Weekend Box Office (02/03/13): Warm Bodies tops while Bullet to the Head tanks.

Ah, Super Bowl weekend!  Warm Bodies (review) can go from a $9 million Saturday to a $2.9 million Sunday and it's okay!  According to the studio, it earned $8.1 million on Friday, $9 million on Saturday, yet is expected to make just $2.9 million today.  Yes, I know today is the Super Bowl, but I'm always shocked by these mega drops each and every year.  The film, which has an estimated $20 million debut, played 60% female (because girls like horror films too!) and 65% under 25, which means it is doing best outside of the stereotypical older male football fan who is already getting ready for the big game so it may end up with a slightly higher weekend total in the end.  It earned a B+ from Cinemascore, with an A- from those under 25 and an A from those under 18.  Regardless, this is a solid debut for a film that easily could have played to the geek crowd exclusively. This is the kind of film that could have easily opened with $8 million over the weekend, as opposed to $8 million on its first day.

Review: The Last Stand (2013) delivers crowd-pleasing B-movie goods in a genuinely entertaining action adventure.

The Last Stand
2013
109 minutes
rated R

by Scott Mendelson

The Last Stand (trailer) is not a great film by any stretch of the imagination.  But even in mid-January, it lays down the gauntlet for providing one of the more overtly crowd-pleasing (and thus successful) genre films to come down the pike in awhile.  The key to this film's success is simple: Director Kim Jee-Woon and writers Andrew Knauer, Jeffrey Nachmanoff, and George Nolfi remember the basics to constructing this kind of meat-and-potatoes entertainment.  It's not rocket science, but you'd be shocked how often simple entertainment value gets left in the dust in the quest to construct the biggest and/or baddest genre entry out there.  The Last Stand isn't the biggest of anything.  It's a mid-budget B-movie action picture set in a small town between California and the Mexican border.  But it is filled to the gills with inventive actions sequences, colorful heroes and appropriately nasty villains.  Everyone knows exactly how seriously to take this material, never getting too reverent but also never descending into pure camp.  It also plays to Arnold Schwarzenegger's relative strengths while doing its best to work around his weaknesses (a look at his very best films).  It may not be art, but its surprisingly splendid entertainment if you're in the mood.

Arnold Schwarzenegger (The Last Stand) vs. Sylvester Stallone (Bullet To the Head): Whose new movie has the worse trailer?

Let's be honest.  Both of these films look pretty terrible.  Both feature over-the-hill action icons who can barely walk at a quick pace let alone engage in all-out fight scenes.  The films look just a big better than substandard direct-to-DVD action fare, and that's not even counting the *good* DTV stuff like Universal Soldier: Regeneration and Undisputed 3.   Both Stallone and Schwarzenegger seem to be acting as badly as possible.  Schwarzenegger is obviously out of practice, but Stallone has little excuse, having delivered perfectly fine turns in Rocky Balboa, Rambo, and The Expendables (I'm hopefully seeing The Expendables 2 tomorrow night).  So, The Last Stand (from Jee-woon Kim, helmer of I Saw the Devil) opens from Lionsgate on January 13th, 2013. Walter Hill's Bullet To the Head (following oodles of reshoots) debuts via Warner Bros. on February 1st, 2013.  They both look pretty terrible.  But as a longtime fan of Homicide: Life on the Street, Bullet To the Head gets bonus points for viciously murdering Jon Seda (who very nearly killed the show during season six) in the opening reel.  Which one looks less awful to you?  Are you surprised that 20th Century Fox didn't have a A Good Day To Die Hard trailer ready for this weekend?  Please share below...

Scott Mendelson