Another small potatoes week, as Hollywood waits with bated breath for the first blockbuster of the year, May 1st’s Iron Man, to be released. There are more big movies this summer than last by a sizable margin, so anything that stumbles its first weekend is likely to be consumed (literally, it will have its available screens eaten away) by the following weekend’s big movie, and so on in turn.
In the meantime, this is as usual the dumping time of the year. Of the 12 top movies this week, the bottom of which drew a paltry 1.5 million (10,000 B.C.), only one, Horton Hears a Who, has a favorable rating at Rottentomatoes.com. I’m aware of this personally; some of my friends and I got together for lunch yesterday, couldn’t find a movie that roused even marginal interest, and went to one of our houses and watched Kung Fu Hustle on DVD instead. I think we made the right choice.
In the top spot this week, depressingly, is Prom Night, the latest by surely by no means the last slasher movie remake to hit screens in the last several years. It drew a pretty healthy $22.7 million (take estimated), carving up the limited box office for a robust $8,400 a screen.
Oldtime horror fan will grouse about these lame remakes, but the other current horror flick, The Ruins, which at least has significantly better reviews (40% positive at RT, compared to Prom Night‘s 12%) and a more novel concept, has fared much more poorly, having drawn rather less in ten days–$13.4 million—than Prom Night has in three. And given the location shooting and f/x and such, one can safely assume that The Ruins also cost a bit more.
As I’ve noted before, geeks make a lot of noise on the net, but they don’t make movies successful in themselves. Geeks don’t make Batman movies successful, mass audiences who largely don’t care about geeks do. Meanwhile, when films are made explicitly for geeks—Grindhouse, Snakes on a Plane, Slither—they draw good reviews and very bad box office. Geeks get excited about these films, but unless they are willing to support them by seeing them multiple times, and dragging whatever friends they have to see them too, the fact remains that they aren’t ever really going to be able to support such movies.
Meanwhile, slasher fans in particular are annoyed when remakes like Prom Night they make them PG-13 like this one. (Although the recent Black Christmas redo was a heavy ‘R’, and it sucked too.] The fact is, however, that these less gore-oriented flicks make money with today’s teens, who are, after all, the target audience. These films aren’t aimed at old school slasher buffs (who being older probably wouldn’t be satisfied with a typically awful ’80s slasher film if they saw one now anyway).
No, they are aimed at kids the age we were when the original Prom Night came out (although I personally was not a slasher fan, to say the least). And anyway, there’s a vocal contingent of horror buffs on the web who get their panties twisted anytime a PG-13 horror movie comes out. Personally, I find complaints that horror movies aren’t ‘authentic’ in some manner if they aren’t spattery gorefests a bit juvenile.
First, you can make even a G rated horror film and it can still be really scary. The original The Haunting would probably by a G by our standards today, and it’s tons scarier than pretty much anything made today. Scary and gory are two completely different things. Second, even if you personally prefer gory films, why would it offend you that some horror movies carry a lighter rating? It’s not like there haven’t be plenty of totally gross torture porn films the last several years. Certainly one of geekdom’s less attractive traits is the inane competition to establish who the ‘real’ geeks are. This seems to fall into that area, with sneers directed at anyone who would go to see The Ring or whatever if it wasn’t R rated.
Anyhoo, enough on that. Coming in second this week to Prom Night (ouch!) was the comparatively star-studded and equally new police actioner Street Kings, with Keanu Reeves, Oscar winner Forrest Whitaker, Hugh Laurie, etc. Since this was aimed at least nominally at adults (James Ellroy wrote the screenplay), presumably bad ratings—31% positive at RT—hurt it rather more than the critic immune Prom Night. It seized $12 million and a far more tepid $4,864 per screen.
Number three went to 21 (seriously, who will remember any of these films six months from now?), which made $11 million, a surprisingly small 28% down from last week’s earnings. Oh, wait, it nearly double the number of screens it was playing on. Still, it’s made a respectable $62 million in three weeks, so it’s already a modest moneymaker based on its $35 million budget.
The kiddie flick Nim’s Island drew $9 million in its second week, for a lame $25 million so far. With a $35 million budget and a name cast (Jodie Foster, Gerald Butler), it must be a bit of a disappointment, although it will probably make enough on home video to stagger into the black.
Leatherheads in its second week got clobbered by Prom Night, which can’t be making director/star George Clooney very happy. The fact is, though, that Clooney is more a movie star in perception than in cold, box office reality. He’s had but five films that made over a $100 million—not even that much these days—and three of them were in the heavily star studded Ocean’s series. The Perfect Storm was a pretty big hit, but that was a while ago. And finally there was Batman and Robin, the film that killed (at that juncture) the Batman franchise. It’s $107 million take was considered all be embarrassingly small, given the nature of the film.
The fact is that although Clooney makes the sort of small, lockstep boutique liberal political films that are considered ‘brave’ in Hollywood these days, those films are largely what his career has floated upon, given the lack of big money hits he’s had in the eight years since The Perfect Storm. Remove the Ocean’s movies, and he’s had but one film cross even the $50 million mark, which was Syriana at $50.8 million. Michael Clayton nearly made that much, too, and Oh, Brother Whereart Thou? made $45 million, but after that the falloff is rather severe.
With Leatherheads making in ten days what Prom Night has made in three (and with its continued falloff likely to be more severe, and at a budget three times larger), well, Clooney could really use a big picture at some point. I’m not sure why he hasn’t clicked in romantic comedies more, which he would seem a natural for. Maybe if he ever makes a good one, or just makes more of them. Oddly, he’s tried but two of these, Leatherheads and Intolerable Cruelty, in his career so far. Oh, wait, there was One Fine Day…back in 1996.
Rounding out the top ten are Horton Hears a Who ($6 million for a $139 million total), new release Smart People ($4.2 million), The Ruins at number eight ($3.25 million; $13.4 million total), Superhero Movie ($3.1 million; $21 million total), and Drillbit Taylor ($2 million; $28.4 million total).
