Preview and Projections for the Weekend of April 8, 2005
By Edward Douglas -

Greetings and welcome back to the Weekend Warrior, your weekly guide to the weekend’s new movies. Tune in every Tuesday for the latest look at the upcoming weekend, and then check back on Friday for any last minute updates and reviews.

WEEKEND PROJECTIONS - final update 4.07.05

Two new movies open in wide release this weekend, both with strong literary credentials, but neither with very strong casts or marketing campaigns. Clive Cussler’s action-adventure Sahara comes to the big screen starring Matthew McConaughey, Penelope Cruz and Steve Zahn, trying to entice a mostly older male audience with its similarities to movies like Raider of the Lost Ark and Nicholas Cage’s recent hit National Treasure. On the other hand, the romantic comedy Fever Pitch, loosely based on the Nick (About a Boy) Hornby novel and starring Jimmy Fallon and Drew Barrymore, could bring in the coveted date crowd with its mix of baseball and romance, as well as the younger female set. The more anticipated action film will likely come out on top, because Cussler's fans probably outnumber those of the Red Sox, but neither film has much buzz. That leaves a lot of room for the returning movies to pick up the slack, although expect this to be a slower weekend at the movies, as people start saving up their money for the impending summer movie season.

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FEVER PITCH (20^th Century Fox)
Starring: Drew Barrymore, Jimmy Fallon
Directed by: Peter and Bobby Farrelly (There’s Something About Mary, Shallow Hal, Stuck On You, Dumb and Dumber)
Genres: Romantic Comedy
Rated PG-13
Theatre Count: 3,267
MY REVIEW

Drew Barrymore plays Lindsay Meeks, a businesswoman whose relationship with a high school teacher named Ben Wrightman (Jimmy Fallon) is going great…until baseball season begins, and she finds out that he is an insanely fanatic Boston Red Sox fan. The question is whether their love can survive when she will always come in second to his favorite team.

While romantic comedies tend to be a dime a dozen, Fever Pitch is a bit of an anomaly, because it’s one of those rare attempts to appeal equally to both sexes. Of course, what else would one expect from Nick Hornby, the author of “High Society” and “About a Boy”, whose novels have found as much of a male audience as women, at least in print? Those two books were turned into vehicles for two leading men, John Cusack and Hugh Grant respectively, and the resulting movies were popular among the twenty-to-thirty something crowd. This won’t be the first time that Hornby’s semi-autobiographical novel was turned into a movie. In 1997, Hornby scripted the screenplay for the British film about a woman’s romance with a diehard soccer fan, but it failed to find audiences here. Now, the story has modified for an American audiences by changing the obsession into a baseball team. (It’s amusing that the book’s title is a play on words that works in both cases.)

Not only that, but the movie is being helmed by Bobby and Peter Farrelly, the directors who brought low-brow gross out humor to the masses with movies like Dumb and Dumber and Kingpin. While they may seem an odd choice for a romantic comedy, they’ve instilled quite a bit of romance into movies like There’s Something About a Mary and Shallow Hal, working with strong comic stars like Ben Stiller and Jack Black. Also, one should remember that About A Boy, the last movie based on a Hornby book, was directed by another pair of directing brothers, Paul and Chris Weitz, best known for the American Pie series. The Farrellys are branching out a bit with Fever Pitch, which may be why their names are not even mentioned in the ads or trailer. Maybe it’s because their last movie, the Siamese twin comedy Stuck on You, was not one of their bigger hits.

The Farrellys don’t have as strong leading man as those who appeared in the previous two Hornby flicks, but Jimmy Fallon is being touted as the film’s big selling point. After years of being the main guy on “Saturday Night Live,” Fallon left the show to make movies. Unfortunately, his first trial-by-fire as a box office draw was last October’s action-comedy Taxi with Queen Latifah, which many consider to be the worst movie of 2004. Then again, the role of an insane Red Sox fan is not too far removed for the comic who played a similar character on SNL and proved popular with the MTV crowd, so this may just be a better vehicle for him.

