Tom Cruise's Dark Knight
The pre-July 4th weekend brought two soaring successes and a few miserable failures, adding more drama to this rollercoaster summer movie season. Let's take a look at the week before America's birthday.
1) Toy Story 3 — $59M
Dropping about 45% in its second week of super duper wide release, this Pixar sex comedy has steamed up the box office to the tune of 226 million titillating dollars. The drooling adults-only audience seems poised to make this sexy romp the highest grossing film that pleasure shingle Pixar has ever released, topping (when it wants to...) the studio's 2003 orgy on the high seas, Finding Nemo. Will Woody the Cowboy and Buzz Lightcock cum back for a fourth hot session? The chances seem to be rising.
2) Grown Ups — $41M
This adult male fantasy movie, about unlovable schlubs and the Salma Hayeks and Maria Bellos who marry them, opened pretty well, with an $11k per screen average and nearly twice the gross of the next film down on the list. So good for Adam Sandler, who really deserves a hit, after approximately two years without one. I was watching Funny People last night, and I don't know... I was wondering if that movie isn't basically a documentary. I know that was kinda the point, but really... That movie was about Adam Sandler, minus the whole Leslie Mann love interest thing. Pretty much everything else though? Yeah, anyway. Hopefully this latest success makes his movie star ennui a little better and he can focus on his next movie Just Go With It, in which he of the ever increasing waist size is romantically torn between Jennifer Aniston and this person. Nicole Kidman is also involved somehow. Riiight.
3) Knight & Day — $20.5M
You could say this Tom Cruise vehicle... came up short. Ba ha ha ha ha. Get it? It's because Cruise's costar Cameron Diaz is tall, so saying it was short is a silly thing because it's the opposite! Get it? There's no other way that joke could be read. That's it. For these stars, not opening a big summer movie well might feel alien (costar Peter Sarsgaard is in the upcoming Green Lantern, which is about a magic ring that might be from outer space), but perhaps their days of movie star mania have passed. Though the movie sounds like a gay (Sarsgaard played gay in Kinsey) old time, I guess director James Mangold didn't quite figure out the science (costar Viola Davis played a scientist in The Andromeda Strain two years ago) of making a big summer hit. Or maybe it wasn't his fault. Maybe no wanted to see a movie starring an increasingly strange short gay Scientologist. (That one is about Tom Cruise.)
4) The Karate Kid — $15.4M
What will be next for little Jaden Smith now that he's a certified movie star draw? Perhaps a remake of Home Alone where he's not actually left at home or is alone? A Blank Check redo where he actually finds a debit card, but it is still called Blank Check? Maybe a new version of Andre where the seal isn't actually named Andre, but the movie is for some reason? He's found a genre he's successful in, so he should just stick with it. What about an updated The Wizard, where they don't actually play video games? Who wouldn't want to see that!
10) Jonah Hex — $1.6M
Ohhhh dear. Second week in release and a 70% drop, with a lousy $550 per screen average. Poor everyone! What a dump. The movie only cost like $50M to make, so at least there's that. It's almost made a fifth of that back! They're almost there. All they need is for some weird foreign country somewhere to really take a liking to supernatural Westerns about people with horrible facial scarring exacting revenge on John Malkovich. Doesn't that actually sound kind of good? I guess I understand why someone green lit this picture. I probably would have too. Maybe the film's concept isn't to blame for its terrible failure. Let's blame Megan Fox, shall we? This is all your fault, Fox!