Box Office

2 posts

Monday Box Office Report: Limitless Ambition

Drugs make you cool! Geckos are great at law enforcement. We can win the alien apocalypse. An old Lincoln works as an office. Seth Rogen’s comedy can save a movie! Paul Giamatti will wrestle lots of money right out of your puny hands! These are all lies.

Here’s the results of some of the millions you shelled out this weekend, and some other stuff you won’t see ever.

1) Limitless — $19 Million

So Bradley Cooper and his pocket full of magic beans tops the box office this week. And that just makes total sense since it’s not everyday in a movie some mousy, drab, rumple-person goes from geek to chic. That’s not something that ever happens in movies nowadays. Why, not since Melanie Griffith chopped off all her Jersey style hair-frizz, grabbed a pair of Reeboks, starched her shoulder pads, and stole a dress from Sigourney Weaver’s bony-ass has this happened in a movie. Nope. Not ever at all. Bradley is charting new territory by taking off his glasses, undoing that uncomely bun, shaking out his lustrous mane and becoming the va,va, va, voom we all hoped he’d be. Mostly, right? Maybe Robert DeNiro packs him a lunch in a cool lunch pail at the end of this thing, right before he stumbles into a real office.

2) Rango — $15.3 Million

In some sort of greasy hair-battle, Bradley Cooper managed to beat out the original oil-follicle Johnny Depp. Not that Rango isn’t an awesome movie. It so clearly is. But in order to sustain dominance, the viewing public needs to actually see an unkempt man parading himself in front of a movie camera with the hopes that he’ll either 1) turn into a heartthrob later on, or 2) rely on past 1980’s hotness to carry him through while he dresses up in various Halloween costumes. A Hawaiian be-shirted animated Gecko can only work for so many weeks until the audience is clamoring for more ratty hobo-ness. And if Johnny Depp can’t deliver, than well, they’ll just look for the next best thing — B.Coops serving Dim Sum and working on Wall Street until Harrison Ford DeNiro saves the movie by trying to steal his magic beans and his miracle shoulder pads.

3) Battle: Los Angeles — $14.6 Million

In with a bang, out with a farty whimper. The reviews of “blockbuster for the ages,” Battle: Los Angeles have not been good. Is it this year’s over-hyped Skyline? Maybe. After a decent opening week — yup, that $36 million got punched in the face reducing it by about $22 million. That’s a whole lot of people who decided they’d rather clip their toenails, or clean their gutters, or sew button eyes on socks, than go see Lt. Vasquez and Harvey Dent play shaky-cam Stratego with a bunch of alien-borg cockroaches or whatever the alien beings are now. There’s probably just as much satisfaction popping in a VHS tape of M. Night Shamaliarlans Signs and just watch that one scene with Joaquin sitting in the closet while the alien struts in an alley i.e. the only cool part of that movie. Simplicity!

4) The Lincoln Lawyer — $13.4 Million

The actor responsible for such enigmatic greats as Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, Fool’s Gold, and Failure to Launch, failed to financially outdo these less than well-received films, which obviously premiered amid a world of McConaughey hypnotism. Really. In the past he must have used one of his shirtless enchanted nipples as a beacon luring unsuspecting virgins to various palaces of cinema with promises of a sip from his sweat-filled armpit of love. There’s really no other explanation. The spell must be broken, since his lawyer doing lawyerly things from a Lincoln’s backseat riddled with Wendy’s bags and Marisa Tomei’s Oscar didn’t do the same amount of business this weekend. He may need to unleash the unencumbered pectorals yet again. No, we really don’t mean this.

5) Paul — $13.2 Million

While Seth Rogen is probably stewing in Judd Apatow’s pool surrounded by a mountain of chicken fingers, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost are having the best week ever! Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz debuted at $3.3 million and $5.8 million, respectively. So for these guys $13.2 Million is like starring in Star Wars, or Battle: LA! Perhaps they’ve finally made it. Maybe now we Yanks will see them as more than just a couple of witty blokes who’ve mastered the shock-faced close up! It’s certainly possible. We like that Ricky Gervais an awful lot don’t we? Uh, well, okay. Maybe not everyone likes Ricky Gervais, but certainly we like Pegg and Frost better than Rowan Atkinson (Stupid Mr. Bean!) or Gordon Ramsey (Evil Mr. Arseface!). That’s something to aspire to — continue being cuddly and American-friendly, and not a cunty-pisser. Good luck, gentlemen.

