Simba's back with surprising $29.3 million weekend for 'Lion King'

By Sarah Sluis

Seventeen years after the animated behemoth released, The Lion King in 3D easily assumed first place with $29.3 million. In comparison, 2009's 3D double feature of Toy Story and Toy Story 2, also a re-release, opened to just $12.4 million. Why such a difference? For one, The Lion King had a much longer waiting period between its release and re-release. There were no (theatrical) sequels to give audiences more time with Simba, Nala, Timon and Pumbaa, whereas the Toy Story re-release was more of a prelude to the next installment, Toy Story 3. Second, The Lion Kingplay is still running on Broadway--a sign of the series' continued appeal. Finally, the animated feature was returning in a wide-open market. The last family movie opened five weeks ago, Spy Kids 3, and the critically panned movie has barely earned $30 million since. The only other kid movie, period, still in release is the two-month-old The Smurfs. No wonder families were flocking to the G-rated title. There's nothing else out there.

Contagion moved down one rung to second place, keeping its second week fall to 35% and earning another $14.4 million. Good reviews and the interest of adult audiences should keep this film in the top ten for weeks to come.

Drive opened in third place with $11 million. The Ryan Gosling getaway car drive movie is extremely polarizing, which is a good thing in my book (I'm one of the movie's fans). Though critics gave the movie a 92% positive rating and 81% of Rotten Tomatoes audiences liked the movie, it received only a C- Cinemascore rating--extremely low for a film that has people gushing with praise. An un-Hollywood ending, violence, and the movie's '80s music score were among the things that confused audiences, and judging from these comments walkouts and surprised looks weren't unusual. It's pretty rare for a movie to generate this diversity of responses, so the box office totals of coming weeks will show if this will spell success or disaster for the unusual action thriller.

The remake of Straw Dogs failed to draw in new audiences. Only $5 million in tickets were sold, showing that not every remake of a revered film will result in a home run the second time around.

I Don't Know How She Does It had a tepid debut of $4.5 million. The target audience (80% female, 50% over 35) isn't known for seeing movies opening weekend, so it could hold well in coming weeks, but this movie is the kind that will heat up once it hits Netflix. The working moms in the movie were probably too busy taking their tykes to a showing of The Lion King.

This Friday, the slick sports drama Moneyball will hit theatres along with Abduction, starring Twlight's Taylor Lautner. Rounding out the offerings will be the action thriller Killer Elite and the dolphin-with-prosthetic-fin tearjerker Dolphin Tale.

'Lion King 3D' leading the pride

By Sarah Sluis

This weekend at the box office should be close, with four films settling around the $10 million mark: Lion King 3D, the second week of Contagion, Drive, and Straw Dogs.

Lion King 3D (2,330 theatres) will take advantage of the lack of fresh family titles. Currently, no G or PG-rated movies are in the top ten, making this a prime time for an animated re-release. Some of the younger parents may have seen the movie as kids themselves in 1994, giving them the chance to reintroduce their little ones to a beloved childhood classic. Because of the high price point of 3D, Disney will actually release the movie in both 2D and 3D. The 2009 re-release of Toy Story and Toy Story 2 grossed $12 million its opening weekend, so Lion King 3D hopes to achieve a similar number.

Drive and Straw Dogs will both be competing for the same audiences, mainly young males. Critically, though, Drive (2,886 theatres) is the clear winner. The "coolly beautiful action thriller," according to critic Maitland McDonagh, is "a glittering toy designed to delight a particular kind of movie lover," one who will take pleasure in the "bleakly funny deconstruction of genre movie clichs." Ryan Gosling stars as a stunt car operator who moonlights as a getaway car driver. Carey Mulligan and "Mad Men's" Christina Hendricks add female star power. The movie's worth seeing just for its opening chase scene, which is so powerfully slick it will keep your adrenaline running through the rest of the film.

Straw Dogs (2,408 theatres), on the other hand, is a remake that pales in comparison to the 1971 Sam Peckinpah actioner. Its mediocrity is "a liability that increases exponentially with the quality of the original," according to McDonagh. The violent movie remains "faithful to its underlying notion that civilization is a thin veneer laid over animal instincts," but McDonagh feels this message doesn't have the same cultural resonance it did in the Vietnam era.

Sarah Jessica Parker plays an overcommitted working mom in I Don't Know How She Does It (2,476 theatres), with barely enough time to do anything, much less see a movie. However, those moms will be the prime audience for the comedy this weekend, which is expected to do in the $6-8 million range. Because of the overbooked target viewers, this movie should see more traction in weeks to come if it has positive word-of-mouth, and should be especially popular once it hits the home entertainment market.

On Monday, we'll see if Drive's 95% positive approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes allows it to race ahead of Contagion or Lion King 3D.

A new kind of getaway scene: 'Drive'

By Sarah Sluis

I'm not really into car chases. They require a suspension of disbelief that bores me and makes me tune out. Car chase sequences that really broke ground, like the one in 1968's Bullitt, have been so copied that watching the original feels like "same old." The only car sequence that truly freaked me out in the past decade or so wasn't even a car chase, but that out-of-the-blue car crash in Adaptation. That felt incredibly real and scary.

For this reason, I wasn't that excited about the indie movie Drive. Ryan Gosling plays a professional driver who moonlights as a getaway car driver. After a job goes wrong, a contract goes out for his death. He runs away with the girlfriend of one of his crime associates (Carey Mulligan), and presumably there's some smooching involved.

The FilmDistrict film is a selection at the Cannes Film Festival, and the festival website just posted a clip of Drive that's truly stunning. It's chock-full of suspense without going over 40mph. Car chases generally involve lots of crashing through intersections, high speeds, and improbable moves like going off a ramp on a pier and landing on a barge in a river (just riffing here). Drive takes the rare step of doing something simple and realistic like pulling over to evade the cops. I almost fainted from excitement.

I don't know if the rest of the movie will be able to pull of that level of suspense, but I also like that the first look of the movie wasn't a trailer, but a brief clip The director, Nicolas Winding Refn, has written and directed seven low-budget action/thrillers that get distributed by the likes of IFC, First Run, and Magnolia. He hasn't ever had the chance to prove himself with a larger budget or well-known stars. But within the low-budget realm, he created Pusher, so successful it was turned into a trilogy and inspired a remake. This man must be doing extremely well in the rental/DVD arena.

Drive will benefit from the support of newbie distributor FilmDistrict, which has been performing strongly. One of its first releases, the horror movie Insidious, has earned $50 million in the U.S. alone off a reported $1.5 million production budget, making it the most profitable movie of 2011. A while back, Drive was given a release date in the fall, where it can take advantage of the post-summer slump.

For a closer look at the Cannes Film Festival, check out Film Journal contributor Jon Frosch's Cannes blog.