How do you spell Bomb? G-r-u-d-g-e M-a-t-c-h

After a while audiences get tired of seeing over age actors doing things overage actors shouldn’t be doing.  Stallone brought his Rocky character back a few years ago and was quite successful at it, but you can only push geriatrics so far.  So what do you do?

You make a boxing movie where the main character is Rocky but isn’t called Rocky. 

And DeNiro was just a little  too old to be doing a reincarnation of Jake LaMotta.  Be that as it may, I will check this movie out…..as soon as it hits Redbox. It’s not on my list of must haves.


From Variety:

Grudge Match,” which opened Christmas day and stars the veteran actors, finished in 11th place on Friday at the box office with $2.4 million and is expected to earn just $13 million through Sunday. Warner Bros.-based producer Bill Gerber had hoped that “Grudge Match” will offer a parallel box office success story to the 2008 hit “Grand Torino,” which starred Clint Eastwood and went on to gross $270 million worldwide. But so far, “Grudge Match” has been a swing and a miss financially. Made for $40 million, “Grudge Match” still has plenty of time to find older audiences but the boxing comedy wraps an otherwise forgettable year for Stallone and De Niro at the box office. “Bullet to the Head,” Stallone’s recent action film (also distribtued by Warner Bros.), was one of the biggest underachievers of 2013, earning just $9.4 million worldwide on a $55 million budget.

They are however working on the next sequel of The Expendables which has been a successful series so far.  I guess as long as your arthritis doesn’t keep you from holding an AK-47, you can do those types of movies forever.  You just can’t box.

Weekend Box Office Report 6-2-2013: The Smith Family crashes and burns in After Earth, then repeats the feat at the Box Office. Wrapping up May, the month of the blockbusters.

I spent most of the weekend prior to this one at the movie theaters in Bakersfield.  Instead of writing about Box Office Receipts, I was contributing to them in a big way, doing my part to help the economy and all of that patriotic stuff. 

I saw three of the blockbusters:  Iron Man 3, Fast & Furious 6, and Star Trek Into Darkness.  I skipped The Hangover III, as I had  no real interest in that, not having met Mr. Hangovers I & II, and having  banished my last hangover some thirty years ago I could not relate.  I would have dearly loved to have gotten to know The Great Gatsby though, but the show times at the local multiplex didn’t jive with my scheduling. 

The week before that, Audrey and I  were at Pismo Beach out here in California.  I wasn’t able to do much in the way of motorvating, and didn’t even attempt to walk towards the end of the pier.  But we did find one great little place to eat and seeing how I haven’t done one of those Food essays in a while, I may have to just do one soon and start giving Guy Fieri a run for his money.


Why didn’t I just do the box office columns during the week?  As I keep saying, I have this real world job that keeps me run down because of real world health problems that happen in the real world outside of Hollywood world.  Some day (maybe in five or six years), if I manage to retire before the Grim Weeper comes a calling, I’ll be able to sit here and write crap that nobody reads or wants to read to my hearts content, and filling that stuff with even more Amazon and Google ads that nobody uses to buy shit.  Yeah, I know.  Life’s a bitch. 

I’m left to roll three weeks of statistics into one overly long article so that when somebody passes by they can at least say, “Boy, that’s a lot of words” before skedaddling over to Twitter where the requirement is to print what you have to say in 140 characters or less. 

Or maybe they’ll head over to Facebook where with a simple mouse click one can prove they have a strong belief in Jesus, support the separation of church and state, believe we should all be Christians, support of the Military/Veterans, their love of Barack Obama, gay marriage, support for finding a cure for cancer, fighting breast cancer, fighting child abuse,  their hatred for Obama, fighting spousal abuse, oppose gay marriage, fight animal cruelty, support of the Affordable Care Act, denouncing the ACA, trickle down economics, lower student loan rates, support executing Jodi Arias, in favor of not cutting Social Security, save Social Security, and do this all in fifteen minutes or less before going on to play Candy Crush Saga which seems to be the newest Facebook game craze of the moment since it’s the one I get asked to join more often than any others.

I have a Facebook page as well.  It has all of 33 followers, so where are you people?  I promise, I’ll never make you click on anything to prove you support whatever.  Share, don’t share, just read, leave a comment, or do absolutely nothing to your heart’s content.  

I did twitter for a while.  Still do on occasion.  But it can become very repetitious unless you have a lot of followers who are actually interested in what you have to say instead of just regurgitating what everybody else has already said.  There’s nothing worse than being on Twitter and feel like you’re talking to dead air. 

So unless you’re someone like Miley Cyrus or part of a very large clique, I’ve yet to see that it holds any great purpose for me but that may change.  I just can’t hang on there 24/7.  So, now that I’ve made it necessary to add the tag “A Day In The Life” to this post, and/or “Random Thoughts”, let’s move on to why we came here in the first place.

If you look at the chart for the week ending 5/19, you’ll see that Star Trek’s take for the three day weekend was $70 million.  And those newspaper and entertainment rags that tend to dwell on failures reported that this was a weak opening as compared to the original.

