Box Office Outlook: Pick Up The Phone Already!

By Katey Rich

This weekend, Hollywood is sending us a signal that there are more important things to focus on than the movies, and is giving us merely one new release so that we can all analyze on the Iowa caucus and the upcoming New Hampshire primary. Or maybe they've gotten over the insanity that forced seven movies to battle one another over and over again during the month of December? OK, fine: This weekend is quiet because it always is, and because there's plenty for people to catch up on without cluttering the marketplace with more movies that will get swallowed up by Nicolas Cage's bad hairpiece. So we're left with one movie, and you don't really need me to tell you that it's barely going to be worth watching, and isn't really the kind of movie critics usually bother with. But because it's all we' ve got, it will be the anchor of the Box Office Outlook today! Oh, can Cloverfield come any sooner?

ONE MISSED CALL. Technology will kill ya, don't you know? If it's not creepy kids crawling out of televisions or roller coasters with a vendetta, it's gotta be cell phones. This remake of a Japanese horror movie finds a girl (Shannyn Sossamon) searching for clues in the mysterious deaths of her friends, all of whom received sinister voice mail messages just days before kicking the bucket. She teams up with a detective (Edward Burns) to investigate the mystery, and the two inevitably put themselves in danger at the hands of the evil spirit responsible for the killer phone calls. Also apparently Ray Wise, a.k.a. Leland Palmer from Twin Peaks, appears at some point.

It's been a while since I saw an actual 0% Rotten Tomatoes rating. "At first [I was]genuinely interested in how French director Eric Valette was going to address the immense heaps of baloney that pile up swiftly in this lackadaisical horror flick, only to realize he has no idea what the heck he's doing," writes EFilmCritic.com. "Actually no worse than the original," is the best ReelFilm.com can come up with. Even the horror buffs turn this one down: "The tired story is beyond told, the resolution of the mystery is a downer, and worst of all, the overuse of CGI is cheesier than my favorite Monty Python sketch," says Horror.com. And to think, sometimes "cheesier than my favorite Monty Python sketch" could sometimes be considered a compliment.

It's worth noting that there's a little joy in Mudville: Atonement and The Great Debaters are both expanding to several hundred new screens, and Juno is leaping up big time, adding nearly 1,000 locations. It's cold comfort for moviegoers who've pretty much seen all the biggies at this point, but really, how many of those moviegoers are there in the world? Even I, a person who is paid to see movies, still need to catch up on Alvin and the Chipmunks and National Treasure 2.