Weekend Box Office (11-04-12): Wreck It Ralph sets a Disney animation record while Flight soars to $25 million on just 1,844 screens.

The holiday season started off with a bang this weekend, with three major openers, all of which over-performed or opened within reasonable expectations.  If Wreck It Ralph's (review) estimate holds, it will have the biggest three-day debut for a non-Pixar Disney cartoon ever.  Believe it or not, a regular Disney toon has never opened at or above $50 million over a Fri-Sun period.  To be fair, The Lion King's $42 million debut back in June 1994 would equal around $75 million today and Tangled earned $48 million on the Fri-Sun portion of a $67 million five-day Thanksgiving opening.  Still, with $49.1 million, Wreck It Ralph managed to top every non-Pixar animated feature that has opened in this holiday kick-off spot save Madagascar 2's $63 million opening in 2008.  It opened higher than A Shark Tale in 2004 ($47 million), Chicken Little in 2005 ($40 million), Flushed Away in 2006 ($18 million), Bee Movie in 2007 ($38 million), A Christmas Carol in 2009 ($30 million), Megamind in 2010 ($45 million), and Puss In Boots in 2011 ($34 million over Halloween weekend and another $33 million over this weekend last year). Inflation and 3D-bumps aside, this is a strong debut for a rather crowd-pleasing cartoon that should play well for the rest of the month even with heavy competition in three weeks from Dreamworks' Rise of the Guardians.  Like pretty much every major Disney cartoon since Bolt four years ago, this film is being touted as Disney's return to glory, but merely doing the numbers means that the Mouse House has a pretty big hit on their hands.

Review: Flight (2012) is generic and conventional would-be character study that never takes off.

Flight

2012
140 minutes
rated R

by Scott Mendelson

That Robert Zemeckis's Flight does not resemble the film that is being advertised (trailer) it not in itself a crime.  Marketing is often a game of misdirection and, considering Zemeckis's reputation for spoiler-filled trailers, it's a little ironic that his return to live-action film making is advertised is such a bait-and-switch fashion.  But while I'll honestly admit that I would have preferred the film being advertised versus the film that was delivered, the core flaw of this well-acted Denzel Washington vehicle is that it's not a very compelling version of what it is.  In short it's *not* a character-driven mystery involving a plane crash and how exactly it went down and who or what was responsible.  It is simply a character study of a functioning alcoholic.  What grounds Flight is the fact that it's simple not a very good film about a functioning alcoholic, as several major narrative choices work to lessen our interest and emotional investment.

Wreck It Ralph vs Flight in the Weekend Movie Preview.

Easily expected to be the biggest film this weekend, Wreck-It Ralph is the latest release from Disney Animation. The plot follows Ralph, the protagonist in the fictional video game Fix-It Felix, who tires of being the bad guy and leaves his game to find another in which he can become a hero. Along the way he encounters Tamora Calhoun, a sergeant in the Call of Duty/Halo style game, Hero's Duty and Vanellope von Schweetz, an 8 year old girl in racing game, Sugar Rush. But while Ralph is trying to realise his dream, Schweetz discovers a problem within her own game, one that could have dire consequences not only for the cast of Sugar Rush but the entire arcade - and it looks like Ralph leaving his own game could be the cause of all the problems. Development on Wreck-It Ralph began a number of years ago, as an idea from story artist Sam Levine. At that point the picture was known as Joe Jump and featured an over the hill character attempting to make the transition into modern videogames. Levine was making good progress on the project (enough for a rough synopsis to turn up online) but when John Lasseter took over as head of Disney Animation in 2006, the status of Joe Jump became unclear. While the Pixar honcho let Levine (and his writer) work on the project for a further year, it began to languish, and with little sign of moving forward, Joe Jump was put on the shelf and Levine was assigned to another project. While Lasseter was impressed by the core idea, he wasn't sold on the story itself. 

Robert Zemeckis's return to live-action, the Denzel Washington drama Flight, gets a great (spoiler-filled?) trailer.

