Your Weekly Guide to New Movies for December 2, 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 12.1.05

The weekend after Thanksgiving is rarely a good time to release a new movie as most people are trying to get back to work and school after the long weekend. With that in mind, only one movie dares to try to find an audience, and that is Aeon Flux, the live action sci-fi movie based on the MTV cartoon starring Charlize Theron in the main role. While it’s not likely to knock Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire from its throne, it should do well enough to take second place over some of the returning Thanksgiving movies. Even with a large drop-off, Harry Potter should have a decent third weekend somewhere between $25 and 30 million, its last weekend at #1 before being knocked down by The Chronicles of Narnia and then Peter Jackson’s King Kong over the next two weeks.

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ÆON FLUX (Paramount Pictures)
Starring: Charlize Theron, Marton Csokas, Jonny Lee Miller, Sophie Okonedo, Pete Postlethwaite, Amelia Warner, Caroline Chikezie, Frances McDormand
Director: Karyn Kusama (Girlfight)
Screenwriter(s): Phil Hay, Matt Manfredi (The Tuxedo, Crazy/Beautiful)
Genres: Action, Science-Fiction, Thriller
Rated PG-13
Theatre Count: 2,608
Tagline: “The future is flux.”

The MTV sci-fi animated series “Æon Flux” is brought to life with Charlize Theron playing the title character, a freedom fighter who fights oppression in the walled city of Bregna, 400 hundred years into the future. For her latest mission, she has been sent to kill the city’s leader Trevor Goodchild (Marton Csokas), but she uncovers secrets along the way.

Back in 1991, MTV still stood for “Music Television” and it was mostly music videos usually supplied by a band or artist’s label to promote their latest album or single. The powers that be knew that the channel had the eyes of millions of impressionable young people and thought it was time to offer something else. One of those early ideas was to showcase cool animators, so they came up with a show called “Liquid Television” to do just that, and part of this early experiment was a serialized dialogue-free science fiction story called “Æon Flux” by animator Peter Chung. Heavily influenced by European comics and Japanese Anime, the segments’ sexy star was popular enough to give her a 10-episode series of half-hour shows in 1995 that added even more background to the character and her story, as well as dialogue.

Flash forward ten years and a long-in-the-works live action film based on the “cartoon” is finally seeing the light of day. You can’t help but wonder whether they waited too long to appease the cartoon’s core audience, since most of them have grown up and moved on, but Paramount and MTV Films are probably hoping that science fiction and action fans will eat up this premise regardless of its origins. To helm it, they brought on Karyn Kusama, whose first film Girlfight impressed anyone who saw it… which wasn’t many judging by the amount it made in theatres.

Kusama’s secret weapon obviously is her star Charlize Theron, who in the last ten years has gone from playing “the girlfriend” to being a bonafide star in her own right mostly thanks to her Oscar winning performance in the movie Monster. As of yet, the gorgeous South African born actress hasn’t had a box office hit where she was the one and only star, although she tried to drab it down ala her Monster role for Niki Caro’s feminist drama North Country. Despite the early Oscar buzz that surrounded the movie, it failed to find an audience during one of the worst Octobers in recent memory. Before Monster, Theron’s biggest movie was the 2003 remake of The Italian Job, where she was the only woman in a diverse ensemble cast. Earlier films have mostly been duds despite Theron being teamed with stronger male stars like Will Smith and Matt Damon (Legend of Bagger Vance), Keanu Reeves (Sweet November) and Ben Affleck (Reindeer Games). The role of Æon Flux also puts Theron into a far more glamorous and far less clothed role, which should certainly appeal to the male fans who appreciate Ms. Theron more for her looks than her acting. Charlize went all out for this role, even getting a serious neck injury in the process, shutting down production last September; as a matter of fact, that injury got more press for the movie than anything since the movie was completed.

