The only thing shocking about this weekend at the box office was that the early estimates were low.

To no one’s surprise, The Hunger Games took the top spot at the box office.  After it’s success on Friday we all know it was coming, it was just a question of what the final number would be.  It came in with $155 million for the weekend, making it the third largest opening weekend ever, and just $3 million shy of second place holder, The Dark Knight.  It was the biggest opening weekend ever for a non-sequel, and that is saying a lot actually.  Internationally the film brought in $59.25 million in only one day of screenings making the worldwide gross for the first three days $214.25 million.  Expect to see just about every young adult novel ever turned into a movie soon.

Coming in second was the surprisingly successful 21 Jump Street which slid a very respectable 41.3% from last weekend to bring in $21.3 million.  It’s domestic gross is now over $71 million, with an additional $16 million from foreign markets.

The Lorax landed in third place with another $13.1 million. This film is holding on surprisingly well considering early reviews weren’t the best.

Languishing in fourth place was Disney’s newest disaster, John Carter. The first of a proposed series of films slipped another dismal 63.1% this weekend to bring in an anemic $5 million. Domestic gross now stands at $62.3 million off of a $250 million budget. The only saving grace for this movie is the foreign markets seem to like it more with $172.1 million coming in from overseas thus far. When you factor in the higher expenses of overseas distribution, however, things are still not good.

Act of Valor made its way back into the top five this week, but with only $2 million in revenue.

Next weeks big releases are Mirror, Mirror and Wrath of the Titans.  While I think Wrath will open strong, I’m going to call it right now that The Hunger Games will win its second weekend with ease.  It’s going to take a 50 to 55% hit from this weekend for sure, but a $70 to $75 million weekend is going to be hard to compete with.  We’ll just have to see what happens.

Apparently if you write a young adult book these days, you’re pretty much setting yourself up for some insane success.

Following in the footsteps of Twilight, Lionsgate released The Hunger Games this weekend and it absolutely destroyed the competition. Filmed on a $78 million budget, the first film in the trilogy brought in $68.2 million on Friday alone.  I don’t normally write up the box office reports during the weekend, but the numbers and records this film is posting are just staggering.

• 4,137 locations/10,000+ prints
• $19.75M in record-setting midnight showings
• 3 AM showings were booked
• Some theaters are going 24-hours a day through out the weekend for this film
• Highest non-sequel opening weekend ever
• Highest debut single day for a non-sequel ever
• Highest March opening ever
• Fifth highest opening day ever

Current estimates have it brining in $140 million total this weekend, but with the Friday numbers being higher than expected there are some rumblings of $150+ million by the time the weekend closes out.

Where analysts are saying it succeeded was that unlike Twilight, this is not a female-only property.  It’s appealing to teen girls, women, males of all ages and those who wish to just know what the heck it’s about leading to it being called a “four-quadrant” film.

The good news is that it is also getting pretty much universally rave reviews.

Catching Fire, the second book in the series, has already had a release date scheduled for its sequel film of November 22, 2013.  With the success we’re seeing from this film, don’t be too surprised if the third book, Mockingjay, gets split it into two movies ala what happened with Twilight and Harry Potter.

The final total numbers for the 2011 box office finally hit today, and they tell a rather interesting tale.

The MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) finally released all the numbers for the 2011 box office, and while the U.S. barely broke the $10 billion mark again, overseas is where the real action was.

U.S. ticket sales brought in $10.2 billion, a drop of 3.8% from 2010.  Admissions – the number of people buying tickets – fell even further by 4.5% to 1.2 billion, the lowest number since at least 1996, which was 1.33 billion.  3D movies lost $400 million to land at $1.8 billion, but the MPAA was quick to point out that Avatar’s numbers were in the 2010 numbers.  The average ticket price jumped 1% to $7.93, and that represents a 37% jump since 2002.

Overseas ticket sales however accounted for a staggering 68.7% of the $32.6 billion total for all tickets sold.

Other bad news, the number of people classified as “frequent moviegoers” – those who buy at least one movie ticket a month – fell 2.2% to 35 million.

The MPAA has spent its day trying to spin all this data as not being as negative as it looks, with a lot of them blame being laid on Avatar doing so spectacularly well the year before.  I’m sorry to tell you, but when you’re losing your most frequent customers, something is definitely wrong no matter how you spin it.

[via Deadline]

Michael Bay is setting out to once again mess up a beloved franchise.

Whether you’re a fan of the original comic book or even the late 1980′s cartoon, everyone knows the origin of the Teenage Muntant Ninja Turtles. Heck, it’s in their name. They are mutants.  At no time has it ever been suggested that they are aliens.

Oh no, leave it to Michael Bay to do that.

