Audiences go to 'Town' with Ben Affleck

By Sarah Sluis

In just three days, Ben Affleck's The Town managed to outperform the entire run of his first directorial effort, Gone Baby Gone. Ringing up $23.8 million, the Boston-accented bank robbing tale tapped older

male audiences eager for thrills. The pairing of Boston townies and crime hearkened back to 2006's The Departed, but The Town was a few million shy of beating that film's opening weekend.

In second place, Easy A amassed $18.2 million, on the high end of openings within the teen comedy genre. It couldn't beat Mean Girls or Superbad, but the Emma Stone picture wowed a primarily young, female audience. Word-of-mouth could propel this movie further, so its

week-to-week drops will be a number to watch. Stone herself is an up-and-coming actress: She has roles in upcoming comedies Friends with Benefits and Crazy, Stupid, Love (both in post-production), and will host "SNL" on Oct. 23. Her biggest coup is landing the lead in The Help, a popular book club selection that has a huge built-in audience.

M. Night Shyamalan's blockbuster cred weakened with the $12.5 million debut of Devil, his lowest yet. Horror movies usually drop 50-60% in their second weekend, so this movie will be unlikely to top $25 million during its run. However, how expensive could a movie that takes place almost entirely in an elevator be? With an unknown cast, it couldn't have cost that much--right?

The animated feature Alpha and Omega made a respectable showing with $9.2 million. It was no match for last year's Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, which opened to $30 million at this time last year. Given the movie's so-so animation and measly 15% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, it fared well.

With the highest per-screen average of the week, Never Let Me Go earned a stellar $30,000 per screen playing in four theatres. Leading the pack of potential Oscar contenders, this movie may remain fresh in the minds of Academy voters--it seems likely to pick up a couple of nominations. Social networking documentary-thriller Catfish, which opened to a $21,000 per screen on twelve screens, debuted lower but arguably better. It's tough to carry that high of a per-screen average across so many screens. Though this movie was a Sundance Festival pickup, Rogue is marketing it as a mainstream, hyper-relevant mystery, a tactic that seems to have appealed to the YouTube generation.

This Friday will be another crowded one. Oliver Stone's Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps leads along with romcom You Again, 3D animated feature Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole, and a limited release of teen sex comedy The Virginity Hit. Specialty releases (take a deep breath) making their debut will include Waiting for "Superman," Woody Allen's You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, Howl, starring James Franco, and Ryan Gosling in a coffin in Buried.

Trio of 'Easy A,' 'The Town,' and 'Devil' vie for the box-office crown

By Sarah Sluis

Following up a quiet week at the box office, four wide releases and two hyped small releases enter the fray.

A snappy teen sex comedy with a chance at the top spot, Easy A (2,856 theatres) stars Emma Stone as a high school student who gets mistakenly slapped with a reputation for being "easy." Despite such misses as the "age-blind casting" noted by critic David Noh (the leads are in their early twenties), this movie has drawn comparisons to Mean Girls and Clueless. Screen Gems ran hundreds of advance screenings for the movie, a sure sign this comedy is expected to generate "oohs" and "aahs" from its teen and college base.

Ben Affleck stars in and directs The Town (2,861 theatres), the story of working-class bank robbers who wear chilling Halloween masks while on a job. Rebecca Hall makes a departure from her plain-Jane appearance in Please Give as a "toonie" (yuppie) bank professional Affleck sparks to after holding her

hostage during a robbery. While the movie doesn't break much new ground, "[t]he robbery and chase sequences are fast-paced, tense but not overly graphic, and crisply choreographed," according to critic Kevin Lally, and "the film is so well-cast, you happily go along with the genre ride."

What's worse than being stuck in an elevator? Being stuck in an elevator with the devil! M. Night Shyamalan's Devil (2,810 theatres) serves

up shaky elevators alongside some accidental shrieks.

Horror aficionados should turn out in force for its opening weekend,

putting it on similar footing with The Town and Easy A. But could an elevator really plummet to the ground? Have no fear: According to this unintentionally hilarious interview with a buttoned-up Otis executive and New York Magazine, elevators are very, very safe.

A B-list 3D animated film, Alpha and Omega (2,625 theatres), is expected to be the box-office loser this weekend. The cute premise centers on star-crossed lovers, one an alpha female wolf and the other a bottom-of-the-pack omega male. However, "the flat picture-book quality of its backgrounds has an old-fashioned appeal but might disappoint viewers used to more pop and dazzle," according to critic Sheri Linden, and the first third of the movie is "devoid of charm." Woof.

What the New York Times cleverly called "the other Facebook movie," Catfish (23 theatres in NY, LA, San Francisco and Austin) may be the first of its kind to document how the Internet, specifically Facebook, facilitates deception. After Nev Schulman meets a young girl and her family on the Internet, he develops a romance with her older sister. Like a true thriller, your imagination runs away with all the possible outcomes, but the truth is weirder and more painful than anything you can dream up as a viewer.

The spare and sad Never Let Me Go (4 theatres) opened on Wednesday to a $6,000 per-screen average,

and is poised to ring up additional business over the weekend. Featuring a "unique comingling of genres," the movie centers on three students (Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightly and Andrew Garfield) who have been raised to serve as organ donors in an alternate history version of Britain circa the 1970s. According to critic Rex Robets, it may just be the rare movie that is better than the book. Showing impeccable restraint, "the moral question at the heart of the story is unspoken�but loudly heard."

On Monday, we'll see which film landed as the box-office topper and if Catfish and Never Let Me Go wowed general audiences as much as festival crowds.

Shyamalan signs genre picture deal with Media Rights Capital

By Sarah Sluis

M. Night Shyamalan, the director who has tried to assume the
mantle of high-minded suspense (a post
vacated by Hitchcock), has moved
in the opposite direction, making a deal with Media Rights Capital to
produce three genre films in three years.  The first film, Devil,
will be based on a story by Shyamalan, and include his creative and
casting input, but he will not write or direct.  Brian Nelson (30 Days of Night), will pen the screenplay and John Erick Dowdle (Quarantine)
will direct.  This deal makes sense to me, since Shyamalan's
twist-oriented sensibilities have become so ingrained in audience's
minds that their expectation of the twist interferes with how the film
itself sets up the twist.  With different writing and direction,
perhaps the films will seem new enough to surprise audiences.  While
they're calling the genre "supernatural thriller," I wonder how closely
the films will resonate with the extremely profitable and loyal
ticket-buying horror audience.  Supernatural thriller to me reads
"horror lite."  It's the kind of film that would appeal to me, a horror
coward, but not thrill- and gore-seeking horror fans.