‘Lego’ leaves the competition far behind

Everything is indeed awesome for the makers of The Lego Movie, whose popular animated flick earned the top spot at the domestic box office for the third consecutive weekend. Easing just 37 percent, Lego grossed $31.5 million. Its overall cume now stands at $183.2 million. Unsurprisingly, Warner Bros. has already greenlit a sequel. The Lego Movie 2 is slated to hit theatres on Memorial Day 2017.

Don’t count on a follow-up to the McG-directed 3 Days to Kill, however. The actioner starring Kevin Costner took second place with an unremarkable $12.3 million. The film’s weekend gross is a little less than that which The Family, the last collaboration between writer-producer Luc Besson and Relativity Media, earned over its opening weekend this past September. Kill’s audience was an older crowd, 80 percent over the age of 25, who collectively awarded the film a B CinemaScore grade. Expectations for the movie’s total haul are pretty low: Pundits are predicting the film will earn around $30 million overall.

However, with a budget of only $28 million, at least 3 Days to Kill isn’t as large – or should we say as volcanic? – a bomb as Pompeii. It’s true, most pundits weren’t expecting much from the poorly reviewed disaster film, but Pompeii managed to underperform nonetheless.  The movie earned $10 million this weekend, a dismal debut considering its production costs topped $100 million. Pompeii’s opening weekend figure was less than half of fellow big-budget movie and box-office failure Poseidon’s debut haul, although it is slightly better than those openings enjoyed by The Legend of Hercules ($8.9 million) and I, Frankenstein ($8.6 million), both of which films were also heavily CGI-dependent. Maybe sensory overload fatigue has finally begun to set in?

Clocking in at No. 4, RoboCop earned $9.4 million, which represents a drop of 57 percent from last weekend. So far, the reboot has grossed $43.6 million.

It may not be the critics’ cup of tea, but George Clooney’s The Monuments Men continues to satisfy a sizable portion of the movie-going public. The WWII caper took in another $8.1 million this weekend, earning it the No. 5 spot and bumping its overall cume to $58 million.

The weekend after Valentine’s Day was a tough one for those releases that opened wide on the national chocolate-and-flowers holiday. About Last Night fared the best, though it still suffered a drop of 71 percent to gross $7.4 million – its total earnings currently stand at $38.2 million. Endless Love took a hit of 68 percent and has now grossed $20.1 million. Poor, misguided Winter’s Tale dipped 71 percent; its total clocks in at a little over $11 million.

Finally, the weekend’s specialty division saw a solid limited opening for Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises. The nominee for Best Animated Feature took in $306,000 from 21 locations. It should continue to chart a successful course once it expands to 450 theatres this coming weekend.

‘I, Frankenstein,’ takes up the rear far behind ‘Ride Along’

Fantasy/action retread I, Frankenstein suffered through its own version of a horror story this past weekend. The movie failed to crack the weekend’s Top 5, let alone claim the No. 2 or 3 slot as befits a big-budget wide release. Instead, I, Frankenstein bombed with $8.3 million. Even worse than The Legend of Hercules’ opening figure ($8.9 million), and roughly half of last year’s comparable title Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters’ debut, Frankenstein’s haul landed the film at No. 6. Expect the DOA would-be franchise to flame out very soon, most likely to less than $20 million.

On the other hand, expect Ride Along to cruise past an overall gross of $100 million by the end of its theatrical run – and potentially towards a sequel. For the second weekend in a row the cop comedy earned the No. 1 spot at the box office. Along raked in $21.2 million, bumping its 10-day cume to $75.4 million.

Another Universal film, Lone Survivor, took second place with $12.6 million. This is the second consecutive weekend the top two spots have been occupied by movies distributed by Universal  – the last time a distributor achieved this feat was back in 1994, when Warner Bros. titles On Deadly Ground and Ace Ventura: Pet Detective both ruled the box office. Having earned $93.6 million so far, Lone Survivor will likely out-gross Zero Dark Thirty, which earned $95.7 million, by the end of the week.

The Nut Job continues to hold well, having accumulated $12.3 million and thus securing the weekend’s No. 3 position.  That figure marks a drop of 37% from last week, and has boosted the film’s domestic earnings to $40.3 million in total.

