Weekend Box Office (05/08/11): Thor grosses $65.7m, Fast Five crashes, and other debuts perform well.

It's a $65.7 million weekend for Thor (review), giving the Marvel adventure pic a solid 2.6x weekend multiplier. It's kinda scary how accurately we can now predict opening weekend grosses just based on the midnight number, but the math once again worked (Thor did 5% of its weekend gross via Thursday midnight sneaks, per usual). Anyway, Marvel was successful at keeping expectations low, saying that anything over $60 million would be a win. And it more-or-less is. The film played heavily 3D, which meant higher ticket prices and the like. I heard plenty of anecdotal stories about moviegoers unable to find a convenient 2D location, which may be part of a depressing trend as the 'summer of 3D' unfolds. But the film had a solid weekend multiplier (if you discount the $3.25 million worth of midnight sneaks, the film's Friday and Saturday figures were pretty even) and decent word of mouth. It earned a B+ from Cinemascore, with an A from those under 18.

Review: The Beaver

The Beaver
2011
90 minutes
rated PG-13

by Scott Mendelson

The Beaver is a film hamstrung by an inability to settle on just which story to tell, and how exactly to tell that story. The film basically concerns a suicidal husband/father who apparently adopts another personality through the guise of a stuffed puppet. But director Jodie Foster and writer Kyle Killen constantly bounce back and forth in terms of telling the story through his eyes or through the eyes of his family and coworkers. As a result, there is a constant shift of narrative focus and every nearly major character gets shorted. There is fascinating material on display, with some truly fine performance work to boot, but the whole ends up far less than the sum of the occasionally exceptional parts.

Jodie Foster and Mel Gibson's The Beaver gets a trailer.

Oddly enough, I had been paying so little attention to the specific details of this picture that I didn't even realize that Jodie Foster was actually co-starring as well as directing. And I certainly didn't realize that Anton Yelchin and Jennifer Laurence were in this one too. The trailer certainly tries to sell a somewhat generic and uplifting 'triumph over mental illness' story (the voice over is beyond patronizing), but there does seem to be some honest quirk in there. Point being, this certainly looks like something worth checking out. Jodie Foster hasn't directed a film in fifteen years (the superb Home For the Holidays), and she remains an icon in her field and someone who always demands our attention. And, whatever we may think of Mel Gibson the human being, Mel Gibson the actor is someone who rarely missteps, especially when he's trying to make a 'real' movie. Summit Entertainment will be opening this picture sometime in early 2011.

Scott Mendelson