In order to arrive at this dreary headline, it was necessary for them to completely ignore the fact that on Thursday, Star Trek Into Darkness scored a whopping $13.5 million dollars in limited showings.  In a Washington Post article that I read, the Thursday evening gross wasn’t even mentioned as if it hadn’t taken place at all.  (Checking back a couple of weeks later though, that article has been removed and replaced with one that did mention it).

Worse was an idiotic article for Forbes written by some bozo named John Gaudiosi who did include the Thursday gross, in a half ass sorry attempt  to equate a poor Star Trek video game by connecting it directly to the gross of the movie and reporting that Into Darkness debut was a total failure.  Everybody on this planet knows that the quality of a film has very little to do with a related video game.  Just ask E.T.  He’ll tell you.

This guy may have super knowledge regarding the video game market.  I have no way of knowing that one way or the other.  But he  doesn’t know shit about the cinema.  I’ll give him some kind of a runner-up award for the absolute worst, most misleading headline of the year so far.

Star Trek’s debut weekend was $83.7 million, thus toppling the debut of its predecessor which also debuted on a Thursday by some $5 million dollars.  In essence, when you talk about box office take these days, you simply manipulate the numbers to whatever fits any asinine story you want to dream up. 

When you get right down to it, it’s all rather pathetic.  These days a film lives and dies by it’s opening weekend, and by whatever tale some young whippersnapper entertainment reporter out to make a name for himself wants to create.  Let’s not forget that Star Trek Into Darkness was released against some much stiffer competition then it’s original predecessor.


And while it remains to be seen as to whether or not Into Darkness will top the previous film in total gross, it’s overseas take is eclipsing Star Trek by a few light years and then some.

Another notable entry over the past three weeks is The Great Gatsby, which has proved its opening weekend was no fluke.  It took in another $23.9 million during it’s second  weekend, and so far has taken in over $128 million in the states.  Stir in another $120 million from overseas and the film that many predicted wouldn’t even take in half that is a genuine hit.

Whomever decided that it was a great idea to open The Hangover Part III on the same weekend as the juggernaut Fast & Furious 6 should just resign now before he’s forced out.  The final chapter in this trilogy will be lucky to make half the amount of Part II.  It is a popular franchise overseas which may or may not resuscitate it into profitability. 

Fast & Furious 6 originally looked ready to eclipse all the Fast Films that came before it. This is one of the few series that just gets stronger with each new entry. Despite having dropped 63 per cent from the opening weekend it still held onto the number one spot in week two. 

The previous Vin Diesel Hot Wheels commercial, Fast Five, also experienced a large drop off from an opening of 86.2 million down to 32.5 in it’s second week.  By comparison, number six dipped from 97.8 million simoleons down to 35.1 million which  means all things being equal, Fast 6 should still top its predecessor overall depending on how it does in week three.  And in week three, there doesn’t appear to be much out there.

Many of these films have something going for them that wasn’t available or should I say exploited until recently.  That’s the China Market, where Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, and Duane the Rock should clean up handily.  The gang has already raked in $310 million across the Atlantic & Pacific in just two weeks while Fast Five managed $416 million total.

The biggest loser of all came this past weekend and it turned out to be The Will Smith Family Movie Making Nepotism Machine which also  had M. Night Shyamalan hitch his wagon to their cart and come along for the ride.  Of course, I’m talking about the Sci-fi epic, After Earth which only managed to come in at number three with a paltry $27.5 million dollar intake.  What this proves is that money can’t buy you love nor can it buy your kid instant stardom and acting ability to go along with it.




 
There’s one clown in the circus who simply had to try and make a name for himself and give this futuristic turkey a rave review to the point where he called After Earth the right film at the right time for M. Night Shamalama Ding Dong.  He may be right.  Maybe it will put Shyamalan’s now lackluster career in the shitter once and for all and he can go do TV commercials or something along the lines of M. Night brings you Flo, The Progressive Girl.  Never has such a promising director fallen so far so fast.

Just about every other critic blasted After Earth, and as word of mouth spread you could watch the audience ratings for the film plummet on both Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB like a futuristic space ship crashing into a futuristic planet.  Maybe if upon crash landing on earth they had found Charlton Heston, one fourth of the Statue of Liberty, and some talking apes everything would have worked out for Papa Will and his spawn called Jaden.

The film that benefitted the most from that disaster was the independent Now You See Me which came in at number two with 29.3 million dollars.  And it did this on 500 less screens, on a budget half the size of After Earth, which made for a per screen average of $10000 compared to Shamalamadingdong’s $8,000 per screen.  I just love a good underdog story, don’t you?  Add to that the fact that magician type movies don’t generally do well in theaters, and Lionsgate/Summit has to be pleased.

