haul for The Devil Inside, but it's still easily the top horror debut for January.  Moreover, the picture earned more, even adjusted for inflation, than the last go around, the painfully underrated Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (retrospective essay).  The 2003 remake took in $28 million way back in October 2003 ($36 million in today's dollars, not even accounting for the whole 3D bump), but this under-hyped and frankly somewhat undersold quasi-sequel to the original 1973 film was never going to reach those heights. Said Platinum Dunes remake was exceedingly well-marketed, with a pioneering trailer (think how often it gets ripped off ten years later), and it basically kicked off the return of the hardcore horror film (along with the mostly ignored Wrong Turn from that May). Of course, the best weapon a new horror January film has is the October release of a new Paranormal Activity sequel, as it's a piece of prime demo-friendly marketing.  The Devil Inside attached its trailer to Paranormal Activity 3 back in October 2011 while Texas Chainsaw 3D had its trailer viewed by those attending Paranormal Activity 4 this October.  Of course, the fourth entry made about half what the third one did, so that probably didn't help.

Weekend Box Office (12/30/12): Les Miserables and Django Unchained neck and neck while The Hobbit tops again.

It's frightening sometimes how accurate the math can be.  Before this year, there were only a handful of movies that have opened on a Christmas day that happened to land on a Tuesday over the last decade (Ali and Kate and Leopold in 2001, Alien vs. Predator: Requim, The Great Debaters, and The Waterhorse).  Ali, AvP2, and the Denzel Washington drama The Great Debaters were pretty front loaded ($10m/$34m and $9.5m/$26m, and $3.5m/$13m respectively) while the smaller films (Kate and Leopold and The Waterhorse: Legend of the Deep) had smaller opening Christmas days but longer legs over the six days ($2.5m/$17m and $2.3m/$16.7m).  I use these prior examples because the three major wide releases this weekend pretty much matched up those patterns to a tee.  So when I tell you that Les Miserables opened on Christmas Day to $18 million but did "just" $28 million for the weekend and "only" $66 million for the six-day holiday (a 3.67x weekend multiplier), that doesn't mean anything other than it played like a normal high-profile film that happened to have opened on Tuesday the 25th.  Or that Django Unchained pulled in $64 million off a $15 million Christmas Tuesday opening, that means that it's actually the biggest legs of any would-be blockbuster to open on this specific Tuesday the 25th date (4.2x weekend multiplier).

2012 in Film: The Overrated...

I wrestled with even doing an 'overrated' list this year.  First of all, the very idea of such a list is to merely tell other critics and/or the masses that they are dead-wrong for liking something, which I'd argue is very different from telling someone they're wrong for disliking something.  Second of all, the Internet has become such a vast land of film criticism that few films completely escape the wrath of critical scrutiny even if the popular consensus happens to lean in the "wrong" direction.  Nonetheless, in the end I enjoy writing about the year in film, so far be it for me to cheat myself out of some arbitrary concern for maintaining the proverbial higher ground.  So, in alphabetical order as always, let's dive right in...

Brave (review/guest essay):
Had this not been Pixar's first animated feature with a female lead, had this not been marketed within the context that Princess Merida was a kind of sword-wielding/bow-clutching warrior, the the film would have been seen for what it is: a deeply problematic character drama that ignores the icky realities at the center of its tale in order to tell an audience-reassuring mother/daughter story.  The film basically tells the same character arc as The Little Mermaid but was declared a feminist milestone because the female lead A) carried a weapon and B) didn't want to get married.  But good intentions cannot get past a story line that treats mother and daughter as equally culpable even when one party is advocating forced marriage.  Make no mistake, say what you will about 'customs of the time' or 'arranged marriage versus forced marriage', the film tells a story of a child who doesn't want to get married to (and yes, have sex with) a man she doesn't know and treats it like a minor inconvenience.  There is a clear right and wrong here, but the film absolves the father of any responsibility while basically stating that the mother (who again, wants her daughter to have sex against her will) kinda-sorta has a point and that the daughter really needs to have empathy for her dear-old mum.