Continuing to afford pundits and journalists ample opportunity to play off the title of its hit song, “Let It Go,” Frozen refuses to do just that when it comes to its hold on the box office. The animated success moved up a bit this weekend to the No. 4 position, enjoying $9.04 million in sales. It is now officially the highest-grossing original animated movie of all time. Yet another boost may be imminent, as Disney plans to release a sing-along version nationwide this coming weekend.

This same nation has more or less opted to take a pass on the new Jack Ryan reboot. Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit rounds out the weekend’s Top 5 with its $8.8 million gross. The movie’s overall cume to date is less than that which the last Jack Ryan attempt, The Sum of All Fears, managed to earn at this same point in its theatrical run a decade ago. Shadow Recruit now stands at $30.2 million.

When it comes to specialty features and, as is the case with the following films, awards contenders, Dallas Buyers Club enjoyed the benefits of a wider release (earning $2.05 million from $1,110 locations) while Nebraska took in $1.44 million from 968 theatres. Right now Nebraska has earned the least of amount of money of the nine Best Picture Academy Awards nominees, while as of this morning Club's  total domestic gross clocked in at $20.4 million.

DiCaprio plays another rich criminal in ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’

Paramount has begun building hype for Leonardo DiCaprio’s
latest project, The Wolf of Wall Street,
directed by Martin Scorsese. The first trailer for the film, slated to hit
theaters November 15, released on Sunday. The
Wolf of Wall Street is based on Jordan Belfort’s 2007 memoir of the same
name. Belfort, a hedge fund manager, made hundreds of millions of dollars in
the 1980s and ’90s through his brokerage firm Stratton Oakmont, until it was
discovered that the firm was inflating stocks and committing fraud, as well as
perpetrating other financial crimes. Belfort was arrested and spent nearly two
years in prison.

The Wolf of Wall
Street trailer bears several striking similarities to DiCaprio’s most
recent movie, The Great Gatsby, both
thematically and in terms of promotional materials. It’s clear that, like Gatsby, Scorsese will devote much of Wolf’s screen time to the protagonist’s
startling displays of wealth. Girls, drugs, wads of cash, luxurious
settings—all are featured prominently in the two-minute-fifteen-second Wolf trailer. The promos for both films
are also carried by a DiCaprio voiceover, explaining his character’s meteoric
rise in wealth and reputation.

Most obviously, both trailers are ushered along by a Kanye
West song—or, in Gatsby’s case, a
West-Jay-Z collaboration. “No Church in the Wild” (Gatsby) and “Black
Skinhead” (Wolf) both feature wild
yells, pounding drum beats, and West’s emotive, angry rapping. The songs provide
a thrilling adrenaline rush, and breathlessly shuttle viewers from shots of
over-the-top parties and all the trappings of excessive wealth, to hints of
DiCaprio’s characters’ downfall and emotional collapse. In fact, Wolf could easily be seen as the latest
in a trilogy of DiCaprio films which explore the indulgence and devastation
created when men from humble beginnings turn to crime and gain incredible
wealth, starting with 2002’s Catch Me if
You Can and continuing with Gatsby.

Wolf looks like a
skillful and highly entertaining drama, far closer in quality to the excellent Catch Me if You Can than this year’s
disappointing Gatsby. Jonah Hill and Matthew
McConaughey (who has shown himself to be terrific in smaller comedic parts,
from Dazed and Confused through Magic Mike) also promise to deliver memorable
performances in supporting roles.

Wolf screenwriter Terence
Winter already has plenty of practice creating devious, charismatic crooks, as
a writer and executive producer on “Boardwalk Empire,” which like Gatsby, is set in the 1920s. Scorsese, of course,
built his career on depicting such characters in award-winning films like Goodfellas, The Departed, and Gangs of New York. It will be quite interesting to
see what parallels the pair draws between the white-collar criminals of the
Roaring Twenties and those of the 1990s.

