Weekend Box Office (02/17/13): Die Hard 5 tops, Save Haven opens well, Beautiful Creatures tanks.

Thanks to an unexpectedly strong second-weekend showing of Identity Thief, there's going to be a lot of wrangling about rank this weekend.  But as you know, I don't care about rank, so let's just get into the numbers.  The biggest opener of the weekend was the stunningly terrible A Good Day To Die Hard, which earned an estimated $25 million for the Fri-Sun weekend, $31 million over the four-day Presidents' Day holiday, and a projected $38 million since opening on Thursday the 14th.  This was the first Die Hard film to open outside of summer, and it's arguable that Fox knew full-well that it had a turkey on its hands.  There were no press screenings until the last minute and Fox didn't even bother to attach a teaser to The Wolverine to prints this weekend, which seemed like a no-brainer save for the danger of being associated with a stunningly bad film.  Nonetheless, the brand is still somewhat strong, although it's obviously waning. Not even playing the inflation game compared to the first three installments which came out in 1988, 1990, and 1995, the fifth Die Hard earned just $3 million more in five days then the fourth picture, Live Free or Die Hard earned over its Fri-Sun weekend back in June 2007.

Review: Beautiful Creatures (2013) is *almost* fantastic.

Beautiful Creatures

2013
129 minutes
rated PG-13

by Scott Mendelson

So much of Beautiful Creatures (trailer/banner) is so unexpectedly terrific that it's almost a tragedy when the picture eventually falls victim to its own plot.  For the 80-minutes or so, the film is warmly engaging, alternating between scenery-chewing camp from the adults and genuinely emotional pathos from the kids, anchored by fine acting and surprisingly clever and authentic dialogue throughout.  The romantic leads (Alice Englert and Alden Ehrenreich) have undeniable charm and chemistry while the likes of Jeremy Irons and Emma Thompson relish the inherently goofy nature of this material while still pulling back when required.  The film paints an evocative picture of life in a dead-end fundamentalist American small town and is unapologetic about depicting some unpleasant sides of religious fundamentalism.  But while the film outright soars when  it focuses on character and human interaction, it cannot withstand the weight of its own overly contrived mythology.  The deeper the film gets into its central conflict the more of a mechanical plot exercise it becomes.  So superb is the first 2/3 of Beautiful Creatures that I felt genuine disappointment when the film flubbed the landing, ending itself in the territory of merely 'very good'.

When the words don't match the face: Beautiful Creatures banner poster brings to light a poster art pet peeve.

This is a perfectly satisfactory billboard poster for the upcoming Beautiful Creatures.  It has its title, its release date, a tagline, and a roll-call of the elder vets and younger newbies (plus young vet Emmy Rossum) that will play in the southern gothic supernatural sandbox.  Everybody looks snazzy and it's a solid sell.  There's just one annoying problem.  They are exactly 1 for 7 when it comes for accuracy of labeling.  I've known Jeremy Irons as an actor for thirty years and I know he doesn't look like some kid aiming to be the next Robert Pattinson.  And I've had a thing for Emmy Rossum since her Mystic River/Day After Tomorrow/Phantom of the Opera break-out led to a near-decade of relative obscurity before bouncing back on Showtime's Shameless.  She does not look like a younger variation on Michael Angarano.  And while I don't know offhand who Thomas Mann is, I know he probably doesn't look like a dead-ringer for Viola Davis, who in turn is not the young Caucasian girl at the center of the poster.  By random chance, Emma Thompson is actually correctly labeled.  But the rest are all very wrong.  Yes I get the poster design, which puts the young girl at the center and then slowly branches out with the various forces of good or evil that will try to influence her destiny (IE - evil Emmy Rossum versus good Emma Thompson or something like that).  But any number of posters that screw this up in any given year don't even have that excuse.

Beautiful Creatures gets a new poster, a new release date, and a new plot-heavy second trailer.

What's interesting about this second look at what is arguably the first of the new wave of 'next Twilight/Hunger Games' franchise-starters is that it sells itself as a story specifically centered on a young girl in the South who is fought over as a result of her supernatural powers and her would-be destiny.  When I wrote about the wave of female-centric young-lit adaptations a couple months ago, I was informed that this movie, or at least the book that it's based on, is actually told from the boy's point-of-view.  You wouldn't know it from this trailer.  And I would argue that it is almost noteworthy that Warner Bros. is trying to trick audiences into thinking that it's a female-pov story.  Anyway, marketing gimmicks aside, this still looks like a solid piece of supernatural hokum.  Come what may, the cast (Jeremy Irons, Emma Thompson, Viola Davis, Emmy Rossum) should be more than enough to do the heavy lifting if the young kids (Alden Ehrenreich and Alice Englert) can't pick up the slack (not presuming they can't of course, Ehrenreich was fine in Francis Ford Coppola's Tetro).  The "big" news is that it's been moved one day up to February 14th, and it's clear that Warner Bros. wants this to be the date-movie of choice for those otherwise uninterested in yet-another Die Hard film.  Will it work?  Depending on how cheap this one was, it may not matter.  Valentine's Day/President's Day weekend is a holiday weekend where a number of big films can flourish alongside each other (witness 2010, where Valentine's Day, Percy Jackson and the Olympians, and The Wolfman all opened to over $30 million).  Anyway, Beautiful Creatures opens on February 14, 2013.  As always, we'll see. If you have any thoughts on the matter, do share them below...

Scott Mendelson 

Comic books for boys, Young-adult literature for girls: On the coming blockbuster-tentpole gender divide...

If you've been paying attention to the various trailers being unleashed in the wake of Breaking Dawn part 2's last week, you'll notice a fevered pitch by the studios to plant their flag in the sand in the newest 'hot' sub-genre.  By that I mean the young-lit franchise adaption. In just the last week we've seen trailers for The Host (trailer and character posters) and The Mortal Instruments (trailer) as they joined the previously advertised Beautiful Creatures (trailer and poster) in the chase to become 'the next Twilight'. What we're seeing is the creation of what amounts to the next blockbuster sub-genre: the young-adult literary adaptation.  The three above films won't be the only ones coming down the pike and we may even see one or two more over the 2013 calendar year on top of the November release of Hunger Games: Catching Fire.  In basic concept they aren't all that different from traditional comic book superhero sagas: An unlikely person realizes that they are unique and have powers (or must take powers) that will allow them to protect humanity from the evil in our midst.  Both sub-genres have room for character actors and/or major movie stars in smaller roles and both have the potential to break-out and become true tent poles. But the core difference between these sub-genres is pretty obvious.  Many, if not most, of them feature female leads.