Christmas Box Office: Les Miserables and Django Unchained blast off, but how frontloaded will they be?

The box office for Christmas day is huge (Les Miserables $18 million, Django Unchained $15 million, The Hobbit $11 million), but the best day may be behind them. The last time Christmas fell on a Tuesday, the major releases (National Treasure: Book of Secrets, Sweeney Todd) opened the Friday before while leaving Christmas day for relative lightweights like Alien Vs. Predator: Requiem and The Great Debaters. I don't recall any recent times when a major film opened on Christmas Day which was a Tuesday (when Christmas fell on a Tuesday in 2007, nothing opened that day) since the severely front-loaded Ali back in 2001.  Looking over those two respective weekends, the pattern is clear.  Even with six days to play with, all three of the above films saw massive front-loading, doing anywhere between 38% (Alien v. Predator 2) and 28% (Ali and The Great Debaters) of their business on Christmas day.  So for the respective debuts of Les Miserables, Django Unchained, and Parental Guidance (which earned $6.5 million), the bad news is that it's probable that none of these films will make more than 3.5x their Christmas number by Sunday, to the extent that it's "bad news".  The outlier among Tuesday Christmas openings is the Meg Ryan/Hugh Jackman rom-com Kate and Leopold, which did 6.8x its $2.5 million Christmas debut by the 30th of December for a $17 million long weekend (it did 15% on Christmas day).  A relative lightweight like Parental Guidance is likely to benefit more than the far-more anticipated (read - front-loaded)  major openers.  So doing the math, Les Miserables and Django Unchained is looking at a six-day opening of $48 million-$63 million and $41 million and $53 million.  Parental Guidance is much harder to peg and could land somewhere between $20 million and $40 million, with obviously a lot of wiggle room in between.

Scott Mendelson

Review: Django Unchained (2012) entertains but is oddly generic and surprisingly conventional.

Django Unchained

2012
165 minutes
rated R

by Scott Mendelson

Quentin Tarantino arguably made Django Unchained (teaser/trailer) because he wanted to try his hand at a Spaghetti Western, and that's basically what he has done.  Alas, the film is little more than a genre exercise, with little more than the obvious role reversals to justify its artistic existence.  That is is mostly entertaining and well-acted across the board goes without saying, but after the slyly subversive Inglorious Basterds, I frankly expect more from the filmmaker.  For a filmmaker known for narrative surprises and challenging the expectations of his audience, his newest entry is oddly conventional and almost timid in terms of how it approaches its subject matter.  Oh, it surely qualifies as another film focusing on revisionist revenge-fantasy history, as well as how we often use the cinematic lens to comprehend the least savory parts of our history, but as a stand-alone film it is lacking in substance.  It is a good movie, for sure, but it is quite frankly not a very good film.

Release date musical chairs: How to fix the upcoming November/December clusterf**k...

I mentioned this briefly last night, but taking a look at the release date calendar of the last two months of the year, it is clear that something is quite amiss.  It's not just a matter of too many movies being released at the end of the year, nor even a matter of too many "Oscar bait" pictures drowning each other out as is sometimes the case.  No, when you look at the release calendar for November and December, you notice an odd pattern.  There are nine weeks in the last two months of the year, during which we have a total of twenty-one (21) wide releases, counting the November 16th expansion of Spielberg's Lincoln.  Now you might think "Oh, that's about two per week, that's not so bad".  But the problem is the scheduling itself.  There are five of those nine weeks with just a single new release, leaving the fifteen other movies to fight it out over the remaining five weeks.  It gets even more dire when you look at the specific release schedules in question.  You've got four weekends with one (1) new release and one weekend with two (2) new nationwide releases.  That leaves fifteen movies fighting it out over four weekends, four weekends which now average 3.75 films a weekend.  Something's gotta give and/or someone has to have the good sense to move around a bit and spread the wealth.

Tarantino's Django Unchained gets a full trailer, keeps its awful Christmas Day release date.

