Well, it looks like greed is still good, even for a sequel that is twenty-three years removed from its predecessor. While Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps may not reward Michael Douglas with an Oscar, the kind Paul Newman got when he reprised his role of “Fast Eddie” Felson in Martin Scorsese’s The Color of Money (1986), having previously played the character in 1961’s The Hustler, the actor still has his original Best Actor statutette from 1987. Oliver Stone’s timely sequel may have only made $19 million over the weekend, but it was enough to ensure that Shia LaBeouf have a sixth straight film open on top. He must be doing something right, or Forbes magazine wouldn’t have proclaimed him Hollywood’s most bankable star. Yeah, like people went to see Transformers and its sequel because Shia was present; they were looking at those big, looming shiny objects that he was running away from. Duh.
Wall Street‘s success shows that audiences are willing to see a movie about the recession while we’re still in a recession and make it a hit. That’s something films about the war in the Middle East have failed to do. Oliver Stone isn’t what you would call a “box office juggernaut,” but he has had his share of hits over the decades. Still, he wrote the screenplay for the film that would one day be in every rapper’s DVD collection (Scarface), Platoon is a classic, JFK has almost every actor imaginable and Natural Born Killers is required viewing to all aspiring editors. (Even though NBK was filmed in 56 days, it took 11 months to edit. The final cut has approximately 3,000 edits.)
Opening on ten more screens than Wall Street: MNS, Warner Bros.’ Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole failed to have much of a connection with audiences. The studio wisely did not promote director Zack Snyder in the trailers or TV ads, since kids shouldn’t be watching 300 or Watchmen, but I’m sure Warner Bros. wanted to recreate the box office magic that was 2006’s Happy Feet. For what it’s worth, Legend of the Guardians is the better flick. It’s a story about heroism involving owls, and it doesn’t dissolve into a soapbox indictment about pollution and global warming in the last act. Even with 3D-inflated prices, the film could only muster $4,569 per location, which is a $1,000 less than the film that came in third, last week’s number one The Town.
Ben Affleck’s sophomore effort as a director has surpassed what Gone Baby Gone made during its entire run. That’s a credit to his proficiency at highlighting the city of Boston in two distinct crime thrillers. With a solid cast, including Mad Men‘s Jon Hamm, recent Oscar nominee Jeremy Renner (The Hurt Locker), and Affleck himself, the actor who was once the bomb in Phantoms looks to rekindle his success as a matinee idol. Now that he’s shown that Matt Damon doesn’t deserve all the credit for the Good Will Hunting screenplay, maybe his stint in career rehab has allowed him to decipher good scripts from bad ones. Personally, I want him to continue his string of crime thrillers with Marcus Sakey’s The Blade Itself, about a reformed thief who has to face his past when his old partner gets paroled.
Thankfully, the word-of-mouth advertising for Easy A has been better than expected. That’s good for two reasons. One, it may reward Emma Stone with a Golden Globe nomination in the musical/comedy category, and two, it means that Disney’s You Again was DOA. For actress Kristen Bell, You Again‘s opening number is $4 million less than her January comedy When in Rome. It seems that audiences aren’t ready to buy Ms. Veronica Mars as a leading lady. While she was funny in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, that doesn’t mean she’s ready to be Katherine Heigl who, besides Knocked Up, had TV’s Grey’s Anatomy to give her a Jennifer Aniston-type boost in visibility.
The M. Night Shyamalan production Devil dropped three places to finish sixth, though only $1.5 million above Resident Evil: Afterlife. Low production costs ensure that Shyamalan’s Night Chronicles trilogy of films will continue. As for Resident Evil, the loss of 3D screens to The Legends of the Guardians and Lionsgate’s animated flick Alpha and Omega (which could set a record for being the lowest-earning 3D release in history) has made it a struggle to be a box office smash in the States. But overseas, the film has already become the most successful entry in the series, nearly doubling the domestic gross of $55 million.
Takers and Inception are hanging on by a thread in spots #9 and #10. The first film managed success despite numerous release delays, and the second one has just been a beast when it comes to staying in the top ten. Eleven weeks after its release on July 16, 2010, it is still in the box office discussion talk. With the likelihood of Inception being gone from the top ten next weekend, it is worth pointing out that the only other film of 2010 to appear in the top ten for ten straight weeks is DreamWorks’ animated hit How to Train Your Dragon.
Turning attention to limited releases, The Virginity Hit made $300,000 on 700 screens. Woody Allen’s latest comedy You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger netted $163,000 on six screens. The claustrophobic thriller Buried, starring Ryan Reynolds, open on 11 screens to a modest $104,500. If judging success on per-screen average alone, Davis Guggenheim’s documentary Waiting for ‘Superman’ had the best performance. Opening on four screens, it averaged $35,000 at each location.
Box Office Estimates taken from
1. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps – $19 million
2. Legend of the Guardians: The Owls Of Ga’Hoole – $16.3 million
3. The Town – $16 million ($49.1 million overall)
4. Easy A – $10.7 million ($32.8 million overall)
5. You Again – $8.3 million
6. Devil – $6.5 million ($21.7 million overall)
7. Resident Evil: Afterlife – $4.9 million ($155 million worldwide)
8. Alpha And Omega – $4.7 million ($15.1 million)
9. Takers – $1.6 million ($54.9 million)
10. Inception – $1.2 million ($755 million worldwide)
