Lasse Hallstrom, welcome back to the B List. The formerly Oscar-nominated director of “The Cider House Rules” and “Chocolat” saw his last effort, a freakin’ dog movie, go straight to DVD, so he did what anyone would do and sold any integrity a man who made “The Shipping News” would have, aligning himself with Nicolas Sparks, literary powerhouse for people who can barely read, and Screen Gems, Sony’s genre arm that has yet to release a good or interesting movie.
Make no mistake, however, the big name here is Sparks, who’s consistently seen films based on his work pull in boffo dollars. His resume now has “Dear John” alongside “The Notebook,” “Message In A Bottle” and “A Walk To Remember,” which is to say, the guy’s now a veritable cottage industry of terrible, terrible movies. Polling numbers will probably skew female, as this is Super Bowl weekend, and men are trading off the big game for ninety minutes of Channing Tatum using his Cro-Magnon charms on Barbie surrogate Amanda Seyfried. Let this also be a death knell for box office prognosticators also playing as weathermen. “Dear John” succeeded in the wake of a horrendous East Coast snowstorm, suggesting neither rain, sleet nor snow can keep people away from their cinematic comfort food — the gross is similar to the opening take of “Freddy Vs. Jason” a few years ago despite a blackout-powered storm destroying the East Coast .
Let history show that “Titanic” was eventually dethroned from its perch as the number one movie in America by the Akiva Goldsman-penned “Lost In Space.” Which is to say, of course, that America will always have at least a temporary draw to terrible art like Nicolas Sparks’ movies no matter what kind of cinematic history is being made. The question is to whether “Avatar” is making cinematic history as the highest grossing film of all time, or merely financial history as a movie everyone’s seen. Is the surface-level charm of “Avatar” going to be a fad in a decade, like when we look back on the 90’s and lament Bugle Boy jeans? Is the bloom off the rose since the film still held strongly, but was otherwise unaffected by the Oscar nominations?
Anecdotally, we’ll bet this is the beginning of the backlash as people come to realize that not only is there less to discuss here than there was with “Titanic” (Is Joel David Moore the new Danny Nucci?) but that James Cameron’s gaudy effects-fest is also the weak sister in the Best Picture race among science fiction crowd-pleasers. It’s not about the money, which “Avatar” has already made by the boatload, but the status, and “Avatar” falling out of first place while at the same time failing to score the most nominations at the Oscars, not to mention being beat out of first by something as terrible as a Nicolas Sparks adaptation, is a bellweather trio that could suggest the inexplicable lovefest for, somehow, the biggest film of all time, is over. Nicolas Sparks alone is no dragonslayer, but, like the old lady in “Dead Alive” would say, the cards suggest a great darkness. She doesn’t say that verbatim, but it’s been awhile, so, c’mon.
“From Paris With Love” may have sat for too long. Like John Travolta’s now-hated “Old Dogs,” the film was in the can for over a year, and audiences have spent a lot of time away from John Travolta the movie star and more time with John Travolta the creepy, bloated, sexually ambiguous Scientologist. The supremely displeasing physical appearance of Travolta in ads certainly didn’t help, as the guy’s probably too old and puffy to be a kung-fu badass, and too unattractive to pull off the bald pate and dusty beard. The industry took Liam Neeson’s grandpa action movie appeal too seriously with last year’s Super Bowl weekend hit “Taken,” with both this and “Edge of Darkness” flopping along at #3 and #4. Politically, could one make an argument that the Super Bowl is most widely worshipped by conservative audiences who would otherwise be seeing the jokily xenophobic “From Paris With Love” and the Old Testament-flavored Mel Gibson actioner? Is it a coincidence that this weekend also hosted the giant Teabagging convention in Nashville*?
“The Tooth Fairy” has kept itself above water after a tepid opening and, provided it can keep up this pace, it could equal or top Dwayne Johnson’s last kidpic “Race to Witch Mountain.” “When In Rome” smashed and grabbed enough to guarantee more work for the odious writer-director Mark Steven Johnson and “Book of Eli” is making a late push for $90. Right behind was the week’s biggest Oscar-gainer, “Crazy Heart,” which jumped into the top ten while expanding into 800 theaters, though to call it a home run is more than a little premature, even with a bigger expansion on the horizon. The question is, how is the media going to treat the lower grossing Best Picture candidates now that the field has grown to ten? How much can they marginalize “Crazy Heart” or “An Education” in favor of this battle of the exes between Kathryn Bigelow and James Cameron? When is Billy Bush finally going to admit his favorite movie of the year was “Bright Star”?
Speaking of “An Education,” the film gained a medium-wide expansion this weekend as well, generating $915k on 761 screens (the biggest percentage gain of any Oscar contenders), while the Best Actor-nominated “A Single Man” did $631k on 353 screens, neither with a great per-screen average. The biggest per-screen average of the week was from the traveling road show “Red Riding” trilogy, which did $15k on only one screen in New York City. Support your local indie theaters, people.
1. Dear John – $32.4 million
2. Avatar – $23.6 million ($630 mil.)
3. From Paris With Love – $8.1 million
4. Edge of Darkness – $7 million ($29 mil.)
5. The Tooth Fairy – $6.5 million ($34 mil.)
6. When In Rome – $5.5 million ($21 mil.)
7. Book of Eli- $4.8 million ($82 mil.)
8. Crazy Heart – $3.7 million ($11 mil.)
9. Legion – $3.4 million ($34 mil.)
10. Sherlock Holmes – $2.6 million ($202 mil.)
*It may go without saying these people are retards, but, these people are retards.