He also has the fortune to work with a co-star who has a lot more experience with the romantic comedy genre. Former child star Drew Barrymore co-starred twice with Adam Sandler, a true comedy box office star, in two of his most romantic films, The Wedding Singer and last year’s 50 First Dates. The question is whether she can carry a movie without having a much stronger male lead, something that Fallon most definitely is not just yet. Besides the Charlie’s Angels movies, which she co-produced, she headlined a popular teen romantic comedy Never Been Kissed and was able to hold her own in the chick flick Riding in Cars with Boys, a semi-successful chick flick. Then again, her pairing with Something About Mary’s Ben Stiller in the 2003 bomb Duplex makes you wonder whether people might go see a comedy just because Barrymore is in it.

Related Comparisons
Title	Release Date	Theater Count	Previous Box Office (in millions)	Weekend Box Office (in millions)	Average	Total Box Office
50 First Dates	2/13/04	3,591		$39.58	$11,098	$120.78
Duplex	9/26/03	2,189		$4.62	$2,111	$9.61
Riding in Cars with Boys	10/19/01	2,770		$10.80	$3,899	$29.78
Never Been Kissed	4/9/99	2,455		$11.84	$4,823	$55.47
The Wedding Singer	2/13/98	2,821		$19.10	$6,771	$80.25
Taxi	10/8/04	3,001	$0.62	$12.03	$4,009	$36.61

Fortunately, Fever Pitch’s comedy credentials don’t just end with Hornby, the Farrellys and Fallon. The script is by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, a writing team who have plenty of experience with successful comedies. Their most recent collaboration was the script for Fox’s recent animated film Robots, but they got their start writing for Gary Marshall’s television shows “Happy Days” and “Laverne and Shirley”. They also have been regular collaborators with Billy Crystal, writing both City Slickers movies, as well as the similar sports-romance Forget Paris and Mr. Saturday Night. The combination of Hornby plot, their script and Farrelly direction adds to the chances of this being a strong comedy.

The opening of Fever Pitch has been carefully timed to coincide with the start of baseball season this past weekend, in hopes that guys will allow themselves to be dragged to see this by their wives or girlfriends instead of going to more appealing action-comedy Sahara. Romantic comedies aren’t normally guy fare, but the baseball angle certainly should hit close to home with couples who suffer similar problems. Then again, the guys might be as disinteresed in the romance as women might be in the baseball.

In a rather strange bit of synchronicity, the Farrellys completely redid the movie’s ending when the Red Sox broke their ninety year jinx by going to the playoffs, coming from behind to beat their arch-rivals, the Yankees, and then doing the same at the World Series. The Farrellys just happened to be shooting at Fenway Park when the Red Sox win a pivotal game, although Adam Sandler used a similar setting for the romantic ending of his 2003 comedy Anger Management, only shooting at Yankee Stadium.) Mind you, being raised in New England, I would consider myself a Red Sox fan above any other baseball team, but having lived in New York City for almost twenty years, I know how much my fellow New Yorkers hate that team, especially after last year’s playoffs win. Considering the amount of sour grapes, I can see a lot of New Yorkers not going to see this movie out of pure spite. More than anything else, this might hurt this movie’s opening, considering that New York is one of the top two markets for new movies. (It may be good to note that the Yankees beat the Red Sox in their opening day match-up on Sunday, another bad portent for Fever Pitch's chances.)

On the other hand, Fever Pitch was given sneak previews in a bunch of theatres, presumably outside New York, over the weekend in order to try to drum-up some last minute word-of-mouth. This has often helped other low-key romantic comedies get a bit more business than they might have otherwise. It won't hurt that the movie got the cover story in "Entertainment Weekly" last week or that author Stephen King raved about the movie in his column that same issue.