Speaking at a recent Nickeloden event, Michael Bay had this to say about the upcoming Teenage Muntant Ninja Turtles movie he is producing:

When you see this movie, kids are going to believe, one day, that these turtles actually do exist when we are done with this movie. These turtles are from an alien race and they are going to be tough, edgy, funny and completely lovable.

That sounds awesome, and … wait a minute. They’re “from an alien race?”

This little tidbit immediately sparked outrage over the weekend, leading to Bay finally addressing the issue on his site:

Fans need to take a breath, and chill. They have not read the script. Our team is working closely with one of the original creators of Ninja Turtles to help expand and give a more complex back story. Relax, we are including everything that made you become fans in the first place. We are just building a richer world.

The Turtles already have a “complex back story.”  They already have a rich world.  Why is it Michael Bay can’t touch anything without adding his own mark to it?  The Transformers for instance had a huge back story, and he chucked almost every bit of it to make his own version which pretty much completely ignores everything.

He says he’s working with one of the original creators, but fails to name which one it is.  Well, I can tell you with 99.9% certainty its Kevin Eastman and not Peter Laird as the latter has pretty much disappeared off the face of the planet since the time of the cartoon.  And as much as I like Eastman as a person – I have met him on multiple occasions – he isn’t all that protective of the property.  Which is fine, but in general, the story has always remained the same: They are mutated turtles.  No aliens.

Why can’t fans “take a breath and chill,” Mr. Bay?  Because we know your track record.  We know how you mutilate things we love.  We know that you don’t have an ounce of talent in your body.  You blow things up.  That’s pretty much your only skill.  Oh, and over using slow motion for no apparent reason.

Teenage Muntant Ninja Turtles hits theaters December 25, 2013 … be afraid, be very afraid.

Apparently some big screen remakes of old TV shows can actually work.

In a rather larger surprise, 21 Jump Street not only did well at the box office this weekend taking in $35 million, but it also fared well with the critics. Who knew?  With a budget of $42 million, which seems a bit high for this type of film, it looks set to get into the black without much trouble.

The Lorax slipped another 41.3% to being in $22.8 million, bringing its domestic total to $158.4 million. The film has done so well that there is talk of the same team next working on an animated adaption of The Cat in the Hat.

John Carter slipped 55.2% which normally wouldn’t be that bad for a second weekend, but when your first weekend was pretty bad, and you had a $250 million budget, you know it’s making some Disney execs sweat.  The film brought in $13.5 million this weekend to make its domestic total $53.1 million.  Overseas the film is doing a bit better and brought in a total of $126.1 million thus far.

Project X keeps chugging along and brought in just over $4 million this weekend to bring its domestic total up to $48.1 million.

Rounding out the top five was A Thousand Words which brought in $3.75 million.

Next weeks sees the release of the highly anticipated The Hunger Games at a whopping 4,000 screens across the United States.

And after only four weeks of release, Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance didn’t crack into the top 49 movies, which makes me wonder if it has already been pulled from theaters.

While the Dark Shadows trailer may have disappointed, the new full trailer for Prometheus sells the movie hard.

We got a teaser trailer for Prometheus back in December, and while it clearly showed there were more connections to the Alien franchise than we were first led to believe there would be, this new full trailer pretty much completely eliminates any questions I had: You see the derelict ship from Alien taking off, you see the Space Jockey moving, there’s a lot of very similar set designs, and … yeah, there’s just no question any more as far as I’m concerned.

This is looking better and better, so maybe there is even more hope for this summer than I was thinking.

At long last a trailer has been released for Tim Burton’s upcoming Dark Shadows, and I think we may now know why they waited so long to release it.

While the original Dark Shadows television series wasn’t exactly the height of high brow entertainment, playing a big budget film version of it totally for a camp factor may not be the wisest of moves.  Even as a fan of Tim Burton and Johnny Depp, this film just lost a ton of appeal for me after seeing the trailer you’ll find below.

While I find some of the lines amusing, the idea of heading to a theater to catch this has definitely dropped down my list of must-see films this summer.  Yes, I loved the two Addams Family films, but that was always played for laughs, while this could have been played as a great dark, creepy black comedy if you must go that direction, not campy.

While I’m sure I’ll see this eventually just as I do with every Burton film, it has certainly dropped down my list now for what was shaping up to be a great year for fun movies.  Guess I’m just back to The Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises now.  Be sure to check out the gallery of images as well and see if you think this went off the rails somewhere along the line.

After the jump you will find a large collection of new official stills.
Continue Reading ->

The new trailer for The Avengers from Japan is just made of so much awesome that it hurts.

