Weekend Box Office: (05/27/12): Men In Black 3 tops Memorial Day while The Moonrise Kingdom slays in limited release.

The Men In Black franchise returned to theaters this weekend after a ten year hiatus and, for better or worse, performed exactly the same as the prior Men In Black films. The first Men In Black debuted with $51 million over the Fri-Sun portion of its July 4th weekend back in 1997 while Men In Black 2 earned $52 million over the same portion in 2002.  To wit, Men In Black 3 earned an estimated $55 million over the Fri-Sun portion of the weekend with a projected $70 million Fri-Mon holiday gross. 3D-bumps and ten years worth of inflation puts a damper on the numbers (in today's respective dollars, the original's debut would be about $88 million while the sequel would be about $71 million), but the consistency is arguably a little remarkable.  It's arguably only a 'dissappointment' due to the unexpectedly high budget of the threequel, which shut down production for six weeks in the middle of filming in order to work out script kinks.  At a cost of anywhere from $220 million to $300 million, Sony was in the unenviable position of needing an 'out of this world' debut (sorry) to justify the expense, and this otherwise hearty haul wasn't it.   Having said that, it's still Will Smith's third-biggest Fri-Sun debut behind his last two blockbusters from 2007 (I Am Legend's $77 million opening) and 2008 (Hancock's $62 million Fri-Sun debut over July 4th 2008).

Review: The Intouchables (2012) is a broad and simplistic 'American' race/class comedy, but in French.

The Intouchables

2012
112 minutes
rated R
This film opens in limited release on May 25th.

by Scott Mendelson

I've written about this from time-to-time, but there is occasionally an odd effect that comes from labeling a film 'arthouse' or 'foreign' that gives it a certain critical allure. If Sucker Punch had been French, would critics have been more willing to plumb the film's social critiques?  If Drive had been released as is but as a major studio release with Hugh Jackman instead of a mid-level release with Ryan Gosling, would the critics have swooned to the same degree? Robert Rodriguez remarked nearly twenty years ago that the Spanish subtitles found in El Mariachi led critics to find copious symbolism in what was intended as a cheap exploitation picture.  And so it is that The Intouchables has become an international sensation, grossing $339 million overseas and becoming (I believe...) the most successful French export of all-time.  The mystique of subtitles and its obvious 'foreignness' has caused many to give a pass to what is as conventional, generic, and contrived a comedy as anything released by Adam Sandler or Eddie Murphy in these United States.