Related Comparisons
Title	Release Date	Theater Count	Previous Box Office (in millions)	Weekend Box Office (in millions)	Average	Total Box Office
Stuck on You	12/12/03	3,003		$9.41	$3,134	$33.45
Shallow Hal	11/9/01	2,771		$23.28	$8,401	$70.83
There's Something About Mary	7/17/98	2,186	$4.06	$13.74	$6,285	$176.48
About a Boy	5/17/02	1,207		$8.56	$7,090	$40.57
High Fidelity	3/31/00	1,183		$6.43	$5,435	$27.04
Wimbledon	9/17/04	2,034		$7.12	$3,500	$16.83
Forget Paris	5/19/95	1,069		$5.81	$5,435	$33.19

Why I Should See It: A Nick Hornby premise combined with the Farrellys’ sense of humor should make this a fun romantic comedy.
Why Not: It will be tough deciding who is the more annoying of the film’s two stars.

Bottom Line: Fever Pitch looks like one of those romantic comedies that either wins a lot of people over and does better than expected in the long term or it just won’t interest anyone. Unfortunately, the things that could interest a wider audience, the creators of the comedy, are being ignored in favor of the two things that could turn a lot of people off…its stars.

Projection: $16 to 17 million opening weekend on its way to $50 million.

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SAHARA (Paramount Pictures)
Starring: Matthew McConaughey, Steve Zahn, Penelope Cruz, Lambert Wilson, Glynn Turman, Delroy Lindo, William H. Macy
Directed by: Breck Eisner (Recon, Thoughtcrimes)
Genres: Action, Adventure, Comedy
Rated PG-13
Theatre Count: 3,154
Tagline: “Dirk Pitt. Adventure has a new name.” (As does “fear” apparently. Lots of name-changing going on these days)

Explorer Dirk Pitt, hero of over a dozen Clive Cussler novels, comes to the big screen, as played by Matthew McConaughey. Pitt is on a treasure hunt through North Africa looking for what the locals call “The Ship of Death”, a device that is responsible for causing madness and death in the locals. Along with his wisecracking sidekick (Steve Zahn) and a beautiful U.N. scientist (Penelope Cruz), they navigate the vast Sahara desert for the source of this environmental disaster.

Sahara is based on the Clive Cussler novel of the same name, which was a part of his bestselling series of adventure novels starring Dirk Pitt and NUMA (the National Underwater and Marine Agency), which Cussler began over thirty years ago with “The Mediterranean Caper.” Sahara was actually the 11th book in the series, released in 1992, but it’s only the second one to make its way to the big screen. With exciting names like “Valhalla Rising”, “Atlantis Found” and “Inca Gold”, the Pitt novels have been regulars on the New York Times bestseller lists, having collectively sold over 125 million books in the last thirty years. His influence can be seen in the writing of other popular writers like Tom Clancy, and most recently Dan Brown, writer of the bestselling “The Da Vinci Code,” which has taken a lot less time to get to the big screen. Like his character, Cussler is known to be a bit of an adventurer himself, something that has helped spur his popularity among fans, who have created shrine-like fansites like Cussler.Net, Society of the Cusslermen and CliveCusslerForum. These are the people who have been patiently waiting for this movies to come to the screen.

With all that success, you wonder why it’s taken so long for Cussler’s novels to be turned into movies. His early novel “Raise the Titanic” was turned into a film in 1980 starring Jason Robards. It earned less than half its budget in theatres and rentals. With that in mind, the path of Sahara from novel to movie has been a difficult one with the current incarnation first rearing its head over three years ago, meant as a summer tent pole release for Paramount Pictures. Two summers came and went, and it got to the point where Paramount just had to get the movie out, which is why it ended up in this less-than-desirable spring release.

