Greetings and welcome back to the Weekend Warrior, your weekly guide to the weekend’s new movies. Tune in every Tuesday for the latest look at the upcoming weekend, and then check back on Thursday night for final projections based on actual theater counts.
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Updated Predictions and Comparisons –
UPDATE: We’re expecting both new movies to cover a little more ground this weekend which might give Step Up a slight edge to beat Inception this weekend but it will be close. The crime drama Middle Men (Paramount) and Joel Schumacher’s Twelve (Hannover House) are both opening in over 200 theaters but we don’t expect either one to crack the Top 10 this weekend. We’ll give the former the edge to come closer to cracking a million this weekend, while Schumacher’s movie will probably end up with less than half that.
1. The Other Guys (Sony) – $37.3 million N/A (Up 1.7 million)
2. Step Up 3D (Disney) – $18.4 million N/A (up .9 million and one spot)
3. Inception (Warner Bros.) – $18.2 million -34%
4. Dinner for Schmucks (Paramount) – $12.4 million -47%
5. Salt (Sony) – $11.1 million -43%
6. Despicable Me (Universal) – $10.4 million -34%
7. Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore (Warner Bros.) – $7.0 million -43%
8. Charlie St. Cloud (Universal) – $5.8 million -53%
9. Toy Story 3 (Disney/Pixar) – $3.2 million -38%
10. Grown Ups (Sony) – $2.5 million -43%
Weekend Overview
It’s August, the last month of the summer movie season and the last chance for studios to make a mark before the fall movie season slows things down at the movies.
Almost exactly four years ago, Will Ferrell and his long time friend and collaborator, director Adam McKay, had one of their biggest hits, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, and now they’re back with their fourth movie together, The Other Guys (Sony), this one a New York-based police action-comedy co-starring Mark Wahlberg, Michael Keaton, Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne Johnson. While the (relative) success of last week’s Dinner for Schmucks bodes well for moviegoers’ desire for comedy, this one seems like more of a slam dunk due to the love moviegoers have for Ferrell’s previous movies directed by McKay, and the promise of action, which should bring in a decidedly male audience from teens to 20-somethings. Working against it is that the police buddy comedy is somewhat of a dead genre and a good number of moviegoers may be tired of Will Ferrell’s schtick, two things that are likely to keep the movie from opening to Talladega Nights (or Bad Boys II) numbers, though it should still open decently due to lack of direct competition before being crushed by next week’s offerings.
Acting as counter-programming by targeting younger women and the urban audience is the third installment in Disney’s successful dance franchise, Step Up 3D, once again switching to other characters whose lives are caught up in the world of dance, this one being more in the vein of movies like You Got Served. With a strong built-in fanbase from the previous movies, it should open decently despite a moderate theater count–a good percentage of them being 3D and thereby, getting more money per ticket–but it’s likely to be battling against Christopher Nolan’s unstoppable Inception for second place.
Last year August kicked off with Stephen Sommers’ G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (Paramount), the first live action movie based on the Hasbro action figures and related cartoons/comics, which raked in $54.7 its opening weekend. Offered as counter-programming was the bio-comedy Julie & Julia (Sony) starring Meryl Streep, Amy Adams and Stanley Tucci, which took in just $20 million, but had huge legs ultimately grossing $94 million and getting Meryl Streep her 5000th Academy Award nomination. Pitch Black director David Twohy returned with the vacation thriller A Perfect Getaway (Rogue Pictures) starring Tim Olyphant and Milla Jovovich, but it had a disappointing opening with less than $6 million in seventh place. The Top 10 grossed $125 million and unless one of the two movies really breaks out, this may be a weekend down from the last.
THE BATTLE CRY
This year’s San Diego Comic-Con has been and gone and we greatly appreciate everyone putting up with last week’s minimal column as we tried to catch our breath and catch-up. With a week to let the experience gestate, it’s time to look back at this year’s winners and losers. And when we say “winners” and “losers,” it’s something rather subjective that has everything to do with how the convention was used in terms of marketing and which studios benefited the most from it.
