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SUNDAY AM: Here are North American box office numbers:
1. Witch Mountain (Dis) [3,187 theaters] $6.7M Fri, $10.9M Sat, $26M wkd
2. Watchmen (WB) [3,611] $5.3M Fri, $7.4M Sat, $18M wkd (-67%), Cume $86M
3. Last House On The Left (Uni) [2,401] $5.6M Fri, $5.3M Sat, $14.6M wkd
Disney’s formula of pairing Dwayne Johnson with rugrats in family fare keeps working for audiences even if it’s tiring to Hollywood. The Rock reunites with his Game Plan director Andy Fickman to reimagine this 1970s franchise — so much so that No. 1 Race To Witch Mountain went up a big 73% from Friday to Saturday because of crowded kiddie matinees. PG-rated films are on fire right now, and this pic movie played across the board to all ages: 51%/49% female/male, while families dominated at 68%, and unaccompanied couples were a surprisingly decent 18%.
Not so R-rated superhero doomsday saga Watchmen. I wrote my Postmortem back on Wednesday, focusing on whether the Warner Bros pic would have legs or earn out. Of course, Hollywood expected an enormous domestic drop from last Friday’s number (which included the grosses from Thursday midnight and Friday 12:01 AM screenings). Still, -78% is a pretty staggering number, as is -73% even if the midnight shows are excluded. But the pic recovered a lot last night, helped by 124 Imax screens, climbing 42% from Friday. ”We’re having a great night. The Dark Knight was only up 22% on the 2nd Saturday,” a Warner Bros exec tells me. “We just might settle in and fool a few of the naysayers.”This weekend went down -67% compared to last.
Internationally, too, the drops were better — UK -64%, and Australia -54%. Yet how embarrassing that the long-awaited Big Screen retelling of the widely admired graphic novel lost Friday to Rogue/Universal’s run-of-the-mill Last House On The Left playing in 1,200 less venues but attracting the date night crowd. Watchmen as expected did finish the weekend #2 with a 10-day domestic cume of $86. Paramount is reporting an overseas cume of $49.5M (this weekend was -54% compared to last week’s opening FSS) for an estimated $135.5M worldwide cume. But that’s still underwhelming compared to its $150M cost.
No. 4 Taken dropped only 9% in its 7th weekend of release for an amazing hold. In 5th place, Madea Goes to Jail will wind up as the first Tyler Perry film to cross the $100 million mark. Overture Film’s Sunshine Cleaning opened with a huge opening weekend theater average of $53,500, the highest thus far for all films released in 2009 (including wide releases), according to Media By Numbers stats.
Finally, this was the first “down” weekend in six weeks (last year’s was led by Horton Hears A Who).
Editor-in-Chief Nikki Finke - tip her here.
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Watchmen wasn’t going to be a popcorn film you could take your 6 year-old to see.
Over-bloated budget? Yes
Amazing studio film? Yes
I actually applaud Warner for taking the risk (Granted, it wasn’t on my dime.)
I’m thankful they DIDN’T dumb it down where it could race to $200m.
follows is my review of watchmen:
wow. just saw it. uh that was pretty awful. reminded me of a slightly more serious version of Mystery Men. ive got a bunch of problems with it so i’ll just list them all. but before i do, id like you guys to know i adored the graphic novel although it still has some problems and i love the cinematography and special effects for the movie. now are the things i didn’t like:
- didnt like any of the characters. rorschach is a psycho and there was really only one or two moments i thought the guy was okay. when he and dan (nite owl 2) bonded and at the end where he’s the only one with the balls to do anything. silk spectre 2 – malin akerman – her acting SUCKED. same monotone delivery every damn scene. ive seen c-list actresses on tv and direct to dvd movies act better than her. yep, the way she acted made her seem better adapted to The Hills. it doesnt help that she pushes the button in Archie that starts a fire. yeah i know she was looking for a smoke in the gn but in the movie we’re like what? dan was pudgy and pathetic. no backbone all the way to the end. and he just looked so greasy and sweaty all the time like my old bio teacher. and that creeps me out more than anything. the comedian kills the woman he impregnates in vietnam, tries to rape laurie’s mom, shoots tear gas directly at rioters — i was glad he died after learning all that. who cares if he has a change of heart after learning what adrian was going to do at this point?