This may be my wife's most anticipated film of 2012.  She hasn't seen the trailer, but I know her well enough to presume as much.  It's ironic that this picture marks Robert Zemeckis's return to live-action twelve years after the double-wammy of What Lies Beneath and Cast Away, as this Denzel Washington vehicle is arguably just the kind of film that they've mostly stopped making over the last decade.  Yes the film seems like an unofficial remake of Piché: entre ciel et terre and yes it appears that Robert Zemeckis is once again spoiling the living hell out of his movies via the trailers.  But those quibbles aside, this looks like a terrific piece of old-school character-driven entertainment.  It's heartening to see that Washington isn't the only actor of color onscreen, as we also have Don Cheadle, Nadine Velazquez, and Tamara Tunie among others playing seemingly major characters.  And the last time Denzel Washington and John Goodman appeared onscreen together, we got Fallen, one of the best supernatural thrillers of the last fifteen years.  So watch this if you can handle the possible spoilers contained therein.  But otherwise know that Flight debuts on November 2nd, and it frankly looks terrific.

Scott Mendelson

Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson's The Adventures of Tintin gets two posters and a teaser trailer.

I may be in the minority, but I rather enjoy the look and feel of motion-capture animation.  I loved The Polar Express and Beowulf and rather liked A Christmas Carol (I have not seen Mars Needs Moms).  And, let's be honest, few things look better in 3D than motion-capture animation.  So the idea of Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson playing in what was once primarily Robert Zemeckis's sandbox is a tantalizing concept.  And while the teaser is just that, it does show off a splendidly vivid and real looking environment with the promise of old-school adventure.  Spielberg is about to embark on 'act three' of his remarkable career, capping a stellar 1993-2008 run that brought us such modern classics as Jurassic Park, Schindler's List, Saving Private Ryan, and Munich, to say nothing of rock-solid entertainments such as Minority Report and Catch Me If You Can.  I can somewhat defend Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,  The Lost World: Jurassic Park and War of the Worlds if need be, but only The Terminal and maybe Amistad count as pure-whiffs.  Anyway, it may be fashionable to bash Spielberg because of his popularity and his role in bringing about more populist mainstream entertainment, but I can think of no other director aside from perhaps Alfred Hitchcock who has so successfully entertained the masses with filmmaking of such high quality.  As for Peter Jackson, he only created the single best live-action trilogy in cinema history, and followed it up with a ripping King Kong remake, so this is certainly an interesting partnership. The Adventures of Tintin comes out on December 23rd, and I shall be there with bells on in IMAX 3D.  The dynamic posters (domestic then international) are after the jump.

Scott Mendelson

Artistic Comeback? He never left. A look at Matthew McConaughey's best films, post-stardom.

Much of the babbling over this weekends The Lincoln Lawyer has been about the idea that the well-reviewed legal thriller represents some kind of artistic reawakening for Mr. Matthew McConaughey. As is the case with many old-school movie stars, the critics and the pundits have a habit of ignoring McConaughey's more interesting films while highlighting his lesser mainstream fare and then reaching the conclusion that he is not but a paycheck hack. While McConaughey is certainly guilty of some questionable artistic choices, there does seem to be a whiff of genre-bias around this newest entry. It's seems that much of the praise is not so much that The Lincoln Lawyer is allegedly a pretty good movie (I'm waiting until Friday night so the wife can come along) but it is the fact that McConaughey is once again playing in a 'respectable' genre (the legal thriller) as opposed to those 'lesser' romantic comedies that he has starred in from time to time. But, without further ado, let us recount a handful of genuinely good, if not great, films that happen to star Matthew McConaughey. Oh, and this list will only cover from 1996-2009. This is for two reasons: McConaughey became a genuine movie star after A Time To Kill in 1996 and... um... I've never gotten around to see Dazed and Confused from 1993 (I know, I know...). Anyway, onward and upward...