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: Warm Bodies (2013) is a poignant and allegorical genre hybrid that adds rich layers to the zombie template.

Warm Bodies

2013
97 minutes
Rated PG-13

by Scott Mendelson

There is very little that happens plot-wise in Jonathan Levine's Warm Bodies (trailer) that you haven't seen somewhere else. But beneath the somewhat generic narrative is both a rather sad subtext and a worthwhile parable that elevates the film beyond its somewhat simplistic humor. Most importantly, the film genuinely adds a new idea to the zombie cannon, something that seems so simple that I'm surprised that someone didn't do it much earlier.  In short, the film is told from the point of view of a zombie.  Set in a world where something somewhere caused the vast majority of the world to turn into zombies, the film tells a seemingly simple story of how one such brain-eating creature falls in love with a random human he happens to encounter.  The romance is arguably the film's weakest element, as it's basically a variation on Beauty and the Beast's Stockholm syndrome, but the story goes in some thoughtful directions nonetheless.  Based on a novel by Isaac Marion, Warm Bodies takes bits and pieces from Beauty and the Beast, Wall-E, and How to Train Your Dragon to shape a film that becomes a parable for our current 'war on terror' foreign policy.  But its most important idea is detailing the sheer hell of actually being a zombie.