Honorable Mention

Win Win — $154,000

The limited release indie didn’t make a whole lot of bank, but the reviews have been strong and Amy Ryan is in it, so basically it doesn’t matter. The King’s Speech gained only marginally better reviews and look what happened there? And in a fight we think Ryan could take on Helena Bonham Hair Nest of Algae Carter. That is if she doesn’t use her crazy person super strength, and she leaves her mismatched-shoes-of-power home for the brawl. Support your local indie flick, after all, these are the things that win awards. What? You thought comedies and science-fiction did? You silly aliens.

Monday Box Office: Extraterrestrial Dominance

Apparently we like things that blow up, sound like Johnny Depp, really should make us want to hug our moms, and are full of magical headwear — where hats and hoods abound.

Let’s see who made a little money this weekend.

1) Battle: Los Angeles — $36 million

BOOM!: The Movie made a good hunk of change this weekend. And just why wouldn’t it? It’s not everyday Alien attack movies show up to make bank at the box office. Usually they just peter along with all their special effects and flashy spaceships and the American public is like, “What? Space aliens that attack the country and some guy has to save the world, and there will be, like, explosions and gun battles, and maybe a full out war? Huh? No, I don’t want to see that. I don’t want to see that at all. Survivor: Season 900 Billion Twenty-Seven is on. That’s what I’m doing today. Whatever, aliens.” Given this, we’re going to assume the success of this movie is an anomaly that won’t be repeated.

2) Rango — $23 million

Officer Tom Hanson along with a team of young-looking police officers have started an undercover unit that specialize in youth crime. He will clean up those mean streets by infiltrating every high school known to man and then eventually hook up with a crazy-haired necrotic gremlin and go on to make several surreal, foppish, strange, and endlessly similar movies until he hooks up with Disney and runs around dressed like a pirate at a Michael Kors fashion show…and then out of nowhere appears a Gecko.

3) Red Riding Hood — $14 million

Amanda Bynes, Colin Firth’s illegitimate daughter, was in retirement when this was made. Fortuitous! This means there was a movie available for Amanda Seyfried, freed from the Big Love Compound of Endless Pronouncements About The Principle, to take on this miraculous gem of a film about werewolf threesomes, Gary Oldman’s waning career, and Jeremy Irons’ son doing some sort of hot-sexy teen grimace. Apparently some of you cared about who the werewolf was. Many more of you didn’t. I just think they should have said, “This is Twilight, but less so, so here, watch this silly thing about fairytale werewolves and Amanda Seyfried’s big kewpie eyes, because, really, that’s all we’ve got.”

4) The Adjustment Bureau — $11 million

The power to adjust the world and cause paradoxical ripple effects lies in the hands of Justin Timberlake’s hat choices from 2007. Right? Right. Seems simple enough. Oh, and then there’s Matt Obama Damon running for Senator of New York and talking about change, and being a real candidate. We’ve heard that one before, Matt! Ha! Take your magic hat and do something like end war and dictatorship! No? You want to be with a girl. Well, okay. What girl? A British girl. Um, okay. You do know that we were once under their rule, right? And that they call us Yankees. And that they eat lots of tea and cake (So un-American, the tea and cake) and something called Bangers and Mash, and they Shag and Wank, and say Bollocks, and make a ssshhh sound when they say Schedule, instead of the American scckkkkkk sound? But you want to risk everything for her though, right? Okay, Brilliant!

5) Mars Needs Moms — $6 million

Oh, ho! Disney made some money off of this thing about one-dimensional mom characters. There was a fight over broccoli, a boy who didn’t give a fig that his mom was taken by aliens, and when he finally stopped jumping on Mars’ trampoline, he asked his overlords if they could find his mom by miming vacuuming a rug, because Disney believes that all mothers have vacuum cleaners extending from their shoulders in place of actual hands. Yup. Let’s all see this little movie about June Cleaver and The Beaver “Aww, momming” and “Now, Beaving” their way into the copious annals of Disney history for now and forever through to the year 2050, when moms will become princesses and husband Charming will ride along and give their lives new meaning and replace those vacuum hands with singing birds! The End.