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).

Weekend Box Office (12/23/12): Hobbit tops, Jack Reacher leads new releases in pre-Christmas pile-up.

 As I have been warning about for months, 10,000 releases all opened in this very weekend, with another 5,000 coming on Tuesday.  Let's just get right into it.  The top film of the weekend was once again The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (review), but it actually took a massive dive from last weekend.  The film earned $36 million, or down 59%.  It's tough to compare this to the previous Lord of the Rings films because they all opened on *this* weekend and had the unbeatable holiday cushion to keep them afloat.  Still, the film has $149 million in ten days, or well below the respective ten-day totals of The Two Towers ($168 million) and Return of the King ($190 million) and very much behind where they were at the end of their second weekends (IE - 12 days as they all opened on Wednesdays - $168 million and $200 million respectively).  It's not bombing, but it's already proving that it's not the box office second-coming ala Star Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace.  Come what may, just with this year's Spider-Man reboot, what was once the biggest franchise of all is now just another large fish swimming in the blockbuster pond.

Review: Jack Reacher (2012) is a mostly satisfying old-school 90s-style genre-throwback.

Jack Reacher

2012
130 minutes
rated PG-13

by Scott Mendelson

Writer/director Christopher McQuarrie's Jack Reacher (trailer) is such an authentic bygone relic that I'm not entirely sure it takes place in the present day.  The picture looks, sounds, and feels like a relatively high-quality action thriller from the mid-1990's, which is mostly a compliment.  I could be mistaken, but I don't recall a single scene where a character uses the Internet and/or uses their cell phone for anything other than *talking* (the title character even uses a pay phone on several occasions).  But, thank the heavens, this is not some kind of 'let's make a 90's thriller' technical exercise, but it merely inhabits a mostly forgotten sub genre so successfully that it becomes something of a time capsule piece.  For those not interesting in examining it as a kind of relic, it fortunately also operates as a consistently entertaining and intelligent procedural.  It is strongly acted by all, with pulpy dialogue which I presume comes from the Lee Childs book (One Shot) from which it is based.  It has issues of length and tone, but it mostly entertains and is the rare would-be franchise starter for which I'd gladly see a sequel.

Watch/Discuss: Tom Cruise's Jack Reacher gets a second somewhat generic trailer.

Putting aside the whole damsel-in-distress subplot (Rosamund Pike arguably deserves better), this all feels so... small-scale for someone like Cruise.  It looks pretty amusing, with a strong cast (Robert Duvall, David Oyelowo, Richard Jenkins, and Warner Herzog as the villain) and pulpy dialogue to spare.  But the million-dollar question is whether or not the never-terribly imposing Tom Cruise can pull off such a relentless bad-ass.  It's still an open question after this trailer frankly.  It's no secret that I'm as big a Cruise fan/defender as anyone, but he seems to be trying *so* hard, and not in a good way.  And if I may nitpick, the tagline arguably should be "The law has limits.  He doesn't."  "He does not." isn't nearly as blunt and to-the-point.  Still, assuming this Christopher McQuarrie film didn't cost more than $40 million, I'm all for a bit of old-school R-rated pulp.  Oh wait, it's PG-13, cost $50 million, and runs 130 minutes!!!  Okay then, make of that what you will.  Long story short, if I'm going to see a Jason Statham film, it probably ought to star Jason Statham.  Anyway, Jack Reacher opens December 21st.  As always, we'll see.

Scott Mendelson