As usual with most recent Tarantino films, if you look closely at the trailer you'll find bits of action surrounded by lots of people talking and talking.  The effectiveness of a Tarantino film generally rests with the quality of the conversations.  In this case, why not spend Christmas day listening to Leonardo DiCaprio, Jamie Foxx, and Christoph Waltz chit-chat for a couple hours (or more)?  DiCaprio looks like he's having the time of his life and if the film earns Oscar love he seems the most likely recipient.  As I've said before, Tarantino makes *movies* and this gorgeous and richly-colorful bit of revisionist history looks like no exception.  Will it be high art, a subversive look at another very dark historical chapter through the wish-fulfillment lens of cinema? One hopes so, as Inglorious Bastards pulled off that trick three years ago.  But even if it's just a trashy good time, it looks like a fun time with good company.  I'm not sure how smart a Christmas day release is. If you have a bunch of family members in the house after Christmas, what are the chances everyone in the family is old enough for this hard-R action comedy?  Truth be told, the big family is going to probably see The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey again as a consensus choice.  If I were Weinstein Company, I'd move this one to the December 14th slot vacated by Les Miserables, which is now opening alongside Django Unchained.  Oh heck, December 7th now has nothing but the Gerald Butler romcom Playing For Keeps.  Point being, being perceived as a box office flop won't help the film's Oscar chances, especially with voting occurring even earlier this season.   So I'd get the hell out of Christmas if I were them.  Anyway, what do you think of the trailer or the release date?

Scott Mendelson

Good movie news in 2012: The return of the "movie".

I've written a bit about this over the last couple years, but this weekend is surely as shining an example as anything about how the mainstream film landscape has somewhat self-corrected.  This weekend sees the release of four wide releases.  We have two R-rated films, one a vulgar (but surprisingly smart) comedy about a talking bear and the other a $5 million indie dramedy about male strippers directing by one of our most successful experimental filmmakers.  We've got a bawdy PG-13 comedy aimed primarily at African-American audiences and a PG-13 star-driven drama.  Ted, Magic Mike, Madea's Witness Protection, and People Like Us are all coming out tomorrow in wide release.  What we've seen over the last year or so and what we will continue to see throughout the remainder of 2012 is the return of what can only be called the old-fashioned 'movie'.  In a time when it seems that every week brings another $150 million male-driven action tentpole based on a comic book or action figure series, a glance at the release schedule shows something very different.  Amid the big-budget animated films (which I generally like), the mega-budget comic book films (which are sometimes very good) and the various remakes and reboots, there exists a plurality of old-school, often star-driven dramas, comedies, and often adult-skewed fare being released by major studios on thousands of screens every weekend.  It seems that Hollywood is getting the message that one cannot subsist on a diet of nothing but tentpoles.

Watch/Discuss: Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained gets a perfectly appropriate QT-style trailer.

Well this looks like a pulpy blast, as I suppose it should be.  There isn't much to comment on.  Jamie Fox suits the role just fine, Leonardo DiCaprio looks to be having a blast, and the soundtrack is vintage Tarantino.  Now, of course as we all know, the final film will probably be less action-packed than dialogue-drenched, but let's hope that it's a cocktail closer to Inglorious Basterds than Death Proof.  This is actually the 20th anniversary of Reservoir Dogs, which means that Tarantino has been making movies for two full decades.  He had a bit of a rut after Jackie Brown, as Kill Bill and Death Proof are basically straight genre homages without a lot of substance underneath.  But Inglorious Basterds arguably turned a corner, and seeing Tarantino explicitly tackle the uglier parts of history twice in a row is encouraging to say the least.  Could it be that act two of QT's career will plunge head-first into wish-fulfillment historical revisionism, with a side-eye turned towards the darker components of said vengeance-fueled fantasy?  I don't know how history will judge his filmography decades from now.  But I will say that Mr. Tarantino arguably has made some of the movie movie-ish movies of any major auteur in recent history.  Anyway, Django Unchained opens on Christmas day 2012.  As always, we'll see.  Thanks to The Film Stage for the embed.

Scott Mendelson