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But Columbia/Sony’s biggest mistake may have been to not open their After the Disaster Earth film wide overseas simultaneously with its domestic release.  They are counting on it to recover  in the International market, and considering Will Smith’s popularity it’s always a possibility.  It’s probably a good thing that they didn’t let the budget ($130 million) soar into John Carter territory though.  But now there is also time for word of mouth passed over the internet to help convince many to spend their Euros elsewhere.

Fast Five was always going to finish on top in it’s second week.  That was a no brainer.  But After Earth was supposed to  challenge it.   It wasn’t that long ago that the soothsayers were predicting a $40 to $50 million opening.

As for the rest of the films, Iron Man and Star Trek keep hovering around the top ten.  The Hangover is still in free fall mode, dropping 60 per cent from it’s poor opening weekend showing and coming in at number six in week two.  Wish it a quick goodbye as it sails out of site and into your nearest Redbox.  Gatsby is still plugging along in the top ten, more power to it.

Mud  is the little film that could.  It keeps hanging in the top ten week after week on just five hundred or so screens.  It’s been on the chart for six weeks now, and it’s another film I hope to catch soon if it isn’t too late.

Iron Man 3 is now the the 5th biggest money maker of all time.  Adjusted for inflation though, and it doesn’t make the top 100.  Robert Downey Jr. no longer just places his money in the bank, he owns the damn thing.

 
Looking ahead to next week, Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson try to conjure up memories of Wedding Crashers with The Internship.  Wedding Crashers ended up scoring $209 million total at the box office, but finished second to Charlie & The Chocolate Factory for two weeks before taking over the number one spot in week three.  It’s been almost eight years since Wedding Crashers, so I’m not sure if that success will even bleed over to this one.  Let me put it this way.  The Internship had better be pretty darn funny.

Here are the numbers for the past three weekends for you to compare, decipher, and decide for yourself whether or not I know what I’m talking about.
 




   






 

Box Office Report 5-12-2013: Gatsby Overcomes Prognosticators Predictions of Doom & Gloom. Ironman? Do you even have to ask?

From Rope of Silicon:

For some reason I think Mamma Mia is a more predictive film, it opened around $28 million back in 2008. The lowest possible number for The Great Gatsby is something like Romeo + Juliet's $16 million opening (adjusted for inflation). The highest number is in the upper $40s, mostly due to sheer marketing might. I enjoyed the film, but it's certainly long, and it's tough to think it will spark male ticket-buying interest, especially with Iron Man 3 and Pain & Gain still on the board.
My Gatsby prediction lands at $35 million against the $40 million tracking number. Care to dream higher?

From Forbes:

Iron Man 3 isn’t remotely terrible and The Great Gatsby isn’t traditional counter-programming.  Yes it’s a literary period piece drama in a summer of fantasy adventures, but it’s also a $120 million 3D spectacle.   Correlation isn’t causation,  but history is not on the side of Baz Luhrmann’s latest adaptation. Obviously the film may very well under-perform in the states only to flourish overseas. But purely from a domestic point of view, it seems beyond odd that Warner Bros. seems to keep tempting fate by attempting to open expensive summer movies during a period where audiences have rejected their pictures in favor of the summer kick-off film again and again. If the pattern holds, The Great Gatsby is doomed.

From Daniel’s Film Reviews:

The main appeal for the young’ns, I think, is Leo DiCaprio.  DiCaprio’s movies have an average opening of $22.28M, and the rest of the cast includes Tobey Maguire, Carey Mulligan, Isla Fisher and Joel Edgerton; and it is directed by a man of style, Baz Luhrmann. The 3D might also help the movie make a little extra money. Similar movies open to an average $23.14 million. This hardly stands a chance at beating Iron Man 3 this weekend, but I expect a healthy opening between Robin Hood‘s $36.06M opening and Shutter Island’s $41.06M, so I’ll go with $39,198,750.

From Yahoo Movies:

When Baz Luhrmann announced that he would helm "The Great Gatsby," with Leonardo DiCaprio playing the title character, it was a buckle-your-seat-belt moment in movie history. Could the Australian director of "Moulin Rouge" finally pull off the literary adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic about the American dream, a vision that has eluded so many before him?
Well, after much delay, fanfare, and cross-promotion, it appears that Luhrmann's $104.5 million 3-D adaptation is in serious trouble. Here are the 10 reasons why we think "The Great Gatsby" may be the summer's first great disappointment.

I just love it when all the soothsayers are so so wrong, and with these predictions they didn't really come close.  In case you haven’t heard, Gatsby did come in at number two as expected, but it did so with $50 million dollars thus astounding the experts and critics alike.  Take that Michael Bay!

I especially loved that last article by some yahoo from Yahoo which gave us not one but ten reasons why Gatsby was in world of hurt at the box office and destined to fail. So instead of just being wrong, that particular writer, Thelma Adams, was wrong in ten different ways.

And now you know why I stay away from Yahoo.  Until I did my google search, I was surprised to find out they still had writers, let alone internet traffic.

