China’s Wanda Group Agrees To Pay $2.6B For AMC … 
Weinstein Clarifies ‘Sapphires’ Remarks; Best … 
How Agencies Did At This Year’s Upfronts: New … 
BOMBS AWAY! ‘Battleship’ Sinks To $25.3M … 
‘Lawless’ Premieres As The Weinstein Company … 
David Guarascio And Moses Port To Run … 
‘Beasts Of The Southern Wild’ Co-Writer Lucy … 
Fox Searchlight Fetes ‘Beasts Of The Southern … 
D.V. DeVincentis Sinks Teeth Into ‘The Night … 
Universal Buys ‘The Disciple Program’ As Mark … 
‘Madagascar 3′ And A ‘Big Brother’ … 
UPDATE: Facebook’s Big IPO Trading Day Results In A … 
UPFRONTS 2012: The Year Of Underdogs, Comebacks & … 
YRF’s Uday Chopra To Finance Nicole Kidman-Starrer … 
Cannes Swirls With Talk Of Convergence Between Distributors … 
TNT & Lifetime Looking At Cancelled CBS Drama … 
Women Dominate Early Competition Films As Marion Cotillard … 
Doug Liman Reacts To ‘I Just Want My Pants … 
Disney Sets Jesse Wigutow To Script ‘Peter And The … 
Anthony Mackie In Step With ‘Runner Runner’ 
Should You Buy Facebook? A Few Things To Consider Before … 
Variety‘s Todd McCarthy has just reviewed Sony’s Hancock and hilariously said it has “a certain whiff of” 1993′s The Last Action Hero. Oy. Since that infamous pic brought down upper management of the studio way back then. If the Sony Pictures Entertainment toppers weren’t all heading into the Barack Obama $2,300-per-person fundraiser at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in the Los Angeles Music Center right now, I’d bet you could hear their screams all over Hollywood. As for the pic, it doesn’t have to be good to make $$$. It’s only 92 minutes long. And Will Smith owns July 4th weekend.
Editor-in-Chief Nikki Finke - tip her here.
Loading ...
We’re not seeing Hancock
All male cast/crew, with woman as girlfriend. This is why movies have become so tiresome
Boycotting movies like these, saving our dollars for the occasional movie with some genuine female imprint
Well…
Keep in mind that this film has been fighting with the MPAA to get a PG-13 rating….
The film was originally submitted 3 times at around 120 minutes (give or take)….
Hell, they were reshooting as recently as 6 weeks ago. Anything to replace footage that was going to have to be cut to get the PG-13.
As screenings go, most exhibitors saw the film yesterday and report that they seemed to like it and expect it to open very big….
But, big openings and Will (Mr. 4th of July) Smith doesn’t always equal big success!
Anyone remember The Wild, Wild West (opening at 49M and only took 113M)?
Coop
anotherWGAmember: Exactly.
I didn’t even like “Tonight, He Comes” when I first read it (10 years ago). But it was very different than the Hancock trailers.
Different, in this case = better
But different also = smaller box office
I remember seeing Last Action Hero about four weeks after everyone proclaimed it as a bomb (this was when movies played longer than three weeks in theaters), and found it quite enjoyable. Not Arnold’s best film, not his worst film, but in the middle of the pack. A typical John McTiernan action picture.
The “bomb” part of it was mostly in the minds of the journalists writing about it. The picture cost $85 million (a lot of money for its time), but it took in $50 million domestic and $87 million international, for a respectable $137 million gross.
This was a picture that had a great initial script, but legal troubles changed it substantially. Originally, Arnold was suppose to fight Frankenstein, Dracula, the Wolfman, and the Mummy, but Universal had trademarked their versions of the characters and threatened to sue if any of the characters were green, wore a cape, had a lot of facial hair, or was wrapped in bandages. So the movie was rewritten from villains you knew and knew their back-stories to new villains you didn’t recognize and knew nothing about.
Hancock has a similar problem. The original script was written in 1996 and over the years has had a long line of directors attached to it: Tony Scott, Michael Mann, Jonathan Mostow, and Gabriele Muccino.
Obviously, it’s been substantially rewritten and a running length of 92 minutes seems problematic. Material has been cut to make it PG-13 after receiving R ratings twice before the MPAA (leaving a director’s cut open for its DVD release). Some advance reviews seem to indicate problems with the plot and the ending.
Still, a short running time will allow theaters to give it more showings during the day, and with Will Smith and some great trailers, I agree with folks who say that this film will do boffo business for the Fourth of July weekend. Commercially, the film will do very well, which is all Hollywood wants these days.
“We’ve seen this cliche’ over and over, the bitter jerk finds his emotional caring side, bleagh!!!”
Have you seen the movie? Is this what ends up happening?
