Weekend Box Office: The Possession tops strong, Lawless opens so-so and Oogieloves bomb epically.

So it looks like Lionsgate's attempt to mimic the marketing campaign of their 2009 chiller The Haunting In Connecticut worked like a charm.  That (rather terrific, natch) horror drama used a single horrifying image (weird liquid supernatural gunk flying out of a child's mouth) to help snag a mighty $23 million debut in Spring 2009.  Back then, it was Lionsgate's second-biggest debut not involving a Saw sequel or a Tyler Perry film.  Today it still stands in fifth place on that scale, and The Possession just proves lightning can strike twice.  The poster focused on basically the same image and basically had the same opening weekend, grossing an estimated $17.7 million over Fri-Sun and $21 million over the four-day Labor Day holiday.  That's the second-biggest Labor Day haul on record, behind the $30 million gross of Rob Zombie's Halloween in 2007, ahead of The Transporter 2's $20 million gross in 2005 and ahead of Jeepers Creepers 2 ($18 million) in 2003 .  In terms of non-sequels/remakes, it's by far the biggest such debut, besting The American ($16 million), Jeepers Creepers ($15 million), and the obscenely underrated Balls of Fury ($14 million).

Review: Premium Rush (2012) peaks too early and struggles to fill its feature-length running time.

Premium Rush

2012
90 minutes
rated PG-13

by Scott Mendelson

The first thirty minutes and last twenty minutes of David Koepp's Premium Rush have the makings of a pretty great B-movie.  It has all the ingredients of a solid piece of genre, with engaging heroes, a terrific villain, and some genuinely entertaining and fresh action sequences.  For its first third, it powers along with an uncommon confidence, establishing its central conflict while dazzling the viewer with stunts that are all the more impressive for being real.  But at around the thirty minute mark, the film slams on the brakes and spends an unholy amount of time with expository flashbacks and needless exposition, testing the viewer's patience and leaving us waiting to get back to the chase.  The film eventually kicks back into gear in time for the relatively successful climax, which both satisfies and makes us realize that the proceeding half-hour or so was all the more needless.  Premium Rush would have made an excellent hour-long short film, but as a feature-length motion picture, it frankly doesn't have enough meat on its bones.

Weekend Box Office (08-26-12): Obama's America not withstanding, summer ends with an epic whimper.

Oh my, another film explicitly targeting an under-served niche did exceptional business almost exclusively with that niche.  In a sane industry that would be called smart business, but the studios tend to treat it as a *shock* and write it off as a fluke.  It was no shock to anyone paying attention during the week, especially when the film was announced to be expanding on over 1,000 screens this weekend.  With the weak slate of new releases and little holdover interest, the market was primed for a solid debut for something preaching to a very devoted choir.  First as foremost, 2016: Obama's America earned about 1/4 as much this weekend as Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 did over its opening weekend on about as many screens eight years ago.  As not-president John Kerry can attest, even the most obscenely successful political documentary of all time ($23 million opening weekend, $119 million domestic total) didn't help John Kerry defeat George W. Bush in the 2004 election (even if we can dispute the results in Ohio, Bush won the popular vote by three million).  So no, the fact that a directly-targeted group of anti-Obama moviegoers gave 2016: Obama's America $6.2 million doesn't mean anything more than the piss-poor box office of last year's The Undefeated (essay) in terms of predicting an upcoming presidential election.  

John Gosling previews the week's new releases (08/24/12).

A relatively low key weekend with just three releases, one of which is it at less than 1,000 locations. We're now in the tail end of August, where studios will often off-load movies that they're not quite sure what to do with.

Hit & Run is a romantic action comedy starring Dax Shephard, Kirsten Bell and Bradley Cooper. It follows ex-con, Charlie Bronson, who breaks out of witness protection to help his girlfriend get to Los Angeles for a once in a lifetime job opportunity. But they won't be making the journey alone as they quickly find themselves pursued by his former partners in crime and a Marshall tasked with keeping the 'witness' protected. Bell and Shephard play the couple, while Cooper plays one of the ex-partners, who ended up enduring prison as a result of Bronson's apparent betrayal. Shephard not only stars in the picture but also wrote, produced and co-directed, alongside David Palmer. The two worked together on the 2010 film, Brother Justice, a mockumentary that followed Shephard's attempts to become the next Chuck Norris style martial artist-movie star (That flick also starred Cooper and Tom Arnold, who plays Randy in this new movie). Prior to that, the actor/director had worked on Punk'd and appeared in Mike Judge's Idiocracy, amongst other films and TV appearances.