Audiences set for 'Date Night'

By Sarah Sluis

The Tina Fey-Steve Carell action comedy Date Night has an enviable position this weekend. It will command 3,374 screens without any fresh competition. Though the movie should draw audiences with the star power of its leads, the story itself is "an irrelevant and mostly unconvincing clothesline on which Fey and Carell can hang improvised riffs," according to FJI critic Frank Lovece. New York Times critic A.O. Scott found the movie's quality to be "superior to most recent movies of its kind, the marital action comedy...[but] better than The Bounty Hunter or Did You Hear About the Morgans? is not quite the same as 'good.'"

Date Night must open strong to beat the second weekend of Clash of the Titans, which will have 500 more screens, many of them 3D. Even with a 50% dropoff, Clash would still earn $30 million, so Carell and Fey have to hope that their talk-show promotions will drive the movie over that mark to give it the top spot.

Without much of a publicity campaign, the faith-based movie Letters to God (trailer here) will open in 897 theatres. The movie follows a young boy who writes letters to God, the postman who intercepts them, and the relationship he develops with the kid's single mom. If the movie posts a high per-screen average, it will follow in the footsteps of other niche Christian movies like Fireproof, 2009's surprise success (Letters to God and Fireproof share the same producer).

On the specialty front, "an honest attempt to portray the destructiveness of violence in the Latino community" starring Benjamin Bratt, La Mission, will debut on 15 screens. The Square, "a tale of an adulterous couple in the sunny Sydney suburbs," offers an "entertaining descent into a black-comic hell" in two locations.

On Monday, we'll see if Clash was able to keep ahead of Date Night or if charm of Fey and Carell's charm managed to woo audiences to the action comedy.