- the logic of the ending was off. kill millions to justify saving billions. that makes a case for every killer then doesnt it? people shouldnt steal, do drugs, walk alone at night, get angry at their abusive partner, make a mistake of teasing the psycho. because they help to keep us morally in check lmfao (thats sarcasm btw). the villain is like hitler. killing millions. and the “heroes” dont do a damn thing. they can kill him, punish him at least. but they let him live and kill rorschach instead. again, i really hated the characters.
- manhattan helping adrian build the machine was stupid. he’s supposed to be a cognoscenti but he cant predict adrian’s gonna blow up millions of people with it. he’s the one building it – he should be able to predict all of the machine’s functions. whether its free energy or a nuclear-type bomb.
- some of the violence was overboard. now i LOVE movie violence but the problem i had with it are in two instances: dan and silk spectre breaking bones is one. they are supposed to be the good guys. i mean isnt that what the ending tells us? these guys are too morally pure that they wont punish the guy that killed millions of people? but then theyll maim and handicap two-bit crooks? not very consistent. the movie doesn’t do a decent job at all of setting a framework for how we should feel. and it was quite out of the blue as well. then rorschach killing the child abductor. i actually felt sorry for the kidnapper which is not how anyone should be made to feel. the violence was repulsive in that scene because i think all along we’ve been wanting to like rorschach and then this is our first real moment with him alone. and what does he do but butcher a dead body. i much prefer the gn’s version.
- the music selection was so cheesy and on the nose. it’s almost as if it was a cartoon where whenever something happened on screen, we’d hear the sound effect. they have sex after dan overcomes his impotence? hallelujah! someone dies? the sound of silence! they’re going back to earth where war is imminent? that war tune everyone’s heard of! ozymandias alone at the end triumphant? some godly score. there was also the first dinner with dan and laurie where the music was like, when is it going to stop. i wouldve like it if it was just dr manhattan’s score throughout. itd be subtlety instead of beating us over the head with how to feel.
- who really cares that the comedian was laurie’s father? it has no impact on the story whatsoever. actually it only makes me hate laurie’s mom even more. she falls in love with her would-be rapist. and then laurie’s mom is thankful it happened cuz it gave her laurie. well, that’s like making rape acceptable. obviously laurie’s mom had sex after the rape attempt but for her to fall in love with the rapist is a crappy social message and makes me think she’s a fucking idiot.
in fact, we never get a sense of the camaraderie that would later lead to laurie and dan springing rorschach from prison. it wouldve been nice if we saw them together as a team backing each other up — you know, real friends. but for the most part we’re playing catchup so that by the time they do start teaming up again i just didnt care anymore.
- the costumes were really ridiculous except for dr manhattan and maybe laurie. nite owl was a second-rate batman wannabe and adrian reminded me of the superheroes from the 50s. its a real confusing paradox: we’re supposed to take these guys seriously but they look like idiots you want to laugh at. sure that was the comic but it doesnt translate on screen. and nixon was ridiculous. didnt look like him at all in fact it was a caricature and that took me even more out of the story.
- some minor nitpicking – rorschach using hair spray with a lit up bundle of sticks. cmon, i saw that in freaking buffy the vampire slayer. they update some things but they dont update this bit of stale action? and all the swat team members get their asses torched with hair spray before even getting off a shot? lmfao.
- the midget with the two bodyguards wanting to get into rorschach’s cell — again, example of stupidity. rorschach just killed a guy with fucking cooking oil and now he wants to get into rorschach’s cell with only one of his bodyguards remaining? makes no goddamn sense. just cuz he’s a villain doesn’t mean he can be so twisted he’s stupid. that’s what separates a stock 1d character with even a 2d character.
