This has been the most pathetic holiday season at the box office in a while. Remember the days when you asked yourself, "Hmm, should we see Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings? The Aviator or Chicago? A Beautiful Mind or Confessions of a Dangerous Mind?"Maybe it was the writer's strike pushing a lot of product into 2009 to cover the gaps. Maybe it was the economy. Maybe it was the lack of pre-sold franchises available. Or maybe it was the fact that too many studio weasels were focused on shitty remakes. Regardless, this has been the perfect time to be homebound with a newborn or snowed in, since the best things to watch are all DVD's like Season 4 of Lost and Deadwood. When the best reviewed film of the weekend (Benjamin Button) only merits a 74% RT freshness rating, then even the critics have given up. Niche films like Milk, Doubt and The Wrestler aside, Hollywood simply laid up this season.
The Spirit had none of its namesake at the box office. Today effectively has ended the solo directing career of one Frank Miller, who enjoyed the two weeks humidor rental at the Beverly Hills Hotel Polo Lounge cigar room but now has been sent packing back to Los Feliz.
The real B.O. battle this weekend was between tabloid favs Aniston vs. Pitt, with GQ's naked cover girl and the dead dog kicking Brad Pitt's wrinkled old-man-ass by a mile. Who would have thunk? And here some of us were all skeptical for Owen Wilson's post-suicidal return to the big screen in a (SPOILER AHEAD) dog-dies-at-end vehicle. We stand corrected. Hmmm, sequel? Dogs never die in Hollywood. They just produce puppies. How about a cross-over franchise? Marley vs. Beethoven: Dog Eat Dog, coming Christmas 2009.
Adam Sandler's hopes that Bedtime Stories would be his Night at the Museum aren't totally dashed just yet. $28M is respectable, if not low by Sandler standards, but it can play and play in January. Nobody believes it's going to be the hit that Disney hoped it would be, marking a pedestrian year for the Mouse House. Disney has now also dropped out of the Narnia franchise after Prince Caspian tanked. Too bad too since the movie garnered good reviews.
Frankly, someone over in Disney marketing should be summarily fired up top. No way they should have released the Narnia sequel in the summer, particularly sandwiching it in between Iron Man and Indy. The original Narnia was a holiday release, and as we like to quote Crash Davis a lot on this site, "You don't fuck with a winning streak." They'd still be in the C.S. Lewis money-printing business if they had simply released the movie this past weekend instead of last June. Overall, there were NO big budget genre films, and that's a travesty during Christmas. Disney above all the other studios, dropped the ball. Adam Sandler won't save them either.
Disney also should be spanked for not marketing Bolt until right before it was released. Someone drew a chart of internet hits for Madagascar 2 vs. Bolt. The line of online interest for Madagascar showed a steady increase from summer through October, indicating the level of awareness. The line for Bolt started roughly a month out. In typical Disney fashion, they waited until right before it opened to tell people about it. It backfired. They've done the same thing with most everything else, save for the Pirates franchise and the Pixar films.
But this past week has just been BORING at the box office. Not a single movie made $40M or more. Most of that is the due to the films themselves, but there is no doubt that snow storms hurt a lot of these films on some level. Normally, it's just the east that gets hit. This month, it was entire sections of the countries and both coasts.
Will Smith's Seven Pounds (of Shit) only cost around $55M and has already made $40M. It may be a bomb by Will Smith standards, but he got his $20M worth of flesh and got to cry on camera while reading the treatments for I Am Still Legend, Hancock Returns and Badder Boys.
Keanu Reeve's The Day The Pants Should Fill is turning out to be an expensive bomb for Fox. Hell even Keanu is babbling about another Speed movie with Sandra Bullock. Fox's only silver lining this past week is that their current legal victory with Watchmen, but they don't have much else to celebrate until Wolverine five months from now, and that could be iffy. And is it us, or is Fox responsible for most of the mediocre Marvel films? X-Men and X2 aside, they've got turds like X3, Daredevil and the Fantastic Fours to account for.
Again, the holidays should include at least two big genre films. Hell even something bloated like Jackson's King Kong would suffice. Hollywood gave us a gnarled up Brad Pitt, a dead dog rom-com, Scientologists vs. Nazis and a pedestrian Adam Sandler FX film. Tsk. Tsk. Let's hope there is no SAG strike. Holiday 2009 could be even worse, if that's at all possible.
