Box Office Outlook: The X-Factor

By Katey Rich

It looks like this weekend may be only the third of the summer to produce a two-time #1 movie. The Dark Knight has continued its hot winning streak throughout the week, setting all-time records for best Monday and Tuesday grosses, and looks to be a powerhouse come Friday as well. Luckily there are no more superheroes to try to grab the crown; Step Brothers and The X-Files: I Want to Believe are both reasonable counter-programming, though X-Files seems likely to suffer in the vast Bat shadow. Plus, only one of the new releases has gotten good reviews-- see if you can guess whether or not it's the one that features Will Ferrell beating John C. Reilly with a shovel.

THE X-FILES: I WANT TO BELIEVE. Opening in 3,100 theatres. Mulder and Scully are back, 10 years after their last on-screen adventure and six years after the TV show "The X-Files" went off the air. The plot of the new film has been kept top-secret, but seems to involve a missing FBI agent who Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully (Gillian Anderson) have to track down. The supernatural presumably plays a role somehow. Series creator Chris Carter is back as director, writer and producer on the new film.

The truth is probably still out there, but most critics don't seem to be interested in hearing it. Our Frank Lovece goes pun-crazy and calls it an "X-cruciatingly un-X-ceptional X-ercise," and Time remarks that "so much has changed that [Mulder and Scully] seem the aliens." "In searching for a great X-Files movie, that truth remains out there," scoffs Variety. Newsday, on the other hand, was perfectly satisfied: "The way the film marries its subplots will keep audiences off balance, which is exactly right for an X-Files movie." And Roger Ebert particularly appreciated the lack of whiz-bang CGI effects: "There was a tangible quality to the film that made the suspense more effective because it involved the physical world."

STEP BROTHERS. Opening in 2,800 theatres. Talladega Nights co-stars John C. Reilly and Will Ferrell are together again in Step Brothers as the siblings of the title-- 40-year-olds who have been happily living at home with their single parents until mom and dad decide to marry. The two handle it about as well as your average 12-year-olds would, playing pranks on each other and squabbling until they decide the great enemy is a younger brother (Adam Scott) who is both a bully and a real grown-up. Yes, the plot really is that simple. Adam McKay directs.

People cool to Ferrell and Reilly's previous efforts may not be amused, but I, for one, had a ball. "Enjoying Step Brothers may require regressing to an adolescent sense of humor, but why resist?" I wrote. "There's something in all of us that wants to laugh when two grown men don matching Chewbacca masks in their treehouse." Owen Gleiberman at Entertainment Weekly liked it, writing, "It's not just an idiot revel: It's nutty, profane, and caustically heartless." But The Chicago Tribune complains "enough with the 40-year-old teenagers for a while," and The San Francisco Chronicle calls it "essentially a throwaway film, one that might have gone straight-to-video if Apatow had not had such a hot hand."