The trailers give the impression that he stays a jerk, which is a large part of the appeal of the trailers. Are they hiding the fact that this gets sappy at the end?
It sounds like the opening is decent, but the rest falls apart, meaning the trailer is mainly just showing stuff from the first part of the movie. Is it just me, or is it a bit worrisome that the trailer doesn’t give any hint what the plot of the movie is, or who (if anyone?) he faces off against at the end? I suppose it could be that they’re just keeping those things a surprise (like Iron Man generally did), but in this case it makes me wonder what is in this movie beyond the initial setup of showing the guy screwing up and then trying to fix his image.
This might be huge, but I agree with those who suspect it will open huge but drop huge – maybe open to around 100M but only end up with 200? Sure, that’s still big, but maybe not even top 5 for the summer. This doesn’t sound like Lowest Common Denominator bad where critics hate it but audiences eat it up, it sounds more like WTF bad where audiences will be put off by it and give it bad word of mouth.
Anyone know what the budget was on this?
Wait…I thought Variety was the evil tool designed to do nothing but PR for the studios? Now I should pay attention to their movie reviews?
Forgive my slip – I remember the film was aiming for a PG13 but had to keep going back to the ratings board because it kept leaving with an R. I heard one of the scenes that had to be cut was a minor being raped. Last Action Hero this is not.
I can believe it. If you read the original script and then saw the giant turd that the studio over-developed it into — you’d vomit.
“All male cast/crew, with woman as girlfriend.”
I can see why you’d assume that from the trailers, but that’s not the case with the film. Can’t really go into more detail without spoilers.
Really, “boycott” this over perceived feminist issues? I’m sure there are plenty of reasons to avoid this, but that seems like kind of a dumb one.
I wonder if the original cut that earned an R is any better? If they really wanted a PG-13, it was careless of them to not address potential issues at the script stage, instead of having to reshoot at the last minute.
Will this end Smith’s “streak”? I guess it depends on how that’s being defined. If it’s just a matter of a $100 million opening, then probably not.
Hancock will certainly enjoy a huge opening weekend, judging by the high tracking it’s receiving. But it wouldn’t surprise me if the film took a huge dive the following weekend, or resulted in some bad publicity for Smith. After all, look at how many “Smith is invincible” stories we’ve seen in recent weeks.
25 years ago on a July 4th weekend, Burt Reynolds saw his career burn out with Stroker Ace. 15 years ago, it was Arnold and Last Action Hero. It doesn’t always take an outright bomb for someone’s career to take a turn. As someone noted, the real damage of Last Action Hero wasn’t its box office (although it did cost Sony around $26 million), but it’s significance to both studio and star.
I concur with a few others on here… the original script TONIGHT, HE COMES was brilliant and Michael Mann was attached to direct a few years ago. THAT version would have been cool.
You know the quickest way to destroy a project? Bring Akiva Goldsman onboard to rewrite it.
I still think this one underperforms. Obviously it will get big numbers here and overseas and turn a hefty profit, but I’m not convinced it beats Iron Man or Indy.
I’m still trying to figure out why the various trailers I’ve seen so far have failed to show more than a glimpse (if that) of Academy Award winner Charlize Theron. WTF? They’ve got a hot actress (in more ways than one) in their movie and they don’t even bother to let the audience know she’s in the movie? I for one am sick to death of Will Smith’s alleged “acting” (if you want to call dinner theater production level mugging acting) as well as his annoying press persona (to Will, everything is fabulous which I suppose is par for the course when you don’t live in the real world where war, murder, rape, abortion, theft and backstabbing happens every day).
Wow..so many here hoping for Smith to bomb with his latest offering
Should we wait not for the opening day to gauge the overall performance, both its B.O and user’s review?
c’mon now. This is not a site to blast a movie which has yet to open and save your comments about the actor later.
Tks
Armand
When you have a film that solely relies on Will to carry it…there’s a problem. The studios continue to give Will preferential treatment on release dates without any serious competition opening against him. I AM LEGEND is a good example. If THE DARK KNIGHT OR WALL-E was opening on July 2, Hancock, Sony, and Will would not win the day or opening weekend.
Well…
With a Tuesday Night start, it has 6 day opening….
100 Mill should not be that hard to make…
But, if this takes a 70% drop like the original HULK or VILLAGE, then this could be one of Mr. Smith’s biggest Summer disappointments…. Along the lines of WILD, WILD, WEST.
Coop
I agree with so many of the sentiments expressed that Tonight He Comes was such a remarkable script. It was dark, fun, edgy and original, which is a rare find these days. And, I think it could have been brilliant had Gabrielle Muccino directed. I have nothing against Peter Berg, but he created an action movie instead of a humane superhero movie that could have been. Big business once again wins out, but, hey, that is the world we live in.