To play the role of the popular Dirk Pitt, they hired Texan actor Matthew McConaughey, whose own adventures have been well documented. After a starring role in Joel Schumacher’s A Time to Kill, McConaughey got a lot of interest from directors, and it wasn’t long before he was doing action-adventure movies like the submarine film U-571, almost exactly five years ago. That did well, but McConaughey’s last foray into action-adventure was the effects-driven dragon movie Reign of Fire, which was meant to be a big summer release, but it ended up disappointing many by underperforming. In the meantime, McConaughey was finding a lot more success as a romantic lead in comedies like The Wedding Planner with Jennifer Lopez and How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days with Kate Hudson. In both cases, the movies seemed to do better based on genre and premise than McConaughey’s presence, which didn’t do much to help Bill Paxton’s thriller Frailty do very much business.

For Sahara, he’s partnered with Spanish actress Penelope Cruz, who still seems to be bubbling under after years of making Hollywood films. After appearing in many low-key Spanish films, she got critical attention for her role in Pedro Almodovar’s All About My Mother. Her transition to English speaking roles wasn’t so smooth with flops like Woman on Top and Captain Correli’s Mandolin not boding well for her career. When Cameron Crowe decided to remake the Spanish film Abre Los Ojos from Alejandro Amenábar (The Sea Inside), he cast Penelope Cruz to reprise her role, starring opposite Tom Cruise. Cruise and Cruz soon became an item, shortly after his split with wife Nicole Kidman, which brought Cruz more attention than her movies. Since then, Cruz has mainly been appearing in a lot of little seen foreign films like Don’t Tempt Me and Don’t Move, though her last big movie was the Halle Berry horror flick Gothika in 2003. She must have enjoyed working on Sahara, because she started dating McConaughey and will appear in his next movie Looper.

Steve Zahn’s name might not be so well known, but he’s a comedic character actor who has become known for playing the buddy or sidekick role in a bunch of comedies. After providing animal voices for a bunch of family films like Stuart Little and Dr. Dolittle, he had a small but memorable part in Eddie Murphy’s Daddy Day Care, although his biggest starring role to date partnered him with Martin Lawrence for National Security. Zahn has a part in Cruz’s next movie, the Luc Besson penned Bandidas, which also stars Salma Hayek…just to further confuse anyone who still has trouble telling her and Cruz apart.

A smaller part of the equation in Sahara is that of William H. Macy, an actor who has built quite a reputation as an actors’ actor from his roles in the Coen Brothers’ Fargo, David Mamet’s films, as well as recent performances in movies like The Cooler and Seabiscuit. While Macy got an Oscar nomination for Fargo, he’s been getting more attention for his television roles, earning a bunch of Emmy nominations and a win for the TV movie “Door to Door.” Macy’s most recent move to the mainstream was his popular role in the thriller Cellular last fall.

The Cast
Title	Release Date	Theater Count		Weekend Box Office (in millions)	Average	Total Box Office
How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days	2/7/03	2,923		$23.77	$8,134	$105.81
Reign of Fire	7/12/02	2,629		$15.63	$5,946	$43.06
Frailty	4/12/02	1,497		$4.21	$2,806	$13.08
The Wedding Planner	1/26/01	2,785		$13.51	$4,851	$60.40
U-571	4/21/00	2,583		$19.55	$7,569	$79.07
Daddy Day Care	5/9/03	3,370		$27.62	$8,197	$103.55
National Security	1/17/03	2,729		$14.37	$5,266	$36.29
Gothika	11/21/03	2,382		$19.29	$8,097	$58.95
Vanilla Sky	12/14/01	2,742		$25.02	$9,123	$100.40
Cellular	9/10/04	2,749		$10.10	$3,674	$32.00

The movie is directed by Breck Eisner, son of Disney CEO Michael Eisner, a credit more prominent on his resume than any of the movies he has made. At least, he’s working in a genre that has shown strength at the box office, the desert-based action-adventure. In the early days of cinema, films like Lawrence of Arabia and Beau Geste were popular among mass audiences, and that feel was recaptured by George Lucas and Steven Spielberg for the Indiana Jones movies during the ‘80s. In recent years, there’s been another resurgence in the setting for movies like The Mummy and Disney’s horse-racing movie Hidalgo last year.

