Friday Estimates saw Klady
22. 20. 11.
aka The Last Three Fridays.
A cult series from which new content is rare, now in 3D, which seemed to fit. A sequel to a film that felt like an exciting discovery to audiences. And a dead franchise making a run at resurrection via 3D.
You can’t really blame Lionsgate marketing or any LGF management – though a frustrated Carl Icahn will – for this uninspired opening. The franchise was clearly body-bagged last year, with Saw VI managing about half, domestically, what any of the previous five Saws had done before. The fall-off was less severe overseas, but it was still the lowest international grosser of the series.
Did 3D matter? Yes. The first day was up about 50% from the last Saw. But still, both opening days for 6 & 7 are lower than any of the previous four sequels. 3D is not a savior. And film by film, everyone is figuring that out.
57% is a pretty good Friday-to-Friday hold – welcome to post-millennial box office – for Paranormal Activity 2. It’s hard to compare to the first film, since that one opened tiny and never ended up in as many theaters as this one opened in. But after a $20 million midnight/opening day launch, I think 57% off – which will make for a lower weekend drop – is solid.
Hereafter‘s 50% Friday-to-Friday drop is less encouraging.
Red‘s 25% drop is strong, leading a parade of 20somethings: Secretariat, the shocking Life As We Know It, and The Town.
The big limited opening is The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, which is opening better than the 100+ expansion of Dragon Tattoo, but not as strong as the mid-summer launch of Played With Fire.
Just a little info, the title of IFC’s new film is “Inspector Bellamy”, not “Bellamy”
http://www.ifcfilms.com/films/inspector-bellamy
Maybe “Welcome to the Rileys” and “Wild Target” are killed by the bad reviews from major critics…. But Freestyle should have known that “Wild Target” would receive mostly negative reviews; I don’t know why Freestyle didn’t open “Wild Target” in more than 100 theaters.
Again, RED, SECRETARIAT and THE TOWN drop 25% or less. Old people wanna go and will go to the movies, studios. Are you paying attention?
Dyslexia on the SAW number, but if KINGO says there were only 5 films then I accept it!
Hard to figure out a request for the correction of a typo in all that, but thanks, Don. Done.
We need a documentary about people who don’t care abotu “The Girl” series.
Might i reccommend “The Guy Who Didn’t Give a Shit”
I was okay with Dragon Tattoo, but Played with Fire turned me off to the series. Just lifeless, bloated, and absurd – one of the worst of the year.
Yeah the last film was aweful, as good as Rapace is. And from what I hear about most of this one, it should be called “The Girl Who Lays In Her Bed.”
I actually like Fire a lot better. It was quick-moving, didn’t have the middle hour of montaging a mystery they forgot to set up suspects for except for the obvious red herring (Granted, I read the book beforehand, but it just had that “We’re making it SO obvious he’s the prime suspect that he can’t be” vibe), and it doesn’t have some of my problems I had with the book (The 100 pages or so of unnecessary table setting are gone, the movie has a clearer ending than seeming to be cut off mid-scene, and it doesn’t hammer on its obvious points as much as the book did). It’s more of an action/thriller than a mystery and some of it’s pretty silly, but I think they made most of the right moves in adapting the book as best as they could considering the stuff they’d changed from Tattoo.
I watched it (part II) yesterday, and it was a shockingly boring, lifeless little would-be mystery. I bent over backwards to be fair to the first picture, and it certainly had a more engaging storyline. As long as we’re talking about alternate titles, how about ‘The Girl Who Isn’t Much More Entertaining Than Cleaning My Living Room Floor For Tomorrow’s Halloween Gathering’.
Congrats to the Texas Rangers. Of course, this now means they’ve won one more World Series game than the Astros ever have. Damn.
RE: 3D
Wasn’t there something about how Resident Evil 3D saw a huge international boost (though not domestic)? Are 3D movies overall playing bigger overseas or was that film just a fluke?
Hornet’s Nest was a total dog. The series devolved into a Law & Order filler.
What made DRAGON TATTOO so special was the interaction between the two leads. They were separated for virtually all of FIRE and, from what I understand, ditto for HORNET. It’s like making a Tracy-Hepburn movie and keeping them separated for the entire picture.