'HSM3' voted 'Most Likely to Succeed' at weekend box office

By Sarah Sluis

In the all-time top twenty for advance ticket sales, High School Musical 3: Senior Year (3,623 screens)
will rule the box office this weekend, with prognosticators estimating at least $30 million for the weekend. The series first made waves two years ago, when gift card-rich kids put the musical's singles in iTunes' top ten after Christmas.  The launch of the series into mainstream culture inspired the same mix of bafflement and resentment as when Harry Potter books hit the New York Times bestseller list. 

I always had a soft spot for Disney original movies, with their film school-inspired Busby Berkeley shots (look for them in the HSM series!) and buoyant, cheesy innocence that high schoolers and above recognize as a guilty pleasure.  The G-rated movie will have the most resonance with aspirational grade school and middle school students, who imagine their high school experience will be Just. Like. the. Movie., but certainly high schoolers will turn out to see the series they grew up with and have watched several times through its endless replays on the Disney Channel.

Horror sequel Saw V (3,060 screens) should compete for some of the older high school audience, but there are signs that the series has lost steam--unlike HSM3, which is the first big-screen version of the franchise.

Crime-and-intrigue Pride and Glory (2,585) releases this week to little fanfare.  Based on an actual corruption scandal, the film centers on a police officer, part of a family legacy of cops, who uncovers rampant corruption involving his family members.

Changeling (15 screens), Synecdoche, New York (excl. NY/LA), Let the Right One In (4 screens), and Passengers (125 screens) all open in limited release this week, with plans to expand.  Changeling has received so-so reviews, with FJI critic Daniel Eagan dismissing the film as "a period version of a movie on Lifetime," and both Eagan and the New York Times review dubious about a genre shift that occurs towards the film's climax.

Let the Right One In's Rotten Tomatoes listing boasts a lone dissenter to the sublimely fascinating Swedish horror character study, which I discussed earlier this week.

Intricate Synedoche, New York, another Charlie Kaufman world-within-a-world film, has inspired a whole new level of meta activity among critics attempting to mimic his layered realities--Wired did a "profile of a profile of Charlie Kaufman" you can check out here.

Anne Hathaway's Passengers might be a blink-and-you'll-miss-it airline crash thriller, depending on its performance and expansion from its limited release. I've Loved You So Long (NY/LA), Stranded: I've Come from a Plane that Crashed in the Mountains (1 screen, NY) and Fear(s) of the Dark (1 screen, NY) also open this week, for those in the city of skyscrapers or highways, respectively.

 

The Horror Never Ends

By Sarah Sluis

With Halloween a week away, I've compiled a round-up of all the horror-related production news (literal, not metaphorical) in Hollywood.

The Saw franchise, now up to Saw V, will release this Halloween for the fifth straight year, prompting
The Hollywood Reporter to write a piece about the unusual longevity of the franchise.  In a rags-to-riches story, the original Saw was planned as a straight-to-DVD release, but early buzz at Sundance and highly favorable test screenings among the non-festival crowd pushed the film into wide release, making the $1.2 million film $18.3 million the opening weekend alone.  I confess that I have never seen a Saw film, as I (apparently mistakenly) pigeonholed the film in the "torture porn" category along with Hostel--a film surprisingly good but a little too squirm-inducing for me to sit through without being dragged to the theatre.  While most horror films skew male, the Saw films have an almost equal amount of male and female viewers, a sign of their broader appeal and the importance of the female audience in a film's success.  Expectations for Saw V are lower than that for Saw IV.  The first film to make less than its previous incarnation at the box office, it has signaled that the franchise may be waning in popularity and profitability.  Ever prepared, a Saw VI script waits in the wings, pending the performance of the upcoming fifth film.

Relativity Media is in talks to buy past and futures titles from Rogue Pictures, Universal's horror label.  One of the primary motivations for the deal is distribution: Relativity has moved from co-producing to independently producing films, and needs an economical way to distribute their films.  Under the terms of this deal, they could distribute their own films, as well as Rogue films, through Universal, securing a comparatively low percentage in the process.  Some of the horror titles they would pick up include Wes Craven's 25/8 and a remake of The Last House on the Left, which are both in post-production, as well as development titles Hack/Slash, a comic book adaptation, Castlevania, from a video game, 1980s teen horror remake Three O'Clock High, and Strangers 2.

While not as close to the horror genre as the title suggests, Chuck Palahnuik's Haunted has been picked up by New School Media.  The book follows a bizarrely irrational group of writers.  Enticed by a patron's invitation to go on a writers' retreat for three months, where the isolation will encourage them to produce work along the lines of other famously isolated authors, like Mary Shelley or Lord Byron, they find themselves not only isolated, but trapped.  Koen Mortier, a Belgian director whose most recent work was Ex-Drummer, has been attached to direct the project.

Overture films has enlisted David Gordon Green (Pineapple Express) to direct Freaks of the Heartland, a script based on material from the graphic novel by Steve Niles .  The story follows Trevor Owen as he tries to protect his "freak" sister and other children of the community born as mutants from their parents, who seek to destroy their deformed offspring.  It's a chilling premise, and the emphasis on the heartland seems like a refreshing spin on Children of the Corn.