Recent Reviews
The Cagneys
A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935)
Something to Sing About (1937)
Angels with Dirty Faces (1938)
A Lion Is In the Streets (1953)
Man of a Thousand Faces (1957)
Never Steal Anything Small (1959)
Shake Hands With the Devil (1959)
Sunday June 19, 2011
Hollywood B.O.: Green Lantern Lacks Green
“Green Lantern” grossed $52 million over the weekend, the sixth-best opening weekend of the year, but the lowest of the summer superhero films. “Thor” opened at $65 million in early May and “X-Men: First Class” opened at $55 million in early June.
More worrisome for Warner Bros. is the dropoff from Friday to Saturday: -22%, compared to -8% for “Thor” and -7% for “XMFC.” It's the worst Friday-to-Saturday dropoff of the year (for wide-release films), and the 27th-worst of all time (or at least on box office mojo's charts). True, this kind of Friday-to-Saturday dropoff can occur with big-buzz movies (“The Dark Knight”: -29%), or with films that appeal to an intense but narrow demographic, such as horror (three of the “Saw” films are on this list), or the “Twilight” franchise (two of the “Twilight”s are near the top of the list). But it can also indicate bad word-of-mouth. Another film that dropped -22%? “Sex and the City 2.”
“Mr. Popper's Penguins” opened less well, at $18 million.
Among the returning wide releases, “Bridesmaids” again fell off at a fraction of the rate of the others: -25%. It's now grossed $136 million.
The shocker, for me anyway, is seeing how well Woody Allen's “Midnight in Paris” is doing. Its widest release is just over 1,000 theaters yet after another $5 million weekend its domestic total stands at $21.8 million. That's already sixth-best among unadjusted Woody Allen films, and less than $2 million away from passing both “Match Point” ($23.1) and “Vicki Cristina Barcelona” ($23.2) in the battle of Woody's Western European locales. The 3,2, 1 slots for the Woodman, for those intereested, are “Annie Hall” ($38m), “Manhattan” ($39m) and “Hannah and Her Sisters” ($40m). Adjust for inflation, and it's “Annie Hall” by a nose over “Manhattan”: $134m to $125m.