Having been to Comic-Con back in the ’90s when it was still about comic books first and foremost and having watched it evolve into a place where all pop culture and especially geek culture is held to the highest esteem, the annual convention has essentially grown to the point where it’s impossible for one person to possibly cover all of it without the powers of Jamie Maddrox. Now mind you, this year I didn’t exactly try to be everywhere at once and was very selective about what I covered and what was assigned to other writers, but it’s not hard to read the buzz in the air when things worked or didn’t work, and really there were very few highlights that everyone can agree upon.
The key thing to realize is that Comic-Con in its current guise is all about marketing. There is very little that takes place at Comic-Con that doesn’t have at least something to do with marketing. Even the comic book related stuff–the booths, the panels, etc–it’s all about letting people know there are new books down the road the companies want people to buy and read. Sure, some of it is about connecting the fans to the creators, as is the case with many of the television panels–for instance, HBO certainly doesn’t NEED to promote “True Blood” because the show is already quite huge. But it’s really hard to be anywhere in San Diego during the four-and-a-half days of Comic-Con without someone telling you something, handing you something or showing you something in regards to something they want to sell you.
Of course, most of our time was focused on the movies being touted at Comic-Con, and Hall H was the place to be almost every day if you were a movie buff.
The one true winner of the weekend (at least on paper) had to be Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, out next week, which couldn’t have been more pervasive unless the Universal marketing department had snuck into people’s dreams and planted the idea that they want to see the movie more than anything else this summer. Besides having a “secret” sneak preview premiere, Universal plastered a prominent hotel with the poster for the movie and then took over the courtyard of another hotel to create the “Scott Pilgrim Experience” where just about anyone–whether they were attending Comic-Con or not–could stand in line for custom T-shirts, flipbooks and lots of other cool stuff. The whole event was just a stroke of genius, especially because it wasn’t limited to the 6,400 people who could get into Hall H or to the 125,000 people at the convention alone, but pretty much anyone in San Diego who happened to come down to that area would know that this movie was coming. The fact that Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is based on a series of graphic novels whose popularity has grown in recent years certainly made Comic-Con the perfect place for such an event to take place and next week, we’ll be able to see if it pays off for Universal.
Another winner was Jon Favreau’s Cowboys & Aliens, which probably was already a no-brainer follow-up for the “Iron Man” director, but given how well he’s used Comic-Con to pump up audiences for the “Iron Man” movies, it made perfect sense he would bring footage from the movie. Not only that, but he also brought the legendary Harrison Ford, whose involvement in the “Star Wars” movies paved the way for geekfests like Comic-Con. We couldn’t get into Hall H for it, but we could hear the crowd going wild from outside.
After the TRON: Legacy panel on Thursday, Disney showed a teaser of Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow, which probably did a good job reminding people why they loved the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies and set them up for next year’s On Stranger Tides. Being so early in the convention, it may have been forgotten by the time Saturday came around.
Personally, I loved seeing the footage from Jonathan Liebesman’s Battle: Los Angeles, which looks to be a great summer tentpole-like movie being released in March, and I hope that the rest of the movie stands up to the extended trailer shown at Comic-Con.
I was really excited to see the Hall H reaction to Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch, having had a great look at what the director was up to while he was shooting in Vancouver, and I wasn’t disappointed as the wild montage of footage really blew the audience away.
Unfortunately, one of the losers may have been the Green Lantern panel, only because they had no footage with Ryan Reynolds in costume–possibly due to the backlash to the “Entertainment Weekly” cover earlier that week–and they only showed the teaser once. At least Ryan Reynolds charmed the audience by reciting the Green Lantern oath and he and Geoff Johns revealed some new information about some of the characters that may appear in the movie, which was pretty cool.
It was really obvious how badly it got blown away when Marvel kicked-off their highly-anticipated annual panel with a teaser for Captain America: The First Avenger and some quickly cut-together footage from the first week of shooting, then they blew that away with some of the first footage from Thor, then a teaser for The Avengers with the entire cast in attendance including Robert Downey Jr., something that was kept a big surprise leading up to the day.
The scheduling of programming continues to be a problem, because while Thursday and Saturday had enough big movies to insure there was a long line for Hall H, movies like
