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MONDAY 12 PM: It’s now official. According to today’s actuals, DreamWorks/Universal’s Cowboys & Aliens narrowly beat Sony Pictures’ Smurfs for the weekend win $36,431,290 vs $35,611,637.
For more estimates listed by title, see box office results here...Editor-in-Chief Nikki Finke - tip her here.
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Thank goodness. Now Cowboys & Aliens is a success!
Congrats to Dreamworks for Losing $100m when all’s said & done…in the wake of their other tentpole attempt I AM NUMBER FOUR misfiring…yikes!!!
Well, they deserve it over getting into bed with grifter James Frey. I can’t feel sorry for them over that one.
…..and the Smurfs jokes stop now.
Dang, Spielberg and gang, y’all really “blue” it. Even though ya done beat them little blue people, only $36M …hahahahah … you done blue it and ya knew it.
It’s pretty sad when Dougie Howser can almost beat 007 Craig and Indiana Ford. Wow, I betcha ‘all ‘r blue in the face after this weekend.
Ha ha.
I’m suddenly reminded of Spinal Tap boasting that they got a bigger dressing room than the puppets.
Its been out for only 3 days and people are calling it a flop. unbelieavable.
It’s going to drop 55%-60% next weekend and be lucky to crack $100M domestic. That was probably their P&A budget. Maybe it’s not “Battlefield Earth,” but it certainly isn’t a success.
This is the movie business circa 2011, bud. A tentpole that should’ve made $50+ in its opening weekend but only did $36 is a flop. What, should we wait until it drops 55% next weekend?
It’s obviously going to be a flop.
#1 flop in America! Spin spin spin all you want, its number 1 but still a flop!
That’s correct.
It was a flop day one! Flop! Let’s all say it, FLOP!!
Okay, now rub their noses in it.
So glad Cowboys & Aliens beat Smurfs for the weekend. I saw it twice already and enjoyed it very much. I really hope the movie has legs because its a fun movie and in a summer full of comic book heroes, remakes, and sequels, it was pretty original. Sure it wasn’t great and had flaws, but it was entertaining. Thats what summer movies are suppose to be…..fun. I had more fun watching C&A than any other movie this year.
Except that it’s based on a comic, too… so it’s not “original.”
Why would you see it twice if you concede it wasn’t great? Lots of cheesy movies are “fun”, 2012 was fun, so was Machete, but that’s very faint praise. A fun movie isn’t worth $10 except to kill time.
Do you think C&A will now pull out the #! at the box office ads for this week?
That will takes balls….
Is all this who won stuff because Sony developed C&A for 5 years before they lost it or passed on it or something? Ego etc.
Cowboys is a classic! There will a huge weekday gross for the film and I predict word of mouth will get out how brilliant it is, number 1 for at least 3 more weekends.
LOL! ITS A FLOP!!!!
It cost too much money to be called a flop, its really a floooooop.
dear dreamworks moneyman: congratulations. now could you please ask your creative execs to stop plagarizing themselves? the third act alien showdowns in super8 and cowboys are so similar it’s, well, embarrassing.
What are you talking about?!?!?!?! How are they even close to being similar?
It is somewhat disturbing to see how Dreamworks just doesn’t seem to know what they’re doing. They’re consistently betting on wrong horses, abusing the Godfather Spielberg effect to sell tentpoles that fail and structuring their deals and financing in ways that cannot work. It is sad to see that all the hopes raised by the creation of a studio that has become less than amblin’ super-sized gone only after a few years of its creation. Clearly the times and the marketplace shifts over these last few years have something to do with it, but deep inside all this is something way wrong. Maybe it is time for the principals at DW to do some careful thinking. It will do nobody good if the studio disappears or continues to decline.
DreamWorks should never have left Paramount. They were making money for once and Paramount knew how to release their films. Instead this version of DreamWorks is making the same mistakes as the original DreamWorks that Paramount bailed out.
Thank God.
Just wait till next weekend’s massive drop off.
That’s BULLSMURF!
Favreau got the tone wrong. Harrison angry is not fun. Craig with an American accent doesn’t work… he’s James Bond – that’s why he’s famous. And Olivia had too much makeup on. So all in all, it made it very hard for audiences to connect with these characters.
It was also boring. I wish Favreau would love himself less.
They should have given the old man role (ford) to Ian McShane. Everything is better with McShane, particularly a western!
When a movie with a budget of $163-200 million only opens to $36 million and has so-so word of mouth, yes it is a flop.
I can’t wait for biggest blockbuster of next year:
COWBOYS VS GREEN LANTERNS!!!