But those I presented to you are only a few of a whole boat load of wrongness out there for you to devour because both you and I knew better didn’t we?  Do a search for predictions regarding Gatsby that were made before this weekend, and they are all pretty much the same. I don't know why but I get the feeling there are a lot of people out there that just don't get Baz Luhrmann. Or don't like him. Or both.  

Not me. I love Baz Luhrmann films because you know you're going to get hit right between the eyes with some different, something imaginative, and usually something unexpected. The first Luhrmanm film I saw in a theater was Moulin Rouge. I went in expecting to hate it, and came out loving it.  It’s one of my favorite musicals. 

His last film, Australia, didn't do well financially. But I liked it. My girlfriend liked it. But it was a film meant to be viewed on the biggest screen possible. Watching at home on a small screen, I can imagine one would just shrug their shoulders and move on. In the theater, it was magnificent.

If you've recently upgraded to a 60 inch screen or larger, and have some stellar surround sound equipment, get the blu-ray of Australia and try again.

I actually came close to seeing Gatsby today. I had to go into town to get a part for our evaporator (more commonly referred to around here as a swamp cooler), and gave serious thought to going. But I dallied with my Annette article for too long this morning and got a late start so that pretty much put the kibosh on that.

Iron Man took in another $73 million here at home. Between that and it's international take of $664 million, it is only $50 million shy of a billion dollars. Like I said last week, Marvel and Disney better do what they can to keep Downey around for The Avengers with those kind of numbers.

The rest of the box office wasn't too rosy for the also rans. Michael Bay's Pain & Gain held onto the number three spot, but only with a paltry $5 million dollar take. I wonder what it's like for Bay to be at the bottom of the well looking up at Iron Man and Gatsby and being able to kiss Leonardo DiCaprio’s ass?  There’s a big difference between Michael Bay and Baz Luhrmann.  Luhrmann is the one that actually has talent.

Tyler Perry Presents Peeples managed to sneak into the number four spot, but only because  the rest of the top ten had already plundered the box office over the past month or so.  However, Perry didn’t star in nor did he direct Peeples.  And if he saw the same trailor for his film that I did, he was probably thanking his lucky stars.  I imagine having his name attached to that turkey makes him feel as bad as well, when Quentin Tarantino lent his name to awful The Man With The Iron Fists.

How bad did number’s three through eight really do?  Oz, the Great and Powerful hung around in the top ten for another week with less than a million dollars as it continues marching towards it’s DVD/Blu-ray release on June 11.  Order it from Amazon through here, and I might just make twenty or thirty cents for a big night out on the town.  Can’t beat that?

And Star Trek?  Like Ironman it made it’s debut overseas, and raked in $31.7 million dollars in markets where the previous Abrams spectacle played well.  So far, it’s doing better than the original which is a good sign for Paramount, Abrams, and the franchise before Abrams packs up his bags and head to Disney to begin working on the Star Wars films.  Buy your Disney stock now. 

Scary Movie 5 has left the building this week, dropping off the chart and probably headed for a quick buck or two on the DVD circuit.

Not from  my wallet though.  Not in this lifetime, nor the next one.

Mud is hanging on, but when you consider it’s only on 854 screens, that’s not too bad. 
Here are the numbers:

Weekend Box Office Report 5 - 5 – 2013: Robert Downey Jr. makes mucho dinero

Yes, I know I missed last Sunday’s report.  I was busy with many other things that sometimes get in the way.  I think it’s called living.  I was going to put it up later in the week but when you’re working eight hours a day, you have to budget your time the best way that you can.  I was also working on another project for this blog (still am) that is taking more time than I thought it would so by Wednesday, I decided it would be rather pointless to publish it.  So here it is, along with this weekend’s take and my usual snarky b.s. which is the real reason you’re here.  You can get the actual numbers anywhere.

And what did I miss writing about last weekend?  Not much.  Michael Bay’s Pain and Gain topped the box office with about $20 million dollars.  It’s sort of a good news bad news kind of thing for Bay.  The good news is that the Pain and Gain only cost Paramount $26 million dollars to make so in the end, they’ll make money from the thing between foreign and domestic box office and the DVD that you can already pre-order.  The bad news is that $20 million dollars is chicken feed compared to what Bay was used to raking in over opening weekends with films like Armageddon, Bad Boys, Bad Boys II, and The Transformers franchise.  If anybody can prove that there’s huge profits in Cinema Sewage, Michael Bay can.  He is is a teenage fanboy’s wet dream.

The truth is not too many people, especially myself, really cared that Bay made a movie that was a bit different than what we are used to seeing him churn out.  P&G has a lofty 46  percent critic approval rating at Rotten Tomatoes.  I say lofty when you compare it to Revenge of the Fallen’ s 20 per cent, Dark of the Moon’s 36 per cent, Bad Boys II’s 23 percent, Bad Boy’s 43 per cent, or Armageddon’s 39 per cent.  A real critic’s darling this guy is.  The only difference between Bay and Uwe Boll is that Bay has big enough budgets to snooker the fan boys into paying to see his mayhem.