- the plot of the movie operates on rorschach’s paranoid logic. one dead comedian means theres a SERIAL mask killer? cmon. as an audience we cannot follow a psycho around because the structure will be a FAIL and this is what happened here. we follow rorschach around cuz rorschach says so but deep down we’re like, why is he attacking this poor old guy with cancer? why is he bothering dr manhattan while he’s apparently building something pretty damn important?
- adrian as the villain is so apparent i knew it first time he showed up on screen. the way he acted and spoke, even after the “assasination” attempt where the killer apparently has the worst aim in the world to shoot at someone’s fucking LEG made it more apparent adrian was behind it. or at the very least superficially again we wonder why is the assassin so inept like so many of the other movie’s characters.
- we never get a sense of why the world accepted masked heroes who dress up like doofuses? and why did they get banned? how is it related to the main story? so because its not set up, its unnecessary exposition and becomes a dead weight throughout the movie.
- i didnt get any real exploration of themes of the movie. is it the passing of one generation’s superheroes responsibilities to the next? is the erecticle dysfunction? is it learning to love your mom (even though you seem perfectly fine without solving this problem)?
- i never got any sense of danger at all from the supposed imminent world war 3. the doomsday clock was laughable and we hardly saw it at all. a bunch of generals with a rubber-nosed nixon aint gonna make me scared. newspaper headlines shouting war aint gonna do it and defcon 1 or 2 sure as hell isnt gonna do it cuz what the heck’s the difference between the two anyway? how about some TANKS on the ground, some nuclear silos preparing to launch, some mass carnage by the ruskies beforehand? nope, none of that.
- nor did i get the sense of the millions of lives that were lost. im not even sure how many cities were involved but really who cares cuz its a big hole in each one. and really it’s not even that big of a hole…maybe if the entire city was destroyed but its like just downtown. i have a downtown in l.a. that im sure the rest of the city can do without. we saw the therapist get killed but i didnt like him from the start. he took away rorschach’s mask and was condescending so who cares if he dies? no sympathy was generated there and everyone else that we did see were complete strangers. remember in independence day where we saw that chick’s friend get blown up on the top of the roof? now that chick i actually cared about. that’s how you do it.
then the scene in antartica afterward…well, the heroes didnt seem to care much for the MILLIONS of lives lost. sure they had some emoting but rorschach of all people seemed to care the most and his face is behind a fucking mask!
so many more but id be here all day. again, there were some parts i liked. first it took warners big balls to do this movie — it is definitely on the edgier side of comic books. and i loved the cinematography and computer effects. and there was a cool fight scene at the prison. but look, bottomline, it mightve been acceptable in the Watchmen graphic novel for adults running around in sewed up linens but man, take a look at wanted. the graphic novel was so much like a comic book it was ridiculous — i think it had monsters or aliens in it. but in the movie, wanted was grounded in reality and a very sleek action film that still retained the spirit. watchmen instead was way literal and the only people who love it are super geek fanboys who will wet themselves in their pants just cuz they see an onscreen replication of what was on the page. but that does not a movie make.
ps the comparisons to fight club and blade runner are laughable. those films actually succeed on every level while watchmen only excels at cinematography and cg. the story above all was wretched. all those complexities and layers in the GN was not written well into the script.
How soon can Peter Rice get “Miss March” on FOX Television?
Anyone who thinks this movie will make it’s money back doesn’t understand how domestic grosses get divvied up with theater owners. Reduce any domestic box office take by about thirty percent and even more for the foreign take. If Watchmen has made $90 million by the end of this weekend, it will have paid for about 100% of it’s prints ($7,000 a print x at LEAST 4,000 prints) and advertising (around $50 million++) not to mention what they paid THX employees to quality-control various of the 3-D theaters. Then, it can start moving towards the $125 million production budget. The truth is, no matter what kind of a happy face they put on it, it will be a long time – if ever – that this thing will pay itself off.
Seems like a decent opening for Last House considering I heard the budget was under $10M.
Mountain should finish with around the same total as Game Plan.
I wish people would stop co-opting the comments section to write their own these on the topic. It makes reading the comments section tedious. If you want to write your own articles or publish your own reviews, get your own blog. I come here to read Nikki, not “Mike”.