Charlize Theron
Title	Release Date	Theater Count	Previous Box Office (in millions)	Weekend Box Office (in millions)	Average	Total Box Office
North Country	10/21/05	2,555		$6.42	$2,513	$17.88
Monster	12/26/03	668	$7.09	$3.37	$5,044	$34.47
The Italian Job	5/30/03	2,633		$19.46	$7,390	$105.63
Trapped	9/20/02	2,227		$3.21	$1,442	$6.92
Sweet November	2/16/01	2,268		$9.73	$4,290	$25.18
Legend of Bagger Vance	11/3/00	2,061		$11.52	$5,590	$30.70
Reindeer Games	2/25/00	2,204		$8.13	$3,689	$23.15

Support for the movie comes from Marton Csokas as Trevor Goodchild, chairman of Bregna’s “council of scientists.” Though he was last seen in The Great Raid and Kingdom of Heaven, he’s better known as Celeborn from the “Lord of the Rings” movies. The former Mr. Angelina Jolie, Jonny Lee Miller, plays his second in command, Oren Goodchild. The movie also reunites Theron with her North Country co-star Frances McDormand and teams her with Sophie Okonedo, who impressed so many moviegoers with her Oscar nominated supporting role in last year’s Hotel Rwanda.

As much as there would seem to be some sort of built-in fanbase for Æon Flux, science fiction and comic book fans are notoriously finicky and movies starring female heroines rarely get the type of attention that their male counterparts do. In the summer of 2004, Halle Berry took on the mantle of Catwoman, and it earned almost $17 million despite tons of ridicule both from critics and comic book fans. Earlier this year, Jennifer Garner had even worse luck with her Daredevil spin-off movie, Elektra, and in October, few of Keira Knightley’s male fans bothered to see her in the action-drama Domino.

The weekend after Thanksgiving is notorious as a dumping ground for movies that studios don’t know what to do with, and along those lines, Æon Flux has been moved around the release schedule for the last year before winding up here. Not that this weekend means doom, since there have been several breakouts including Behind Enemy Lines and Tom Cruise’s The Last Samurai, both which were strong enough to bring people into theatres the weekend after Thanksgiving. Æon Flux may not be as strong as either of those, but it’s also opening in a weekend with no other new movies offering competition, which will probably keep it from completely bombing.

Paramount Pictures gave a big rollout for Æon Flux at Comic-Con International this year, with over 5,000 people getting a sneak peak at the upcoming movie. At the time, it probably looked pretty impressive, but that was over four months ago, and the commercials and trailer haven’t done much to keep people interested. As a matter of fact, what looked cool in the big Comic-Con presentation has started to look kind of cheesy. In a year where action films aren’t as big a draw as they used be, the genre’s male audience has found other distractions like DVDs and video games, as seen by the lackluster performances by Stealth, Doom and Serenity. (Ironically, all three of those also debuted at Comic-Con for an audience of sci-fi comics fans that you would think would be interested in them.) It certainly won’t help that Paramount has refused to screen the movie for critics, since no reviews in the papers will mean that fewer people knowing the the movie is getting released.

Related Comparisons
Title	Release Date	Theater Count	Previous Box Office (in millions)	Weekend Box Office (in millions)	Average	Total Box Office
Girlfight	10/6/00	253	$0.28	$0.50	$1,119	$1.52
Domino	10/14/05	2,223		$4.67	$2,101	$10.14
Elektra	1/14/05	3,203		$14.79	$4,618	$24.41
Catwoman	7/23/04	3,117		$16.73	$5,367	$39.78
Doom	10/21/05	3,043		$15.49	$5,090	$27.94
Serenity	9/30/05	2,188		$10.09	$4,610	$25.34
The Fifth Element	5/9/97	2,500		$17.03	$6,812	$63.55
Behind Enemy Lines	11/30/01	2,770		$19.20	$6,931	$58.77

Why I Should See It: Charlize Theron running around in skimpy outfits.
Why Not: Because in between all that running around, there’s likely to be an attempt at a futuristic sci-fi story that looks laughably cheesy.