Crowdsourcing success: Veronica Mars movie raises over $2.5 million with Kickstarter

Kickstarter is starting to get really, really powerful. It's funded tons of indie movies and even (perhaps regrettably) Lindsay Lohan-led The Canyons. Now it's funded one of its most mainstream projects yet. With the support of "Veronica Mars" star Kristen Bell and the blessing of Warner Bros.' digital
division, the TV show's writer and executive producer, Rob Thomas, created a Kickstarter campaign to get a feature-film version made--although the studio has the final word, of course. That was yesterday. Today, the campaign has earned over $2.6 million--I'd give the specific number, but it's rising by the second. Did I mention that the goal of $2 million was met within 11 hours, and there's 29 days left in the campaign?

Film Journal's written before about how independent movie theatres have been using Kickstarter to help finance digital conversions. But it's pretty amazing that a mainstream network television show is using this method. While it seems exceptional at first, there have been some prominent TV shows that have recruited fans to bring them back. The most famous early example was "Family Guy," and a new season of "Arrested Development" is coming to Netflix soon after years of speculation that the series would have a second run somewhere.

So much has been said about how social media has turned opening weekend into opening day.  Word-of-mouth can destroy bad movies much quicker than they used to. As this Kickstarter campaign shows, it can also work in reverse. Good programs may be subject to cancellations by executives or declining ratings despite a rapt fan base. But those same fans can now actually have a say. In today's day-and-age, there's no way a cult show like "Twin Peaks" would be cancelled and gone forever. Here's to the Kickstarter campaign for "Veronica Mars," and fans having a vote in saying what movies will make them show up to theatres.

'Justice League' to answer 'The Avengers'

Comic book naïf that I am, I thought that The Avengers was the only time superheroes from separate comic universes joined together to fight evil. I was wrong. Turns out Batman, Wonder Woman, Superman, the Green Lantern, the Flash (and the lesser-known Martian Manhunter and Hawkgirl) have their own crime-fighting gang, dubbed the Justice League. The comic book was turned into an animated series that ran on the Cartoon Network in the early aughts. Now Warner Bros., the studio behind the The Dark Knight Rises, is working on a film treatment of the Justice League. Will Beall (upcoming The Gangster Squad) will write a script that will team together the DC Comics superheroes.

Just as Disney owns Marvel Studios, Warner Bros. owns DC Comics. Both studios have been aggressively working on giving the comic book heroes their own movies. Iron Man, Iron Man 2, and The Avengers have been Disney's biggest hits, while The Dark Knight was a huge success for Warner Bros. The latter studio has also had some bad misses--like Jonah Hex (which grossed just $10 million) or the lackluster Green Lantern (a "mere" $117 million).

This isn't the first time Warner Bros. has tried to put together a Justice League film. Back in 2008, a version that was already cast fell apart due to a lack of tax breaks and the WGA strike. A couple of years ago, ScreenRant catalogued the various stages of Warner Bros.' DC Comics projects. A lot of them still aren't off the ground. Besides Justice League, it seems that audiences will be most likely to see a version of Wonder Woman or The Flash in the near future. This summer holds both The Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises. Through 2014, Disney has Iron Man 3 and Thor 2 lined up, but Warner Bros. doesn't have any DC Comics productions--they're putting their muscle behind a little project known as The Hobbit. Given the long production cycle and extensive special effects that go into a superhero movie, along with Warner Bros. many other big-budget films, it may be a while before Batman joins forces with his DC Comics companions.

 

Warner Bros. remaking sacred cow 'The Bodyguard'

By Sarah Sluis

When I heard Warner Bros. was remaking The Bodyguard, the first thing I thought was "Noooo! They can't do that." The second thing I did was pull up a YouTube video of Whitney Houston singing "I Will Always Love You."

After listening to the song (as it appeared in the movie), I can concede that the movie is a bit dated. The camera circling 360 degrees around Houston and Kevin Costner as they kiss? The saxophone playing in the background of the song? The fact that Whitney Houston's latest claim of fame is admitting her crack addiction on "Oprah"? But never mind. The Bodyguard is a sentimental, feel-good movie, a modern-day take on the "love from different social classes" variety of romance. And can we talk about the fact that this movie earned over $120 million? In 1992?