To mike,
Your opinion to hate this movie is noted.
However, I am one of those movie goers who greatly enjoyed this film and even saw it twice. I have also niver read the GN.
Personally I dont give a damn if this movie is the next “fight club” or “blade runner.” personally not everybody likes those movies either. I do but many people dont. what of it?
dont want to waste my little life answering point for point “why you hated it” but all I can say is, I was able to perfectly follow the changes to the GN that you didnt like. I liked them alot. Didnt know they were changes and didnt care. I guess now I do know they are changes and when I finally read the GN it will be interesting to compare the differences. But I dont think I could ever think the movie sucked because of them.
I also thought the movie’s use of music was dead on perfect. From the opening with Dylan to Sounds of Silence, to all the rest. They were perfectly utilized. I also enjoyed the acting very much. In fact, I found there were a few scenes that were very touching & moving.
go figure…
see ya champ.
Shit on the Wachowski brothers all you want, but Speed Racer was a movie for young boys who like fast cars. It wasn’t supposed to be anything else. And the random fight sequence in that film was probably better choreographed than any fight sequence in “Watchmen”. The best fight was at the very beginning. The rest of the stuff was lame.
Also for Snyder to be hailed as a “Visionary” I laughed at how every action sequence, and slow mo-speed up fight in “Watchmen” was done nearly 10 years ago in “The Matrix”. Who directed “The Matrix”? The Wachowski brothers. So how is Snyder a visionary if he is dick riding what the Wachowski’s did nearly a decade ago?
But I like Snyder. I thought “Dawn of the Dead” 2003 was a great action horror film. I also enjoyed “300″ even though “Gladiator” will always be the top dog of the Swords and Sandals epics. But “Watchmen” left me cold. It was too long, silly at times, and inaccessible to non fans of the comic. The theater I saw the film in was silent, and when the credits rolled, there were scattered boos heard. As I left one guy even said “I’m mad I paid 14.50 to see blue cock for 2 hours and 45 minutes”.
And there is the problem. It’s not that people don’t get it. It’s more of a situation like “What’s the fucking point”? The movie doesn’t make a statement at all. And has a really disappointing ending. The musical cues were stupid. And the sex scene on the Owl’s ship incited laughter.
I could have gone all my life without seeing “Watchmen” and been fine.
Never trust the folks who cut trailers. Bunch of fucking snake oil salesmen.
To put this in perspective -
Watchmen weekend 2 B.O – $16mil (projected)
Beverly Hills Chihuahua weekend 2 B.O. – $17.5mil (Boxofficemojo)
I think this just goes to show: it’s not the product by itself but the marketing too. All Watchmen’s marketing was “geek, superhero, visuals” which (a) didn’t appeal to most market segments, and (b) shouldn’t have been the positioning given the source material (Dr Manhattan’s glowing blue wang fills all the categories of “geek, superhero, visuals” and just exemplifies why it was a dumb idea to focus on that).
Just read all the anecdotes about people going in (sometimes with kids in tow) expecting generic superhero and coming out confused as hell.
Bad targeting + bad marketing = confused audience + bad word of mouth = box office fallout
Wow, what’s with the logorrhea ’round these parts lately? We like comments to be snappy and snarky.
In other words: tl;dr.
to johnny:
you’re welcome to skip my post as i am welcome to skip yours. my review is a comment upon her article which makes it more than valid especially since i am one of those that went to see it on the second weekend boosting its box office.
and since when did the comments section become part and parcel of what nikki writes? it is for us web site visitors to connect with her article as well as other blog-goers. however, just like you have one- sentence posts i find annoying as they have no substance, i will not go and crusade for a communistic censorship.
Just saw “Race to Witch Mountain” and it was definitely one of the more enjoyable kid flicks I have seen in a long time. I think Dwayne Johnson may have found his niche in being the anti-hero inside family movies, where grownups can relate to him and the internal struggles of survival versus noble efforts. (I think too much!)
But it is really a good flick. And since I saw the original Witch Mountain as a child, I had to see how this one held up. Both are good flicks for their times. Really glad I saw it.