But it doesn’t matter at this time.  At least until Bay’s next atrocity Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles From Outer Space makes it’s way into theaters next year.  Supposedly he’s only a producer on that one.  Yeah, and if you believe that then let me tell you how I crap diamonds.  By the time this weekend rolled around though, Iron Man was ready to escort Bay and his fans to the exit.

Even before it opened here in the states everybody knew that Iron Man 3 should just go ahead and be given a license to print money by the Treasury Department.  While Bay was scraping the bottom of the pickle barrel to come up with $20 million last week, Iron Man was already raking in $198 million overseas, beating The Avengers as far as foreign box office openings go.  By the time it opened here, the only question was whether or not it would beat The Avengers opening in the U.S.  It didn’t, coming in second, but I don’t think anybody is down in the dumps about that when your movie is almost to the one billion dollar mark after only a week.  From Hollywood Reporter:

Overseas, the Disney and Marvel threequel grossed $175.9 million in its second weekend, putting the 3D movie's international total at $504.8 million and early worldwide haul at $680.1 million. Internationally, Iron Man 3 - the first title in the franchise to be released in 3D -- is all but matching Avengers overseas, where 3D remains a big draw. China leads with a whopping $63.5 million, the top opening of all time for a Marvel film. Iron Man 3 -- directed by franchise newcomer Shane Black -- has a strong shot of joining an elite club of films ultimately grossing $1 billion or more and is another sizeable victory for Marvel and parent company Disney, giving them the top two slots on the list of all-time North American openings as Iron Man 3 beat out the final Harry Potter pic ($169.2 million).

Box office observers are convinced that the threequel is playing more like a sequel to Avengers than to Iron Man 2, a testament to Marvel's superhero strategy. They say it bodes well for sequels Thor: The Dark World, which opens Nov. 8, and Captain America: The Winter Soldier, opening April 14, 2014 (both characters shared the screen with Downey's Tony Stark in Avengers). "A year ago, we speculated as to the impact of Avengers, and now we're witnessing it first-hand with the success of Iron Man 3," said Disney executive vice president of distribution Dave Hollis, crediting Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige. Case in point: Iron Man 3 has already surpassed the total global box office of Iron Man ($585 million), Iron Man 2 ($624 million), Thor ($449 million) and Captain America ($369 million). And it zoomed past the $128.1 million domestic opening of Iron Man 2.

I also read today that for his part in The Avengers, Downey raked in $50 million dollars. I don't know what his haul on Iron Man 3 will be, but it will undoubtedly match that or easily surpass it. However, he has said he is tiring of the character. I guess he can now afford to be now although we all know that wasn’t always the case. If he decides to retire from the franchise, it'll be a question mark as to whether Iron Man can survive his departure.

Consider this: The totally unnecessary Spider-man reboot put out by Cheapskate Sony Incorporated made $262 million. Sounds like a lot until you realize that it didn't top the $300 million dollar mark, a feat achieved by all three of it's three predecessors.

Sure, it helped Sony that they cut the budget down to the point where a profit was inevitable, but in my opinion, they've so damaged the franchise it's doubtful these remakes will ever achieve the rarified air that the originals did. Not that it matters to everybody when you stop to consider that as Sony has proven, along with Michael Bay, a fanboy and his money are easily parted. 

So look for Disney/Marvel to do everything in it's power to keep Downey around at least until The Avengers sequel in a couple of years. 

Besides Pan & Gain dropping well over 60 per cent of it’s box office from 4/28 to 5/5, wave goodbye to Olympus Has Fallen, Jurassic Park 3D, and GI Joe.  Welcome back into the fold Oz, The Great and Powerful who had left the building last week.  Enter Mud, who creeps in with 2.2 million from only 576 Screens.  The Croods just keep hanging around.  Look for Iron Man to top the charts next weekend as well.  But there’s a starship named Enterprise making it’s way across the Galaxy to blast him all to shit.

Here are last weeks and this week’s numbers.

Weekend Box Office Report 4/21/2013: Tom Cruises to the Top

Despite the title of his latest film epic, Oblivion, Tom Cruise shows once again why when all is said and done, he’s still good box office and is not about to fade into oblivion himself.   Oblivion blasts its way to a $38.2 million dollar opening.  This after his previous film, Jack Reacher, was declared dead on arrival although I don’t quite concur with that forensic analysis.

Was Jack Reacher a gigantic box office bonanza on the level of Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol?  Of course not.  There are only so many Ghost Protocols, War of the World’s, or Minority Report’s that any actor can conjure up.  But if any other film a big name star takes part in doesn’t match their biggest successes, it’s labeled a failure.  Consider this.

Jack Reacher was up against some stiff competition in The Hobbit.  Another entry in the seemingly never ending Tolkien saga being milked for every cent Hollywood can squeeze out of it.  And although Reacher only grossed just over $15 million opening weekend, it did go on to take in $80 million domestically on a $60 million dollar budget.  Hardly a total disaster.  Stir in an overseas box office take of $136 million, and suddenly the film is well into profitability.   And once it reaches DVD and Blu-ray in a couple of weeks, those who haven’t seen it will find out just as I did that it was in fact, a damn good action, espionage, thriller.