But how does one remake such an iconic film and its unforgettable song? The one thing that would pique interest in a remake is star power. Warner Bros. will have to cast a charismatic songstress (perhaps with a forte in a different genre of music?) that can attract viewers interested in seeing a movie about her, not a remake of The Bodyguard. Another key draw to The Bodyguard was its "backstage" view of a celebrity. In the age of celebrity Twitter accounts, TMZ, and reality shows centered on stars, a lot has changed, and including these details would make the script stand out. Dan Lin (Sherlock Holmes) is producing, and two newbie scribes with an action comedy script under their belt are rewriting. It turns out the original Bodyguard was conceived for Diana Ross and Steve McQueen, so perhaps the Costner/Houston version isn't the only way to tell this story. Is it time for the original Bodyguard to step aside? Here's the lyrical answer: If I should stay/ I would only be in your way./ So I'll go, but I know /I'll think of you every step of the way....

Al Capone shooting up the big screen with 'Cicero'

By Sarah Sluis

Can there ever be too many gangster movies? I've been dying over the bus ads for HBO's "Boardwalk Empire," which follows glamorous low-lifes in Atlantic City, New Jersey, during the prohibition era. While I'll only have to wait a week to see "Boardwalk Empire," I'll also have a gangster movie to look forward to sometime in the future: Cicero.

Based on a screenplay by Walon Green, Cicero will follow Al Capone from his early days in Brooklyn through his move to Chicago. Variety described it as an old-fashioned story in the vein of 1930s gangster movies like Public Enemy, and I suspect that the script itself is also ancient. Green, who wrote The Wild Bunch back in 1965, has been working in television for the past decade, so it's likely that this script has been around for awhile--but that doesn't mean it won't be good.

There's some concern, however, that the gangster genre may be getting old. After all, 2009's Public Enemies made just under $100 million with a budget just that high. And Al Capone was covered in 1987's The Untouchables, and still sees frequent play on cable channels--could there be topic fatigue? On the flip side, the idea of American gangsters has traditionally been popular abroad, even more so than domestically, so unlike many movies about American history, this one won't have any problem appealing to international audiences.

Over at Cinematical, they put together a list of potential actors to play Al Capone. None of them seem quite right to me, but one had me intrigued. Could James Gandolfini pull off playing another gangster character believably, or is he so tied to his Tony Soprano character he could never don the gunstrap of Al Capone?

'Gran Torino' revs up for December release

By Sarah Sluis

Clint Eastwood's Changeling releases this Friday, and Warner Bros. has confirmed that his second
2008 film, Gran Torino, will release December 17th.  While the week (and month) is crowded with A-list stars and action pictures, as well as the studios' Oscar contenders, mediocre reviews and last-minute juggling of release dates (i.e. The Reader) may thin the ranks and give Gran Torino a better chance at the gold statue.  However, studios are also cutting back on their Oscar promotional budgets this year, as mentioned by Variety editor-in-chief Peter Bart in his blog.  He faults the economy, as well as a lack of enthusiasm for projects (doubtful), as the reason for his presumable poor Oscar-related ad sales to date.

In development news, Warner Bros. has enlisted McG to direct spy thriller Dead Spy Running.  The Charlie's Angels director is currently finishing up action sequel Terminator Salvation.  The material comes from an as-yet unpublished book by Jon Stock, a British author and journalist who spent time as a foreign correspondent.  I see two positive forces at work here:  Stock's experience reporting abroad will certainly enhance the book's authenticity, and with Terminator Salvation McG will accumulate another action credential, presumably one that will take the over-the-top, humorous action of the Charlie's Angels films in another direction.

On a bit of a roll, Warner Bros. also bought an action pitch for a film version of last year's rescue of fifteen hostages from the Colombian jungle.   The rescue was the culmination of five years of effort after three Americans were captured in 2003.  Their employer, defense and aerospace company Northrup Grumman, (who knows why they were in Colombia in the first place...) hired McLarty Associates to consult on the rescue.  Interestingly, this same consulting firm will actually produce the film through their spin-off company, McLarty Media.  I find this an odd mix.  While no more biased than an autobiography, what company would want to hire a consulting firm knowing that any juicy story might be considered for a movie pitch?  Moreover, will the company consider the film a chance to airbrush less attractive parts of the story?  New York Times foreign correspondent Peter Landesman, who recently wrote an adaptation of a Deep Throat biography, will script the project, so perhaps those questions will fall to him instead of the producers.