The stunts were good. The CGI was minimally invasive. And the story had enough humor and tension. Disney did well with this one.
Hope to see Johnson in another. This is definitely good for him.
Watchmen was a fantastic film. It was never a movie that would appeal to mainstream audiences, who are brain dead and only want to see crap like Mall Cop. So naturally, it fell big time, as predicted. But this movie WILL be a cult hit, much like Blade Runner and Fight Club. Anybody who disagrees with that is obviously biased becuase they hated the movie since it was too SMART for them. Your opinions are all lovely, but they’re wrong. This movie WILL be a cult hit and make lots of money in the long run. I bet the DVD sells huge too.
You’re right, Mike, I am welcome to skip your posts, but I’m sick of having to track through half the page to do so. Like I said: if you want to write a term paper, get your own blog. You don’t like “one-sentence posts”? Then join a forum.
Go MALL COP
“I’m guessing $50 to $65 mil with at least a 70% drop in weekend two. To my mind, the opening weekend gross isn’t nearly as interesting as the legs it does or doesn’t have in the following weeks. I think the drop will be BIG.”
http://www.deadlinehollywooddaily.com/wkd-prediction-watchmen-could-do-70m/#comment-212279
Just wanted to enjoy a “TOLDJA” moment. Perhaps my opening weekend prediction of the gross was a bit broad but I just about nailed the week to week drop. Not that this was terribly difficult to call. It is a niche film with a decent fanboy audience but nothing to keep it afloat after all the geeks had given it a good opening.
I went to see it Wednesday, liked it, didn’t love it. It was fun but far from groundbreaking. To be perfectly honest, the trailers sucked from a mass audience point of view. They gave no narrative, and almost dared non-readers of the graphic novel to not like it. They needed to do a better job of explaining what the movie was about rather than spend inordinate amounts of time telling the world the it was made by the “visionary” director of 300. That was some insanely pretentious shit. I mean, aside from 300, what is/was so visionary about Zack Snyder? The Dawn of the Dead remake? And as someone else mentioned somewhere else, the thing that made 300 visionary was the FX people, not necessarily Zack Snyder.
HoopersX
People forget that BLADE RUNNER was NOT considered a classic by any means when it first came out. Instead, it was considered very much a niche film and was certainly no sell-out the first day it came out. At least not in the theater I attended back then. About the only selling points that film had back then were Harrison Ford and Ridley Scott, due to the success of STAR WARS (obviously) and ALIEN. Rutger Hauer, Sean Young and the rest of that great cast were about on the same level of name recognition as most of the WATCHMEN cast are with today’s audiences.
My preference leans towards the original version over Scott’s re-edited later versions for a lot of reasons, especially as I never considered the original ending a classic studio happy ending the way Scott makes it out to be.
WATCHMEN was as close to pure adaptation of the original source material as we are ever likely to see, and if the fanboys don’t support this, I can certainly understand if we don’t see anything else attempted with this much fidelity to the source material.
Regarding the comments of SUPERMAN RETURNS, I was not commenting on how good or bad that particular film was, but rather questioning the thought that Superman is a niche character. He’s obviously not, and audience reception to any new Superman film is all due to how well the filmmakers did their job. Bryan Singer was obviously not the man for the job, as the final results bear out. Christopher Nolan, on the other hand, perfectly understood how to make a crowd-pleasing Batman film.
Bryan Singer made a homage to the original Superman movie and director Richard Donner. Too bad his was listless, while Donner’s was groundbreaking. Singer’s attempts at humor fell flat, while the material for Donner’s Superman allowed the humor to thrive with the action.
Singer was simply too in love with Superman. And Brendan Routh can’t act. That was another problem. But he certainly looks the part. I did enjoy his portrayal of Clark Kent at times. But as Superman he was angst ridden and emotionless.
Just like the movie.
“the villain is like hitler. killing millions. and the “heroes” dont do a damn thing. they can kill him, punish him at least. but they let him live and kill rorschach instead.”
