By Scott Bowles, USA TODAY
Where are the serious fall filmgoers?
Studio executives are wondering, after yet another movie proclaimed to be an early Oscar contender fell by the wayside this weekend at the box office.
All the King's Men, the Sean Penn remake of the 1949 Oscar winner, did a dismal $3.8 million for No. 7, according to Nielsen EDI. Jackass: Number Two, the grossout-stunts sequel starring Johnny Knoxville, was an easy winner for the weekend with $28.1 million.
The King's Men haul is half what most analysts expected and confirms what they suspected about the 2006 Oscar race: that it lacks a heavyweight contender. "I can't think of one movie that people are considering a lock," Entertainment Weekly's Dave Karger says. "It's always anyone's race this time of year, but this is especially open."
King's Men follows the middling performance of Hollywoodland, the Superman drama that opened to $6 million two weeks ago but fell out of the top 10.
Though an Oscar contender doesn't have to be a commercial success, analysts say box-office momentum is a key component to an awards run. And already, executives behind smaller, popular movies released this summer such as Little Miss Sunshine and The Illusionist are revamping their awards campaign to fill the void. Sunshine has done $50.3 million, Illusionist $27.5 million.
"There are movies that on paper look like award-type films, but the marketplace will decide if that's true," says David Dinerstein, head of distribution for the Yari Film Group, which distributed The Illusionist. "We see an opportunity to be aggressive through the fall."
King's Men was supposed to be one of those movies, but it never recovered from its lukewarm reception at the Toronto Film Festival earlier this month.
"We believe in this movie, and we're proud of it, so we're disappointed," says Rory Bruer, distribution chief for Sony, which released King's Men. "Obviously, it wasn't the type of movie that fits what people are going to see right now."
Instead, people are going to see movies in which men are attacked by animals and have things hurled at their groins. On its first night of release, Jackass recouped its $11 million budget.
"There must be something in the water for Jackass fans," says Don Harris, an executive vice president for distributor Paramount Pictures. "If they don't make a Jackass 3, I may do it myself."
Jet Li's Fearless opened at No. 2 with $10.6 million, followed by Gridiron Gang with $9.7 million. Flyboys was fourth with $6 million. Ticket sales for the top 10 movies dipped 9% from the same weekend last year.
4 comments:
I hate when we, the moviegoers, get obliquely scolded for not seeing bad highbrow movies.
The overwhelming critical consensus of "King's Men" was that it was terrible. Not "boring if you didn't go to college" or "too smart for the American moviegoers" but simply a BAD adaptation of Robert Penn Warren's novel. Slate's review was headlined, "Why, Oh Why, Did They Have To Re-make All The King's Men"?
The public sensed this, probably because they, I don't know, maybe READ THE REVIEWS, and didn't go. And yet it's being described as some kind of scary, mysterious far-reaching trend. They're all so willfully stupid.
I watched The Illusionist last night and thought it was terrific. Then again, I went to college.
It's like they stick the label "quality" onto something the way the Doonsbury Donald Trump does, providing them with this week's excuse for why the zonko movie-making alchemy they use continually fails.
Although I understand the reasons why it happens, it always blows my mind a little when a bad movie is made or an ugly building is built. Here you've got a colossal, time-consuming project involving a number of stages and hundreds of people, and presumably NONE of them noticed during ALL of that time that the project was all based on a horrible idea. I think that's why we get all this ass-covering box office analysis that places the blame where it belongs: on the suckers who weren't suckers enough over the previous weekend.
Being scolded by Hollywood for not being highbrow enough is pretty ironic.
Exactly!
With buildings, it's especially egregious, since people have to, like, live in them, work in them and look at them for decades.
I've been reading the famous "mini-microsoft" blog (in which a disgruntled high-level Microsoft employee anonymously bashes the company's practices, revealing all kinds of unflattering internal details, for which the company is apoplectically trying to silence him) and it points to the same institutional problems we all experience from time to time; the "committee think" that lets things get this way.
I could go on endlessly on this topic but basically it's like:
1) Everyone says "This is great!"
2) Everyone then says, "Except, there's a small change you need to make..."
3) (repeat step 2 endlessly)
4) Everyone admits, "I liked the original version better."
5) The mult-edited version, which nobody likes, becomes the final version
6) Everyone is vaguely puzzled and disappointed; there is nobody to blame
This happens everywhere, all the time.
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