Weekend Box Office (04/08/12): Hunger Games tops $300m, American Reunion and Titanic 3D open slightly soft.

Whatever my issues with The Hunger Games in terms of its quality as a film, its continued box office might can only be a good thing.  Considering the current trend of studios basically remaking/rebooting/rehashing every remotely popular property over the last thirty years, the fact that this NEW adaptation from a NEW novel is going to be among the top three grossing films of the year by a healthy margin can only be a good lesson.  Anyway, The Hunger Games topped the box office for the third time in a row this weekend, dropping a perfectly reasonable 43% in weekend three, for a weekend haul of $33.5 million.  This gives the film a massive $302 million in seventeen days, which is the second-largest such haul for a film outside of summer in history.  That's the fifth-biggest seventeen-day total in history, and 11 days ahead of Alice In Wonderland, the closest non-summer competitor and just two days behind Avatar.  Forget Twilight comparisons, it's already passed Eclipse, which is the highest-grossing entry in the series.  And forget the majority of the Harry Potter series, as it's $14 million away from surpassing Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and it's already tied with the $303 million 17-day total of  Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part II with significantly larger second and third weekends to boot.  At this point, it's playing like Spider-Man 2 and the last Harry Potter film, with stronger weekends but lighter weekday grosses.  The second Spidey pick ended its third weekend with $302 million and ended its domestic haul with $373 million, while Harry Potter 7.2 ended with $381 million.  Factoring a rather busy April and the coming summer onslaught, that's as good a place to predict as to where the first The Hunger Games ends up.

3 of a Kind: Mirror Mirror and two prior fractured fairy-tales that end on a song.

Why Relativity saw fit to release this climactic dance number from Mirror Mirror well-ahead of its theatrical release, I cannot say.  But while it's pretty disconnected from the film, it does reveal a pretty big spoiler involving the fate of a major supporting character (and also ruins one of the biggest 'wtf?' cameos in recent memory).  It may not be fair to continuously compare Mirror Mirror to the somewhat similar Ella Enchanted, but it is worth noting that they actually end in pretty much the same way, albeit with an established song as opposed to an original Bollywood-ish tune.

Weekend Box Office (04/01/12): The Hunger Games powers on, Wrath of the Titans falls into the "Tomb Raider trap", Mirror Mirror underwhelms.

As expected, The Hunger Games (review/trailer) again topped the box office this weekend, but its relatively strong hold suggests that it may be a bit mightier than a conventional Twilight/Harry Potter sequel.  With $58 million in weekend two (the ninth-biggest non-opening weekend ever, ahead of all the respective Harry Potter and Twilight Saga films), the film dropped 61% and ended day ten with a whopping $248 million.  That's the biggest ten-day total for a non-sequel ever, and the fifth-biggest ever.  It came in above the $240 million ten-day total of Spider-Man 3, and it is that film which its performance most resembles.  Spider-Man 3 opened with $151 million in May of 2007 before dropping 61% for a $58 million weekend.  Spidey took a drop on weekend two despite having no new releases to compete against because it wasn't exclaimed critically-acclaimed among the fanbase.  The Hunger Games had two big releases this weekend, plus the loss of its IMAX screens which represented about 7% of its theaters and 10% of its gross last weekend.  No other mega-opener on this level that benefited from IMAX has had to deal with the immediate loss of those premium screens, so it bares mention when comparing it to the respective second weekends of The Dark Knight ($75 million off a $158 million debut) or Alice In Wonderland ($62 million off a $116 million debut).  Spider-Man 3 ended its domestic run with $336 million, and its ten day total represented 71% of the gross.  Giving The Hunger Games a similar pattern would give this franchise-starter a final domestic cume of $349 million.  We'll see how it weathers the 3D reissue of Titanic next weekend.  Oh, and it's up to $362 million worldwide, all on a mere $90 million budget.

Review: Mirror Mirror (2012) is lifeless and drab, a poor-man's Ella Enchanted.

Mirror Mirror
2012
106 minutes
rated PG

by Scott Mendelson

The good news is that Tarsem Singh's Mirror Mirror is nowhere near as obnoxiously zany and aggressively annoying as the trailers seem to suggest.  Frankly, the most eye-rolling moments of the marketing campaign aren't even in the movie, and I'd be hard-pressed to name more than a few pop-culture references over modern-anachronisms.  And the film is surprisingly nonchalant about gender, presenting a heroine and  female villain whose respective strengths and flaws have little to do with their gender.  But the film is strangely immobile throughout, feeling less like a cinematic experience than an overlong stage-play with expensive costumes and occasionally well-constructed sets.  Every scene goes on too long and every performer seems too tired to give it their all.  When the first trailer dropped, I derisively compared its apparent tone to the live-action Cat in the Hat.  As horrible as that film is, Mirror Mirror could have used some of its boundless energy.

Trailer: Tarsem's Snow White revamp, Mirror Mirror, looks like a terrible remake of Ella Enchanted, as Julia Roberts invokes The Cat in the Hat.

Wow... just wow.  This looks shockingly bad, a sophomoric, obnoxious, and outright painful.  The humor seems to be on the level of Happily N'Ever After, and any kind of would-be 'fairy tale reversal' shtick just points out that Ella Enchanted did it first, did it smarter and wittier, and did it without having to piggy-back on a famous property.  Julia Roberts looks so strained and campy that she evokes an awkward kind of sympathy with her ghastly 'comic moments' and the constant pokes at her age (most of her bits revolve around how apparently old and ugly she is).  Of course Lily Collins looks gorgeous and fetching, and Arnie Hammer looks blandly-dashing, but the whole tone reeks of Mike Meyer's The Cat in the Hat.  This one drops on March 16th, 2012.  As always, we'll see, but unless this is some kind of bait-and-switch, um... yeah.

Scott Mendelson