We already had one awesome trailer for The Avengers recently, but the new one from Japan is just so much more awesome that it almost hurts.  More shots of the attacking army, the first spoken lines for Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) and Maria Hill (Cobie Smulders) and the first really good shot of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s Helicarrier … I wanted to see this move before, but now I’m almost as hyped for it as I am for The Dark Knight Rises.  May can’t get here soon enough.

Things are definitely not looking good for Jack Bauer to strap on the Satchel of Death for another go at terrorists.

Despite looking like a certainty back in December, it appears the 24 movie may be dead in the water.  Filming was scheduled to start in April, but Fox has pulled the plug for now with conflicting reports over the reasoining.

According to Deadline, Keitfer Sutherland was due to film the movie during an upcoming hiatus in his new series, Touch.  Fox was reportedly concerned that that it didn’t feel the hiatus was long enough to complete the film and held the movie off.  The rumor making the rounds, however, is that the film was coming in at a $45 to $60 million dollar budget and Fox was only ready to pony up $30 million for the feature.

Supposedly this film was going to be the first in a proposed trilogy, but if they can’t even work this one out, it seems unlikely we’ll see any of them.  Sutherland, for the record, does not appear to be the issue having knocked his fee down to $1 million as opposed to his usual $5 million with a bigger cut of the gross so he would be performance based.  It sounds to me like Fox is just being a tightwad on this, but we saw similar things happen with Disney’s upcoming Lone Ranger, and it’s now filming, so never say die.

[via Deadline]

That thud you heard this weekend was John Carter slamming into The Lorax and falling to the ground.

Slipping a respectable 44.1%, The Lorax held on to the number one spot for a second weekend with $39.1 million.  That brings its domestic total to $121.95 million off of a $70 million budget.

The big news of the weekend, however, was Disney’s John Carter landed with a huge thud in second place with $30.6 million off of a $250 million budget.  It has done $70.6 million overseas for a worldwide total of $101.2 million.  It’s going to have a heck of a time recouping its budget, and I will say again that I think this film has been horribly mis-marketed.  For whatever reason Disney opted to just go with “John Carter” as the title as opposed to stressing the Mars aspect of the series, something that has been attached to the books since day one.  Whatever their reasoning, I’m thinking we won’t see be a sequel.

Project X slipped to third place, losing 45.1% to come in with $11.55 million.  I finally figured out which movie this is … good marketing, folks.

Horror film Silent House opened in fourth place with just a hair over $7 million.

Slipping to fifth place was Act of Valor, the film filled with real life SEAL team members.

The only major release next week is the abysmal looking 21 Jump Street, so don’t expect to see the top five changing much next week.  It will, however, be interesting to see what happens with John Carter.

The Avengers isn’t due to hit theaters until May, but that isn’t stopping director Joss Whedon from already speculating where he might go with a sequel.

Speaking with SFX, Joss Whedon – the creator of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer and Angel – talked about where he would like to go with a sequel to Marvel’s huge team movie.  First he spoke as to what he hoped to do with this first film in what is sure to become a series, and said, ”I want to know what makes them tick, what makes them flawed, what makes them fight – and ultimately, what makes them awesome. I go to these movies for those moments when the heroes define themselves, either through action or deliciously overwritten speeches.”  If you’re familiar with Whedon’s previous work, this sounds exactly like him and what he does.

Speaking to the sequel, he was asked where it could go and how he could go bigger with it.”By not trying to. By being smaller. More personal, more painful… By being the next thing that should happen to these characters, and not just a rehash of what seemed to work the first time. By having a theme that is completely fresh and organic to itself.”

… Joss Whedon just sold me on a ticket to the sequel without even seeing the first one yet.

I get so tired of sequels taking what worked in the original and trying to make it bigger and “better.”  It quite often fails, so the idea of trying to go “smaller” with a sequel is much more in line with what I would like to see these films do.  If anyone knows how to do engaging character pieces, it’s Joss Whedon.

Please Marvel, let him do The Avengers 2 just like he’s describing here.

[via Digital Spy]

Remember how The Lone Ranger movie was canceled, and then it was back on?  Well, it missed the announced February 6 production start date, but as of February 13 things were in full swing.

Not to miss a beat, producer Jerry Bruckheimer tweeted the photo you see below of Arnie Hammer as the titular Lone Ranger and Johnny Depp as his sidekick Tonto.  Click the image for a larger view.

Er … okay. Not quite like any version of Tonto I’ve seen before, but then again this is being directed by Gore Verbinski (who directed the first three Pirate of the Caribbean), and he is known for some odd make-up choices, but this is just out there.  I’m not quite sure why he has a bird on his head, but … well, it’s Johnny Depp, so who really knows.

The Lone Ranger will hit theaters on May 31, 2013.

[via Deadline]