I almost made it to see Oblivion this weekend, but my girlfriend Wilma wasn’t particularly keen on the idea.  She probably would have gone if I had been an obnoxious prick about it, but instead I decided to be Mr. Nice Guy.

Wilma had me run down the list of movies playing, what they were about, and where they were showing.  Any theater except those owned by Regal would do.  I’ll never step foot in another Regal cinema, but that’s a story I’ll try to get to later in the week.  We decided on The Place Beyond The Pines, a film that we knew little about but from the plot synopsis sounded very interesting.   We never made it there.

We had lunch at a place called Logan’s Roadhouse Grill (great meatloaf), then afterwards we decided to go to Burlington Coat Factory which was in this small strip mall that also housed one of those second run, admission only $1.00 theaters called the Starplex Cinema.  It was a perfect candidate to do one of my Road Trip reviews, that is if I could squeeze it in.  In other words, don’t look for that to happen.
 

Back when it was originally released, and because Wilma is a romantic kind of gal, she had wanted to see the Julianne Hough movie Safe Haven which was another straight from the heart romantic dopuses from writer, now producer, Nicholas Sparks.  As for myself,  I can only get into these types of films if they are the Romantic Comedy classification (they better be damn funny), Romantic Suspense classification (better keep me on the edge of my seat), or perhaps even just Romance Drama’s (better be damn meaningful)  if the drama part is laid on thick and heavy.  Straight romance movies bore the heck out of me and are fodder for Hallmark and Lifetime. 

So since we were already there,  because the next showing was just 30 minutes away, and most of all because it was  only a buck, I decided to be Good Guy Clyde, and escort her to see it.  Two other things worked in her favor: 
1.  The fact that it was an adult oriented romance film that meant the chances of there being a bunch of noisy rug rats running around the theater were pretty slim, even on a Saturday afternoon.
 
2.  It was only a dollar so what did I have to loose?  And we had just eaten lunch so there was no need to buy the popcorn or soft drinks which were just as overpriced as any other theater showing a first run film.  On the other hand, they are the Marge Schott of movie theaters and you can get a hot dog for $1.00 anytime.  I have to admit that I did fill a twinge of guilt for not purchasing anything from the concession stand since I know the theater makes nothing from the $1.00 admission.  But that only lasted a millisecond.  Next time I’ll be sure to get a wienie or two.
As for the film itself, since every thing I watch is always a candidate for  future page filler, all I’ll say is that the first fifteen minutes were intriguing, and the last fifteen minutes were fairly decent despite the fact that I couldn’t stop laughing at the ludicrous plot twist tacked on.   But everything in between was an exercise in never ending tedium.  Never has there been a romance that was as uninteresting and developed as slowly and as boringly as what happens between Julianne Hough and Josh Duhamel.  I wanted to take a nap in the worst way but managed to somehow stay awake.  Then again, what do I know?  Except that Wilma concurred with my opinion and this is a woman who likes practically everything she’s ever paid admission to.  Maybe the book was better, especially since it have a lofty rating of 4.6 stars from those on Amazon who have read it.  Count me out though.  I’ve been working on the same romantic/mystery/suspense trilogy for about three or four months now.

I had thought Safe Haven, like Jack Reacher, was a total bomb at the box office.  But that perception of mine must have come from the way the critics had savaged it (13 percent at Rotten Tomatoes).    The film managed to rake in $70 million domestically and over 16 million overseas on a shoe string $28 million dollar budget, so if profitability is the name of the game, Safe Haven achieved that goal.   I’m sure that my two bucks helped tremendously in that regards.  All I know is I still haven’t seen Jurassic Park 3D, and time is running out.  But the weekend is almost over, and unlike Reese Witherspoon, most of us had a pleasant enough time. 

Here are your Box Office totals:

Weekend Box Office Report 4/14/2013: Jackie Robinson Hits a Home Run, Ends Racism

If only it were true.  Robinson went a long way to breaking the color barrier in Major League Baseball, but racism as we all know, continues onward to this day.  Where would the Tea Farty and many Republicans go and who would they vote for if they didn’t have their fearless leaders feeding into the paranoid delusions of their half witted followers that all minorities are out to get them?

I didn’t get to get out and see 42 this weekend, which was the number one film at the box office.  And I still haven’t made it out to find out if 3D dinosaurs are better than the 2D ones.  And time is running out on that one unless I want to invest in a 3D Flat Screen.  I don’t, not after having just invested in a 2D back in January.

Sometimes…..well most of the time, I hate living where I do.  Being 30 miles away from the nearest theater is a pain in the ass, not only because of the time it takes to get there and back, but because the cost of the gasoline you need to do it just adds to what is usually a pretty expensive outing anyway.  There have been many times I would have gone to see a movie during the week, but when you arrive home from your job at 5:00 or thereabouts, driving over sixty miles is far from being appealing no matter what the reason.

