2008 Woodie Awards
The Reel Deal: What to Catch and What to Miss
Sarah Culp
Issue date: 4/21/04 Section: Arts and Entertainment
This past Easter weekend, Mel Gibson may have inspired a new Christian tradition: doing like Jews on Christmas and heading for the movie theater. After sinking down to #5 in its sixth week of release, The Passion of the Christ did rise, rise back to #1, easily throwing off last week's topper Hellboy and new releases Johnson Family Vacation, The Alamo, The Whole Ten Yards, Ella Enchanted, and The Girl Next Door. Whew. That's a lot of challengers. Don't worry, kids, we'll get through this.
Hellboy grossed only half of what it did opening weekend, leaving it at $10.8 million and #2. Johnson barely eked out a win among the new releases, despite having the lowest screen count, and landed at #3 with $9.3 million. Right behind it was The Alamo, which Disney pushed back from its original release date of Christmas 2003 (where it would probably have been a giant hit among reunited family members craving vicarious violence). In its new spot, it made a disappointing $9.1 million.
Down in spots 8 through 10 was another cluster of mediocrity. The Whole Ten Yards made $6.6 million, half of what its predecessor opened to. Unlike that predecessor, Ten Yards will probably not stay in theatres forever to become a cult hit among 45-year-olds willing to indulge Bruce Willis until he goes back to blowing things up. Ella Enchanted grossed $6.1 million; could there be some inherent flaw in Miramax's "Hey, let's take a hit children's book and then ignore why people liked it and instead rip off Shrek and A Knight's Tale, throwing everything together into a sour and gluelike stew of stupidity" formula? And despite critical acclaim, Fox was unable to convince audiences that The Girl Next Door was any better than the vapid teenage fluff to which we've become accustomed, leaving it with a take of only $6 million.
This past weekend was much, much simpler. Sequel does good, bad action movie does okay, terrible comedy bombs. In the role of the sequel, Kill Bill Vol. 2 banked a decent $25.5 million, a slight ($3 million) increase over the debut of the original Kill Bill, and enough for #1. As the bad action movie, The Punisher got terrible reviews but managed to woo whatever fanboys were still mad at Quentin Tarantino for killing off Lucy Liu, making $14 million for second place.
Nia Vardalos' sophomore effort, Connie and Carla, grossed only $3.2 million at #13. But hey, all hope is not lost: that's over 5 times as much as My Big Fat Greek Wedding made in its first weekend! And if Connie and Carla follows the same path of expansion ... (hold on, I'm opening my Windows calculator here) ... it will have a final gross of $2.4 billion, more than doubling Titanic's box office and making it the #1 movie of all time. Go, Nia, go!
Meanwhile, The Passion plummeted to ninth place with $4.1 million, which is actually right about where it should be if it weren't for the Easter boost. It appears as if Passion will end up with just under the final domestic gross of Lord of the Rings: Return of the King; it currently has about $360 million next to Rings' $376 million. However, those numbers will change drastically with the inevitable rereleases of both films, although it's anyone's bet whether that happens in twenty years, ten years, or four months from now when all of the summer releases bomb horribly.
So what's coming up? This weekend, Jennifer Garner plays Tom Hanks in 13 Going On 30, the latest entry in the I-wish-I-was-older-oh-my-god-I'm-older-if-only-I'd-ever-gone-to-a-movie-before-in-my-life-I-would-have-known-better-than-to-make-such-a-dumb-wish-instead-of-asking-for-a-pony-or-an-X-box-or-something genre. (I have to admit, this one does look kind of cute. And Andy Serkis, originator of Lord of the Rings' Gollum, gets at least one line. So that will be fun.) Also being released is Man on Fire, in which abducted moppet Dakota Fanning rekindles burned-out government agent Denzel Washington's zeal for life. I think that's rekindling in the Curly Sue sense, not the Happiness sense.
And on April 30 comes five more new openers. Why do we need so many damned movies? There are little children in Africa who only get to see one screening of a mangled Surf Ninjas print in their whole lives, and they're darn happy about it. I don't even mention the independent releases, which are usually the only ones worth seeing anyway. Quick takes: In Bobby Jones - Stroke of Genius, ex-Jesus Jim Caviezel plays a real-life golf guru and wins a lot of awards, although Son of God is probably not one of them. In Envy, Jack Black invents a device that makes dog feces disappear, and Ben Stiller is jealous. I wish you guys would get over Ben Stiller. I really do.
In Godsend, scientist Robert DeNiro helps grieving parents Greg Kinnear and Rebecca Romijn-Stamos clone their dead 8-year-old son. In Laws of Attraction, Pierce Brosnan and Julianne Moore play divorce attorneys who hate each other and then get married in Vegas. And in Mean Girls, Tina Fey finally kills her funniest gag in her talk-show appearances by appearing in a real movie, which she wrote herself. Lindsey Lohan enters high school and finds that it is hard and that people are mean. You'd think a smart kid could figure out that the social dealings of people with nothing better to do than sit around making up nicknames for all the cliques and honing their cafeteria tours for indoctrinating the new kids will not actually turn out to be all that important in the rest of their lives. But what do I know: I went to a fake high school where anybody remotely resembling this supposed "teen royalty" would be relentlessly mocked or ridiculed. Unless they had a hot tub.
