After three weeks of Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper dominating the box office, what would happen if it actually managed to make it a fourth week in a row at #1? It’s a crazy concept, but nothing’s been stopping it so far. Even with three new movies opening on Friday, all of them have some potential but are also hindered by their share of issues, so one might wonder if they’re just going to suffer the same fate of all the other movies that have tried to make a mark against Sniper.
The film does look somewhat odd because it has the characters coming into the real world as 3D animation and interacting with humans which sometimes works (as in The Smurfs) and sometimes doesn’t (as in The Smurfs 2). Actually that’s a good example of how hit family movies don’t always deliver hit sequels, and that sequel was released fairly closely to the earlier blockbuster hit. Waiting ten years for another movie is definitely taking a chance on Paramount and Nickelodeon’s part, because you’ve lost the momentum created by the original movie. There’s still something to say about the namebrand value of SpongeBob SquarePants especially among kids, since the show is still popular, and the movie will offer the same level of fun, being from the same creators of the show along with Tom Kenny and Bill Fagerbakke providing voices of their popular characters, joined by the likes of Antonio Banderas and Frankie Muniz. It’s also the only movie that doesn’t have some of the issues that the others are facing, and while it probably won’t get stellar reviews, it’s also the movie that’s going to be least affected by reviews. While I don’t think it will open quite as big as the previous movie, I think it’s still good for $20 million, which may be enough to be #1 for the weekend, depending on whether American Sniper rallies post-Super Bowl or has run its course.
It would make sense that having big stars like Tatum and Kunis would be a big selling point for the movie although they’ve been doing the bare minimum in promoting the movie, and even Oscar nominee Eddie Redmayne is doing his best to distance himself from the movie to keep it from hurting his campaign. That leaves the Wachowskis to sell the movie, their last film being David Mitchell’s time-spanning anthology Cloud Atlas, starring Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Ben Whishaw and more, which they adapted with Thomas Tykwer. It opened with a weak $9.6 million in October 2012 and made $27.1 million domestic, which is pretty awful considering how much it cost. (It added another $100 million overseas, but I don’t think that would even cover the production costs.) This one is probably just as expensive—we’ve heard word of it costing something like $175 million, which is crazy even by today’s blockbuster standards. It’s obviously great that there’s some original science fiction being created, but not being based on a known property means that it’s relying entirely on the Wachowskis and their cast to sell it. This looks like a pretty epic FX-heavy science-fiction movie going by the trailers and commercials, but good luck figuring out what the movie is about, because that’s one thing that hasn’t come across at all in any of the trailers. Buzz on the movie has generally been pretty bad even with it having a secret screening at the Sundance Film Festival last week and that could put off a lot of the discerning moviegoers that might give the Wachowskis a chance. The Wachowskis’ latest could win Friday with their fans rushing out to see their latest movie after weeks without something new or fresh to see, but it’s going to quickly tail off after that, falling behind The SpongeBob Movie and American Sniper, which means it’s gunning for second or third place at best.
Seventh Son is another novel adaptation that suddenly found itself being greenlit in the fervor following the success of the “Twilight” movies, but many of those movies have failed and Seventh Son doesn’t seem like it will be joining the plus side of the ledger. If you consider the fact that the movie was first pushed by Legendary Entertainment at their very first Comic-Con panel way back in 2011, before the movie had even begun shooting, and then started filming in early 2012 with plans to release in 2013, it’s become one of those “whatever happened to” movies that we get from time to time. (Like 2013’s 47 Ronin for instance.) Legendary brought Seventh Son back to Comic-Con in 2013 when it had already been pushed back to January 2014 but then Legendary left their home at Warner Bros. and set up a new deal at Universal and Seventh Son was one of the movies that went along with it, as it got delayed a full year. Now I don’t know about you, but when a movie gets delayed that much and finally gets a release without much fanfare in early February, my “bad movie sense” goes off, and it doesn’t take an expert to realize that Legendary Pictures probably knew they had a dud and have just delayed the inevitable as long as possible. Even though it’s opening fairly wide, this one will be fighting for the fantasy sci-fi crowd against Jupiter Ascending, and will probably be lucky to open with $10 million especially since it’s coming into a market where few movies are faring well.
This Week’s Updated Predictions: (The gallery has not been updated, only the numbers below) UPDATE: Definitely going a bit bigger on two of the new movies since it seems like time for things to break out a bit after the domination of American Sniper over the past few weeks. 1. The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water (Paramount) – $28.8 million N/A (up 8 million) Next Week: Possibly one of the most anticipated movies of the year, at least among housewives, is the “romantic” S&M drama Fifty Shades of Grey (Focus/Universal) which hits theaters just in time for Valentine’s Day. Acting as counter-programming for the guys who are able to stand up to their wives and girlfriends and see a movie they’d rather see is Matthew Vaughn’s R-rated take on spy films, Kingsman: The Secret Service (20th Century Fox), starring Colin Firth, Samuel L. Jackson, Taron Eggerton and more. This Week’s Must-Sees Ballet 422 (Magnolia) Other Limited Releases of Note: The Voices (Lionsgate) Outcast (eOne Films) Love, Rosie (The Film Arcade) Listen (Mance Media) Boy Meets Girl (Cinephile International Pictures) Call for Help (Studio) You can post any comments or questions below, or you can get in touch with the Weekend Warrior on Twitter. Copyright 2015 Edward Douglas Show Comments |
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