Heh. I’d give a million (of someone else’s cash flow) to see that…:)
Nikki…you are far too smart and far too industry savvy to believe this headline. Three studios and three major directors involved in Cowboys and Aliens put pressure on Sony to report a lie.
Cowboys actually did $34,800,000 and was in second place.
My hat is off to the collective flacks on this one because their spin changed the worldwide conversation from bomb to “too close to call” and now to this.
Cowboys and Aliens will lose $100 million worldwide and I hope that you will write that story in detail in the weeks ahead.
Here are my suggestions for issues to cover…
The decision to give Daniel Craig a starring role after every single film he had starred in except James Bond had bombed.
The decision not to go 3-D. In fact Jon Favreu bragged at Comic Con about staying 2-D. They will likely not reach $100m domestic as a result of that single decision.
The decision to spend $183 million to produce the film and another $80 million to open the film domestically.
The decision to cast Olivia Wilde when far more qualified actresses wanted the role. Exit polls prove she did not bring out any of the young male audience she was hired to recruit. She is box office poison.
The decision to open at Comic Con was a waste of time and money. Exit polls show the key group that did not support this film was young men.
This is what you get when Favreu does not have a brand name title like Iron Man and Kurtzman & Orci do not have a brand name title like Transformers or Star Trek. The last time Kurtzman & Orci did not have a brand title was a movie called The Island which also lost a $100 million dollars. The non-branded film Favreu directed before Iron Man was called Zathura and it lost $80 million dollars.
The decision to treat a truly ridiculous concept and title seriously and then talk in press interviews about the influence of John Ford on the film. John Ford? This is a movie called Cowboys and Aliens.
The decision to ignore Harrison Ford when he told Favreu and others that the “script did not make any sense to me”. Ford has stated this in a number of interviews. He needed the film but he knew the problems it had and after Star Wars, Indiana Jones and Jack Ryan the filmmakers should have listened to him.
The decision for Jon Favreu to over promote the film in every possible venue and format made him look desperate and the film look wanting.
The decision to prominently feature cowboy Daniel Craig in the trailers throwing a rope around a space ship flying over him and then watching as that space ship towed him across the sky. It is an image that brought about laughter in movie houses around the world when the trailer played and sold the film as unintentionally campy.
>pressure on Sony to report a lie
Lying? This is show business! There is no lying in show business!
That scene — Craig lassoing the spacecraft — isn’t in the film. And I don’t recall it in any of the trailers I saw. He rides along a cliff edge and then leaps, Indiana Jones-like, onto the back of a craft carrying a lassoed Olivia Wilde. Granted, that’s just as ridiculous. But no lassoing of spacecraft happens in this dojo.
It seems to me that you’re critiquing, and passing judgement, on a film you’ve yet to see. Yeah, that’s really fair. Careful, your bias is showing.
Many points in this post seem valid to me.
But I’m not sure I believe Sony lying to cater to the bigwigs.
Ok, maybe it ain’t The Searchers, but that doesn’t mean that JF wasn’t an influence for the “western” part of this. There is practically no western that isn’t influenced by Ford’s Monument Valley location.
So cool your jets.
Nikki: This is The Biggest “TANK IN YEARS”. I Demand a RECALL BALLOT.
Those Little Blue Adorable SMURF’s Have Legs. There Franchise is Healthy. The Merchandise and Toys will do Well at Holiday Time.
Out in West, Dreamworks will have a graveyard. The Inscription On The Tombstone it will say. “We BEAT THE SMURFS But They WON THE WAR”.
Doc JP Sinda
Ah, who cares?
If you saw both or either of these movies this weekend you are part of the problem.
RE: interested observer …. you are very correct. BOTH of these movies suck infested cow balls. It all reminds me of a rootin’, shootin’ sales dispute years ago between two Southern beers — Louisiana’s Blackened Voodoo Lager Vs. Texas’ Lone Star beer. A beer distributor summed up the spat thusly:
“A BROUHAHA OVER HA HA BREW” !!!!!!!!!
And that, too, describes “Cowboys and Aliens” as well as “Smurfs” — BOTH should be flushed down the damn commode !!!!!
lol so true.
Ain’t it the truth. Even though CAPTAIN AMERICA loses steam halfway through, it was more worth seeing than either of these two.
Jon Farvreau’s greatest movie currently is The Last Mimzy. That is a shame because he didn’t even make that one. Next weekend we’ll know for sure that it is a bomb. Right now it just a really bad movie with bad marketing and an OLD Harrison Ford.
Cowboys vs. The Last Mimzy. When? I am so there. I am camping out NOW in front of The Vista Theater in Loz Feliz.
Like!