And people wonder why I sometimes wait until
Monday to write about the box office...
Thanks to Warner Bros' severe underestimate of
The Hangover's Sunday box office take, the opening weekend total has been bumped up from $42 million to $44.9 million. That was just enough to place it over Pixar's
Up for the number 01 box office draw this weekend. Whether or not this is any kind of game changer remains to be seen, but this is truly a shocking result no matter how you slice it. You have an R-rated comedy starring a cast of unknowns and moderately recognizable faces that just opened bigger than all but one Adam Sandler comedy (
The Longest Yard pulled in $47 million in 2005), and all but one Will Ferrell vehicle (
Talledega Nights also opened with $47 million in 2006... which is also the only Judd Apatow-related film with a higher opening weekend). Hell, throw Jim Carrey into the mix, and you still only have four bigger opening weekends and three of them weren't comedy vehicles (they are,
Bruce Almighty at $67 million,
The Grinch at $55 million,
Batman Forever at $53 million, and the animated
Horton Hears a Who! at $45 million). This Todd Phillips-directed comedy has the third-biggest R-rated comedy launch in history, behind
Sex & The City: The Movie ($57 million) and
American Pie 2 ($45 million). It's also netted the thirteenth-biggest R-rated opening in history. Oh, and it's actually pretty darn funny, so it has that going for it too.
The weekend multiplier was a so-so 2.68x, so we'll have to wait till next weekend to find out if the (most-likely positive) word of mouth will make this a long-term hit or a quick-kill blockbuster. I'm actually curious how the film plays with stereotypical female audiences and/or kids, as the film isn't nearly as vulgar (or sexist) as you might think. Heck, end credit-cookie and a splash of comedic male nudity aside, the film could probably air on TBS unmolested save for some choice dubbing. This might be one of those popular R-rated comedies (think
There's Something About Mary) where the actual onscreen content is light enough that parents let their otherwise forbidden teens see the film in the weeks to come. Come what may, whether it craps out and barely crosses $100 million or whether it goes the $150 million+ distance, this is a major and important win for everyone involved. Bradley Cooper now has his pick of tent pole projects (paging Lantern Corps...), the out-of-nowhere Zach Galianakis is now assured several supporting gigs for the next couple years, and Ed Helms is now a triple threat (sketch comedy pro, television star, and movie star).
For Todd Phillips, this is a major comeback after the brutally disappointing
School For Scoundrels in 2006. For Warner Bros, this was a badly needed jolt after the disappointments of
Watchmen and
Terminator Salvation and the outright tanking of
Observe & Report. And, while this is pure speculation, the film has a solid chance of being the second-highest grossing June release, as well as one of Warner Bros' highest grossers for 2009. Looking at the WB 2009 release charts, only
Where the Wild Things Are,
Ninja Assassin,
Invictus, and
Sherlock Holmes have any legitimate shot at passing $100 million+. So, depending on the breaks, this $30 million break out may end up number two or three for the Warner Bros' year after
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and possibly
Gran Torino.
Not to be outdone, the Pixar toon was equally impressive, dropping a mere 35% to $44.1 million.
Up now has a ten-day total of $137 million. In the realm of Pixar releases, the film trails only
Finding Nemo at this point, and only by $7 million. It's effectively leaving everything else in the dust, making it quite possible that
Up will end up the second-highest domestic grosser in Pixar history. After all, terrific word-of-mouth aside, the film has absolutely no family competition until
Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs.
Land of the Lost is irrelevant (more on that below) and
Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian is already under $15 million by the third weekend (it's at $127 million today, so it will struggle to get past $165 million). It's more than reasonable at this point that it will surpass
Star Trek by the end of the summer, making it likely that Pixar will once again claim one of the summer's very top spots. How far up it will rank will depend on its own legs in the next two weeks and the impact of the two mega-titans waiting in the wings (will
Transformers 2 outperform its predecessor and will
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince break the $290 million sequel ceiling?).
Next on the list is Universal's expensive flub,
Land of the Lost. Opening at just $18 million (the lower end of Will Ferrell comedy openings), this $100 million+ adaptation of the 1970s kids series finds itself in a remarkably similar position as
Speed Racer. The problems are a little different this time around. Last year, Warner Bros. knew what it had but just couldn't figure out how to market it. This time, Universal didn't really know what they were dealing with and seemingly just threw darts at a wall. Too PG-13 vulgar for kids and too juvenile for adults, this was basically fit for no one (ironically, there was far more overt vulgarity in this would-be family comedy that in the R-rated
Hangover). They basically had no choice but to advertise Will Ferrell being chased by a dinosaur and hope/pray that everyone who ever liked Will Ferrell in any movie would show up. They didn't. Of course, the film cost FAR more than any prior Ferrell vehicles, meaning it pretty much had to perform at
Elf-like numbers to make a profit. The bigger problem is that Will Ferrell movies make very little overseas. The highest overseas grossers are
Bewitched at $56 million and
Elf at $47 million. Everything else is below $30 million. As always, when you budget a film so high that the actor pretty much has to break his own box office records to turn a profit, you're going to get fried every time.