I have a nice enough blu-ray set up here at home, so I guess I shouldn’t complain.  Those movies I don’t make it out to the theater to see, I’ll watch from the comfort of my living room, even though I still prefer the theatrical presentation with it’s sticky floors, overpriced popcorn, crying brats, cell phone distractions, and the guy who sits next to me narrating the film on a continual basis.  Oh, and let’s not forget the fact that you can’t pause the action while you go take a squirt.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, 42 was given a CinemaScore of A+, and was like by all types of audiences be they male, female, young or old:

Financed by Legendary, whose CEO Thomas Tull personally produced the $40 million project, the PG-13-rated 42 recounts the career of Jackie Robinson. The film was written and directed by Brian Helgeland (A Knight’s Tale), and stars Chadwick Boseman as Robinson and Harrison Ford as the Brooklyn Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey. With an excellent A-plus CinemaScore from all four quadrants of the audience, it was embraced by moviegoers as it outperformed expectations, which had the movie opening in the mid-to-high-teen millions.

42 enjoyed something of a hometown advantage in Los Angeles, where the Dodgers now play: Of the top ten-grossing theaters playing the pic, five were in Los Angeles. “It played extremely well in large and small markets, urban and suburban, and we have a great road ahead of us,” said Dan Fellman, Warners president, domestic distribution. “Congratulations to Thomas Tull and Legendary for bringing the picture to us.”

The movie did play older: 83 percent of its audience was over 25, with 45 percent of the audience between 25 and 49. Gender-wise, it broke fairly evenly though, with 48 percent male and 52 percent female. While African-Americans contributed to the audience that turned out for the drama about breaking racial barriers, the film enjoyed broad appeal. “There’s not one pattern that jumps out,” Fellman said. The film is currently playing in 3003 locations, but Fellman expects to expand it further in the coming weekend.

And don't feel sorry for the Weinstein’s Scary Movie 5 either which only managed to scrape up a piddling $15 million which doesn’t at all compare favorably to the $40 million opening of it’s predecessor, Scary Movie 4.  The movie only cost about $17 million to make, and I’m sure it’ll make a profit from the rest of its domestic run and any other Euro’s it can scrape up overseas. You can alread preorder the DVD or Blu-ray if you wish.  Look for this pre-order price to come down quite a bit. 

I know this is going to sound bad but I haven’t even seen the first Scary Movie, let alone it’s long run of sequels.  The whole lame brain premise just doesn’t appeal to me and as long as this blog only has the equivalent of five visitors a week, then there’s no real reason to see some films I don’t want to put any effort into.  And besides that, aren’t most horror films already kind of a parody of themselves?

That doesn’t necessarily mean I’ll exclude bad movies from my viewing habits.  You should already know that from some of my previous Poo Poo winners.  But unless this blog miraculously rakes in $30 thousand a year so I can do nothing but write pointless crap twelve hours a day, I’ll have to keep my shit job until I can retire.  By that time I may be too decrepit to write at all.

On the other hand, Netflix does have the first two Scary Movies available for streaming and if they stay there long enough, I may get to them.  Maybe I’ll even be greatly surprised by their insightful humor and wicked parody of horror films.  Uh-huh.  I’ll let you know. 

There’s one other film I should mention before we get to the chart.  Tom Cruise’s Oblivion actually opened this past week as well.  But not in the U.S.  It hit the European circuit for a rather hefty total of $61.1 Million.  Good for first place in the international market.  It opens in the U.S. this coming weekend.  This is no longer unusual.  Many films have opened overseas before unfolding across the continental U.S.  Spielberg’s Adventures of Tin Tin played in Europe a long time before it arrived here because it was better known.  And there have been films that were declared flops in the U.S. that actually did fairly decent business overseas.  That’s the new world order, so get used to it.  Here’s the tallies:

Weekend Box Office Report 4/7/2013: The Evil Dead-Revised Edition

It was another testosterone filled weekend at the Box Office as American Males scurried into the theaters to gape, holler, and hoot, at the gore and bloodletting in Evil Dead to the tune of $30.5 million dollars off of a production budget of $17 million dollars.  Chances of Evil Dead recuperating it’s production AND marketing costs are now at 100 percent.  However, the film only earned a C+ CinemaScore in North America which proves one thing:  Since the audience was made up of 58 percent males, when it comes to guts and gory, the guys will watch about any piece of crap you put up on the screen these days.  Unless of course it’s directed by Uwe Boll.  Nobody wants to see any movie produced by the guy who is a continual blight on the art of film making.

Jurassic Park 3D, the other not so really new entry, came in at number four with a domestic take of $18.2 million dollars.  Not bad for a movie that has been on DVD forever, and was released on Blu-ray in a boxed trilogy set just about a year and a half ago.  It even beat Titanic’s 3D Weekend totals, but keep in mind that Titanic had the disadvantage of less showings due to it’s running time of over three hours.  Up next for the dinosaur epic is the Blu-ray 3D version scheduled for release in just two weeks on April 23, for those of you who have the capability at home for that format. 

