Six of the fifteen highest-grossing films this year are either female-centric or have female leading characters, seven if you count the $61 million-grossing “The Last Song.” It may be a cheat to include “Alice In Wonderland,” which was marketed on the strength of Johnny Depp, but that film had a huge female turnout and is on the way to very easily being the year’s highest-grossing film, and a rare $1 billion hit. Other female-aimed films, including “Valentine’s Day,” “Dear John” and even “Date Night” managed to heavily outperform equivalent middle-to-lower-brow male fare like “Hot Tub Time Machine,” “The Wolfman” and “Kick Ass” in similar time periods. And this is before the release of “The Twilight Saga: Eclipse.”
And so, continuing the trend, “Sex and the City 2” delivered a definitive smackdown on Jerry Bruckheimer’s male-aimed “The Prince Of Persia: The Sands Of Time” this weekend. There’s a definite disconnect between the savage (mostly male) critical beating “SATC2” has received and its ecstatic audience reception. And while the gross didn’t improve on the first film’s mammoth opening take, finishing at #2 in the charts, it was still strong enough to suggest that the film has a massive core audience that can support whatever the budget for this type of films is. People may rant and rave about, for once, how a shallow, materialistic, socially demented female film is outgrossing shallow, materialistic, socially demented male-centric offerings, but at the end of the day, it seems a certain audience wants to see the same shit over and over again, sex be damned. At least it can now be said that a gigantic cross-section doesn’t care how old, dumb or wrinkly their protagonists are (for the record, two of the supposedly old and ragged “Sex” girls are the same age as Blockbuster Action Star Robert Downey Jr., and one is actually younger).
Meanwhile, “Shrek Forever After” didn’t plunge the way that the third film did, remaining at #1 and giving credence to those that would claim that it’s better than the third film. The numbers, however, only prove that the third film must have been a total piece of shit, because this isn’t the type of hold CG ‘toons normally have. Maybe, even with this box office heat, kids don’t really like “Shrek.” Maybe this bizarrely random pop culture hit is being driven by the curiosity of restless thirty-and-fortysomethings desperate to remain with-it for their children and/or co-workers. Whatever the case, we wouldn’t exactly call this an embarrassment, but it’s not exactly a hit yet either.
Speaking of embarrassment, “Prince of Persia.” No matter what the audience, critics or ad campaign demonstrates about this movie, the real place they failed was in spending so much; the opening isn’t too unspectacular until you factor in the obscene $200-or-so million it cost to put this thing on the screen. The spend is remarkable considering in the realm of video games with household name recognition, “PoP” doesn’t deserve to sit at the table with “Super Mario Bros.” or even “Resident Evil.” Add to that the stigma of there never being a good video game-based-movie (we’d like to think whoever champions “Silent Hill” in the comments section had better be a huge Lucio Fulci or Mario Bava fan), the title dealing with Persia (which general audiences think is a faraway land of brownfaces), and the presence of Jake Gyllenhaal, and you’ve got a perfect storm of indifference. Casting Gyllenhaal, a dramatic actor who’s NEVER put butts in seats, as an action figure is akin to bringing in Billy Crudup for “Bruce Almighty III.” People compared this to Johnny Depp in “Pirates of the Caribbean,” but in that case Depp was enough of a personality to seem above the film, whereas Gyllenhaal was born to fade into the wallpaper.
“Iron Man 2” and “Robin Hood” fill up space in the top five, with “IM2” looking more and more like it won’t outgross its predecessor. The format for these superhero films used to be that the second one would wildly outpace the first in both quality and profit, but “Iron Man 2” appears to have bucked the trend both ways. Downey Jr.’s got “Due Date,” “Gravity” and “Sherlock Holmes 2” coming up, and they all seem like bona fide hits, so if “Captain America” and “Thor” don’t impress next summer, at least they can still market “The Avengers” as “Iron Man 3.” No such optimism for the future adventures of Russell Crowe’s “Robin Hood,” but we wonder who were they fooling – let’s get the 46 year old Crowe to star in a $200 million franchise starter directed by the clearly busy 73-year-old Ridley Scott! The whole point of spending a stupid amount of money on a franchise-starter is that you don’t have to break the bank on part two if the cast and a few sets are in place (see: “Star Trek 2”), but even with the blockbusting international numbers, who’s begging for “Robin Hood 2”?
The rest of the list stayed pretty stagnant, with “Letters to Juliet” and “Just Wright” stalked by “Date Night,” which is currently approaching $100 million. Yes, that’s 40 percent of the top ten taken up by female-centric pictures, with two of the ten clearly on pace for $100 million, in case you were counting. Not headed for any sort of milestone is “MacGruber,” which plummeted after its already tepid first weekend. A movie like this was never going to coast on its star power, but we imagine it would have done better had they squeezed in a Bill Hader or a Jack Black cameo, or really any type of comedic performer with a box office track record. Actually, we imagine it would do better if the title were changed, or the ads made it look like a talking dog movie, or it only played at Sesame Place – what we’re trying to say is, it’s really rare to flop this hard.
Indie hit “The Secret In Their Eyes” continued climbing up the indie film charts, showing audience increases in each of its seven weeks. The Oscar winner pulled in $468k to bring its total to $3.3 million, possibly the true sleeper of the summer indie scene. Debuting on four screens was “Micmacs,” which grabbed $47.7k on four screens (decent), while a “Breathless” re-issue pulled in $32.7k on the same. Is one of those four theaters showing “Breathless” near you? Have you seen it yet? If not, quit being a jerk and support your local arthouse.
1. Shrek Forever Obvious – $43.3 million ($133 mil.)
2. White Privilege – $32.1 million ($43 mil.)
3. The Prince Of Persia: Remo Williams, The Adventure Begins – $30.1 million
4. Iron Man The Second – $16 million ($275 mil.)
5. Robin Hood The First – $10.3 million ($83 mil.)
6. Letters To Juliet – $5.9 million ($37 mil.)
7. Just Wright – $2.2 million ($18 mil.)
8. Date Night – $1.8 million ($94 mil.)
9. MacGruber – $1.5 million ($7 mil.)
10. How To Suckle And Kegel Your Dragon – $1 million ($213 mil.)