What’s good, what’s good? It’s September. The calendar has turned. The summer box office season is done. Congratulations, girl/guy who wears unnecessary accessories out, lives in Soho or Brooklyn, and hasn’t stopped talking about “500 Days of Summer” for the last month, you don’t have to be so angry anymore about the dearth of films in the market that have independent flare/bad lighting and sound. That’s right, you can finally return to your Sunshine Cinema after having only watched the previously listed movie and “Where the Wild Things Are” trailers for the past three months. For those of you on the opposite end of the spectrum, don’t worry either, bad action movies never stop being released, smart people just stop going to see them. In case you didn’t notice, I lied to you when I said I was never going to tag people in these forecasts again. Push the Box membership (pushthebox.blogspot.com) has only gone up by one member since my last forecast, in which I asked people to join the blog in order to exponentially increase the blog’s traffic in the hope that such a sudden burst of site popularity would ultimately lead to Hu Jintao’s decision to add my blog to the list of blocked websites in China. Yes, it’s true that I could probably get my blog blocked by the China pretty easily if I just posted a bunch of pictures of Tienmen Square and Pokémon, but that’s no fun. Just like I won’t stop talking about Michael Bay’s candidacy for the California governorship until he personally blows up a CGI look-a-like of me in his next film, I will continue to harass you, Hu Jintao, until you block my website.
You know the deal with the predictions…
The widest release of the weekend, Gamer, opens today in approximately 2,500 theaters. The Gerard Butler starrer is exactly the type of bad action movie that smart people will no longer pay money to watch now that September has rolled around. Lionsgate knows this as well, seeing that they’ve only leased the film to 2,500 locations (that number would be around 3,300 if the movie had come out two months ago) to cut down on costs. The two movies I’d compare Gamer to from last year are Babylon A.D. and Death Race. Babylon, starring Vin Diesel, also opened on Labor Day weekend and failed miserably at attempting to make any money. Produced for 70M, A.D. grossed BC-like numbers with only 11M through the four-day weekend and 22M for its entire theatrical release. The other movie I mentioned, Death Race, came out in late August of last year and posted similarly miserable numbers with 12.6M in its first weekend and a final tally of 36M domestically at a budget of 45M. I think Gamer will pretty much follow suit with Death Race, seeing as they’re both about reality video-games in which convicts get a chance to win their freedom by risking their lives. I’d go with about 15M for the frame.
I know I doubted Sandra Bullock earlier this summer in The Proposal and paid the price for it, but I’m going to doubt her yet again because, once again, it’s September, not June or July. Shockingly, the pic, All About Steve, is a romantic comedy, which certainly does play to Bullock’s least weaknesses, but, this time, there will be no Ryan Reynolds to save the day, only Bradley Cooper. I’m still convinced that The Proposal did so well because it had a great trailer, but AAS (I hate whoever just thought about geometry) doesn’t. In fact, it has a horrible trailer. Not only does the movie not look funny, but they’ve somehow managed to make Sandra Bullock look ugly. I’m gonna go with about 12M from 2,200 theaters.
Opening in 1,600 theaters, Extract, starring Jason Bateman and Mila Kunis, shouldn’t expect to extract too much cash from box-office either. Ben Affleck is also in it, so that should be a pretty good indicator that Extract won’t last long. The quasi-limited release doesn’t bode well for the film either, along with the fact that Miramax is distributing. I’d go with about 7M for the weekend.
Among interesting holdovers from last weekend, expect to see The Final Destination fall hard, like raining frogs hard. I don’t know how, but FD made 27.4M last weekend, which is about 10M north of where I placed it at, but I’m going to enjoy watching it drop 65% to about 9.5M (Fri-Sun) and to a Fri-Mon take of around 12M.
Alright, good stuff. JOIN THE BLOG so I can get my blog blocked by the China.