As well, letting Adrian live makes no sense from a practical perspective. Come on–he’s spent the entire movie getting rid of loose ends/anyone who can tie him to the catastrophe. Why on earth would the remaining Watchmen think he wouldn’t get antsy at some future point and get rid of _them_, as well? In addition, Adrian is dangerous in the way that an insane idealist is–if he didn’t hesitate to kill millions once, who’s to say he won’t do something worse later on?
“People forget that BLADE RUNNER was NOT considered a classic by any means when it first came out.”
No we don’t. We can just tell the difference between something that is masterfully crafted and a broken, amateur mess.
“WATCHMEN was as close to pure adaptation of the original source material as we are ever likely to see, and if the fanboys don’t support this, I can certainly understand if we don’t see anything else attempted with this much fidelity to the source material.”
First off, just saying “fanboys.” It’s a uselessly outdated and sexist comment that is repeated whenever the speaker has no interest in seeing the point of view of someone who may have a greater understanding of something than they do, or have the interest to pay attention to.
Watchmen didn’t fail because it was 2 1/2 hours or too close to the book. It failed because the movie isn’t generating word of mouth. The reviews are mixed (at best) and the film isn’t working for the number of people it needs to survive, having read the book or not.
When you have this many people saying it doesn’t work, regardless of their familiarity with the source material, than it isn’t simply the fans. IT DOESN’T WORK. People need to stop blaming anyone but the filmmakers for this. Not the fans. Not Alan Moore. Look at the filmmaking.
Zack Snyder has taken a 12 issue maxi-series that was, in it’s very inception, designed to explore what the comic medium could do as a form. It’s very dense, long and contains many large sections of flat out prose. Pruning the story down to it’s plot points, extending and stylizing anything involving sex and violence, and arbitrarily changing character/story details (both major and minor) doesn’t do the book any favors whatsoever.
What people like you need to do is stop making excuses for a film’s mistakes because you’ve been sold on this idea that these books begged to be turned into films. First off, movies are not inherently superior to either comics or prose that we should praise people just for trying to adapt something. Second, the writer of the book didn’t think this was a good idea.
To say it “was as close to pure adaptation of the original source material as we are ever likely to see” is somewhat disingenious because it implies that what Snyder did needed to happen. I’m with Moore, in that it was a stupid idea and the people behind the adaptation were already CLEARLY predisposed to taking it in the wrong direction.
I can only imagine what will happen once Moore finds out they turned Ozymandias into a gay Nazi. That’s definitely three for three when it comes to Snyders never-subtle demonization of homosexuality and weird obsessive homoeroticism. Moore’s thrashing of the Wachowski’s for V for Vendetta was as amusing as it was appropriate, but JESUS CHRIST… can’t wait.
Dude, seriously, you really need to get out more if you think this thing is Blade Runner. Was it the cityscape with dergibles and rainy night scenes? Trust me, you can get that in a lot of movies.
HoopersX, it’s not like your prediction was all that “visionary.” You gave a $15 million opening weekend box office range, which is just silly. EVERYONE knew it would fall within that range. And the 2nd weekend drop is also in the range of what most people thought.
In other words, who the f*** cares about your lame prognostications?
Can anyone tell me if “Miss March” is on video yet, or have Ms Utley and Mr Gilula given it direct to Mr. Rice to help FOX TV on Friday nights?
The house from the left would’ve done much better as a wide release film instead of limiting its venue. It’s going to hurt it more in the long run.
Mike- thanks for articulating in detail the problems of Watchmen. What a blown opportunity and I think you did a great job explaining just why this movie didn’t measure up. The one thing you missed was the terrible direction of Snyder, he has a good visual sense but his story sense is terrible.
mike is the preeminent wordsmith of our generation.
oh, and wb deserves to have a one-weekend movie with watchmen since they kowtowed to the losers who demanded total fidelity to the comic. these people either can’t afford to see it more than once in a matinee since they’re deadbeats or they didn’t pay to see it at all by downloading the torrent. the non-losers were totally alienated by the film and rightfully so with how esoteric it was. the only winner here is alan moore who wisely washed his hands of this debacle.