Universal's other (relative) disappointment is
Drag Me to Hell, which collapsed 55% for a ten-day total of $28 million. When a horror film with reviews like this one got still all but flops, there is absolutely no reason for studios to even try to make good horror pictures. This one won't even equal the opening weekend of
Friday the 13th, a film that everyone on Earth loathed. I've given up trying to figure out why this didn't at least do as well as a mid-range Screen Gems horror picture, so I'll just throw my hands up in despair. When studios continue remaking Asian horror films and rebooting 70s and 80s slasher franchises, you have only yourselves to blame, horror fans.
The other news in brief...
Star Trek became the second-highest grossing
Star Trek movie when adjusted for inflation (current total $222 million).
Terminator Salvation crossed the $100 million mark and probably won't get to $125 million total (but it's overseas numbers have also already crossed $100 million). Despite middling domestic returns ($116 million so far),
Angels & Demons has already crossed $400 million globally. And
X-Men Origins: Wolverine continues to chug toward the $180 million domestic marker, and its global total has just crossed $350 million.
And that's all the news that's fit to print. Next weekend is a relatively low-key one, as
The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 will probably do the usual Denzel Washington $20 million start, Eddie Murphy's
Imagine That will attempt to capture the box office glow of
Dr. Dolittle and/or
Daddy Day Care, and Sandra Bullock's
The Proposal will get a rare Saturday-night paid sneak-preview.
Scott Mendelson
I've written before about the coming IMAX wars, when every major studio will jockey for their allotted IMAX run for their respective summer tent pole film. With IMAX quickly becoming the new normal for major franchise pictures, it was only a matter of time before conflicts arose. Well, yesterday morning, word leaked that the IMAX premiere of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince will in fact be delayed for over two full weeks. While the 35mm version will still open all across the country on Wednesday, July 15th, the IMAX version will not be available nationwide until July 29th. There will be only two IMAX theaters, one in LA and one in NY, that will be playing Harry Potter 6 in IMAX for the first two weeks. The reason? Well, Paramount apparently booked an exclusive five-week engagement for their own mega-movie, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (many articles about this wrongly claim that it was a four-week exclusive that will end on July 22nd). IMAX's stock took a 6% dive because of the news, and they seem to be assigned primary blame in this situation.
Both would-be summer champions have an extra bonus for IMAX viewers. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen has several scenes that were shot on IMAX film (Ala The Dark Knight), and the IMAX version will actually be a few minutes longer. On the other hand, Harry Potter 6 will have a twelve-minute climactic sequence that will be rendered in 3D, just as Order of the Pheonix did. the two films are all-but guaranteed to end up the first and second-highest grossing films of the summer (with Pixar's Up playing a possible spoiler role). If the Paramount sci-fi spectacle and Warner's wizard's tale end up anywhere close to each other in domestic box office, expect cries for an asterisk to be placed in front of the second Transformers's ranking at summer's end.
As a reaction, Warner Bros. could move Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince back to Friday the 17th of July (it was moved to Wednesday, July 15th early this year). Or, if it's not too late, Warner could just move Harry Potter 6 to July 24th. So, instead of having to make the fans hold out for two weeks (which is an eternity in this front-loaded opening-weekend driven industry), you now only have one week. Moving to the 29th is impossible since that means that they get less than a month before most kids go back to school, although planting it on August 7th, the day GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra, would be a nice 'up-yours' to Paramount. Any date change at this late period would be a drastic choice and one that could further fan the flames of annoyance amongst the very die-hard Potter fans who would probably see the film in both formats anyway. Plus it would be a signal that Warner Bros. was basically admitting defeat in this unofficial d**k-measuring contest. Still, such a move to July 24th might actually help Warner Bros as the IMAX premiere weekend could cause a much smaller than usual second-weekend drop if the hardcores all go see it for a second time at IMAX theaters.
All this making lemonade out of lemons aside, this is an interesting problem that will have major consequences as IMAX becomes a bigger and more dominant variable in franchise filmmaking. The best case scenario is that this turns out to be similar to the bootlegged copy of X-Men Origins: Wolverine, an 'ohmygod-ohmygod!' story that turned out to be irrelevant when the film opened to $85 million anyway. Truth be told, I can't imagine anyone who was planning on seeing Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince on opening weekend deciding not to go because it was only available in 35mm. I'm guessing that this will be more of an 'egg on our face' moment than anything else.