More importantly, Paramount has been advertising Sahara to look like Nicholas Cage’s National Treasure, emulating the mix of mystery and action which made it such a huge hit for the company run by Eisner’s Dad last Thanksgiving. Opening to $35 million and earning almost $170 million over the holidays, it’s a good model and Paramount would love to have that type of hit with this. Unfortunately, it looks just as much like the Brett Ratner buddy action-comedy After the Sunset, which opened one week earlier to far less success. With all that sand, it looks even more like the remake of Flight of the Phoenix, which bombed a few weeks later.

Obviously, the main audience for this film will be guys in their 30’s, 40’s and older and maybe some women that are familiar with Cussler’s novels, not exactly the demographic that rushes out to see movies. The diehard Cussler fans will probably go to see the movie opening weekend, although they’re probably already well aware of the production problems and how many times the movie has been moved. Sahara has not exactly been promoted very well, although executive producer Matthew McConaughey took a cross-country in a trailer emblazoned with the “Sahara” logo to try to increase awareness.

Related Comparisons
Title	Release Date	Theater Count		Weekend Box Office (in millions)	Average	Total Box Office
The Flight of the Phoenix	12/17/04	2,604		$5.02	$1,928	$21.01
National Treasure	11/19/04	3,017		$35.14	$11,648	$169.79
After the Sunset	11/12/04	2,819		$11.10	$3,938	$28.33
Hidalgo	3/5/04	3,063		$18.83	$6,147	$67.29
The Rundown	9/26/03	3,152		$18.53	$5,880	$47.59
The Mummy	5/7/99	3,210		$43.37	$13,511	$155.25

Why I Should See It: With the Cussler name, it could be a strong action-adventure ala The Rundown or National Treasure.
Why Not: Besides the name, it’s likely to have little in common with the Cussler novel and honestly, how a movie starring McConaughey, Zhan and Cruz as the leads possibly be any good? The number of delays for the movie is also worrisome.

Bottom Line: Based on a novel from one of the country’s most well known adventure writers, Sahara could be an exciting movie, although the majority of the draw will be to older guys and some women who are familiar with the original novels. With a weaker cast and poor marketing, it will probably have to work a bit harder to do as well as similar action-adventures like The Rundown and Hidalgo.

Projection: $17 to 19 million opening weekend on its way to $45 million or under.

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UNDER THE RADAR

Do you live in a major North American city? If so, there are a number of limited release movies worth checking out. And if you don't live in one of the cities in which these movies open, look for some of them to hit your area sometime in the next few months.

Opening in Limited Release:
CHRYSTAL (First Look Pictures)
EROS (Warner Independent Pictures)
NEW! SMILE (Dark Forest Releasing)
WINTER SOLSTICE (Paramount Classics)

In writer/director Ray McKinnon’s Chrystal, Billy Bob Thornton plays Joe, husband of emotionally damaged Chrystal (Lisa Blount) who hopes to put their lives back together once Joe is released from jail after a police chase that left her injured and their young son missing. Her family isn’t particularly happy about Joe’s return. After opening in Arkansas this weekend, the Sundance Festival hit will expand to Georgia and Texas on April 15, and North Carolina the week after that.

In Eros, three respected directors tell short stories about love and sex: Wong Kar Wai (In the Mood for Love) chronicles the relationship between a high-priced call girl (Gong Li) and her tailor in “The Hand”; Steven Soderbergh (Traffic) provides “Equilibrium”, a therapy session between an ad writer (Robert Downey Jr.) and his psychiatrist (Alan Arkin); and Michelangelo Antonioni (L’Aventurra) tells an abstract tale of love and infidelity in “The Dangerous Thread of Things.” The artsy anthology film opens in select cities this weekend.

Smile is the story of two girls--one from California, the other in China. The former is trying to deal with the pains of growing up while the latter has a much more serious affliction that has left her face deformed. Jeffrey Kramer's film tells the story of how these two girls are brought together by fate to become friends. It opens at 51 theatrse in Los Angeles and San Francisco on Friday.

