• The swashbuckling spirit behind “Pirate Radio.” [Los Angeles Times]
• Anne Thompson wants to know where the screeners of “The Hurt Locker” are. Probably waiting on “New Moon” box office receipts. [Thompson on Hollywood]
• The gall: Why Roger Corman doesn’t deserve an Oscar. Apparently there’s a “pro” side on the way. [Cinematical]
*All historical figures are adjusted to today’s dollars.
Roland Emmerich’s still got it. And by “it,” I mean the ability to make blockbuster hits out of the same movie again and again.
“2012” opened at the top of the box office with $65 million and the seventh-biggest opening of 2009. It’s also the 10th-biggest November opening of all time, sliding in between last year’s “Quantum of Solace” and 2002’s surprise juggernaut “8 Mile.”
Mid-November releases have the benefit of the highly lucrative Thanksgiving holiday coming somewhere around their second or third week, so “2012” has the chance to earn three times its opening, which certainly wouldn’t be the case in the summer. I actually don’t think it will be the case here either and I think we’ll see it top out around $150 million. While that figure is less than the production budget, the film has already made $225 million worldwide after just three days, so Emmerich has free reign to make whatever disaster movie he wants next.
Destroying the Earth four times is probably the limit for any director but luckily for Emmerich, we just discovered water on the moon, so he can go ahead and make a movie where we’ve colonized it and are living there, but for whatever reason it gets destroyed.
*All historical figures cited are adjusted to today’s dollars.
(This is the first of a new series of columns splitting the weekly Sunday Cents column in half. We’ll cover the weekend box office on Sundays and save the forecasts for Thursdays from here on out.)
Roland Emmerich returns this weekend to popular landmark destruction for the fourth time in his career. He has experienced gargantuan openings in each previous attempts, so there’s little reason to think that “2012” won’t win the box office weekend by a mile.
Sony has spent a fortune on the making and advertising of this film, although the studio seems to have saved some money by not hiring an editor as the finished product clocks in at a totally gratuitous 158 minutes. Squeezing in less showtimes may factor microscopically in the grosses, but theaters will be playing this sucker around the clock beginning tonight at midnight.
“Independence Day” opened with $81.6 million during the fourth of July weekend in 1996 for a venue average of $28,311. “Godzilla” earned $67.4 million during Memorial Day of 1998 for an average of $20,373. “The Day After Tomorrow” also bowed on Memorial Day, in 2004. with $79.5 million and an average of $23,206. Clearly, audiences have a taste for the Emmerich touch when it comes to disaster flicks. His various attempts to make films outside this micro-genre have been met with relative shrugs at the box office (“The Patriot” and “10,000 B.C.”).
Regular readers will know that I’m something of a fan of January Jones. The 31 year-old star of “Mad Men” (which wrapped its third season this week, though me and my fellow Brits haven’t even got started) has essayed the best female character in American film or TV in two years, gives great interview and, well, looks like this.
Somebody give her a movie already. No, “Pirate Radio” does not count. Anyway there’s nothing edifying, intelligent or movie-related about this video from Jones’s recent GQ cover shoot, but…
I don’t know why, but this “Pirate Radio” trailer (which has been around a while) is really doing it for me. I saw it yesterday before a screening of “Zombieland.” And how long before Philip Seymour Hoffman completes his trilogy of rock types? He knocked Lester Bangs out of the park in “Almost Famous” and his character The Count here is inspired by Radio One’s Emperor Rosko. Come on. Just one more.
Another month, another step closer to the awards season. As the summer winds down and the industry slowly begins to square itself with the off-season’s bombshell Oscar news, the picture becomes a little clearer. Kind of.
Universal Pictures, in a move speculated upon endlessly by now, shuffled two of its contenders — Paul Greengrass’s “Green Zone” and Joe Johnston’s “The Wolf Man” — off to 2010. As Anne Thompson shrewdly noted in a recent item, the decision likely has everything to do with a numbers game. The studio has experienced a rocky two quarters this year and things aren’t necessarily looking up. Some think, in the case of “The Wolf Man,” the shift was made to avoid another box office misfire in 2009 (as by now, with push after push, the film is beginning to smell fishy). Others say the “Green Zone” shift had a lot to do with “The Hurt Locker”‘s release pattern.
Whatever the case, the evacuations change the Oscar landscape ever so slightly, giving us just a few more talking points in the vacuum of August before we have anything of value worth discussing when the fall festival season hits in less than a month’s time.
Universal is now left with two critically divisive, commercially dubious titles in Michael Mann’s “Public Enemies” and Judd Apatow’s “Funny People” to hawk for awards consideration, effectively (if you’re asking me, though I realize no one is) taking the studio out of the game this year — or, at the very least, making the hill steeper.
But taking note of the studio awards landscape, it doesn’t seem to me that anyone else is on surer ground. As I look out at the many contenders and the campaigns being prepared for them, it appears the entire industry will be dealing with unconventional approaches and product to go along with the new changes in the Best Picture category (and all the headache that comes with them) this season.
A few weeks ago we learned that the folks at Focus Features would be re-editing Richard Curtis’s “The Boat That Rocked” for U.S. shores in an effort to whip the project, which didn’t fare well with critics across the pond, into more profitable shape. Now I’m hearing the title is also getting a change, to the more fetching (if you’re asking me, though I know no one is) “Pirate Radio.”
Thoughts?