Should Scorsese stick with thrillers?
Shutter Island opened this week to an excellent $40 million at the American box office, for a very tidy $13,440 per screen average. This makes it the biggest opening for the director, and due to the film’s nicely understated $80 million budget, means the film with be in the green very quickly.
This is reminiscent of Scorsese’s last pure thriller, the (to me underwhelming) remake of Cape Fear. That film eventually drew about $80 million at the box office, which easily made it his most successful film to that time. Indeed, the director wouldn’t have a bigger hit until The Aviator racked up $102 million (which, let’s admit it, is just decent bread these days) thirteen years later. 2006’s The Departed remains his biggest film to date, though, at $132 million. We’ll see if Shutter Island can beat that. Still, Scorsese might want to work the thriller market more regularly. Even a film like that every five years or so would help his career numbers.
Shutter Island was the only big new movie this last weekend, so number two was last week’s number one, Valentine’s Day. I noted the title itself dated the film to last weekend, but even I’m surprised that the film’s revenues dropped 70% (!), racking up another $17M for an admittedly robust $87M total so far. The film will probably go a bit over a hundred million, and then make a pretty decent amount of coin on the home video market. It is again helped by its thrifty $52M budget.
Avatar…what can you say. It’s hanging in there, and worldwide has now taken in an astounding 2.47 BILLION dollars. Sweet Fancy Moses. I saw clips of Cameron on The View (THE VIEW?!) the other day, though, and had to laugh at his bloviating about the “subversive” (his word) anti-corporate message he cleverly put into the film (which cost half a billion dollars to make and which will put hundreds of millions of dollars in Cameron’s own pocket). First of all, thanks for letting us in on the big secret, dude. Avatar is anti-corporate?! Gasp! Who knew? Second, wow, an anti-corporate Hollywood movie. That is subversive! Have they ever made one of those before?
The rest? Percy Jackson, Wolfman, blah blah blah.
So, anybody see anything this weekend?