In Winter Solstice, Anthony LaPaglia, star of the CBS drama “Without a Trace”, plays a quiet widower trying to deal with two troubled sons, one played by X2’s Aaron Stanford, who he feels are making bad decisions. With the help of his new neighbor, played by “The West Wing’s” Allison Janney, he finds a way to deal with his life and the future of his family. Josh Sternfeld’s drama opens in select cities.

Opening in New York and Los Angeles:
KUNG FU HUSTLE (Sony Pictures Classics)

WARRIOR'S PICK: Steven Chow (Shaolin Soccer) writes, directs and stars in Kung Fu Hustle, his homage to the kung fu films of his youth, mixing action with the over-the-top slapstick comedy for which he’s best known. Chow plays Sing, a bumbling petty criminal who inadvertently starts a feud between a group of gangsters and an impoverished town, which happens to house three legendary kung fu masters. Chow’s latest martial arts action-comedy will roll out nationwide on April 22^nd after its platform release. MY REVIEW

Opening in Utah:
SUITS ON THE LOOSE (Halestone Distribution)

Two rebellious teens breakout from a military desert survival camp and steal the identities of two naïve Mormon missionaries, a ruse so convincing that the police insist on escorting them to the missionaries’ destination, the town of New Harmony. But what will happen when the town finds out they’re not really Mormons at all? Politically incorrect religious comedy reigns in Rodney Henson’s movie, which opens--where else?--in Utah.

Opening in New York:

NEW! HAPPILY EVER AFTER (Kino International)
A HOLE IN MY HEART (Newmarket Films)

Yvan Attal's Happily Ever After tells the story of two friends, who are both married, and jealous of their other single friend and the number of women he sleeps with. Things get more complicated when one of them decides to have an affair without letting his friends know. The French comedy opens at New York's Paris Theatre on Friday, and then opens in Los angeles on April 22.

Swedish filmmaker Lucas Moodyson (Lilya 4-Ever) returns with the controversial A Hole in My Heart about a lonely teen and his low-life father who shoots amateur porn videos in their living room. One such endeavor leads to a day filled with sensual perversion, physical degradation and isolation, taking “reality television” to a shocking and disturbing place. Moodyson’s provocative film opens at New York’s Cinema Village on Friday.

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THIS TIME LAST YEAR

This weekend last year coincided with Easter weekend, and it was a bit of a mess. With five new movies in wide release, surely one of them should be able to take out the previous week’s #1 Hellboy, right? Nope. Guillermo Del Toro’s superhero flick wasn’t able to hold the top spot, but it lost the position to Mel Gibson’s religious epic, The Passion of the Christ, which had an appropriate boost considering what Easter weekend represents for Catholics and Christians. The gory film jumped 44% from the previous weekend and moved from #5 back up to the top with a $15 million weekend. The irony that a movie called Hellboy came in 2^nd was probably lost on many. That just left eight more places and five new movies. As has often been the case, the movie opening in the fewest theatres did the best, as Cedric the Entertainer’s family comedy Johnson Family Vacation, an urban nod to the National Lampoon “Vacation” films, earned just over $9 million on the weekend after a Wednesday opening. Apparently, no one remembered to see Disney’s The Alamo, since its $9 million opening weekend was disastrous compared to its $70 million plus production budget. Likewise, the Bruce Willis-Matthew Perry crime comedy sequel, The Whole Ten Yards, did not find many takers, as it opened in the most theatres, earning the least in them than the other movies. Anne Hathaway, star of Disney’s The Princess Diaries, took on another character from a book with the fantasy Ella Enchanted, which made just over $6 million, taking ninth place. At the bottom of the heap was the R-rated comedy The Girl Next Door with Emile Hirsch and Elisa Cuthbert, which barely got into the Top 10 with its own $6 million opening weekend take.

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Next week sees only one new movie, but it’s a doozy… the remake of the horror film The Amityville Horror!

Copyright 2005 Edward Douglas