Weekend Box Office (07/08/12): Savages debuts well, Katy Perry does not, as holdovers get holiday boost.

I've already allotted five paragraphs to The Amazing Spider-Man, so it's time to discuss the other films.  There were two other wide openers this weekend.  Oliver Stone's Savages debuted on Friday of the holiday weekend, proving to be relatively successful counter-programming.  The $45 million hard-R drug thriller earned $16.2 million.  Considering most of the stars (Blake Lively, Salma Hayek, Taylor Kitsch, Aaron Johnson, and Benicio Del Toro) are not box office draws, the director was the main attraction here.  While supporting player John Travolta probably helped a bit, this was Oliver Stone's unofficial return to gritty, adult-skewing genre fare.  World Trade Center, W., and Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps were exactly kids flicks, but the unapologetic auteur behind Platoon, JFK, and Natural Born Killers hadn't been seen since Any Given Sunday back in 1999 .  As such, it stands as the third-biggest debut of his career, behind World Trade Center ($18 million) and Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps ($19 million).  With a C+ from Cinemascore (it's arguably worse than that, sadly, highlighting boring youngsters over entertaining grownups while being a good 50% longer than it should be), it won't be reaching the heights of Platoon ($138 million) or the $70-$75 million range of Any Given Sunday, JFK, World Trade Center, and Born on the Fourth of July.  Coming anywhere near the $50 million mark (Natural Born Killers) will count as a win for Universal, which probably should have moved this one to July 13th after they moved the unexpectedly successful Ted to June 29th.

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.

Good movie news in 2012: the return of R-rated movies.

Normally, I wouldn't be one to consider Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (which to be fair I have not yet seen) as a shining example of a positive trend in movie-going.  But the historical fiction action-thriller may be many things, but one thing it is not is PG-13.  Oh no, it is a mid-summer major studio spectacle that is going out into 3,000+ theaters with an honest-to-goodness R.  Said rating is officially for "violence throughout and brief sexuality".  Whether or not the film could have been edited down to a PG-13 is arguably a moot point.  20th Century Fox spent $70 million (a refreshingly reasonable sum) on a major summer production that was conceived and produced with the intent that it would indeed be R-rated.  And most shockingly, it was not even the only R-rated wide release last weekend, as Focus Features unspooled Seeking Friends at the End of the World in 1,400 theaters.  I've written/ranted for years about how the R-rating became an endangered species for major-studio releases due to the 2001 FEC regulations regarding the marketing of R-rated films, but the tide does seem to be changing over the last couple years.  And it's reached a glorious peak at this very moment, with an avalanche of R-rated wide releases filling up the multiplexes.

Summer movie musical chairs: Ted moves to June 29th.

Universal has announced that Seth McFarlane's Ted (which my wife wants to see) will now open on June 29th, 2012 in the 'vacated' slot (by vacated, that means its also opening against Tatum's Magic Mike, Tyler Perry's Madea's Witness Protection, and People Like Us).  Oddly enough, Universal is opening Oliver Stone's Savages just a week later on July 6th.  So if Universal ends up moving Savages to July 13th, don't be too surprised.  I'm genuinely surprised that Universal didn't take the opportunity to move The Bourne Legacy from its August 3rd slot where it would be opening head-to-head with Total Recall.  Of course, considering July 13th will now have only Ice Age: Continental Drift, expect some studio to move one of their bigger movies to the now nearly-empty slot.  That leaves just six titles opening in wide release this July (The Amazing Spider-Man, Savages, Ice Age 4, The Dark Knight Rises, Step Up 4, and The Watch).  If I were Sony, I'd move the Meryl Streep/Tommy Lee Jones/Steve Carell drama Hope Springs into the July 13th slot, as it will provide solid counter-programming against both Ice Age 4 and The Dark Knight Rises and allow Sony to move Total Recall to August 10th.  August has 14 movies opening over five weeks.  I expect that number to drop by at least one while July's total increases to seven before too long. What do you think will go down with this latest round of musical chairs?  Share below.

Scott Mendelson

Oliver Stone's star-filled, and unapologetically R-rated Savages, the official 'adult popcorn film of summer 2012', gets a down-and-dirty trailer.

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It used to be a custom of sorts to have at least one somewhat adult-skewing genre picture in any given summer, something to stand out for older audiences who liked their summer thrills with a bit less fantasy and a bit more gore and/or nudity.  Be it Wolf in 1994, A Time to Kill in 1996, Swordfish in 2001, The Road to Perdition in 2002, or Collateral in 2004 (along with, arguably The Manchurian Candidate redo), this once time-honored tradition somewhat went the way of the dinosaur as seemingly adult genre fare like Mr. and Mrs. Smith, The Da Vinci Code, Live Free or Die Hard and Salt got squeezed into the PG-13 zone and R-rated comedies like The Wedding Crashers, Tropic Thunder, and The Hangover compensated for the lack of truly R-rated action fare.  Aside from the likes of The Expendables in 2010, summer has pretty much been the place where everything is aimed at everyone for the last several years.  But Universal senses an opening, not only moving this seemingly trashy bit of pulp fiction into the summer, but slotting it three days after the debut of Sony's The Amazing Spider-Man.