I purchased a new set for my girlfriend this past Christmas and didn’t go that route.  Finances were not on my side, but more than that, I still see the appeal of 3D as being limited as well.  The expense doesn’t stop with the purchase of a 3D set either.  You need a blu-ray player that is 3D capable (I have one of those, but looks like I’ll never use it for that function), and the 3D blu-ray discs are more expensive.  There isn’t much as far as the broadcast medium either, and what you will find is that it will cost you extra as well. 

On the other hand, those who keep predicting that this latest incarnation of 3D will eventually die off keep being proven wrong.  It appears audiences are just being more selective in what they see, or perhaps when they believe the 3D will add to the experience.  And despite Jurassic Park being a 3D retrofit, most of the reviews I’ve read have praised it.  I gave thought to seeing it myself this past weekend but my girlfriend had other ideas.  We ended up seeing The Call with Halle Barry.

The Croods, in it’s second full week of release pretty much tied with GI Joe for runner up status and continues to rake in the dough surpassing the $125 million dollar mark domestically.  GI Joe, while taking in 21.1 million domestically, continues to conquer Europe and Asia where it has taken in $145 million in overseas box office compared to the $86.7 totals it’s racked up here at home.  Sorry kiddies, but the U.S. box office is not not the only thing that makes the world go round.

From Hollywood Reporter:

Universal opens the 3D rerelease of Jurassic Park 20 years after the original dinosaur movie debuted and is using the pic to prime audiences for Jurassic Park IV, which rolls out in June 2014 (Spielberg is producing but not directing). Hollywood has had a mixed track record with 3D rereleases and will be watching closely to see how Jurassic Park performs over the course of its short run (the Blu-Ray/DVD comes out in two weeks).

The Croods and G.I. Joe: Retaliation claimed the No. 2 and No. 3 spots on the North American box office chart, although the precise order won't be determined until Monday morning, since both films are estimating a $21.1 million weekend.

Croods, from DreamWorks Animation and Fox, jumped the $300 million mark globally over the weekend, becoming only the second title of 2013 to do so after Oz the Great and Powerful. Croods grossed $34.1 million internationally from 62 markets for a foreign total of $206.8 million. The 3D toon has now earned $125.8 domestically for a global cume of $332.6 million.

G.I. Joe raced past the $200 million mark in its second weekend of play at the global box office. The action pic, from Paramount, MGM and Skydance, boasts a domestic total of $86.7 million, while it earned $40.2 million internationally from 60 countries for a foreign total of $145.2 million and global haul of $231.9 million.

For all you box office score keepers out there, here are the totals:

Weekend Box Office Report: 3/31/2013: G.I. Saves The World

GI Joe: Retaliation cleans up globally.  I haven’t seen it and I’m not sure I want to.  I did attempt to watch G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra once, but turned it off after about a half hour.  I couldn’t take it any more.  I may get back to it one of these days but don’t hold your breath.  Maybe the reason I couldn’t get into it was because my testosterone levels were low that day.

Retaliation was supposed to open last summer, but Paramount pulled it back to do a 3D conversion, and to stir in a few more scenes of Channing Tatum.  

Frankly, I’m not getting the whole Channing Tatum thing.  What am I missing?  I saw 21 Jump Street and I wasn’t impressed.  I watched The Vow with my girlfriend, and it was a painful experience.  I hate to say things like “it’s a woman’s thing” because it sounds so damn sexist, but I can’t offer up any other explanation.  Except that a big fat 68 per cent of the audience was made up of hyper testosteroned males.  Thank you, but I’ll wait for the DVD and that’s probably when I’ll get back to the first one.  Not before.

From Hollywood Reporter:

G.I. Joe took in $80.3 million overseas and $51.7 million domestically, including $41.2 million for the weekend proper, the second-best domestic Easter gross behind the 2010 Clash of the Titans ($61.2 million). Internationally, G.I. Joe opened 10 percent ahead of Oz the Great and Powerful, which debuted earlier this month to $69.9 million.

Overseas, the sequel is doing double the business that Cobra did (that film opened to $92 million globally). It's doing especially well in Russia ($11 million), Latin America and Asia, where 3D remains a popular format. IMAX theaters generated $7 million of the total global gross.

The successful opening of G.I. Joe vindicates Paramount for deciding to push back the film's release from summer 2012 in order to convert it to 3D and refashion Channing Tatum's role so that the actor has more scenes.

"Clearly this was a movie that felt like it should be in 3D, so Jon Chu went back and did an excellent job in making that happen," said Paramount vice chairman Rob Moore. "Certain parts of the story also needed to be massaged, and Adam Goodman and his team worked with Jon to get it to a great place. 

Here’s how they stack up for the Cesar Chavez Holiday Weekend.  Oh yea, and that Bunny thing too.