Bottom Line: Aeon Flux may be Charlize Theron’s last chance to prove that she can carry a movie without the help of a strong male star, and unfortunately, she’s doing it in a genre that hasn’t been doing well and hasn’t been kind to female stars. Fortunately, Theron’s good looks might help bring in the guys who were turned off by her last movie, North Country, although the weak premise and the general lack of interest might keep it from making big money its opening weekend, and then the two blockbusters on the way (Chronicles of Narnia and King Kong) will do the rest.

Projection: $12 to 14 million opening weekend on its way to $35 million.

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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.

This week’s WARRIOR’S PICKS are TRANSAMERICA (The Weinstein Co.) starring Felicity Huffman, and the documentary BE HERE TO LOVE ME: A FILM ABOUT TOWNES VAN ZANDT (Palm Pictures). Opening in New York and L.A., Duncan Tucker’s TransAmerica stars Felicity Huffman from “Desperate Housewives” as Sabrina “Bree” Osbourne, a preop transsexual about to have the operation that turns he into a she, when s/he learns that she has a 17-year-old son in New York. So begins a cross-country journey as she tries to reconnect with her son while keeping her own identity a secret. MY REVIEW Be Here To Love Me is a fascinating look at the life and music at the reclusive country/folk singer Townes Van Zandt, using archival footage assembled by director Margaret Brown and interviews with country greats Steve Earle, Emmylou Harris, Kris Kristofferson, and Willie Nelson.

Opening in over 200 theatres in major cities is Kevin Harrison’s snowboarding documentary FIRST DESCENT (Universal Pictures), spotlighting some of the sport’s pioneers and the current cutting edge superstars, as they make a trip to the treacherous mountains of Alaska to push themselves even further.

Tom Arnold wrote and stars in THE KID & I (Slowhand Releasing), a touching comedy directed by Penelope Spheeris (“Wayne’s World”) about a has-been actor (Arnold—obviously a bit of method acting), hired to write and star in a movie with the cerebral palsy afflicted teen of a wealthy producer.

Adam Goldberg's I LOVE YOUR WORK (THINKFilm) opens in New York on Friday after its L.A. release in early November. It stars Giovanni Ribisi as popular actor Gray Evans, whose inability to deal with his celebrity causes him to lose touch with reality.
Quebec filmmaker Richard Lepage directs the adaptation of his play FAR SIDE OF THE MOON (TLA Releasing) about the sibling rivalry between two brothers—both played by Lepage--as they dispute over their dead mother’s belongings. One’s a gay meterologist, and the other is an older student, who must travel to Russia to defend his doctoral dissertation. Featuring a soundtrack by Benoit Jutras, from the Cirque Du Soleil, it opens in New York.

Nicole Conn’s documentary LITTLE MAN, not to be confused with the upcoming Shawn Wayans movie, is about a lesbian mother whose son is born 100 days too early, weighing only 1 lb. This stirring human drama opens at the Cinema Village on Friday. Another documentary opening at New York’s Film Forum on Wednesday is THE BOYS OF BARAKA (THINKFilm), a coming-of-age story about a group of boys from the ghettos of Baltimore, who are sent to a boarding school in Kenya in order to find their true worth.

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THIS TIME LAST YEAR

As mentioned above, the weekend after Thanksgiving is generally not a good one to release a new movie, but Sony used the open weekend as an opportunity to release the Mike Leigh directed drama Closer, starring Julia Roberts, Jude Law, Clive Owen and Natalie Portman in the film based on Patrick Marber’s stageplay. It opened in only 476 theatres in select cities, but had strong enough buzz to bring in over $7.7 million its opening weekend, an average of over $16 thousand per theatre, before expanding further in the following two weeks. Disney’s National Treasure still roosted at the top, followed by the holiday duo of Christmas with the Kranks and The Polar Express, while the animated hit The Incredibles dropped down to 4^th with a 61% drop-off from the holiday weekend. Oliver Stone’s Alexander took an even bigger tumble, making 66% less in its second weekend than it did over Thanksgiving.

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Next week, C.S. Lewis’ fantasy epic The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe comes to theatres and Stephen Gaghan’s political thriller Syriana expands nationwide.

Copyright 2005 Edward Douglas

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