Hellboy grossed only half of what it did opening weekend, leaving it at $10.8 million and #2. Johnson barely eked out a win among the new releases, despite having the lowest screen count, and landed at #3 with $9.3 million. Right behind it was The Alamo, which Disney pushed back from its original release date of Christmas 2003 (where it would probably have been a giant hit among reunited family members craving vicarious violence). In its new spot, it made a disappointing $9.1 million.
Down in spots 8 through 10 was another cluster of mediocrity. The Whole Ten Yards made $6.6 million, half of what its predecessor opened to. Unlike that predecessor, Ten Yards will probably not stay in theatres forever to become a cult hit among 45-year-olds willing to indulge Bruce Willis until he goes back to blowing things up. Ella Enchanted grossed $6.1 million; could there be some inherent flaw in Miramax's "Hey, let's take a hit children's book and then ignore why people liked it and instead rip off Shrek and A Knight's Tale, throwing everything together into a sour and gluelike stew of stupidity" formula? And despite critical acclaim, Fox was unable to convince audiences that The Girl Next Door was any better than the vapid teenage fluff to which we've become accustomed, leaving it with a take of only $6 million.
This past weekend was much, much simpler. Sequel does good, bad action movie does okay, terrible comedy bombs. In the role of the sequel, Kill Bill Vol. 2 banked a decent $25.5 million, a slight ($3 million) increase over the debut of the original Kill Bill, and enough for #1. As the bad action movie, The Punisher got terrible reviews but managed to woo whatever fanboys were still mad at Quentin Tarantino for killing off Lucy Liu, making $14 million for second place.
Nia Vardalos' sophomore effort, Connie and Carla, grossed only $3.2 million at #13. But hey, all hope is not lost: that's over 5 times as much as My Big Fat Greek Wedding made in its first weekend! And if Connie and Carla follows the same path of expansion ... (hold on, I'm opening my Windows calculator here) ... it will have a final gross of $2.4 billion, more than doubling Titanic's box office and making it the #1 movie of all time. Go, Nia, go!
Meanwhile, The Passion plummeted to ninth place with $4.1 million, which is actually right about where it should be if it weren't for the Easter boost. It appears as if Passion will end up with just under the final domestic gross of Lord of the Rings: Return of the King; it currently has about $360 million next to Rings' $376 million. However, those numbers will change drastically with the inevitable rereleases of both films, although it's anyone's bet whether that happens in twenty years, ten years, or four months from now when all of the summer releases bomb horribly.
So what's coming up? This weekend, Jennifer Garner plays Tom Hanks in 13 Going On 30, the latest entry in the I-wish-I-was-older-oh-my-god-I'm-older-if-only-I'd-ever-gone-to-a-movie-before-in-my-life-I-would-have-known-better-than-to-make-such-a-dumb-wish-instead-of-asking-for-a-pony-or-an-X-box-or-something genre. (I have to admit, this one does look kind of cute. And Andy Serkis, originator of Lord of the Rings' Gollum, gets at least one line. So that will be fun.) Also being released is Man on Fire, in which abducted moppet Dakota Fanning rekindles burned-out government agent Denzel Washington's zeal for life. I think that's rekindling in the Curly Sue sense, not the Happiness sense.
And on April 30 comes five more new openers. Why do we need so many damned movies? There are little children in Africa who only get to see one screening of a mangled Surf Ninjas print in their whole lives, and they're darn happy about it. I don't even mention the independent releases, which are usually the only ones worth seeing anyway. Quick takes: In Bobby Jones - Stroke of Genius, ex-Jesus Jim Caviezel plays a real-life golf guru and wins a lot of awards, although Son of God is probably not one of them. In Envy, Jack Black invents a device that makes dog feces disappear, and Ben Stiller is jealous. I wish you guys would get over Ben Stiller. I really do.
In Godsend, scientist Robert DeNiro helps grieving parents Greg Kinnear and Rebecca Romijn-Stamos clone their dead 8-year-old son. In Laws of Attraction, Pierce Brosnan and Julianne Moore play divorce attorneys who hate each other and then get married in Vegas. And in Mean Girls, Tina Fey finally kills her funniest gag in her talk-show appearances by appearing in a real movie, which she wrote herself. Lindsey Lohan enters high school and finds that it is hard and that people are mean. You'd think a smart kid could figure out that the social dealings of people with nothing better to do than sit around making up nicknames for all the cliques and honing their cafeteria tours for indoctrinating the new kids will not actually turn out to be all that important in the rest of their lives. But what do I know: I went to a fake high school where anybody remotely resembling this supposed "teen royalty" would be relentlessly mocked or ridiculed. Unless they had a hot tub.