2012 in Film: The Year's "Worst" Films.

Almost to the end, folks.  But before we finally recap the best (or, err, my favorites) of 2012, let's take a pit stop to discuss what are arguably the worst films of 2012.  Now as always, I can't presume that I've seen every probable terrible movie out there (I generally avoid Adam Sandler comedies and didn't catch Parental Guidance in time), but I tried to highlight films that were both very bad and whose respective failures meant something more than just their artistic inadequacy.  As always, the films below are in alphabetical order.  So, without further ado, let's dive in!

Alex Cross:
To William Hurt in A History of Violence, "How to do you f*** that up?!"  You have a long-running detective series filled with larger-than-life villains and often insanely over-the-top violence.  You have Tyler Perry, if perhaps cast against type than at least hungry to prove that he can do something different.  You have Matthew Fox theoretically willing to chew up every bit of available scenery.  And you have audiences primed for a kind of old-school adult-skewing genre picture that the previous two Morgan Freeman-starring Alex Cross films (Kiss the Girls and Along Came A Spider) represented back in the 1990s.  How in the world do you make this film this incredibly boring?  First of all, you take an explicitly R-rated story and neuter it into a still-inappropriate PG-13.  Then you pile on generic cliche on top of generic cliche.  Then you instruct every actor other than Fox to be as lifeless as possible.  Finally, you never decide to make a down-to-Earth crime thriller or a would-be superhero/super villain story.  The end result is a painfully dull would-be thriller that can't hold a candle to the most average episode of Criminal Minds.

Weekend Box Office (04/29/12): Think Like a Man tops again as four new releases perform relatively poorly. Oh, and The Avengers assemble overseas to the tune of $178 million.

In the weekend before the official start of the summer season, four new releases, all of which were relatively smaller fare, all debuted to numbers ranging from not awful to genuinely awful (or example 4,321 on why comparing total weekend box office is stupid).  The top film this weekend was once again Think Like A Man, which dropped a surprisingly decent 46%, earning another $18 million.  The ensemble romantic comedy has now earned $60 million, putting it on track to be among the domestic bigger grossers of the first 1/3 of 2012.  If we're specifically talking 'black-films', then the Tim Story picture is a few days from outgrossing every Tyler Perry movie save Madea Goes to Jail, which grossed $90 million three years ago (the second highest-grossing Perry film is the $63 million-grossing Madea's Family Reunion). With a smaller drop and a larger second weekend off a $8 million-smaller opening weekend, it may pass that mark all the way to $100 million if it can hold onto screens as summer begins.  It will soon surpass the $65 million gross of Barbershop 2, the $67 million gross of Waiting to Exhale, and the $75 million gross of Barbershop within the next full week.  It's also out-grosssed and/or will likely out-gross any number of higher-profile 'white' romantic comedies or dramas (the $81 million-grossing Dear John, the $84 million-grossing Stupid, Crazy Love, the $54 million-grossing New Year's Eve, etc).  Usually when a $12 million-budgeted film ends up flirting with $100 million, studios respond with sequels and/or star-vehicles for certain higher-profile cast-members.  We'll see if Hollywood again writes off this 'unconventional' smash hit as a 'fluke' or whether Kevin Hart, Gabrielle Union, and Meagan Good (among others) get any 'bumps' off this film's unquestionable success.

Another weekend, another perfect example of the utter stupidity of weekend-to-weekend box office comparison...

Granted, I'm going by unofficial weekend estimates based on the Friday box office figures, but it appears that the entire total gross of all films in the box office top-twelve this weekend will equal around $96 million.  This same weekend last year had a total top-12 gross of $145 million, meaning this weekend will be down by about 34%.  I guess according to the standards set by the 'official' box office punditry, that would mean that moviegoing may be in a slump, right?  I mean, weekend-to-weekend totals are down by nearly $50 million compared to 2011 on this specific weekend!  Oh... wait, what's that you say?  Last weekend had the debut of Universal's Fast Five, the much-anticipated fifth installment in the recharged Fast/Furious franchise?  You remember Fast Five, right?  Great reviews, strong marketing, popular franchise... all of these things led to a massive $86 million opening weekend, the biggest in Universal history.  Yes that's right, last year had Universal rolling the dice and successfully kicking off the summer season a week earlier than usual, and it paid off in spades.  So you have a weekend where one film last year made almost as much as the entire top-twelve films' total grosses from this year.  You mean we shouldn't be too surprised if the cumulative might of The Raven, Safe, The Pirates: Band of Misfits, and The Five-Year Engagement couldn't quite measure up to a blockbuster debut like Fast Five? The four openers should gross about $36 million combined over the weekend, or about what Fast Five alone made on its opening day.  Oh right, maybe, just maybe, it IS about the individual movies performing at levels that are judged based on the respective expectations of each specific picture after all!  Four small-ish pictures debuted with relatively small-ish grosses, and their combined might plus the various holdovers weren't enough to equal the juggernaut of a presold (and well-reviewed, natch) blockbuster sequel.